Inner Light, Radiant Life

Return of the Light

2011-12-23T19:00:00.073-06:00

HOLIDAY CANDLELIGHT AND TAIZÉ CHANT SERVICE

Mt. Vernon Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

7:00 PM, Friday, December 23, 2011

The service begins with the sanctuary in silence and darkness, the dim lights that helped people find their seats, extinguished, the congregation waiting in silent expectation. The service takes place with ample silence between segments. Those present are encouraged to discuss, comment, or question afterwards, but this service includes no explanations. It is intended to be experiential rather than cerebral.

Kislev Meditation
by Ellen Dannin

The seed, planted in the dark,
waiting in the dark of the year,
the seed drawn to the light,
the seed planted in the dark earth
by our own hands,
to be drawn from the earth by the light,
which will return.
Do the planted and the planter
wait in despair in the dark
for the return of the season of light?
What if, we think, the light did not return,
if we waited in the dark
and, at last, despaired of light?
We could almost forget, in our winter’s darkness,
that light will come again.
We light the lights in the dark of the year
to recall
that all is in readiness,
that we wait only for the warmth of light,
that even in the absence of light,
the work of creation is made ready.

Lighting the Shabbat Candles
Traditional

Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha-Olam
Asher kideshanu b’mitzvotav
Vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat

Reflection on Shabbat and Cosmos
by Paul Kent Oakley

Honoring the Sabbath rest is not the first commandment written but is the first commandment illustrated in the Hebrew scriptures. After the creative force of the Big Bang established the evolving Cosmos and its laws, the banging stopped. The universal processes were self-sustaining. In the mythic language of Genesis, God rested. On the model of countless generations of Jews, we have ushered in this Shabbat with the lighting of candles and blessing. We carve out of time a temple, a utopian dream, where all can rest and rejuvenate. Where all are equal and all needs are met. Shabbat is a weekly reminder of larger, natural cycles, of hope growing in the dark as the Winter Solstice comes. When we plan and prepare for the rebirth of the natural order and the arrival of something new.

Lighting the Advent Wreath
by Timothy Murphy, adapted, additional words by Paul Kent Oakley

Source of Life, great well of diversity on this planet, inspire us. As we prepare ourselves during this season, we look in hope to the possibilities diversity offers us. May our growing together more fully reflect the beauty of creation.

Divine Wisdom, manifest in prophets and thinkers who have urged humanity forward and also manifest in one another, we seek greater understanding. May we seek the wellbeing of our sisters and brothers, infusing divine love in all our paths, that what is hidden may be revealed.

Matrix of Becoming, in joyous expectation we prepare ourselves for those moments where we encounter the perfectibility of humanity and the world we have created. May we be ready to joyfully proclaim this good news, a revelation bursts through the mundane. May we listen for the surprising places and voices where truths are revealed, that we may receive in joy.

Empowering Spirit, breathing through us the desire for a transforming peace. As we seek to be faithful partners with all life and this whole Cosmos, may we discern the signs of peace where it is most needed. Affirming our worth, may we have the courage to lovingly resist all oppression in our lives and our communities.

Hope. Peace. Joy. Love. These are promises and practices that have sustained us as we have waited for something new to emerge in this world, prepared for something old to be renewed.

Lighting the Yule Log
from “The Pagan Housewife,” adapted

From the darkness is born the light, from void, fulfillment emerges.
The darkest night of the year's at the threshold,
Open now the door, and honor the darkness.

Dark my surroundings, and cold be this night
But the labor of the blessed mother has reborn the sacred light,
The child divine, the most honored sun shall return with the sunrise.

Awaken, my lady, look upon your divine child,
Whose rebirth while you slumbered was subtle and silent.
The divine sun awaits your wakening, gentle and benevolent.

Hail the blessed sun, reborn to the mother,
For he retook his throne at the end of solstice night!

Lighting the Chanukiah
Traditional, variation preferred by Rabbi Randy Fleisher,
and The Society for Humanistic Judaism

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu ruach ha-olam,
asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav
v'tzivanu l'hadlik neir shel chanukah.

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu ruach ha-olam,
she-asah nisim la-avoteinu,
bayamim haheim, baz'man hazeh.

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu ruach ha-olam,
shehecheyanu, v'kiyemanu,
vehigi-anu laz'man hazeh.

Blessed is the light of the world.
Blessed is the light within humanity.
Blessed is the light of Chanukah.

Let My Voice be a Hammer, excerpt
by Rabbi Rachel G. Greengrass

Mattathias was just a man,
A man who saw that if he did not stand up, no one else would
Judith was just a woman,
Who saw that if she did nothing, her people would be destroyed.
Both refused to give up, both used what little they had, attacked by using cunning, guerrilla warfare.
And so it was that one woman was able to save her town,
and one family was able to save their people –
From loss of life –
From loss of spirit –

So let my voice be a hammer
Let it break down walls,
Build homes and community,
Strike out against injustice
Let it be a comforting tool for my sisters and brothers
and those who are weak
Let it smash indifference
Let it ring the eardrums of those who would silence us
Because I am Israel.
I struggle with the divine,
I will not be kept quiet
Let my voice be a hammer
Like Mattathias… and like Judith…

Lighting the Sanctuary Candles

La ténèbre n’est point ténèbre
(recording from the Taizé Community)

La ténèbre n’est point ténèbre devant toi
La nuit comme le jour est lumière.

Our darkness is never darkness in your sight;
the deepest night is clear as the daylight.

TAIZÉ CHANTS

Within Our Darkest Night
Within our darkest night, we kindle the fire that never dies away,
never dies away.

The Kingdom of God
The Kingdom of God is justice and peace and joy in the holy spirit.
Come, Hope, and open in me, the gates of your kingdom.

Bless the Lord
Bless the Lord, my soul, and bless God’s holy name.
Bless the Lord, my soul, who leads me into life.

LESSON

Choose Something Like A Star
by Robert Frost

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

Passing the Flame
Silence
Placing the Candles in Community

TAIZÉ CHANTS

Ubi Caritas
Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas, Deus ibi est.

Where there is charity and love, God is to be found.

In Love Alone
In Love alone my soul can find rest and peace,
in Love my peace and joy.
Only in Love my soul can find its rest,
find its rest and peace.

Kindle in Us the Fire of Love
Spirit of Life, come to us. Kindle in us the fire of love.
Spirit of Life, come to us. Spirit of Life, come to us.

Words for the ending of Advent
by Paul Kent Oakley

The time of waiting has ended. Each day is longer than the day before. Light is returning. The formal time of introspection and self-evaluation is over, leaving each one prepared to act. The great metaphor of the Kingdom of God, that realm of justice and peace, calls to us – each one with a task to further the kingdom, to usher in a messianic age. In Advent it felt, at times, that what some would call salvation was private and personal, but the great myth of the Nativity teaches that heaven and nature and all humanity are implicated. We usher in justice and peace for all, or there is no salvation for any. Advent has ended.

Taizé reprise

The Kingdom of God
The Kingdom of God is justice and peace and joy in the holy spirit.
Come, Hope, and open in me, the gates of your kingdom.

Blessing
by Paul Kent Oakley, including words borrowed from Marcia Falk's "Blessing of the Children"

We dare to dream a utopian dream amidst a world of sometimes harsh realities that are mixed with beauty beyond imagining. We imagine a world without injustice and commit ourselves to doing our part to making that world reality. Something new can be born. Something new must be born. We are its midwives, its mother, and the baby. May we never forget our sacred role, and so, I charge you to be who you are, and may you be blessed in all that you are.

Candles remain burning, as the congregation, when each is ready, moves to the fellowship area where refreshments are set up. The party commences.

Readers:
Walter Lazenby
Donna Beaumont
Mike DeVilbiss
Paul Kent Oakley

Room Preparation and Candle Lighting:
Gail DeVilbiss
Mike DeVilbiss
Donna Beaumont
Paul Kent Oakley

Thanksgiving for Diversity

2011-11-24T09:21:00.001-06:00

In a piece for Huffington Post last year, Rajiv Malhotra wrote on the need for replacing the frequent use of the word “tolerance” with “mutual respect” in interreligious settings. Malhotra is the founder of the Infinity Foundation, which seeks to foster better understanding of Buddhism and Hinduism, traditions that he says are generally more comfortable with the “mutual respect” language than are the Abrahamic Religions.

From my perspective as a gay man, I have long felt the barbed loathing of tolerance. I know that the person who tolerates me has arrogated to him or herself the right to decide the relative worth of others and, too, whether or not to afford us essential human dignity. The person who tolerates me hates me, wishes I didn’t exist but has decided it is better not to risk prison time by wiping me off the face of the earth. The tolerant person is not my friend and will feel no constraints on political action aimed at restricting, eliminating, or preventing my exercise of the same rights s/he takes for granted.

So I find it easy to like Malhotra’s argument for mutual respect between the religious traditions. He described an occasion in the late 1990s when he made the call for the language of mutual respect at Claremont Graduate University and was told that his doing so ruffled a lot of feathers. He told of the current Roman Catholic pope, before becoming pope, strongly objecting to the use of the language of respect at the United Nation's Millennium Religion Summit in 2000. As Malhotra explained, if the Vatican accepted the language of mutual respect it would have no grounds for efforts to proselytize the "heathen." But eventually the Vatican caved on the document from this summit but covered itself by quickly issuing its own statement to the effect that other religions are “in a gravely deficient situation.” In other words, the Vatican signed onto the language of mutual respect for one document only and then violated that “respect” at the earliest possible opportunity.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. The traditions of Christians destroying the sacred groves in Europe and then the indigenous holy sites in the worldwide colonies of European nations in order to destroy the spiritual underpinnings of psychosocial life of the established populations, rendering them more susceptible to proselytizing efforts – these traditions are still celebrated in global European Christianity. This demand for religious uniformity, though never fully realized, is at the core of Western national and denominational identities. It is not going to be relinquished easily by traditions that still revere the legends around that history.

The more distant from the Christian majorities’ sense of history a group finds itself, the more difficult it is for various Christian positions to accommodate a group as worthy of respect. The non-Abrahamic, non-monotheistic, and non-Western religions might sometimes find “tolerance” is all they can hope for. But even farther than any of those traditions is from normative Christian bases for respect or even tolerance is atheism, which has been described, with a lot of evidence to support the phrase, as the most despised minority in America. It is true that books by the so-called “New Atheists” have been best sellers, and a lot more people are openly declaring themselves to be atheists than at any previous time in our history. But when George W. Bush was still governor of the little state of Texas and campaigning for the White House, he said in published interviews that he did not consider atheists to be citizens of the United States. And while that did not dominate his campaign, he did not renounce it and was elected to two terms.

The need for mutual respect expands broadly to include non-Western religions and philosophies, certainly, but only when “we” include among those worthy of respect those who are farthest from “us” can we be worthy of a tradition that sees humanity as bearer of something special. Christianity may lose sight of it in doctrines of Original Sin and in the Nicene Creed, but, from Judaism, it still holds humanity to be made in the likeness and image of God. My tradition, Unitarian Universalism holds as its first-stated principle the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. If we take these foundational claims seriously, we are enjoined to see every individual as reflecting and shaped on the pattern of the divine. The despised atheist is divine if God is. The Buddhist, Hindu, Pagan, pantheist too. If any person’s tradition is worthy of respect, all are. For God to be divine we all must be. For Christianity to be a holy tradition, so too must atheism be. For the churches and traditions of the West to be worthy of respect, the institutions and traditions of the rest of the world must be afforded mutual respect.

If humanity is made in the image and likeness of God, or every human individual has inherent worth and dignity, then “mutual respect” is the only approach to the Other that can be afforded our respect.

Notes of a Worship Visitor in Naperville

2011-10-17T18:38:00.011-05:00

Having finished an Our Whole Lives facilitator training workshop at 9PM Saturday evening, I decided not to drive the 5+ hours home that night, staying instead to worship with the DuPage Unitarian Universalist Church, which had hosted the workshop. My friend and seminary colleague Charlotte Lehmann is the Ministerial Intern there, and I hoped to see her too.

I arrived at 9:20 for a 9:30 service, hung my jacket, went to the restroom, and made my way into the sanctuary with a few minutes to spare. It was a rainy morning out, with clearing skies forecast for later, so I wasn't surprised to find a very spare congregation with a large portion of the seats empty.

Despite the use of the "C-word" in the name of the congregation, the sanctuary appears to have been designed to deemphasize the churchiness of it. It is a modest rectangular room with a high flat ceiling with exposed beams. Individual chairs in rows facing the front with a center aisle serve instead of pews, as is true at many of UU congregations. At the front is a low stage with a wide pulpit in the central position. It appears designed to simultaneously stress the central importance of the spoken message, which is called a sermon here, without drawing a vivid visual connection to the pulpits used in many Christian denominations. Directly below the pulpit is a low table with a wooden chalice on it that holds a white tower candle. To the left, in a rather cramped corner, is a keyboard, a baby grand piano, the place from which the 6-person choir sings and the place for a drummer and guitarist to sit and perform. To the right is a bronze sculpture incorporating a ring of 25 candle sockets large enough to hold full-sized dinner candles, to be used during Joys and Concerns.

The shape of the service was somewhat different than I usually encounter, with the sermon coming immediately after the opening song, the offering and joys and concerns coming after the sermon, and no announcements being spoken, instead being printed on an insert to the order of service.

WELCOME
CHALICE LIGHTING
PRELUDE
OPENING WORDS
OPENING SONG
SERMON
OFFERING/ OFFERTORY
JOYS and CONCERNS
CLOSING THOUGHTS
CLOSING SONG
POSTLUDE
BENEDICTION

It is an order that, while not so specified, is closely derivative of the liturgical churches' structure of liturgy of the word followed by the liturgy of the eucharist, except for the sermon's length, which was more related to the "low" liturgical form of much of Protestant Christianity.

The Welcome was spoken by a member of the congregation's board. In it, the invitation was made to newcomers to stand and introduce themselves. I was surprised that there were several newcomers. All the more surprising given the low overall attendance at the service. But as each of us introduced ourselves, the congregation spoke words of welcome to us. When I sat down after introducing myself, the woman behind me rubbed my back, which was a bit of a surprise. And then we settled into the service with a child kindling the chalice and the performance of the prelude.

The service did not make use of the gray hymnal Singing the Living Tradition. Instead, along with a sung prelude from Garth Brooks ("Standing Outside the Fire," 1993), a sung offertory from James Taylor ("Shower the People," 1976), and a sung postlude from John Legend ("If You're Out There," 2008), the congregation sang two songs from the teal hymnal Singing the Journey, which is a 2005 supplement. The two songs from it: "When I am Frightened" and "Love Knocks and Waits For Us to Hear," copyrighted 1999 and 1996, respectively. Love or hate the gray hymnal, one advantage it has over the teal hymnal is that more of its selections can be sung by a congregation with minimal stumbling. It seems to me that the selections, while nice for a choir, were a bit complex for a congregation trying to sight read. But we made it through...

The Rev. Emmy Lou Belcher's sermon was titled Follow the Fireweed. She had great pulpit presence. And her sermon pulled together many different global, social justice, and political issues, stories, and anecdotes, together with several references to Christian existentialist theologian Paul Tillich and a couple to Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams. At various times, the poignancy of the stories she cited moved me, even to the point of tears. But I admit that, perhaps because I was tired from the intensive workshop and did not get enough sleep the night before, I could not discern what her theme was, let alone the structure of the sermon.

Joys and Concerns, often considered something to be tightly managed in our congregations, was open and comfortable here. Persons with a joy or concern came to the front, were handed a candle by the minister that they then lighted, inserted into the sculpture intended for that purpose, and then spoke what they wanted to share, without the minister appearing antsy or trying to control the time used. It felt like a very comfortable time of sacred sharing within this congregation. After the last candles were lighted, the minister, eyes closed, spoke words of pastoral prayer, lifting up the spoken and unspoken joys and concerns without resort to God-language or language of request. Very nicely handled. It so clearly was prayer yet of a sort whose words and intent could not make the most ardent anti-theist uncomfortable yet whose frame was open to theistic interpretation by those for whom that makes prayer meaningful.

I had a cup of coffee during the coffee hour that comes between the 9:30 service and the 11:15 service, thinking I might see my friend Charlotte. Somehow our paths did not cross. Given the warm words of welcome at the beginning of the service, I expected to be approached and drawn into conversations while I had my coffee, but no one spoke to me. And since I was thinking about hitting the road and getting home, I didn't take on the responsibility of starting a conversation myself, as I ordinarily would do.

When I had finished my coffee and made a pitstop, I headed for my car. Just outside the front door, I was greeted by a woman who told me that growing up conservative Christian, she had gone to a church-run camp on Little Grassy Lake, near Carbondale IL. She wished me safe driving, and I was on my way home.

I didn't have my camera along, so I can't share a picture of the building or sanctuary, but here is a link to a copyrighted image of the church: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimfrazier/1486821723/

CPE - Sermon 2

2011-10-02T12:00:00.011-05:00

TO BE OF SERVICE

A Sermon by Paul Kent Oakley

Carbondale (IL) Unitarian Fellowship

10:30 AM, October 2, 2011

WHAT IS A CHAPLAIN?
How many of you have ever received a chaplain visit in the hospital? Either when you were a patient or a family member of a patient? For how many of you was that a positive, helpful experience? How many of you had an unsatisfying or negative experience?

What does the phrase “hospital chaplain” suggest to you? What is a chaplain supposed to do?

Before I started seminary at Meadville Lombard I really didn’t have any idea what a chaplain did. I knew Father Francis Mulcahy from a decade of watching M*A*S*H. Father Mulcahy was a usually good-natured priest who could be called on to do a Methodist service or even officiate at a bris in the absence of both rabbi and mohel. But aside from television, I thought more about the US Air Force Academy, where Evangelical Christian fervor has been known to browbeat non-Christians and the uninterested into attending Christian services and being subjected to proselytization offensives. In hospitals, though, I think I just thought of an ingratiating Evangelical minister going around from room to room trying to save souls before they slipped on to the next world. The only time I had been a patient in a hospital, almost a quarter century ago, it was in Germany. In my month-long hospital stay, no chaplain visited me. It wasn’t part of how things were done there. So I was totally in the dark until I had a class in pastoral ministry in my first year of seminary.

What I learned before heading to St. Louis was that one of the biggest no-no’s for a real chaplain is attempting to provide answers to a patient from the chaplain’s own philosophy or theology. The essential job of the chaplain is to assess the spiritual needs and spiritual resources that the patient (or the patient’s family) has come with and help them access their own source of strength. No preaching allowed. Praying, however is frequently requested by patients and families, though that, too can be problematic. Petitionary prayer is not part of my spiritual practice, but patients often expect it.

HOW A CHAPLAIN IS TRAINED
I was enrolled this summer in a two-and-one-half-month unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (or CPE), a chaplaincy training, at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. CPE is a clinical training method. That means that the biggest text book is the doing of chaplaincy work. The intern chaplain is thrown in the deep end and told to swim. At least that is what it felt like at first. Through practice and reflection, a group of five of us chaplain interns of different faiths and different ages, with different life experiences, came together to learn from the patients and staff, our mentors and supervisor, and from each other how we can address the spiritual needs of patients and families who often do not share our faith identity or other demographic factors. In addition to me, the middle-aged gay white male Unitarian Univeralist, my colleagues were a middle-aged married conservative non-denominational Christian African American woman, a middle-aged married white male liberal Catholic, a young-adult single white female United Methodist, and a young-adult single white female Reform Jew.

To do this work we had to start from a place of authenticity, each being true to our own faith. We five chaplain interns supported each other, helping each other see the meaning or not become overwhelmed in what could be emotionally difficult encounters. Many were the times when as chaplain I sat with a couple as they face pain and uncertainty and even death, and my job was to help them grieve or reconnect with some sense of meaning, some sense of the Holy? And some patients had no one. The chaplain sits with them in their room, together seeking to find hope and comfort. Sometimes, hope and comfort are so far away, that the chaplain has to bear the burden of hope and faith alone until the patient is able to take it up again.

We each took the sense of the divine or what gives meaning from within our traditions as our grounding. But then we had to communicate coherently with patients and families whose cultural language was significantly different from our own. And we heard from them in their many cultural languages, messages that we needed to translate into our own idioms so that we could show back to them the resources and commitments that they had lost touch with in their pain, fear, and uncertainty.

To prepare to do that, we five interns and our supervisor spent eight hours of each week together for class, sacred text, sharing a patient encounter for reflection and feedback, and interpersonal group, where we supported each other and learned from each other. Each of us interns had an hour in individual session with our supervisor each week, during which he helped us to focus on what we are doing and to see ourselves and our chaplaincy with greater accuracy. We interns saw each other at the beginning and end of every day. And many days we also managed to eat lunch together. Supported in this way, I believe, we saw ourselves as facilitators, helping our patients and their families touch the spiritual resources they had within themselves.

But part of that learning process required each intern to arrive at a set of learning goals. Three of us in the group had goals that directly related to how we would relate to patients whose theology was significant different from our own. I cannot share the specific goals of my colleagues, but think about what it might mean to the faith and conscience of a conservative non-denominational Christian or a liberal Jew or a flaming Unitarian Universalist to be asked to pray with a patient whose belief structure and language of prayer were totally foreign – perhaps even offensive to the personal sensibilities of the chaplain. Each one of us had to negotiate a tenable position over the course of the summer, each deciding where the individual’s boundaries were. What will I do for a patient as their chaplain? And what goes too far for me to do in good conscience? What would the patient accept as help from the chaplain? What were the possibilities to navigate between?

I’m going to share a few experiences with you. I’ve made a few alterations that remove all identifying features because each patient has the right to privacy. Here is some of what I learned from this summer:

EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT EXPERIENCE
Now remember I said that clinical education tosses you off the deep end? Imagine this experience. The very first time I was called to the Emergency Department, I entered a room where the body of a young man killed in a motorcycle accident was laid out for his family to spend some time with before they signed papers and went out into what was now a cruel world, alone. I stepped into the room and found family members there, as I had been told. But I was totally unprepared for what I found beyond their presence. While the women comforted each other, the men stood on either side of the broken body of the son who had been pronounced dead on arrival. And as they stood there, they prayed in vigorous Pentecostal manner for a miracle. They proclaimed their faith in a God who raised the dead. The asked for, they claimed, they demanded the miracle that they believed God was capable of and performs. I sat with the women. Held their hands. Got them tissues. Fetched them glasses of ice water. Listened to their groans of horrible pain. I sat with them in their pain. And then, allowing the family some privacy, I left the room to come back later.

When I returned in 15 minutes, the prayers still continued. For two full hours the men prayed for the miracle. And then, as if they had reached their limit, passed beyond denial through exhaustion into acceptance. The tone of their prayers changed. The demands for the miracle were done, and in their place a softer, pained, resigned acceptance of God’s will, a prayer for the young’ man’s soul and thanksgiving for his life. One man told the women to do their crying in that room because when they walked out they were going out victorious in the grace of God.

It wasn’t until later in my time at Barnes-Jewish that I found viable techniques for being authentic yet still of service to patients or families who specifically asked me to pray for a miracle. But that day, I learned that even when I could not in good conscience join in the prayers for the young man to be raised from the dead, I could still be there for the family. Sitting in silence, holding a hand, listening to the mother express her grief, seeing to physical needs… Even when I was completely theologically incompatible with a patient or family, I still had something to offer that no one else in the Emergency Department had the time to offer.

THE PATIENT’S SONS
As well as encounters with true believers, there were probably as many encounters where religious belief and practice were not what a patient wanted. I remember one patient, a middle aged man who’d had spinal surgery. When I introduced myself as a chaplain, he sort of tensed up, but he didn’t tell me to leave, so I stayed and just talked with him for a while, seeing whether something might come up that he needed my ears or shoulder for. And sure enough, as soon as he saw I wasn’t peddling anything, he started talking about what was on his mind. He wasn’t worried about his surgery and recovery. He had faith in his surgeon and the hospital concerning that. But he had a heavy, heavy weight on his heart.

He started talking about his sons for whom he gave up advances in his career in order to raise them alone. In tears he told me how they had not been at the hospital for his surgery. He detailed several ways in which they hadn’t shown they cared about him when he needed them the most. Just for moral support. This was a strong man who had the appearance of someone who didn’t usually cry. Indeed, he told me he hadn’t cried once in the several years since their mother had left. But he cried in my presence as I allowed him to talk about what was important to him rather than coming with an agenda.

His problems could not be fixed in our encounter, but the simple fact of my being present to him, without any agenda, not trying to fix him, allowed this patient the space he needed to unburden his soul of his great disappointment in his sons. I learned again from this patient that it is more important to listen than to think it is possible to fix another’s problems.

EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE
And then there was the patient who, in the middle of a longish encounter, suddenly reminded me of my ex-wife at her most vulnerable. So there I was, forced to separate out in the moment my personal stuff that I had to deal with later and the needs of the patient. What surprised me as I was putting that personal stuff to the side is that this difficult encounter showed me what I least of all expected: that buried deep there was within me still a well of tenderness toward my ex. Even after decades having only the most minimal contact after some emotional extremes after our divorce. In just a few minutes, this patient forced me to think about things long buried. Talk about a shock! But I put it aside in the moment in order to be present for the patient.

She had a degenerative disease, could barely move in her hospital bed, and you would think that that would be enough. Right? But the universe doesn’t work on the fairness principle but on some other complex calculus of cause and effect. So this woman, a mother of several children, was divorced by her husband when she got the diagnosis of this disease. And because she was debilitated with her disease, he got custody of her children and then remarried. And one of her children committed suicide. And another blamed herself for her sibling’s suicide and couldn’t bring herself to do anything positive and constructive with her life because of the guilt. And that would certainly be enough, no? But there is more. Her house and all her belongings were destroyed in a tornado. If she had lived a few millennia earlier, they might have written a book of the Bible about her story.

Every sentence was physically difficult for her to express. And I was fighting back tears as she was telling it. And finally she asks a wrenching question: does God forgive her? Now here was the big chaplain’s no-no, right? I’m not supposed to tell her what I think. I’m supposed to draw out and help her strengthen her own belief. I tried. Believe me I tried. But she kept coming back to the question. She wanted an answer not a process, and I didn't know how to move forward. So I reassured her that certainly God forgave her. We cried together. She asked for a prayer.

I left her room knowing two things: I had technically broken the rules of engagement, and I had done the right thing - a right thing for my patient, at least given my level of skill at that moment. From her I learned that rules, though important, have to be weighed against an individual’s carefully discerned need.

FINAL ENCOUNTER
And finally I must tell you that the very last patient I visited this summer threw me out of her room. It is good to laugh now when I word it that way. But there was nothing funny at the time. The nurses had asked me to see her because she had just received a new and devastating diagnosis. So in I went. Somewhat confident in my abilities by that time. I introduced myself as the chaplain. The patient glared at me then turned and stared out the window. I attempted to engage her, using techniques that I’d learned over the summer. And she spoke to me briefly. She told me that all she wanted to do was look out the window and not think about her diagnosis. I tried again because you never know. Sometimes people need someone to let them know that they’re not going away. But she was not ready. She told me loudly that she didn’t want to think about it and used a few colorful phrases to tell me to leave. And I left, telling her that if she would like to see a chaplain later she could ask her nurse to page me.

The final reinforcement of a lesson that I got from her was a crucial lesson. From her I learned again that it’s not about me. My function of trying to help her find a way to deal with what she is going through is supremely unimportant compared to her confirmed judgment that she wants none of it and wants to stare out the window. Looking back on the summer, I am so happy she was my last patient because that is such an important yet difficult lesson to assimilate. It’s not about me.

SEGUE TO CHOIR
I could burden you further with my summer experiences, but I’ve already run past the limits of your patience. So I ask that you pause for a deep breath. …In… Out… In… Out… In… Out…

…Silence is important. Only when we stop our own voices can we hear the voice of those who need our presence…

Before the finest symphony can swell with notes profound

The silence must resound, the silence must resound.

And so we listen in moments clear and calm

To hear, with wonder the quiet strains prolong.

~~~~~

ORDER OF SERVICE
Sunday, October 2, 2011

Mr. Paul Kent Oakley, Presiding and Speaking
Ms. Shaina Graff, Violinist
Mr. Alan Christensen, Pianist
The Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship Choir
directed by Ms. Geri McKee

Welcome and Introduction
Kindling the Chalice Flame: Nicholas Therrell
Announcements
Prelude: Shaina Graff
Opening Hymn #359 “When We Are Gathered”
Opening Reading #567 “To Be of Use”
Sharing of Joys and Sorrows
A Moment of Silence
Metta Prayer
Unison Offering Reading
Offering Music: Shaina Graff
Message: “To Be of Service”
Musical Interlude: “The Silence and the Song” by Mark Patterson - Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship Choir
Closing Words
Closing Hymn #18 “What Wondrous Love”
Benediction

Before God, the State of Illinois, and Assembled Family and Friends

2011-09-30T16:45:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, September 29, 2011, I was given the pleasure of officiating at the civil union ceremony of Renee Foster and Lynn Crespi. Lynn told me that theirs was the 21st license for civil union to be applied for in Williamson County IL. Only since June 1, 2011 have civil unions been the law in Illinois.

I had talked to Renee on the phone, and she and Lynn had the opportunity to review the text of their ceremony in advance, but I had not met them until an hour before the ceremony. Lynn was especially relieved to learn that I am gay and said that knowing this made going through the ceremony so much easier for her. She didn't say it in these words, but it seemed that part of what she was saying was that, with a heterosexual minister, she might have felt that the minister was condescending to accept her union in contrast to knowing that the gay minister was on her same team, sharing rather than merely accepting.

The ceremony took place under a pergola at the back of the house Lynn and Renee will be moving to in a few weeks. The space was just the right size to accommodate their guests.

One part of the ceremony that I wrote for them I will share here:

Wedding Address

Many ancient societies didn’t have words to express the bond we are gathered here to celebrate and give witness to today. But some did. There have always been those who recognize the divine gift of the loving pairing of one person with another in its many forms. In our society today there are those who don’t yet have a vocabulary that allows them to understand the God-given grace of the union we have gathered to celebrate today. But a growing portion of the people around us are beginning to awaken to the beauty of love and commitment in all its rainbow colors and many expressions. We live in a time of wonderful potential, when people in love can receive the recognition of law and support of society that each one deserves.

Almost 2,400 years ago a Greek philosopher wrote about a dinner party where each guest was to give a speech in praise of love. Among the guests, one told a humorous metaphorical tale about early humans being a composite of the stuff that would make up two persons, but in one complex body. Each human body was either female and female, female and male, or male and male. But the gods decided that these joined humans were too powerful, and so they split them into two unique persons in separate female and male bodies. As a result of the separation, though, each one feels incomplete and seeks her other half.

The biology of attraction, the chemistry of love, and the sociology of commitment are quite complex. Our scientists are still trying to figure it out. But in the Book of Genesis, God observes that it is not good for a person to be alone. There is something deep within our humanity that yearns for another person to mutually balance, complete, and support us. This is a precious gift from God.

And so today we come together as witnesses, recognizing the joining of Renee Foster and Lynn Crespi in bonds of mutual love and support.

~~~~~

The brides were radiant. And I was privileged to be a part of their publicly recognized union.

Greeting the Sabbath at Home

2011-08-20T12:03:00.002-05:00

Yesterday evening for the first time since May, I was not in synagogue to greet the Sabbath with my unofficially adopted summer congregation, Central Reform Congregation. I missed being with them, and, so, welcomed Shabbat on my own while thinking of my CRC family.

I lighted candles, gathered the light to myself, covered my eyes and sang the blessing:

ברוך אתה ה' אלוהינו מלך העולם,
אשר קדשנו במצותיו וצונו להדליק נר של שבת.‏

Baruch atah Adonai
Eloheinu, Melech haolam,
asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav,
v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.

I sang it in the form composed by my friend Leslie Caplan, a cantor at CRC, but I missed the tone and timbre of her voice. The candle light was warm and lovely.

Now here's a bit of interfaith recycling at work: the candles were left over from last December's Advent wreath. One purple, one pink. To borrow from the Christians, purple (violet) is the liturgical color of repentance/ tashuvah while pink (rose) is the color of rejoicing/ simchah. I like the pairing of the two. Not unlike the drinking of sweet wine and the breaking of a glass in Jewish weddings - the pairing of joy and sorrow, bane and blessing, pain and pleasure. Besides, the pink and purple candles are just pretty together.

I don't have candlesticks - several chanukiot, yes, a silver candelabrum, a single Romanian-crystal candlestick, and a Kosta Boda tealight, but not a set for just two candles - so I used champagne flutes with enough kosher salt to hold the candles upright.

I kept hearing the V'Shamru running through my head, its text taken from Exodus 31:16-17, a reiteration of the everlasting covenant of the Sabbath. I especially kept hearing Leslie's voice singing the "Beini u’vein b’nei Yisrael" part.

Pancakes instead of challah...

Closing a Chapter at CRC

2011-08-13T20:00:00.199-05:00

The process of farewells began last Friday evening. After a summer of attending Shabbat services every week at Central Reform Congregation, I was very conscious of the shortness of the remaining time with this congregation that so easily and warmly embraced me, where I could, in Rabbi Susan's words, end each week of suffering, despair, fear, and death and sometimes wondering whether I had done the suffering much good, by "breathing in all that is good and high and holy and breathing out the schmutz."

On Friday, August 5, I was joined at CRC by my CPE colleagues Crystal Brown and Leanne Noland. Leanne also brought her boyfriend and her parents with her. Leanne had been to a Jewish service once before as part of a class when she was a pre-teen, but Crystal, Leanne's boyfriend, and her parents had never before experienced Jewish worship. We all let the liturgy wash over us, each with her or his own understanding, them experiencing some things as unusual, me feeling that what I've become very familiar with will be a weekly part of my life only a bit longer, "evening the frayed edges of our lives."

I preached, at Rabbi Susan's invitation, receiving appreciative responses that went beyond polite recognition of a guest speaker. Rabbi Susan gave me a gift that she had brought back from Tzfat, Israel, on the trip she had returned from just the day before - a piece of kabbalistic art that represents the separation and reunification of the divine in the realms of human consciousness:

Tashuv-Hey - The upper and lower Hey of the Holy Name.
A mystical representation of the never-pronounced four-letter name of G-d.

It also serves as a kind of Jewish yin-yang representation, the unification of opposites. "When we are concerned only for ourself we are empty. When we care for each other we are overflowing."

Wonderful oneg conversation rendered poignant by the realization of how little time remained.

The next morning I arrived at 8:45 for Torah study of the parsha, the day's assigned Torah portion, that I had preached on the night before. Then at the 10:00AM Shacharit service, there was a double bat mitzvah. Twin girls were leading the service, reading from the Torah scroll and the haftorah portion in Hebrew, with cantillation. The girls each had different styles and skills, presented different perspectives in their divrei Torah, their teachings on the parsha. It was a beautiful service with lots of family and friends who are not members of the congregation swelling the attendance.

The Aron Hakodesh, the Ark of the Torah, from the outside.

This past Friday evening, after saying goodbyes to all but one of my CPE colleagues, supervisor, mentors, and floor staff, Bob Crecelius, who had been on call on the 5th and thus unable to attend when I preached at CRC, and I went out to eat at Rasoi, the Indian restaurant on Euclid, before both attending the Kabbalat Shabbat service at CRC. Bob had just once previously attended a synagogue service, and that was in a Conservative congregation. He loved the service and thought that he would sometime bring his wife to a service here. They live in Farmington MO, something like an hour away from the city.

Representation of the Klipot, the shards that, according to Kabbalah,
resulted from the first breaking of Creation

It was, as always a beautiful service, and I sang with full voice, the prayers of the liturgy that has become familiar and comforting through this summer. It was also Social Responsibility Shabbat, and the congregation was presented with the first annual Missouri IMPACT Amos 5:24 Justice Advocate Award by the Rev. Dr. John Bennett and the Rev. Allen Ladage, members of the IMPACT Board.

After the service, Bob and I said our goodbyes, I had wonderful oneg conversations. And then Leslie Caplan and I went to the Moonrise rooftop terrace in the University City Delmar Loop and talked and talked until after 2:00 AM, not even realizing the time until the bouncer told us that they were getting ready to close up, and the elevators would be crowded with drunk people. We should leave soon if we wanted to avoid that experience.

Light shines into the oneg from every direction.

Bright and early, I got up for Torah study at CRC. At the morning service there was a bar mitzvah. So beautiful in every aspect. At several points in the service I had tears in my eyes. I was hyper-aware of this being my last service at CRC for a while and was emotional on that count, certainly. But the bar mitzvah boy did a wonderful job leading the service with the support and guidance of Rabbi Randy and Rabbi Susan. And at various points it was clear that this was a very emotional experience for him. He was not just fulfilling a communal expectation, becoming a man in the sense of being responsible for his own actions. This was something he took seriously - at age 12. He wiped tears from his eyes several times.

Leslie Caplan and I
enjoying after-kiddush-luncheon conversation

At the end of the service, in addition to the bar mitzvah boy and his parents, Rabbi Susan called to the bima a girl who is departing this week for university. And then she called me up to the bima too, telling the congregation that I had spent the summer worshiping with them while I was in the chaplaincy program at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, that I had preached for them on the 5th, and that this was my last Shabbat with them for now. I walked up to the bima, stood with the bar mitzvah family, the college-bound girl, Rabbi Susan and Rabbi Randy, all arm-in-arm, as the congregation, also arm-in-arm, sang the words of blessing, and Rabbis Randy, Ed, and Susan, in turn, interpreted the blessing in ways appropriate for that day and that gathering. I've long said that I love blessings. It felt wonderful, receiving this one. I was proud to share the bima with the new bar mitzvah and this congregation's rabbis, whom I love and respect immensely.

And I cried a little bit.

After the service, I was approached by several people who had been present when I preached but hadn't yet spoken with me about it. Very positive responses. And members who have come to know me expressed their sadness at my leaving, wishing me the best.

The bar mitzvah family provided a kiddush luncheon with some of my favorite things - like lox, like a delicious kugel, like... And Leslie Caplan, her daughter (on the verge of her own adventure going off to live in California), and I sat talking until about 2:00PM. Then back to the apartment to pack and take most of my things back home to Mt. Vernon.

I was rather emotional. I will miss CRC very much!

CPE - Wk. 11 - Goodbyes

2011-08-13T08:00:00.096-05:00

This was a week full of goodbyes and preparations for goodbyes. Preparations for evaluations and the evaluations themselves. It was exhausting.

The week began on Monday with regular visits on our assigned units followed by an afternoon didactic on saying goodbyes. When I finished the day at the hospital, I drove an hour over into Illinois to attend the visitation of a patient who had died at Barnes-Jewish the week before. I had visited the patient's parents and daughter several times in the ICU waiting room over the previous two weeks and was there to pray the last prayer over her. Her family specifically asked me to come to the visitation and/or the funeral. The funeral was not possible because of my schedule, but I was honored that the family had valued my presence enough to ask me to be there at that time. I was tired when I got back to St. Louis, but it was a good experience, being present with the family as they were remembering the life of the patient, who had not been conscious in the time I had "known" her in the hospital.

Tuesday I visited a patient who had been moved from my floor to oncology after a new diagnosis. She was glad for my presence and wanted prayer. Again. That evening after leaving the hospital, I went to see a movie: Cowboys and Aliens, which I loved! I should have been working on my self evaluation, which was nowhere near done, but sometimes stress is better relieved through enjoyable procrastination.

Wednesday, I started the day by completing my self-evaluation and supplying copies to my peers and supervisor. At noon, we CPE students had our graduation ceremony and luncheon, attended by staff we invited from our units, as well as by our mentors and the contract chaplains who were available.

My Certificate of Successful Completion of CPE

Thursday a final verbatim from a peer after a day on our units, seeing patients and reminding staff that Friday would be our last day. That evening, instead of working on finishing my program evaluation, I went to the cinema again to see the devastating and beautiful film Sarah's Key.

Friday morning: finishing the program evaluation, had a final individual session with my supervisor. My supervisor gave me a very positive preview of what he will write over the next 45 days in my final evaluation. Then off to the unit for the last time. I took donuts, cookies, and veggies with dip for the floor staff as a goodbye and a thank you. Said goodbyes and voiced my appreciation. And my last patient encounter ended rather quickly with the patient throwing me out of her room because she was not yet able to do anything other than scream or stare out the window after receiving an unexpected and terrible diagnosis. It was an appropriate, if uncomfortable, way to end, a reminder of how little it is possible to accomplish and never to assume that someone will be at a point in their experience where they are able to receive anything positive from even the best-trained and best-intentioned person.

Friday afternoon was our final group session, going over our self-evaluations, taking pictures, and giving our supervisor a card and bookplate for the gift he will be receiving from us within the week: his own personal copy of Siddur Sha'ar Zahav, the prayerbook of the San Francisco LGBT synagogue by that name, a prayerbook that I had used when it was my final turn to present Sacred Text at the beginning of our group session. Jim had been very impressed with the range of life events and style of writing included in the prayerbook. And partly in that experience, my Jewish colleague had come to a greater appreciation of the interfaith value of Jewish liturgy. And our other colleagues responded as impressed as Jim. It just seemed like the one item available for purchase that best fit our experience together this summer. Jim had tears in his eyes, hugged us all, and told us it was the best gift he'd ever gotten from his CPE students.

Goodbyes all round. Peers, supervisor, and staff chaplains leaving one by one. Finally it was down to me and Bob. We went out to dinner together and then on to Central Reform Congregation for Shabbat service, since Bob had been on call when I preached there the previous Friday. We sat together for the service and then said our goodbyes. With emotion felt if not profusely exhibited. But eyes did have a tear.

left to right: Jim Bennett, Bob Crecelius, Deana Sussman,
Crystal Brown, Paul Oakley, and Leanne Noland
CPE-1 2011 Summer Intensive Unit, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis MO

I will miss my colleagues very much, who supported me and whom I supported through this experience called CPE: Crystal Brown, Bob Crecelius, Leanne Noland, and Deana Sussman. And our supervisor Jim Bennett. And my mentor Elisha Donaldson. I will miss them all, yet they are now a part of me too.

Walking on Water - 2/3 and 1/2/3

2011-08-07T22:15:00.003-05:00

I attended three churches this weekend - two for the third time and one for the second time on its third Sunday service of its young life. Thanks to the lectionary, at each the Gospel reading on which the sermon was based was Matthew 14:22-33, the account of Jesus walking on the water.

Or is that what it is about? Or is it about Peter walking on the water? Or something else?

At the Community of St. Clare and St. Francis (Ecumenical Catholic Communion), the home congregation of a CPE colleague, George the lay homilist interpreted the passage as a definition of the nature and meaning of faith. A disciple calls out with some degree of doubt even about the identity of the divine one, asking to be asked to come where God is and do what God is doing. The disciple is asked. The disciple ingores the storm for a moment and steps out of the boat to move toward where God is to do what God is doing. The disciple is distracted by the storm, realizes the audacity of the enterprise, and is overcome by realistic thinking. The disciple begins to sink as a result. God rescues the disciple and gets into the boat with God's followers. The homilist saw the entire arc of action as Faith, rather than just the few moments when the disciple too the steps into the humanly impossible action. The doubtful request of who might be the Divine One. The audacious action. The realization of reality. The rescue. Getting back into the boat accompanied by the Divine One. Each of these is an aspect of Faith. This homilist did not present the disciple as sinking because of a loss of faith but as a realistic part of the Faith process and continuum of action that brings the Divine One into the boat with the disciple and the community of disciples.

Evangelical United Church of Christ
204 E. Lockwood, Webster Groves, MO
Host of Sts. Clare and Francis

At Trinity Episcopal Church the Rev. Anne Kelsey, who back in 2007 graciously gave permission for us at MVUUF to use a wonderful LGBT-affirming sermon of hers, today preached a sophisticatedly structured sermon that wove many intricate strands together: the reading from Genesis and its accompanying Psalm about Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers and his eventual rise in Egypt; the Gospel account of walking on water; an exploration of how story telling and interpretation vary with teller and listener's age and experience, meaning something new with each reading, each telling; the structure and function of the lectionary; a story from this year in this parish, when a service got moved to an inner hallway as it was interrupted by civil defense sirens warning of extreme weather; and a speculation about how that local story might be received two thousand years hence if somehow preserved and retold until then. It was an intricately woven sermon that ended with Anne, speaking from that speculative future, using a delightful locution to invite the listener to finish the sermon with his or her own meaning of the Gospel lesson. Meaning shaped by individual stages of cognitive and faith development and through the lens of his or her own specific experience.

Trinity Episcopal Church
600 North Euclid, St. Louis MO

And at St. Catherine of Siena American National Catholic Church, at this young parish's third service, the Rev. Phillip Lichtenwalter, a deacon and leader of this church plant, who will be ordained a priest in November, and who is a facebook friend of mine, preached to a congregation of seven plus his partner. His sermon closely linked the audacity of Peter stepping out of the boat to the experience of this parish starting up. An aspect that was unspoken in this sermon but contextually present through pre-service conversation and pre-dismissal announcements is that St. Louis is a very Roman Catholic town, where the Roman bishop has a great deal of influence if not controlling power. The precariousness of their position as a non-Roman Catholic venture is palpable - as is their confidence in the value of the attempt. But Phillip's sermon did not rest solely at the parochial level. He invited his listeners to think of their own lives and how they have or might step out of the boat. He recognized the possibility of failures, a question that a reporter had brought up when interviewing him about the new parish. Failure of a particular enterprise entered in faith is not the issue. Failures of various kinds happen and will continue to happen. The important thing that can be relied on is being pulled out of the wave when that failure comes.

St. John's Episcopal Church
3664 Arsenal Street, Saint Louis, MO
Host of St. Catherine of Siena ANCC

At St. Catherine of Siena, I once again loved the way the roles of reader of the Lessons and of the Prayers of the Faithful were passed among those present and the reading done from the reader's seat rather than from a lectern/ ambo/ pulpit. I felt a little twinge of regret that this is probably not going to last very long and this parish will obtain an ambo and organize itself in more-or-less traditional ways, with persons in position as lector, and so forth. I am a visitor and have no right to shape the process. But I would feel a loss of something organic and special when the time comes and traditional ways of organizing kick in. Change is inevitable with growth and time. I hope, though, that the changes that are made are chosen for their value rather than just acquiesced to out of the weight of tradition. Of course, that may well just be my bias, both personal and denominational in its roots.

Phillip made clear that communion here is open to all who wish to partake and that a blessing is available as well, should anyone not feel worthy to partake. Because Phillip is a deacon rather than a priest, this was not a celebration of the Liturgy of the Eucharist but a communion service, using hosts sanctified by the bishop. Phillip will begin celebrating the Liturgy of the Eucharist after his priestly ordination in November.

In the announcements, Phillip announced a meeting of the parish council. Maybe proto-council, given the current level of organization, but he made it clear that the American National Catholic Church is congregational in its governance. The people will direct their own existence and goals. They have a bishop, George Lucey, also a facebook friend of mine, but he does not control the life of the parish or its developmental decisions.

After the service I had a good conversation with Phillip's partner Scott. Thirty-three years old, several tattoos, injured by his conservative Christian upbringing, he considers himself no longer Christian but is spiritual. He attends to support Phillip in his ministry. A wonderful smile and person. I was glad for the opportunity to get to know him.

At Trinity Episcopal I was greeted by several members both before and after the service. On learning I'm UU, the response was always affirmative - from comments on the respect for and good relations they have with First Unitarian, to a statement that the speaker's son is UU, to "We share the same values, it's just the liturgy that's different," and so on. A few of the people, including the deacon and the rector, I had met on my previous attendance here for Compline.

This congregation are robust singers. Try as it might, the magnificent swells of the organ never once drowned out the strong voices of the congregation singing. I let the richness of the Book of Common Prayer Rite II liturgy wash over me. Here, as at Christ Church Cathedral downtown, the Gospel reading is done not from the lectern but from the center of the nave, with the procession of torches, processional cross, thurible billowing incense, and so forth bringing the Gospel down among the people rather than proclaiming it from on high.

High on the east wall of the chancel, above the altar, is what in a Roman Catholic church would be a crucifix, but the cross is decorated and stylized, its Jesus robed, arms extended in welcome rather than nailed in the agony and naked disgrace of execution. This is a presentation more in keeping with the presentation of Jesus in the early church, before the Church entered its second thousand years with a megastrong crucifixation. It is also representative of the inclusiveness of this parish, a member of Oasis, an Episcopal LGBT-affirming organization, which practices open communion, as do the other churches I visited this weekend.

At St. Clare and Francis I was recognized, called by name. The same warmth and welcome I had encountered before was present still. The sermon was given by a lay homilist, and the Eucharist was co-celebrated by male and female priests. I knew Fr. Frank from my two previous visits. This was the first time I had seen a woman priest at the altar here, though I had seen her in the congregation and knew she was a priest. The co-officiating, co-celebrating of men and women with clear cooperation of laity and clergy, as evidenced in the preaching by a lay member, is symbolically something wonderful here.

As before, the post-Vatican II musical style, the gathering of all who wished to join around the altar for the Eucharist, the communion explicitly open to everyone, the full inclusiveness without regard to gender or sexuality or race or ability or other distinguishing characteristics are beautifully combined here in community together.

Each of these three Catholic but non-Roman congregations is fully inclusive at all levels of membership and leadership and participation, regardless of characteristics of identity. Each practices truly open communion. Each has a social conscience and is involved and becoming more so in doing social justice work. Each welcomes the stranger with genuine expressions of the love of God for all. Each encourages those they meet to walk on water with the divine One or ride in the boat with the divine One, reassuring all that they are not alone, even in a storm.

CPE - Sermon 1

2011-08-06T14:20:00.005-05:00

“ON THAT SIDE OF THE JORDAN”
– MOSES BEGINS AND EXPLAINS TORAH –

A Teaching by Paul Kent Oakley

Central Reform Congregation, St. Louis MO

7:30 PM, August 5, 2011

It is an honor and a pleasure to stand here with you today. Before I unofficially adopted you as my home congregation for my two and one-half months in St. Louis this summer, I first came to know of Central Reform Congregation from articles in the Post-Dispatch when you built this beautiful building.

I came to know a little more when I took a chance and, with no idea what might come of it, invited Rabbi Randy to come preach to my home congregation, a small, lay-led Unitarian Universalist fellowship in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. It was December 2008, and I asked Rabbi Randy to give a spiritual teaching on a theme from Chanukah. He did that for us, and beautifully. He also brought the chanukiah that came back to this congregation after its sojourn in a church here in the Central West End after the last previous synagogue in St. Louis city made its way to the county. He sang the blessings and lighted the candles, drawing us into that culturally significant minor holiday farther than most of us had been before. But in the encounter he also provided something special, a point of connection, for a couple of Jewish participants in our small congregation, people who had entered into interfaith marriages at a time when that was less comfortable than it is today. One of the couples were married in and had found common religious ground in Unitarian and Universalist congregations in a time of fewer options. Rabbi Randy came back the next year as well. And this June he spoke at my internship congregation in Carbondale, Illinois. I greatly appreciate his willingness to make the long trek to Mt. Vernon and Carbondale to give his teachings that encouraged us in interfaith cooperation, social justice, and peace-making.

My first visit to CRC was for Simchat Torah last fall. That evening I think I fell a little bit in love!

My thanks to Rabbi Susan for graciously inviting me to give this teaching here tonight! But I have to say, the first thought that went through my head when she asked me was, what do I have to teach you that you haven’t heard a thousand times before – and better. And then I looked to see what the Torah portion would be for today because I wanted to make a connection there if possible. But Parasha Devarim, the opening chapters of Deuteronomy, is Moses’ final admonition to the people. Oh my! These are words of rebuke. How could I who am not a member of the people use this parsha? So I looked to the haftorah portion. This text is Isaiah chapter one. “Woe to a sinful nation”?! Oh my! These are more words of rebuke! And, let me tell you, Unitarian Universalists don’t handle rebuke all that well. Maybe there would be something I could connect to in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, in the chapter traditionally read on this Shabbat? And my eyes lighted on this: “…One who stays awake at night, or travels alone on the road, and turns his heart to idleness, has forfeited his life” (Chapter 3 verse 4)? Ouch! I’m a night owl who frequently travels alone and who enjoys leisure – when I can find the time. I felt that my attempt to engage the texts for this Shabbat must surely be doomed!

But then my eye moved on to the sixth verse of the third chapter of the Ethics of the Fathers. In the English translation that I read, altered here only to remove gendered pronouns for G-d, it goes like this:

Rabbi Chalafta the son of Dosa of the village of Chanania would say: Ten who sit together and occupy themselves with Torah, the Divine Presence rests amongst them, as is stated: ‘The Almighty stands in the congregation of G-d’ (Psalms 82:1). And from where do we know that such is also the case with five? From the verse, “G-d established G-d’s band on earth” (Amos 9:6). And three? From the verse, “G-d renders judgement in the midst of the tribunal” (Psalms 82:1). And two? From the verse, “Then the G-d-fearing conversed with one another, and G-d listened and heard” (Malachi 3:16). And from where do we know that such is the case even with a single individual? From the verse, “Every place where I have My name mentioned, I shall come to you and bless you” (Exodus 20:21).

Now, I am enrolled in a summer unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, a chaplaincy training, at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Through practice and reflection, a group of five of us chaplain interns of different faiths and different ages, with different life experiences, have come together to learn from the patients and staff, our mentors and supervisor, and from each other how we can address the spiritual needs of patients and families who often do not share our faith identity or other demographic factors. Yet we need to be authentic, true to our own faith. We five chaplain interns together with our five mentors are ten who hope to evoke a sense of meaning, a feeling of the Divine Presence, in the patients whom we serve. The five interns support each other, helping each other see the divine in what can be emotionally difficult encounters. How many the times when as chaplain I sit with a couple as they face pain and uncertainty and even death, and my job is to help them grieve or reconnect with some sense of meaning, some sense of the Holy? And some patients have no one. The chaplain sits with them in their room, together seeking to find hope and comfort. Sometimes, hope and comfort are so far away, that the chaplain has to bear the burden of hope and faith alone. Ten. Five. Three. Two. Even one. And the Shekhinah is present. Moving. Breathing… I, I believe I had found a way into this Shabbat.

Then a few weeks ago I sat in the library here at CRC and learned from Rashi, the great eleventh-century rabbi – and winemaker, I’ve been told. Parasha Devarim begins, “These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel on that side of the Jordan in the desert, in the plain opposite the Red Sea, between Paran and Tofel and Lavan and Hazeroth and Di Zahav.” Among the things I learned from Rashi is that no such location exists in normal space. “On that side of the Jordan” tells us that, once again, the important encounter is happening outside the Promised Land. Torah was given at Sinai rather than at Zion. Even earlier, Jacob, as he was returning home from the sojourn with his uncle in Haran, still on “that side of the Jordan,” wrestled through the night with a stranger, giving us that great metaphor for struggling with what is difficult to make sense of. With what it seems impossible to find meaning in. “On that side of the Jordan” is a place of uncertainty, a transitional setting. It is a place of unfulfilled promise and miracles together. And Rashi teaches that the place names represent those significant occasions when the Israelites angered G-d between Egypt and the death of Moses. Di Zahav, for example, refers to the gold of the golden calf episode; Hazeroth, to the rebellion of Korach. The text defines no literal place, but a transitional space, surrounded by the weaknesses and shortcomings of the people.

What an apt metaphor for the hospital. A transitional space surrounded by weaknesses and failings, where patients can be hyper aware of shortcomings, for the need to refocus. The transition varies by patient and family. Sometimes it is a transition from life to death. Or from sickness to health. From diminished capacity to restoration. Or from minor diagnosis to life-changing chronic diagnosis. Some move through the transition so quickly that it is hard to hold onto the memory of their presence. Others grab at our hearts. One patient reminded me of my grandmother. And in the month she moved from unit to unit, I followed her, moved by her paralysis and other complicating problems. Some patients have obvious spiritual needs; others, less obvious ones. Prayer is a common request. But how to pray? If I am Unitarian Univeralist and the patient is a conservative Muslim, for example, how can I provide them what they need?

Which brings me back to Rashi. In Parasha Devarim, Rashi next led me to the fifth verse of the same chapter: “On that side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses commenced and explained this Law.” As I read the verse in English I thought it simply a repetition of the first verse without the symbolic made-up place names. But Rashi’s explanation zeroes in on Moses’ “explaining” Torah at this time and in this place. Surely Moses had already explained Torah to the people. But Rashi tells us that Moses “explained” Torah in seventy languages. Seventy languages refers to the languages of the world after G-d confused the languages at Babel. So Rashi is saying that Moses explained Torah in every human language. Every language is the source and carrier of culture, of a unique family of subcultures. The commentaries give explanations of the reason for the seventy languages. But today I would like to interpret Moses’ act of translation in my own way. I think that Rashi’s gloss suggests that Moses taught Torah that was communicated in the language and culture and religious idiom of all people and all times. In addition to teaching the unique Torah of Israel, the Torah of the Jewish people, in Parasha Devarim Moses also taught Torah in twenty-first-century American English and in the religious idiom that I, a Unitarian Universalist, can also receive.

Though there are overlaps, the religious culture through which I approach the divine is certainly different from the culture through which my colleagues approach the divine. I would like to introduce two of my colleagues who are here this evening, and note the diversity of the cultures through which we and our mentors approach the divine:

Crystal Brown serves as chaplain on the units for women and infants. She is a non-denominational Christian. Her mentor is United Church of Christ.
Leanne Noland serves as chaplain on the general medicine unit. She is United Methodist. Her mentor is Ethical Society and Buddhist.
I, of course, am the gay, Unitarian Universalist member of our group; I serve on the neurosurgery and neurology units. My mentor is an interdenominational Christian.

Unable to be with us tonight only because he is on-call at the hospital is:

Bob Crecelius, a liberal Catholic; he serves on the trauma unit, where his mentor is a non-denominational Christian.

And one of our colleagues is unable to be present because of a happy occasion – today is her grandmother’s 75th birthday:

Deana Sussman is studying at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles to become a Reform Rabbi; she is serving in oncology; and her mentor is Rabbi Dale Schreiber.

Our supervisor and teacher is Jim Bennett, an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a denomination that a year or so ago decided to live its liberal theology more fully by accepting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender clergy.

We five interns and our supervisor spend eight hours of each week together for class, sacred text, sharing a patient encounter for reflection and feedback, and interpersonal group, where we support each other and learn from each other. Each of us interns has an hour in individual session with our supervisor each week, during which he helps us focus on what we are doing and see ourselves and our chaplaincy with greater accuracy. We interns see each other at the beginning and end of every day. And many days we also manage to eat lunch together. Supported in this way, I believe, we see ourselves as facilitators of the divine presence for each other and for our patients and their families in a way that is reminiscent of the way Rabbi Chalafta the son of Dosa of the village of Chanania saw ten or five or three or two or even one as capable of invoking the divine presence.

We work in a transitional space, “on that side of the Jordan,” which is where Torah places several major encounters with the divine. Together with our patients, each of us apprehends Torah in our unique languages. And, where Rashi presents Moses as teaching Torah in the seventy languages of humanity, each day my colleagues and I have to speak and hear in many languages. We take the sense of the divine within our traditions as our grounding. But then we must communicate coherently with patients and families whose cultural language is significantly different from our own. And we hear from them in their many languages, divine messages that we must translate into our own idioms so that we can show that divinity back to them.

We remember Jacob’s dream at Bethel, angels ascending and descending, and G-d tells Jacob that through his descendents all the nations will be blessed. And Rashi tells us that Moses explained Torah in seventy languages, the languages of all the nations. Rashi is teaching that regardless of the perfection of a particular culture’s Torah, despite the perfection of the unique and precious gift of Torah to the Jewish people, the perfection of Torah can also be communicated through other cultures. My religious culture holds as one of its principles the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Torah teaches that G-d created us, through our first parents, in G-d’s own image. Every day those of us serving as chaplains work to preserve for the dying, sick, and injured a sense of their being of inherent worth, made in G-d’s image. I enter the room of a patient who is a prisoner chained to his bed, whose guard sits in the same room, impassive and bored, and I see divinity before me, even though the prisoner and the guard do not sense it. I must help them see that divinity. My task is Moses’ task: to translate into a new language. Indeed, living in a multicultural, interfaith world, it is the necessary task of each of us to translate the divine for others and understand the expression of the divine in the seventy languages of the human family. We can do this in acts of visiting the sick, interfaith cooperation, and social justice. Tikkun olam. Repairing this one precious world. Together.

And now, to close, since we are thinking about Moses as translator, I would like to use the greeting that our Hindu sisters and brothers teach us. Namaṣte! The divine that is in me recognizes and honors the divine that is in you.

Namaṣte! Shalom!

CPE - Wks. 9 and 10

2011-08-05T07:00:00.007-05:00

Week Nine started off as something innocuous enough but ended with me with no energy to write about it. So now I have two weeks to cover and perhaps even less up for the writing.

Wk. 9
Monday. In class our supervisor presented the sacred text: Jacob at the Jabbok wrestling with the strange man. I didn't tell him that he was stealing from my sermon material for CRC. The didactic for that day was on hospice chaplaincy and was presented by BJC's hospice chaplain Eunice Hiott. She presented a picture of great need paired with resource cutbacks so stark that many of her hospice patients get a visit from her only once for the initial assessment, with any further support provided by volunteers. I had been thinking of hospice care as something rather attractive: serving the needs of a dying patient over the duration of a final illness. But no. For most it seems hospice chaplaincy is little more than a bureaucratic form to fill out - figure out what is most needed and then be unable to provide it. Eunice is currently doing the job once was done by four chaplains. None of the warm, supportive chaplaincy I'd imagined in hospice. At least not for most patients. Let the air out of that balloon.

Wednesday. I visited a patient, retired, whose primary complaint other than the uncertainties of her health was that she was neglected by her adult child. She explored her situation through narrative. And as I listened to her story, what emerged was not neglect but a story of her child not believing the religious doctrines that are important to the patient. The longer I listened to her admit, when I pressed her, to the wonderful qualities of her child while persisting in her characterization of herself as being abused by her child, the tenser I became. To the point that I sat nearly fifteen minutes in strong physical pain from a major cramp in the middle of my back, trying to hide it in my face and responses, because my job is not to tell her where she is wrong but to elicit from her what is important to her and what her resources are for dealing with it. But this was like listening to my grandmother. I felt guilty for just a moment, thinking of this patient as a pain in my backside. Literally.

Thursday. The class topic today was Family Systems.

Friday. While covering for my mentor who was out with gout, I had the full experience of a Code 7 (cardiac arrest) being called on a patient just as I happened by. The room filled with doctors and nurses. The patient's family member who had been in the room was asked to move to the hall so the doctors could maneuver. When she heard that the patient had no pulse, she let out a shriek that went to the bone. I stayed with her to provide what support I could. Prayed with her. But mostly I didn't leave her. The medical team wanted her to go to the waiting room, but she would not, could not budge. When she gained the tiniest bit of composure, she set to calling family members. As they arrived, the patient was rushed to ICU, and CPR continued for more than 2 hours. I never realized how brutal CPR is. Athletic strength was exerted by person after person in the team. Med students were called in from other units to keep up the exhausting effort.

I accompanied the doctor when he updated the family at the halfway point. He was explaining facts and likelihoods. The family wouldn't hear it. They refused the explanation. And the doctor, deaf to the emotional reality in front of him, kept trying to EXPLAIN. I tried to give him nonverbal signals that it was not helpful and that he might consider leaving. But he missed my cues too. Since I had no working relationship with this doctor, I could not simply tell him it might be better for him to leave. Finally, the family shouted him out the door. It was a wrenching two and a half hours. The pain of the family was raw and exposed and refused to be quiet. The patient lived.

That was the morning. In the afternoon, I had the death of another patient...

My back was still very sore from Wednesday's encounter that reminded me of the worst aspects of my grandmother. But I wasn't feeling the effects yet from the encounters of this Friday. Yet for reasons I didn't quite understand, I stayed for a couple of hours after my shift ended talking with the evening chaplains. I didn't talk about the encounters so much. But I wasn't ready to go home to an empty apartment. I finally left when I saw there was not much time left before Shabbat services at Central Reform Congregation. I hurried out the door and got there on time. I was so ready to greet the Sabbath.

Central Reform Congregation
Waterman at Kingshighway, St. Louis MO

I let the music and the words of the prayers wash over me. During the silent prayers of the Amidah, I had a few emotions of my own that flowed into the silence. Memories of patients and families and the connection I made with them for a brief time. It all flowed into the silence as others were silently reciting the fixed texts or their own words. Mine was a more an amorphous glob. A slowly flowing glob reaching into the void.

Afterward, Leslie Caplan and her friend Pamela, a member named Sarah, and I stood talking in the parking lot for quite awhile. Sarah was curious about what I would be preaching on next week. I retained the secret. Leslie, who earlier this summer had dubbed me a "Hebetarian," told me this evening that she thought maybe I was more Hebe than 'Tarian.

Saturday/Sunday. I drove to Mt. Vernon on Saturday morning to spend the weekend there. I e-mailed out some inquiries regarding where the processes were in others' preparations for the fall. Did some writing and reading. Spent time with Walter and our dogs.

On Sunday morning, I was slow starting and walked into Mt. Vernon UU Fellowship, my home congregation, about seven minutes late. No mercy. I opened the door to find that the chairs were all facing the entrance. As it turned out, the reason was that Debbie Czarnopys-White, who was leading the service, wanted to take advantage of a banner on display over the back doorway. Her service was on spirituality, as distinct from religion, and she brought in an array of spiritual perspectives, represented in the symbols on the banner.

In the coffee hour, I spent time with Donna Beaumont and Gail DeVilbiss, new board members of the fellowship, answering some of their questions about the congregation's history and the early years of board decisions and offering my opinion of a few issues that probably will need the current board's attention. Then conversation on other matters with Linda Rowe and with Deb Czarnopyz-White. After going out to lunch with Walter mid-afternoon, I searched through my computer for various files related to the organization of the fellowship and sent them to Donna, did laundry, and packed for my return to St. Louis. I had thought I would leave for St. Louis after an early supper, so as to avoid driving in the dark, but I just wasn't ready. I ended up watching Mystery on PBS with Walter before leaving, getting into my apartment after 11:00PM.

Week 10
Monday. My mentor was still out. I spent more time on his floors but mine. A family of a patient in ICU, people I'd been providing spiritual care for a couple of weeks, informed me that they had made a decision and would do a terminal wean in a few days, allowing their loved one to come off the ventilator and die a natural death. They put on a brave face, but conversation reveals the chinks in the armor.

In the evening, I discover that a task I had thought was finished was, in fact, not. I fret a little and then decide to do the task after work the next day.

Tuesday. After a day with moderate encounters, I stayed on my own time in the office to complete the task I had discover needed done the day before. I worked on it until complete at around 9PM. Headed home to find a notice from the building manager telling me my rent was late and a penalty was incurred. I had prepaid the entire term of this summer lease, so I knew it was wrong. I called the office expecting to get voicemail but got a live body. No brain, though, it seems. Because when I told him I had prepaid the entire term of the lease at the time of signing, he asked me what I meant. "Prepaid?" As if I had coined the word. I found myself angry at him for being so stupid but reigned it in.

Wednesday. Because the apartment office doesn't open before I clock in at the hospital, I make the call mid morning to see what was up with the late-rent notice. Turns out that having an end date on a lease is insufficient. They require that I give them a 30-day notice in writing informing them when I will be vacating the apartment. They knew explicitly at the time I signed this short-term lease that on August 15 I would vacate the apartment, that there was no possibility that I would extend. I am paid through the end of the lease, which falls on August 15. A couple of weeks ago a message from the manager informed me that I was coming up on the end of my lease and that I should contact the office if I wished to extend. And now, even though I am paid up, the absence of a written-30-day notice means I'm late even though I'm early and that I owe rent for time after I will vacate the apartment. I was angry. And I told the manager so. I distinguished between her and the policy, saying I was not angry at her but that I was very angry. I asked what they would do if I did not pay. She said they would begin the eviction process. I said, "So if I leave at the end of my lease, I will be evicted after I'm gone?" I was getting angrier. I ended the conversation and, realizing my emotional state, walked back to the office rather than going to the floor to see patients. I just wasn't there for them then. And as I walked I got angrier and angrier. I was livid. It was not simply in my mind but in my body.

Back in the office I tell my colleagues what has me riled. Bob tells me to take deep breaths. "Calm down. You're on blood pressure medicine," he says. I call Walter. Eventually I calm down but still feel the emotion in my chest. I walk to north campus and back to try to get back into a place where I can do what I am there to do.

I go out to the floor to begin seeing patients and am greeted by the family that told me on Monday that they were about ready to take their loved one off the machines. The number of family present has grown. I sit with them, meeting the new arrivals. This is the kind of family that just enfolds everyone in their presence. At the time of their need, I have been taken into their warm embrace. It is their way of responding to my bein their with them and for them over these past weeks. They tell me that their loved one will be taken off the machines at 1PM. I promise to be there with them.

I return to be with them and spend several hours with them before and after. I find I am quite emotional along with the family. Their loved one's body is tenacious, not easily letting go as the inevitable happens after removal of the machines. At 4PM, the family is still waiting. I explain my evening schedule to the patient's daughter and mother and return to the office to accept the triage pager and begin the next eight hours as on-call chaplain.

A slow triage shift. Only three deaths, including the one I'd been waiting for with the family through the day. There was a non-emergency referral that was a short encounter, but draining. A patient was hostile to a chaplain's presence. And the only reason I was there in the first place was that the mother of the patient was concerned about the patient's eternal salvation. Say what? How is her worry about something outside the room what this is all about? She wasn't even present. And me? I'm a Universalist. If there were a heaven, everybody would go there. I let the patient know that a chaplain was available if he wanted one and that we are not here to push any agenda or anyone's agenda, excused myself and left.

After midnight, I returned to the apartment and found a dun tucked behind the doorknob. I growled. Drank half a beer without the least enjoyment. And fell asleep on the couch.

Thursday. Slow start. Breakfast. Coffee. Ablutions. Practicing my sermon for Friday evening at CRC. I took my trousers to the cleaners. Stopped by the apartment manager's office. Went through the crap. I was angry at the manager too this time because I saw her attitude. She wasn't just doing her job. She refused to even consider any reasonable accommodation, such as not charging the late fee because I was paid up through the end of the lease. It boiled down to paying up the full un-owed amount now or the account would be sent to collections. I wrote a check. Feeling the rage in my body in ways I never had before. I was really worried that I was going to end up a patient in the hospital myself.

Went to the St. Louis Art Museum. Stood looking at my Florentine Nobleman for several minutes, alternately unseeing, elsewhere, and dealing with aesthetic minutiae. I walked to the center of the large room of portraits, saw them all staring impassively at me. Had enough of them. And walked into the next room. There I sat on a leather sofa and gazed into Bircher's Twilight in the Wilderness.

Twilight in the Wilderness (1865) by Alfred T. Bircher

A magical-realist effect was in play. As I looked at the painting, it felt alive, beckoning in more than an aesthetic way. It was as if I could have walked into the painting and off into its sunset. I knew the boundary of the imagination and the "real," but it felt as if this were a portal. I sat there contemplating its allure for a long time. Zoning out. Not my thoughts wandering. Real zoning.For a few moments, I was Nowhere. I was in the Void. Then I would return to the painting, the portal before me. Eventually I realized that the same museum guard had passed by more than a dozen times. Was he watching me? Is this level of absorption with a work so rare in the art museum that it appears suspect? I moved on.

Similarly engaged with a work I had always despised:

January, December, November (1989) by Gerhard Richter

Something about the bottom portion of the left canvas of January drew me in:

Detail, left panel of January

Here too I zoned into the Void. It was wonderful and exhausting. Eventually I got up, went to my car, drove to the Central West End, and ate lunch from the buffet at Rasoi, an Indian restaurant. Returned to the apartment, took off my clothes and fell asleep for two and a half hours. On the bed for a change.

Got up. Putzed around a bit. About 7:30PM I started making supper: Italian sausage and a melange of potatoes, sweet peppers, and okra. I enjoyed it thoroughly with a Boulevard Pale Ale.

Friday. The end of the week is beginning. Who knows what the day brings. But looming large in my mind, looming really large, is the arrival of Shabbat at the end of this day of service...

Three Thirds of Worship Exploration

2011-07-24T16:43:00.007-05:00

Being in a city this summer gives me plenty of opportunity to worship with the festival of religious flavors, observing, comparing, meeting, and appreciating differences and overlaps. This weekend, in addition to going to Central Reform Congregation, I visited three congregations which offered me the third time being with a church of its larger denominational identity, though organizationally separate.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

5:00 PM, Saturday,July 23, 2011
Memorial Presbyterian Church
(Presbyterian Church in America)

My maternal grandfather's mother was a Presbyterian. Two of the main founders of the Restoration Movement were ordained Presbyterian ministers from Scotland. This movement is represented today by the liberal Disciples of Christ, the fundamentalist independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ (in which I grew up), and the fundamentalist non-instrument Church of Christ. And Walter grew up in the Presbyterian Church, attended a Presbyterian college, and his parents, for whom Presbyterian was their compromise between the Methodist and Baptist identities they brought to their marriage, remained Presbyterian until they died.

So it seems a mite strange that this was only my third time to a Presbyterian church, the first being for Walter's mother's funeral in Owensboro KY and the second being this past January in Chicago when I attended a Sunday evening jazz service at 4th Presbyterian across the street from the John Hancock Building.

Memorial Presbyterian Church
201 South Skinker Blvd., St. Louis MO

I entered Memorial Presbyterian ten minutes prior to the posted Saturday evening starting time to find only a handful of people present in the massive sanctuary. The rear 2/3 of the pews were roped off to move people toward the front of the church. A middle-aged man saw me and came over to welcome me. He told me a bit about the congregation - not much money but a great building. They are focusing on urban ministry and have a lot of young adults. Indeed, as people started arriving, most were young adults, about two-thirds there as individuals or groups, one-third young parents with young children.

The man who greeted me also said that they had redesigned the previously unused chapel and turned it into a free arts and performance venue for young artists. The church is theologically conservative but does not assert any control over the content of the artists' work who use the chapel space. They see it as part of the church's outreach to the community. They are Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) not Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). That is, they are the more conservative of the two largest Presbyterian denominations in the US. They have close ties to Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis County and to church-planting missions in the city.

The music for the service was accompanied by piano and guitar, played by a couple of young men, lyrics projected onto bare wall to the left and right of the chancel. The music was partly popular Christian music from a few years back, partly old hymn in contemporary arrangement. The surprise was, in addition to the recitation of the creed, there was also a unison recitation of part of a catechism. The church is clearly concerned with right belief.

The sermon was given by a minister who is starting a church plant next week in the area around St. Louis University. He was well spoken, but the more he talked, the more it became clear how exclusive his approach to church is. He was preaching from the gospel account of Jesus and the Canaanite woman. He used the text to make three points about faith. But the biggie was the importance of getting the details right. Believing the right thing is the paramount thing in faith and worship here. The exclusivity quickly felt oppressive.

The preacher made a point of saying that plenty of atheists are more moral and generally nicer people than a lot of Christians but that the right-believing Christians were going to heaven and the atheists to hell. That's right. As told by this minister, the good go to eternal punishment in hell. As if the thoughts in your head were somehow more important than what you do in the world. More important than whether you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison...

Where the dvar torah at Central Reform Congregation that morning had explicitly worked to apply reason to a difficult text with an expectation of finding ways not to violate our ethics in dealing with the facts of an ancient society, this minister insisted that we accept the God-commanded genocides of the Bible as truly divine will. There is no wrestling with scripture here, only a requirement of blind acceptance.

After the sermon, there was communion. It was treated as open communion. That is, you don't need to be a member of that church or that denomination to partake. However, the point was clearly made that you needed to believe the right thing to partake. They didn't have police monitoring it. Only individual conscience. But the beauty of open communion was marred by the requirement for self-policing of thought and belief. The opportunity for openness and acceptance turned into a direction to exclude the self.

The people were nice, but the theology was regressive, even nasty. "Deny the best of your humanity to accept the worst of God's divinity," could have been their motto. Much like the painful approach to theology that the fundamentalist church of my upbringing practiced. I was glad to leave when the time came.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

10:00 AM, Sunday, July 24, 2011
St. Louis Friends Meeting
(Friends General Conference)

My fifth-grade teacher Sharon Newell was a Quaker. Somehow or other, she got my parents' consent to take me with her one evening (not a Sunday) to a special service at her church on a rural backroad in the next county north from us. It was not a service where the people sat in silence waiting on God, but a musical evening. I didn't know at the time that there were different flavors of Quaker available. And this was the only Quaker meeting or church in at least a nine-county circle around Jasper County IL, where I grew up. Much to my parents' consternation, I came home that evening with a borrowed biography of George Fox and another book about the Quakers. Surprisingly, they allowed me to read the books. Perhaps only because they knew there weren't many Quakers around. But Mom did wear her displeasure on her face. From the reading I developed a serious respect for the faith of Friends and the silent worship described in those books.

The next time I attended a Friends meeting was in October 2007, when I was attending a conference in Philadelphia PA. I attended the Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia at Fourth and Arch that Sunday morning, the oldest Quaker congregation meeting continuously in the same location in the heart of historical Philadelphia. Together we sat in silence. One young man in plain dress and the young woman sitting with him were both moved to speak. When prayer concerns were solicited at the end of the service, I raised my oldest daughter, who was then facing surgery.

St. Louis Friends Meeting
1001 Park Ave., St. Louis MO

This morning, I arrived at the meeting house at five minutes of the hour, was greeted at the door by a member who asked me if it was my first time at a Friend's meeting. When she found I was a relative newcomer, she gave me what looked like a bulletin, but instead of an order of service, it contained a brief introduction to the unprogrammed style of worship. I entered. Several people were already sitting in silence. The room was arranged with slightly bowed pews in three rows forming a more-or-less rectangle around an empty center.

We were about fifty people, sitting in silence. Some people with eyes closed. Some with eyes open. Waiting. At about thirty minutes the first person spoke, mentioning a workshop and the challenge from that workshop to think about what change is needed and how to pursue that change. At about forty-five minutes, the second person spoke a word of encouragement not to fear because God is with us. Then the children and their teachers came into the meeting. Four people gave messages that seemed rather like testimony about how the meeting has helped them. Three of those sang a brief chorus as part of their testimony. Then the clerk announced time for Joys and Concerns, and several people stood to voice them. We shook hands to formally end the meeting. Then announcements were read and, immediately before dismissal, everyone present said their name and newcomers were encouraged to say they were newcomers, to which the members said "Welcome!"

On my way out, some people spoke to me. One, someone who works at Children's Hospital and has great respect for the chaplains there. One man, someone who has meditated in a class taught by BJH staff chaplain Randall Blain, a Buddhist who is also endorsed by the Ethical Society.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

1:00 PM, Sunday, July 24, 2011
St Catherine of Siena Catholic Church
(American National Catholic Church)

By interesting coincidence, this was also precisely the third time I had attended a Catholic service that was not identified either as Roman Catholic or Episcopal/ Anglican. The previous two times being with the Community of St. Clare and St. Francis (Ecumenical Catholic Communion) in Webster Groves MO this summer. Like the ECC, the ANCC is fully inclusive, welcoming into all levels of leadership and congregational life both women, married persons, and non-celibate LGBT persons.

Chapel of St. John's Episcopal Church
3664 Arsenal St., St. Louis MO

St. Catherine of Siena was officially meeting for Sunday worship for the first time this Sunday. It is led by a deacon, the Rev. Phillip Lichtenwalter, who is a facebook friend of mine and who is scheduled to be ordained a priest this November. This fledgling parish meets in the chapel of St. John's Episcopal Church on Arsenal Street, on the south side of Tower Grove Park.

There were seven present, including Phillip, Phillip's partner, and Phillip's mother and father. Phillip said that the Post Dispatch has interviewed him and will run an article on the new parish and new presence in the city of this independent Catholic church. It is a small starting point, but the chapel where they meet has the possibility of holding around twenty-five people. They will have a comfortable place in which to grow to that size if they have the financial support to pay the bills until the numbers and financial base grow.

We did a little bit of a cappella singing in the service. And those present accepted the role of reader for the lessons and the prayers of the faithful. I served as reader for the prayers. Like communion at Sts. Clare and Francis, communion here is open to anyone who desires to partake. A blessing is also available to any who would like to receive one instead of communion.

Phillip preached a very nice interpretation of the Gospel lesson, Matthew 13:44-52, The Pearl of Great Price, and is off to a good start. I wish him and the new parish well.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

CPE - Wk. 8

2011-07-23T15:44:00.001-05:00

Last Sunday I pulled into St. Louis just in time to park and walk into Trinity Episcopal Church for 7:00 PM Compline.

Trinity Episcopal Church
Euclid at Washington, St. Louis MO

Each month Compline has a different theme here. This month it was the Virgin Mary. Marian readings included the Magnificat, a selection from Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd, the poem "Terry Berrigan" by Anne Porter, and a translation of "Salve Regina." The scripture reading was Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. The canticle, a Ute prayer, "Earth Teach Me Stillness," read responsively. And Wendell Berry's poem "Great Trees" was first read then a recording played of the American Boy Choir singing it to the music of Malcolm Dalgliesh. Altogether a satisfying way to end the day.

"Great Trees"
By Wendell Berry

Slowly, slowly, they return
To the small woodland let alone:
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in air
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout beams upholding weightless grace
Of song, a blessing on this place.

They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground,
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.

Receiving sun and giving shade,
Their life's a benefaction made,
And is a benediction said
Over the living and the dead.

In fall their brightened leaves, released,
Fly down the wind, and we are pleased
To walk on radiance, amazed.
O light come down to earth, be praised!

Twenty-one persons attended this Compline. Good conversation afterward with the deacon, the rector, and others...

For CPE class time this week, Deana brought as sacred text a Chasidic tale by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov: "The Turkey Prince," which teaches about meeting people where they are and questions the distinctions between mental health and mental illness. The class topic that day was chaplaincy and the mentally ill. Then on Thursday, I brought in prayers of mourning from the Siddur Sha'ar Zahav and a poem on love and death by Chaim Stern. Our overall topic that day was emotional intelligence.

On my unit, I saw patients who were an interesting mix of ordinary and not-so-ordinary. One patient who had been in pain and unable to move in bed started moving about saying she was pain free and ready to get up and run after I prayed with her. I saw her several times over a period of days, watching her moods shift but her proclamations of faith never wavering. A patient who had been on the unit for quite some time moved on to rehab. A new set of patients came in...

On Thursday evening, I went to the movies, watching A Better Life at Plaza Frontenac and the final Harry Potter movie in Clayton. Enjoyed both.

Then Friday evening I was on call at Barnes-Jewish. It was relatively quiet, but I had two deaths, spending a great deal of time ministering to the needs of one very large family. And I spent time with a family with someone in ICU. Lots of suppressed feelings waiting to emerge.

Since I was unable to go to synagogue last night, I attended this morning. My first attendance at morning service at Central Reform Congregation. Torah study at 8:45, Shacharit service at 10:00... Well, those times are approximately correct. Rabbi Randy led the service and Rabbi Ed gave the Dvar Torah, the teaching on the Torah portion for this Shabbat. It is the section of Numbers in which Moses commands the people to kill the Midionites. Difficult portion. But a good teaching. Met some new people who regularly attend Saturday morning but not Friday evening.

Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad!
Hear, o Israel, Adonai our God, Adonai is One!

My this week passed quickly!

CPE - Wk. 7

2011-07-17T16:42:00.002-05:00

Another week of Clinical Pastoral Education is over. This week held some emotional encounters with patients who knew there was nothing left to do to keep them alive, patients with young children who will soon have to grow up without their father figure in their life. It was sad. Very sad. But I held it together until the photo album came out. My colleagues are wonderfully supportive.

I appreciate the support and truly hope I give it as well as I receive it. But I now realize that support and goodwill do not always mean that the person standing with me understand what my issues are. For that, I have to speak up and say exactly what is going on for me. As do my colleagues with their issues.

We had a didactic on prayer in which we discussed what prayer is in our traditions and for us personally, how it is shaped, what it means, what it is meant to accomplish. Each of us shared prayers from our own tradition. Among the prayers I shared was my Prayer of Remembrance, that I wrote for Memorial Day Sunday at Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship. Despite its different shape from the prayers my colleagues brought from their nondenominational Christian, United Methodist, liberal Catholic, and Reform Jewish traditions, they all accepted it graciously. My liberal Catholic colleague said that is more how he prays in his personal prayers. The ambiguity and/or absence of addressee did not bother my colleagues. Our theologies are varied, but there is an amazing amount of overlap. Our ELCA supervisor found the Prayer of Remembrance a very good prayer...

On Thursday we visited BJC Extended Care and received training from the chaplain there concerning differences in chaplaincy in long-term care, as opposed to a hospital setting. It was a rewarding excursion, a good day outside the hospital. And at the end of the day I found out that my middle daughter Elisabeth and my son-in-law Derek have now found out the sex of their third child who is expected to enter this world in November. It's going to be a girl! No announcement concerning a decision on a name. I think they're planning on waiting for that.

Friday evening at Central Reform Congregation, Rabbis Susan, Randy, and Ed were all gone. The service was led instead by Rabbi Dale Schreiber, a member of CRC who serves as chaplain on the oncology unit at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, heads a small synagogue that meets one Friday a month in St. Peters MO, and serves other small congregations as an itinerant rabbi.

Artwork by a deceased member of CRC

I had arrived a half hour early because I was just a bit discombobulated after the day at the hospital. I was the first person to arrive. So I went into the synagogue library. Suddenly I knew what I was doing there then. I had agreed to give the teaching at the Friday evening service on August 5 but had been stymied. I knew the general topic I wanted to expound on, but I wanted to find a way to tie it in with the week's Torah portion. But much as I had tried, I just couldn't see the connection I wanted. There in the library, though, I took Rashi's commentary off the shelf, and within fifteen minutes, he had led me to the perfect connection to the parsha for the shabbat when I would give the teaching.

While I was reading Deuteronomy and Rashi's commentary on it, Rabbi Dale walked in, saw I was studying, and asked if I was studying the portion for that shabbat. I explained, not that one but one a few weeks later. She smiled an almost ecstatic smile and said, "How wonderful just to be studying Torah!"

Rabbi Dale's own teaching that evening was also dealing with a difficult parsha - the portion where the zealotry of Pinchas is celebrated. And then I wondered, are there any Torah portions that are not a challenge? Any parsha that does not require the serious student to "wrestle" with the text to make it work for us living now rather than against our values?

The service had a little different flavor as Rabbi Dale had selected some different tunes for the prayers than are commonly used at CRC. Andrew Bollinger and Leslie Caplan served beautifully as cantors, as always, as they led us in the new and sometimes intricate melodies. At the end of the service, they led those of us who had not immediately left the sanctuary in a version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" with alternate lyrics written by Leslie Caplan. Beautiful!

After oneg conversation, I got in the car and drove home to Mt. Vernon.

Saturday afternoon we bathed the dogs. Both seemed to love it. That's a new development! Maybe it was just the level of physical attention they were getting after my being away in St. Louis for such a duration. Then Saturday night I was up till almost 4:00 AM today writing the sermon to deliver at CRC at the 7:30 PM service on August 5, 2011. A little bit of tweaking to do, certainly, but I'm happy with the sermon as it now stands...

This morning I attended at Mt. Vernon Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, my home congregation. Since I entered the stream that is supposed to carry me to the shores of UU ministry, it has been so rare when I can go to my own church. I was nice to be there today. The service was an open reading service. The readings included:

a piece on UU history;
a set of several poems by Mary Oliver;
a piece on the interconnected web of life told via the story of the parachuting of cats into Borneo to combat the increase in rats that were the result of major ecological imbalance that resulted from spraying DDT to control malaria-carrying mosquitos;
I spoke on my CPE experience, my synagogue attendance, my struggle finding an in to the Torah portion for the service where I will preach, and I led a responsive reading related to translating between religious idioms;
there was a reading that focused on the character of various trees, translated from the Finnish;
a reflection on an artwork by a member;
and a recording of "Let the Mystery Be" by Iris Dement.

It was a wonderful service followed by wonderful conversation. There's no place like home, Dorothy.

Lunch out with Walter. Coffee at home. Now it's about time for some ice cream before hitting the road to St. Louis. Maybe I'll get back in time for Compline this evening at Trinity Episcopal Church in the Central West End...

CPE - Wk. 6 - Weird Week

2011-07-10T14:47:00.014-05:00

I spent Sunday afternoon through Monday of the 4th of July Weekend at home in Mt. Vernon, returning to St. Louis Just in time to see the fireworks display on the river as I came over the hill into the Mississippi River bottoms. Traffic had been thin and flying along up to then. But from the nine miles from the Centreville exit to the river took about 50 minutes.

Cars were at a crawl as drivers watched the fireworks rather than paying attention to the road. There were a few minor fender benders. The shoulders were full of cars parked to watch the display. And it was a helluva show! I got back to my apartment and looked out my 10th-floor window over the city. All over the city there were fireworks going off. There was a fog of gunpowder smoke hanging over the whole city. There were still a few areas of the city making a display as late as 12:30 AM when I went to bed.

Tuesday was largely spent on midterm evaluations, each of us CPE students writing and sharing with the group and our supervisor our self-evaluations. It is hard to imagine that we reached the halfway point so quickly! Wednesday I saw patients on my floor, wrote a verbatim, and had an individual session with my supervisor. He affirmed me in what I've been doing and challenged me to try some new approaches.

Thursday all the CPE interns and residents of the St. Louis CPE Cluster had a day retreat at Mercy Retreat Center. The day began beautifully with a short Interfaith service, fully inclusive and respectful of all. As far as I could tell, the only non-Christians present were me and my Reform Jewish colleague at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. The worship included on equal footing Unitarian Universalist, Jewish, and Christian invocations and kept to this inclusive, respectful path. Then came our guest speaker for the day, Dr. Richard Winter, talking on the topic of perfectionism. Dr. Winter is a psychiatrist who teaches at Covenant Theological Seminary in west St. Louis County, a conservative Presbyterian school. The morning portion of the program was expansive and open. Fully inclusive if a bit long-winded. And then came the afternoon, which quickly devolved into a conservative Christian sermon, in which he explicitly dismissed all other faith traditions. He not only dismissed them, he dismissed them as all taking the same, inadequate, failure-producing approach.

So simplistic. So exclusive. So unworthy of a CPE event. CPE is not supposed to be sectarian or even ecumenical but, rather, inclusive of all faith positions - from hard atheism, through spiritual but not religious, to the full range of all religions at all levels of observance, and all philosophies of life. Each chaplain is grounded in his or her own tradition but not preaching that tradition, instead drawing forth the sources of comfort and strength of the patient and/or family. It is spiritual care the chaplain is called on to provide, not religious care. There is no legitimacy in CPE for the kind of thing that we were subjected to.

My Jewish colleague and I cringed through the afternoon. Our Christian colleagues were sensitized to what was happening and made comments in our support on their event evaluations, which they signed. And, at the end of the event, one of the residents at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, a Christian, spoke up that not everyone present was Christian. But the event was what it was, and the day was over. Wonderful support from my BJH peers. But the speaker should have been more carefully selected or else the needs for the event made clearer to him in the planning phase...

I've been considering what I might do the next time it happens in a supposedly neutral setting like this. Do I interrupt the presentation to ask the speaker to observe the rules of inclusion? Do I walk out? Do I suffer through it and then complain afterward? The latter is what I did, and it was not satisfactory at all. Not at all. I don't know if I have the chutzpa required to interrupt the speaker and challenge him to change his presentation on the spot. But that is what I would like to be able to do.

I left the retreat with the same sort of icky feeling I get when some calls me a faggot, a queer, a pervert.

Feeling that way, I didn't really feel like doing anything at all, so I went to the movies at Chase Park Plaza. I saw a matinee of the thoroughly enjoyable Tom Hanks/Julia Roberts movie Larry Crowne, co-written by Nia Vardalos. When I came out of the movie, it was pouring buckets, raining cats and dogs, and any other idiom that indicates very heavy rain. So I went right back inside and saw a second movie: Beginners, starring Ewan McGregor, Mélanie Laurent, and Christpher Plummer. I hadn't heard of it before, but it was wonderful. I cried! Contemporary fallout of 1950s marriage. Misunderstanding of parents by their child. Difficulty forming meaningful relationships. Everyone a beginner in the game of life. Beautifully acted and very moving!

Friday I had off because of being scheduled to be second-shift triage chaplain on Saturday. I started the day by taking a walk in Forest Park.

Forest Park, St. Louis MO

Everything was clean from the heavy rains the day before. Kind of like Okazaki, Japan, felt after a typhoon. Beautiful quality to the air and light. After 9:00 AM I headed to St. Louis Art Museum, only to realize that they don't open until 10:00.

Detail, St. Louis' Horse

Near the equestrian statue of French king St. Louis I saw a young man who seemed to be waiting. He noticed me and started looking at me in ways that made me think he might be cruising me. I walked away, finding a park bench in the shade to wait for the museum to open.

After a bit the young man approached me. Turns out he is a counseling student at Covenant Seminary, a student of Dr. Winter, a Presbyterian, married, from Salt Lake City. We talked seminary, ministry, religion and such for about 45 minutes before heading into the museum. I still don't know whether he had started out cruising me, whether he was doing some kind of psych/ counseling assignment that required him to approach a stranger in a public place, or just what was going on. But it was an unusual encounter. A thoroughly pleasant and, incidentally, good-looking young man, though. But what was it that happened? I haven't a clue!

In the museum I visited my favorites and, as well, devoted extra time to these:

Ian Monroe - arc (2011) and ambassadors club (2011)

El Greco - St. Paul

Feet of Amida Buddha standing on the Lotus Throne
Kamakura Period Japan

Tumbuan Dance Costume
Papua New Guinea

Adu siraha salawa (deified ancestor figure)
Sumatra, Indonesia

Friday evening I attended Central Reform Congregation. It was their monthly Social Justice Shabbat, with Paula Gianino, Pres. and CEO of Planned Parenthood of St. Louis and Southwest Missouri, as the speaker. She contextualized the range of services they provide and the political assault they are currently undergoing, at real risk of losing the ability to provide essential healthcare and reproductive and family planning services to poor and other women - and men. And the really important role of providing sex and reproductive education in a society where schools are only allowed to teach abstinence. CRC has been a strong supporter of Planned Parenthood from the beginning

Central Reform Congregation
Kingshighway at Waterman, St. Louis MO

During oneg conversation, I brought up the experience at the CPE day retreat. The people I talked with knew just what I'd experienced. It's a far too common experience, of course. One older woman said she has a friend who responds vocally with "Ouch!" when thoughtlessly exclusivist or unintentionally/ ignorantly hurtful things are said whether to her or in her presence. I like that approach, but I think it may be too subtle, assuming that the offender already understands what is hurtful and why and only needs a reminder...

Saturday as triage (on-call) chaplain, I was called to serve a stabbing victim, a patient in extreme pain with very advanced cervical cancer, her teen-aged children in the room with her, trying to keep it together, a patient about to die with meningitis, a debilitatedly mentally ill spouse of brain-death patient, a paralysed patient, a heart attack patient, a loud and violent inebriated patient, a terminal wean, a patient with presurgery anxiety, a family trying to make end of life decisions for their loved one...

In the neurology ICU, while I was waiting, a Resident (MD) asked me what religion I was. When I told him Unitarian Universalist, his face lit up. He told me that his maternal grandfather had been a Unitarian Universalist minister in California. A staunch Humanist. His grandmother, now a widow, still attends Unitarian Universalist church. His mother converted to Judaism to marry his father. The Jewish family take the Unitarian Universalist grandmother to church every Sunday. This young Resident expressed his respect for Unitarian Universalism, his own slight involvement in Judaism, skepticism about most religion, belief that underneath all the claims of religion most religions share an ethical core. He was a religion and neuroscience double-major in college. Had been most interested in Asian religions. A very pleasant conversation in an unlikely setting, waiting for a patient to die...

This morning I visited Unity Christ Church (Unity School of Christianity) on Skinker Blvd., across from the west side of Forest Park.

Unity Christ Church on Skinker Blvd., St. Louis MO

On the church's street-side sign, the message read: "Spiritual, not religious? Try Unity." In the order of service and on the projection screen on entering the sanctuary I saw this message: "We reserve the right to accept absolutely everybody!" Indeed, a more formal statement of who they are conscious to include is printed on a newcomer's letter I was handed at the end of the service.

We welcome all people regardless of race, gender, age, ethnicity, physical disability, national origin or sexual orientation. We are a healthy, loving diversity; not "saints", just regular "children of God".

Those present were Black and white, men and women. The other aspects of diversity present could not be gauged by a glance around the room.

The thirty or so persons present were dwarfed by the auditorium with seating for probably around 400. Everyone was pleasant, but I was not comfortable with the content of their worship. They believe that we think our reality into being. In a very real sense. They spoke of "prosperity consciousness."

I guess in comparison I'm what? some kind of post-Christian neo-Calvinist? I believe in original sin. We are born into and raised in a family, community, and world not of our own making. These structures and details of existence are already fully formed before our arrival, though they continue to evolve. They have been being formed by all humanity before us. They shape us in lots of negative ways not of our choosing. If there had been a literal Adam and Eve, it would have started with them. The myths point in the right direction. Our lineage is the bearer of unchosen sin. And I believe that choice, so basic in our culture, is largely an illusion.

Unity believes we actually choose, cause, and make our own reality. That just doesn't match the reality I know personally or the reality I see every day in the hospital.

Sculpture at Unity Christ Church

Their worship has music, meditation, affirmations, and a "lesson." Despite the name of the congregation, Jesus was mentioned only once, as "the Master Teacher," as the congregation prepared to recite together the Lord's Prayer. The word "christ" was used only once, in a general sense of the divine that is in everyone, not in the sense of an individual person who is divine. There was no reference to any sacred or authoritative writings. The service ended with a simple prayer circle, few words spoken, and singing "Let there be peace on earth" together.

It was an interesting experience, the people pleasant, but I don't expect to go back.

Now an afternoon alone with my thoughts and humid 90 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures in the city known as the Gateway to the West.

Blessings!

Church and Cinema on the Holiday Weekend

2011-07-03T15:52:00.016-05:00

5:00 PM, Saturday, July 2, 2011
Community of St. Clare and St. Francis
(Ecumenical Catholic Communion)

I first visited this congregation on Pentecost and found them warm, welcoming, and in possession of a strong social conscience. On this visit, those impressions were reinforced. I was warmly greeted. A few people recognized me from the earlier visit. Fr. Frank greeted me warmly as he walked up the aisle before the service began. He recognized me but needed a brief reminder to place me.

As before, the music was led by a band of two guitars, light percussion, a violin, a saxophone, and three additional singers. The opening hymn was "Gather Us In" by Marty Haugen, in a 1980's post-Vatican-II liturgical style.

"Gather Us In" sung in worship at St Mary's Catholic Community
South Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

(View on YouTube)

A delight to sing. Accommodation was made to the national holiday by singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" for the offertory and "America the Beautiful" as the closing music.

Fr. Frank's homily wove together the Gospel lesson and the tension between national pride and national shame that Americans of conscience and good will feel in the age of our military hegemony. He focused on encouraging honest self-assessment and social justice. It was a good, extemporaneous sermon that recognized the holiday but focused on gospel meaning.

The open communion practiced here, all gathered around the altar, is joyous and expansive. but the thing that most impressed me on this visit was the prayers of the community. After the words of prayer led by a reader followed by the repeated congregational response, "God of Love, hear our prayer," members of the assembly spoke individual items of concern, petition, or gratitude, with the congregation offering the same response. Many people voiced their prayers that were then joined in by everyone, though the response. Everyone spoke with sufficient volume and clarity for all to hear. But the truly beautiful part was the way people spoke their prayers, uncensored, and were then affirmed vocally by all as the prayer of the group. In that way, the concern of the individual was transformed into the prayer of the congregation. It was confidently carried out and beautiful to experience.

Evangelical United Church of Christ
204 East Lockwood Ave., Webster Groves MO
Host facility for Sts. Clare and Francis

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Back at the apartment, I made myself a simple supper of Malaysian lodeh (veggies and tofu in a coconut-milk-based curry), wheat crackers, fresh figs, and a Schlafly pale ale. Fell asleep on the sofa. When I woke I thought to myself that it might be nice to take in a movie. By choice I've been spending my summer without television, and, as an accident of geography and schedules, I hadn't been to a cinema since mid-January in Chicago. It felt like time.

So I drove to Plaza Frontenac, which has the largest selection of art films and foreign films in St. Louis. On the way I listened to Public Radio, taking in part of a beautiful performance of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, one of my favs since forever. Pulled into the parking lot and thought I'd be able to make a choice of what to see, but I'd slept too long.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

9:30 PM, Saturday, July 2, 2011
Plaza Frontenac Cinema (A Landmark Theater)

I got there right at the last screen time of the day. So I saw what was on at that time: Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's most recent offering, starring Owen Wilson. Other than knowing it was Woody Allen's, I knew nothing about it, going in. But I figured that, well, even though I'm not gaga for Woody (capitalization is crucial to truth telling), the story takes place in Paris! And even though Woody's not my favorite, he knows his craft.

I loved this magical-realist piece. The ending could be seen coming almost from the beginning, but the path to get there was wonderful. It's a movie with a slap-you-in-the-face obvious moral used as a structural device. It is the temporal equivalent of Dorothy's mantra while clicking the heels of her ruby slippers. Instead of "There's no place like home," this movie is shaped about learning that being at home in the present is better than living in a nostalgic fog, pining for a golden age that was no more golden than any other time. Amusing and ironic that the fallacy of idealizing an imagined past is exposed by the least sympathetic character, a super-sophisticated know-it-all pedant whom the viewer would love to slap silly.

Ah! but the glory of the nostalgia we wade through before arriving at that oh-so-obvious insight is beautiful. Woody likes to have it both ways, indulging the nostalgia, wallowing in it, but ultimately using it as a mechanism for facilitating something else. Like, maybe, better narrative choices in the now.

But is that really what happens? What of the now that is being touted? The film has a facile, Hollywood-ish fairy tale of a happy ending, but it is the fantasy journey through the an idealized past that allows one the grace to forgive the formulaic resolution in the present. The whole story is thoroughly unbelievable except for the mismatched couple and the cheating fiancée. But one suspends disbelief... I loved it.

We forgive "And they all lived happily ever after" because there is no other way to end other than "And they all died horrific deaths." Life doesn't conclude. Yes individuals die. Relationships die. Aesthetic movements die. But endings are all somewhat facile - attempts to encapsulate as narrative a life or experience that had no beginning, no middle, and no end - to make meaning out of no meaning.

When faced with the vast undifferentiated is-ness of Life and the inescapability of mortality, the formula allows us to stop talking and go to bed. To sleep. Perchance to dream...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

10:00 AM, Sunday, July 3, 2011
Eliot Unitarian Chapel

This morning I went to church at Eliot Chapel. Eliot is in the interim period between called ministers, its former minister having departed about a year ago. The process to call a new minister is about two years long, so this time next year they hope to have a minister set to come soon thereafter. The interim minister is, per contract, at home in California for the summer, so summer programming does not include him. Instead, the Rev. David Breeden, who interned here three years back, returned to fill in for four Sundays in July. I was minimally familiar with him from his visit to preach one Sunday at Mt. Vernon Unitarian Universalist Fellowship during his internship year at Eliot.

Eliot Unitarian Chapel
100 S. Taylor Ave., Kirkwood MO

From across the street as I approached the building, I saw a banner on the door with the word "Welcome" on a Pride rainbow-colored background. I entered the building at 9:48 AM for the 10:00 service and was greeted by a man and woman who were official greeters. Looking through the glass wall into the sanctuary, I saw only Rev. Breeden at the pulpit and two people in the pews. The greeters assured me that, even though summer attendance is less than the rest of the year, members have arrival down to a science, with everyone flooding in in the last five minutes before the service. And, indeed, that is just how it happened.

The greeters gave me the mini history of their congregation and their building. Congregation: 50+ year-old offshoot of First Unitarian in the Central West End, formed to serve members who had moved to the southwest suburbs of the city. Building: acquired 40+ years ago from the Episcopal congregation that had built a new building a few blocks away. To Unitarianize the Christian edifice, all the stained glass was removed, the apse was given an exterior wall of clear glass to look out onto the tree and shrub-green yard, and the cross on the spire was replaced with a new symbol:

Spire of Eliot Chapel

Unlike the liturgical Christian churches' placement of the altar at the visual center or the non-liturgical Christian churches' placement of the pulpit at the center, Eliot Chapel had a baby grand piano at the center of the chancel with the green of the landscape as backdrop through the apse window-wall. The pulpit was off to the left in what seemed an awkward spot, as became more evident during the sermon. The only other furniture on the chancel was a chair to the right where the song-leader/drummer sat. Interesting that, in a religion that prizes sermons as a major duty on which many a minister or candidate is evaluated, this Unitarian Universalist congregation has visually indicated that something else is more important. And it is musical performance.

And so the service began with Jocelyn Rugaber at the piano, playing Alan Silvestri's "Feather Theme" from Forrest Gump. Since I've never seen the movie, this was simply beautiful music to me and did not evoke any particular scenes. I don't know whether it was on the program to evoke some content or setting from the movie or was chosen for its self-contained aesthetic qualities. It was lovely. Ms. Rugaber played George Winston's "Loreta and Desiree's Bouquet" as an interlude before the sermon, Joseph Martin's "On the Blue Ridge" as the offertory, and Francis Poulenc's Trois Mouvements Perpetuels No. 1 as music for going forth. In addition, she accompanied three hymns sung by the congregation. Her playing was a delight and of very high quality.

David Breeden's sermon was about wonder and awe as the basis of all religious and spiritual feeling and expression. He used texts from Lao Tsu and Albert Einstein, among others and explained the absence of creed in Unitarian Universalism in relation to the individual's commitment to continue to explore the world with wonder even after leaving childhood behind. Our religious duty is to maintain a sense of wonder and to live in the divine awe that was once natural to all of us.

I was surprised that, after staying for coffee and cookies and multiple conversations, when I got into the car to head back to the Central West End, only an hour and eight minutes had passed from the beginning of the service. How was that possible? ...Well, for one thing, there were NO ANNOUNCEMENTS and no expression of joys and concerns from the congregation. Those are the two time sinks I've observed in some other Unitarian Universalist congregations. There is never any way to know how long they will last.

So the service had cleaner lines than sometimes occurs in other churches. And I am happy for announcements to go by the wayside, since most congregations provide plenty of print and electronic versions of all manner of announcements. But the absence of Joys and Concerns was a stark absence - especially in light of last night's prayers of the congregation at Sts. Clare and Francis that so greatly impressed me.

Each congregation has its own ways. But I missed some mechanism for the people to join in the concerns and celebrations of the individual. The service was, though, aesthetically pleasing, the message relevant, and the people pleasant and welcoming.

Francis Poulenc's Trois Mouvements Perpetuels No. 1
Played by Zak, a 2006 graduate of Florida State University

(View on YouTube)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

CPE - Wk. 5

2011-07-02T12:52:00.012-05:00

In my comments on Week 3 of CPE, I wrote:

It occurs to me that my maternal grandfather died from an inoperable brain tumor and my paternal grandmother died from stroke. There is a gentle undercurrent of tending to the spiritual needs of family as I serve this population of patients and their families.

How much more so when the patients sometimes bear a close resemblance to these or other family members. Depending on the relationship I had or have with the person the patient resembles, this can be a complicating factor in serving that patient's spiritual needs.

I see a resemblance to my ex-wife, with all the baggage of that relationship, and I have to take that recognition into conscious awareness and then put it in my pocket to deal with later with my peers. In group with them, I can unpack what that recognition meant to how I responded to the patient and what it meant to me. But in the moment I cannot allow such awareness to get in the way of what I am there to do. And later, together with my peers and my supervisor, I realize things about myself and that relationship that I hadn't even thought of in a really long time. Everything that ever happened to me is resting quietly in a brain shadow waiting for the light to move its way. Nothing that ever happened is gone except through brain injury or death.

I see a resemblance between one of my patients and my grandmother. I feel good about caring for her. But I have to work to keep her family story separate from my own. Parts of it match my family story too closely for comfort. Other points of difference prompt me to judge the response of her family negatively. I have to take the recognition, accept it for what it is, but set it aside when I am with this patient. My judgment goes into the file, it must not enter this encounter.

And sometimes the patient doesn't call to my mind anyone in particular, but something else makes the encounter difficult. Maybe I know what the doctors are saying but the patient hasn't been informed yet. Maybe I know that the patient who came in with one diagnosis now is going to have to face a worse one as well. As chaplain, I am not the person to pass on medical information to the patient or family. I work with them with what they know and believe and feel. Medicine is left in the hands of the medical staff. But when I know something the patient doesn't yet, the encounter can produce great tension within me.

I sit in group with my fellow Intern Chaplains. One recognizes a very painful experience from her family in the patient encounter described by another. The room fills with pain, tears, and caring attempts at expressing empathy. To do what we do, we are open to each other at sometimes raw and painful edges. We are Black and white, Christian, Jewish, and Unitarian Universalist, middle-aged and young-adult, men and women, gay and not-gay. But we are each other's brothers and sisters.

I sit with a family whose loved one entered the hospital expecting a diagnosis and treatment plan that would allow an eventual return to something like normal life. What they got was altogether different. Terminal degeneration. Quick progression. The family have great faith. But also very great pain. They are supported by an army of prayer warriors, as their tradition does in extremis, but realize that the miracle they ask for might best be made real with death to end the suffering. I sit with them, tears welling in my own eyes as they fall from the eyes of the present family. I pray with them, giving voice to their fears and hopes, my hand being gripped with great difficulty by the patient.

I move on to the family of a patient whose impending death is more immediate...

Central Reform Congregation
Waterman at Kingshighway, St. Louis MO

And then I leave that week behind in worship in the Kabbalat Shabbat service of Central Reform Congregation.

It was a special service. It began with a string quartet, musicians of the Gesher Music Festival of Emerging Artists - Sage Cole and Tessa Gotman (violins), Lilian Belknap (viola), and Sara Sitzer (cello) - playing the Adagio from Felix Mendelssohn's final composition, his String Quartet No. 6 in F-minor, Op. 80, written while devastated over the sudden death of his sister Fanny from a brain hemorrhage, after his own related collapse and brain injury that led to his own death. Fanny and Felix both could have been my patients on the neurology and neurosurgery floors. I could have been their chaplain... The Adagio is gentle but full of pain.

The service then progressed as usual, but with the string quartet joining the guitars and drums. So beautifully! Improvising. Rabbi Susan's teaching was based on the Torah portion where Miryam and Aaron die, Moses strikes the rock in anger at the people and will, as a result, not be allowed into the Promised Land. She dealt with the weirdness of the red heifer passage, the joining of life and death, curse and blessing, and other extreme opposites in the reality of life on earth.

Immediately after her teaching, the string quartet played Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae. In the composer's own words:

I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it "from afar", the music would probably offer a "beautiful" surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain.

Pain and beauty, life and death, prayer for peace... The themes of my week played out in worship. Rabbi Susan declared the performance of Tenebrae "great Torah!" It was also powerful, powerful music. Music that touched, that grasped the soul.

The service progressed to a wedding blessing. Rabbi Susan always leads up to the blessing with a beautiful, emotion-filled, personalized teaching for the bride and groom standing before her and the congregation wrapped together in a single tallit, evoking the chuppah under which they will stand in a few short days. The teaching celebrates the couple's growth, achievements, and individual qualities and is filled with Rabbi Susan's personal memories of the couple - or the member of the couple whom she has known for many years, seeing them grow up.

The service then moved on to the Mourner's Kaddish, members standing to speak the name of parents, siblings, children, partners and others dear to them, remembering them in the first year after their death and on their yahrzeit, the anniversary of their death. Some deaths are within the past week, some a half-century or more ago. All the dead are remembered. May their memory be a blessing!

This juxtapositions of life and death, promise and memories, brought tears to my eyes. Again. And again we ended in blessing of the gathered congregation, the wine, the bread...

CPE - Sacred Text - 1

2011-06-27T17:00:00.057-05:00

Twice a week when my cohorts in CPE at Barnes-Jewish Hospital gather for class, we begin with one of us briefly presenting a sacred text, however we define that term, followed by the group briefly reflecting on it. I am the last of our group to go and no one yet has read a selection from a text accepted somewhere as scripture. So leave it to the Unitarian Universalist to buck the trend and turn to the Christian Bible for a text.

THE LORD’S PRAYER / OUR FATHER

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever.
Amen.

(Matthew 6:9-13 – KJV)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Recording of “The Lord’s Prayer” by Isaac Cates and Ordained
(Listen on YouTube)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

THE STRANGEST PRAYER
From the “Prologue” to The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer, by John Dominic Crossan (NY: HarperOne, ©2010)

The Lord’s Prayer is Christianity’s greatest prayer. It is also Christianity’s strangest prayer. It is prayed by all Christians, but it never mentions Christ. It is prayed in all churches, but it never mentions church. It is prayed on all Sundays, but it never mentions Sunday. It is called the “Lord’s Prayer,” but it never mentions “Lord.”

It is prayed by fundamentalist Christians, but it never mentions the inspired inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth, the miracles, the atoning death, or bodily resurrection of Christ. It is prayed by evangelical Christians, but it never mentions the evangelium, or gospel. It is prayed by Pentecostal Christians, but it never mentions ecstasy or the Holy Spirit.

It is prayed by Congregational, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Roman Catholic Christians, but it never mentions congregation, priest, bishop, or pope. It is prayed by Christians who split from one another over this or that doctrine, but it never mentions a single one of those doctrines. It is prayed by Christians who focus on Christ’s substitutionary sacrificial atonement for human sin, but it never mentions Christ, substitution, sacrifice, atonement, or sin.

It is prayed by Christians who focus on the next life in heaven or in hell, but it never mentions the next life, heaven or hell. It is prayed by Christians who emphasize what it never mentions and also prayed by Christians who ignore what it does.

You could respond, of course, that there is nothing strange there at all. It is, you might say, a Jewish prayer from a Jewish Jesus; hence nothing Christian or even Jewish Christian is present. But that only invites us to start the question of strangeness all over again. It does not mention covenant or law, Temple or Torah, circumcision or purity, and so on.

What if the Lord’s Prayer is neither a Jewish prayer for Jews nor yet a Christian prayer for Christians? What if it is… a prayer from the heart of Judaism on the lips of Christianity for the conscience of the world? What if it is… a radical manifesto and a hymn of hope for all humanity in language addressed to all the earth?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

APPRECIATIVE REFLECTION

I selected the Lord’s Prayer and John Dominic Crossan’s introduction to his invitation to reinterpret the Lord ’s Prayer specifically because one of my learning goals this summer is prayer related. Prayer and theology intersect and interact in many ways, not all of them obvious, and I’m trying to work my way through how that works for me in my encounters with patients and their families.

I appreciate the way Crossan highlights that most of the beliefs of Christians are totally absent from the prayer Jesus offered those who followed him as a model for how to pray. In repeating it, Christians do not give voice to their beliefs – or only to a very small, not very controversial portion of them – even as they give voice to their faith. The words of the prayer are less than the prayer. And the prayer functions in ways that exceed its content.

While I am only beginning to study the Kaddish, a Jewish prayer that is best known to non-Jews for its function in honoring the memory of the dead, I realize that it too is a prayer whose literal content gives no expression to that widely known function. It is not a prayer for the dead, in a Christian sense, nor for the grieving. It does not mention death, the dead, afterlife or resurrection, loneliness, grief or loss. It is a prayer expressive of the greatness of God that ends with a prayer for peace.

This contradiction and interplay between function and theological content of some of the greatest prayers in two great Abrahamic religions gives me much food for thought and perhaps a little inspiration as I work to develop ways to pray authentically with patients and families while still providing what they need in the prayers that I give voice in their presence.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Pride 2011 at MVUUF

2011-06-26T15:31:00.006-05:00

Almost all of the congregations I've visited in my time in St. Louis have been planning their participation in LGBTQ Pride Weekend. They all are anxious to make their presence as supportive allies public. What an amazing development! But instead of staying in St. Louis to take advantage of the myriad of Pride events this weekend, I came home to Mt. Vernon to lead the Pride service at my home congregation.

Mt. Vernon Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
1600 Isabella Ave., Mt. Vernon IL

Here is the Order of Service:

PRIDE SUNDAY

Mt. Vernon (IL) Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

June 26, 2011

PROLOGUE
Music: “There are Numerous Strings”
          - Chancel Choir, First Unitarian, Oakland CA
Welcome & Lighting the Chalice
Responsive Reading: “We Arrive Out of Many Singular Rooms”
          - by Kenneth Patton
Music: “Standing on the Side of Love” - Jason Shelton

READINGS from
SIDDUR B’CHOL L’VAV’CHA: WITH ALL YOUR HEART, The prayer book of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, New York City (2008)
     "Over the Rainbow and Stonewall" - by Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum
     "Of Pride and Liberation" - by Rabbi Ron Weiss

READINGS from
SIDDUR SHA’AR ZAHAV, The prayer book of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, San Francisco (2009)
     "Exotic Fruit" - by Rabbi Warren Stone
     "I Am Unique" - by Congregation Sha'ar Zahav

READINGS from the BIBLE
     David and Jonathan - I Samuel 20 and II Samuel 1:17-27 (NRSV)

REFLECTION - Pride and Prejudice - by Paul Kent Oakley

TIME OF SACRED SHARING
     Personal Contexts of Pride: Sharing Our Experiences
     Hymn: “Bring Many Names” - Singing the Living Tradition # 23
     Joys and Sorrows, then Stillness
     Affirmation: “An Unending Love” - by Rabbi Rami Shapiro
     Hymn: “Spirit of Live” - Singing the Living Tradition # 123

EPILOGUE
     Announcements
     Extinguishing the Chalice
     Music before Parting: “I Am What I Am” - Gloria Gaynor

BLESSING
Please stand and bless those near you with the words from
Marcia Falk's Book of Blessings:
     "Be who you are,
       and may you be blessed in all that you are."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The entire service was moving, but I was particularly touched by the sharing of personal experiences in the "Personal Contexts of Pride." People spoke openly about their struggles with LGBTQ equality from a variety of perspectives. Amazingly open sharing, trusting each other with some things that hadn't been shared before. Nobody whitewashing where they've been before coming to the acceptance and love they now hold.

Gloria Gaynor - "I Am What I Am"

(View on YouTube)

I made the right choice to be home for Pride Sunday!

CPE - Wk. 4

2011-06-25T16:54:00.011-05:00

This week was neatly bookended with beautiful worship: an Episcopal Compline service on Sunday evening to begin the week and a Reform Jewish Kabbalat Shabbat service to cap it off on Friday evening. And interspersing the week, I spent Wednesday afternoon in an art museum and Thursday evening at an Episcopal Festival Evensong. Of course, the meat of the week was in the chaplaincy work of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).

I found myself challenged this week in encounters with patients. It is hard for those who are themselves healthy and who do not work in a hospital to realize the immensity of the luck of being well. Each day I see people who not only have degenerative disease or stroke or paralysis or brain tumor or any of a host of conditions that brought them to the hospital, but also none has ceased to have the problems of ordinary life that they had to deal with even without being sick: divorce, death of loved ones, losses to disasters, economic challenges, legal difficulties, psychological traumas - you name it! And some patients come to the hospital because they have been subjected to physical violence. Sometimes, patients have so many kinds of problems piled on top of another heap of health problems that it can be difficult not being struck dumb by the great pain of it all.

Sometimes I can only feel helpless at their side.

And then, sometimes there is an experience of grace. Sometimes I manage to focus the patient's thoughts, beliefs, and faith toward a way - consistent with who they are, whether religious or not, whether speaking a different spiritual vocabulary than I do or not - of coping with those realities beyond their control and attempting to reassert a bit of control where possible. It doesn't always happen, of course. Sometimes, the only significant thing I can do is be present.

But sometimes grace appears.

And then I begin again with another patient with his or her own complex array of health issues and life issues, with his or her own mix of beliefs, fears, hopes, faith, practices, community - or lack thereof. And I start over. From the beginning.

Some nights I fall asleep in the middle of my supper...

But on Monday, when I got home from the day's challenges, I checked my messages and found that my oldest daughter and her husband had just adopted a newborn. Their first child. And their first message about it was not in the planning but after the final hearing at which the birth mother had the opportunity to change her mind. I was dumbstruck! And so happy! And proud! Josie Lundstedt, born June 7, 2011, my third grandchild!

Josie Lundstedt
Born June 7, 2011

I didn't fall asleep in my supper that night...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

7:00 PM, Sunday, June 19, 2011
Trinity Episcopal Church
Compline

Trinity Episcopal Church
Euclid Ave. at Washington Ave., St. Louis MO

Last Sunday evening, I walked the eight blocks (1.2 miles) from my apartment to Trinity Episcopal Church for Compline. As I entered, at the back of the nave were piano and cello, which provided the music for the service. At the front of the nave, at the bottom of the six or so steps up into the chancel, were the seats of the choir. four rows of three, facing each other. And down the center between them, a prayer rail draped in rainbow colors and white pillar candles on black iron pedestals, each unique.

I was greeted by those present, told they were very informal - indeed, some were in shorts and sandals - and just to take a seat in the choir wherever I wanted. When everyone had arrived, we were one more persons than chairs, so the deacon sat in the first pew facing the choir.

We began together in silence, used the "Order of Compline" from the Book of Common Prayer (1979), interspersed with additional readings expressive of the experience and struggle of LGBTQ persons. The classical selections played by the pianist and cellist were skillfully and movingly rendered. And the mix of spoken, chanted, and briefly sung words of the choir brought the day to a perfect close, as Compline is supposed to do.

I met the priest and stayed late talking with the deacon, who had gone through CPE at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in the previous year. Then I walked back to the apartment to prepare for the following day...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Wednesday afternoon, June 22, 2011
St. Louis Art Museum

St. Louis Art Museum
Forest Park, St. Louis MO

Having served as triage chaplain (on-call) for the second shift Tuesday after a full daytime shift on my floor, I had Wednesday off. After my previous dissatisfying visit to the art museum, I returned - both to make sure I wasn't ruined for the experience of the arts somehow by the experience of chaplaincy and in the hope of experiencing the communion with the aesthetic ancestors that the museum offers. It was a beautiful day, sun shining, delightfully cool temperatures. I parked down the hill from the museum again and enjoyed the walk up. Inside the museum, I went directly to a favorite to see whether I had recalibrated after the previous visit:

Portrait of a Florentine Nobleman, detail
by Francesco Salviati

Fortunately, I found I had. It was delightful as ever. I even found joy in a Degas bronze-gauze-satin sculpture that had never done much for me before:

Little Dancer of Fourteen Years
by Edgar Degas

This time, when I heard Sister Wendy's voice in my head replaying the line, "You have a cold heart, Mr. Degas," I couldn't believe it. This little dancer seemed so poised, so open, so at home among the van Goghs, Cézannes, and Gaugins of this room. Then, once again, I spent a long time communing with a standing Amida Buddha, as I usually do here:

Standing Amitābha Buddha
Mid-13th-century Japan (Kamakura Period)

I spent a refreshing three hours in the museum, even rejoicing in the statue of the city's namesake, on leaving:

Equestrian Statue of St.Louis
King Louis IX of France, the city's namesake

It was a very good day, even though it had to end with six hours of homework...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

6:00 PM, Thursday, June 23, 2011
Church of St. Michael and St. George, Clayton MO
Festival Evensong and Service of Re-Dedication for the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

Church of St. Michael and St. George (Episcopal)
Wyndown Blvd. at Ellenwood Ave., Clayton MO
Photo via Collegium Vocale of St. Louis website

In the car Wednesday afternoon, I just happened to hear that there would be a Choral Evensong the next day at a church in Clayton MO, just on the other side of Forest Park from Barnes-Jewish Hospital. So after I finished my shift on Thursday, I drove the three miles from the hospital to the Church of St. Michael and St. George. The space had a very English feel to it. And as people arrived, I felt distinctly under-dressed in my black dress slacks, light-blue button-down pinpoint-oxford shirt with a nice tie. Everyone else was in suits that obviously cost far beyond entire my clothing budget for multiple years. Nevertheless, everyone was quite pleasant to me.

What the public radio announcement hadn't said was that this was a Festival Evensong in celebration of the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist and also a special service for the St. Louis chapter of the Priory in the United States of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. What a mouthful!

It was a beautiful Evensong from processional through recessional. But everything included a bit more pomp, pomposity, and pompousness because of the presence of the Venerable Order. The procession consisted of, in this order, the Cross, Torches, the Choir, the Brigade Colour Standard, Postulants to the Venerable Order, Members, Officers, Commanders, Knights and Dames, Members of the Priory Chapter, the Banner of the Priory in the United States, the Clergy Cross, Torches, Lay Readers, the Guest Preacher, the Officiating Chaplain, and, finally, the Rector of the Parish. My! What a procession!

The order of service included a sermon by an important member of the Order, spoken with that English accent of universal disdain for the rest of humanity, in which he proudly reminded those present that this Venerable Order is a legitimate order of knights and dames under the tutelage of Queen Elizabeth herself. He snorted disgust and even anger at faux orders of knighthood not headed by a reigning monarch. None, of that, it seemed to me, was relevant to celebration of a saint's feast or the saying of evening prayers. Still, the displays of anglo-snobbery were contained enough not to ruin the service.

The processional hymn was "Praise, my soul, the King of heaven" (Words by Henry Francis Lyte) sung to the tune "Lauda Anima." And the humn before the sermon was "Love divine, all loves excelling" (Words by Chales Wesley) sung to the tune "Hyfrydol." The choir, in addition to leading the congregation in the hymns and chants, beautifully sang "The Lamentations of Jeremiah" (Music by Edward Bairstow and scriptural verses selected by E.M. Milner-White) and the anthem "O Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem" (Music by Herbert Howells and words from Psalm 122). The recessional hymn was "Glorious things of thee are spoken" (Words by John Newton) sung to the majestic tune "Austria" by Franz Joseph Haydn.

As I left, the clerics in the receiving line all greeted me warmly and one Rev. Canon of the Venerable Order gave me a thick packet of information about the Order and its work in East Jerusalem. And I went out into a perfect evening and early slumbers.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

7:30 PM, Friday June 24, 2011
Cenral Reform Congregation
Kabbalat Shabbat

Central Reform Congregation
Kingshighway at Waterman, St. Louis MO

This Shabbat eve at my adopted shul was a real treat. There was a bar mitzvah of a young man who is from a secular Jewish family who, on his own, became interested and pursued the necessary education to be able to read from the Torah scroll and to give a dvar Torah - a teaching based on that portion. This young man wanted to be able to go off to university having the grounding of being bar mitzvah'd. He started learning Hebrew alephbeth about a year ago at age 17 and in the short span of a year committed all the necessary time to learning and understanding the body of knowledge needed to pass this milestone in Jewish life.

Part of the ceremony was the handing of the Torah scroll down the generations of his gathered family to him. This scroll that was saved from the Holocaust was the Torah of a Czechoslovakian synagogue before the Nazi-era and is over a hundred years old. Knowing this history, seeing the scroll handed from grandfather to grandfather to grandmother to father to mother to son was highly moving. A lump rose in my throat and tears welled up in my eyes even without knowing any of the people involved. Very moving.

The bar mitzvah is a charming young man and gave a good teaching based on a very difficult Torah portion - the story of Korah, who rebelled against Moses' leadership in what appears like a democratic rebellion, who gets swallowed up by the earth in punishment. He got the Torah portion that falls this Shabbat the way every b'nei mitzvah youth does, and he acquitted himself very well.

Normally the Torah reading is done at the Shabbat morning service not at the Shabbat eve service, but an exception was made for this celebration.

There was a wedding blessing included as part of this service, the soon to marry couple being a Jewish man and a Puerto Rican woman. So, because of the Jewish/ Spanish connection and because the bar mitzvah young man's teacher was Rabbi James Stone Goodman, Rabbi Susan Talve's husband who is the rabbi of Neve Shalom, a Jewish Renewal congregation in St. Louis, Rabbi Goodman played Spanish/ Sephardic music in the service, both as the arrangements of the prayers of the service and to serenade the marrying couple. It was a real treat! The dusky, soulful Sephardic style was a beautiful variation on the timeless themes of the prayers sung every Shabbat!

And, as always, I was deeply moved by the speaking of names of deceased loved ones whose anniversary of their death has come, with Rabbi Susan responding sometimes with a memory of the deceased and always with the formula, "May his/her memory be a blessing." Their memory is kept alive through the lifetime of those who knew them and shared in the community.

Pleasant oneg conversation, then I walked home, poured myself a drink, and fell asleep before I could drink it. I woke at 5:30 AM on the couch, figured I would just sleep too long if I got up and went to bed, so I dozed a couple more hours on the couch - still in yesterday's clothes - before getting up to start the day.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So this morning I gathered up the necessary stuff and hit the road to Mt. Vernon IL. It would be wonderful to participate in St. Louis Pride along with the several congregations I've worshiped with. All of them are making some kind of proudly allied public presence during the LGBTQ Pride events there. But instead, I am home to lead the Pride service at my home congregation tomorrow. St. Louis's wonderful events will get on just fine without me, but at my small home congregation, each individual makes a difference with his or her presence and participation. Besides, if I stayed for Pride in St. Louis, whose participation would I join of all the congregations I've worshiped with there? I am only one place at a time. And this Sunday that place is home.

CPE - Wk. 3 and My Weekend

2011-06-19T13:55:00.011-05:00

Friday evening, I came home to my studio, having finished my week of chaplaining at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, fixed myself a little supper, drank a Smithwick's and dozed off on the couch. Why was I so tired? It was my colleagues, not I, who this week had faced terminal weans, stillbirths, infant deaths, victims of vehicular collisions and violence. I had the somewhat less fraught task of serving patients and families of cancer and stroke victims, among other illnesses, some going home or to rehab, some facing major surgery or a terminal diagnosis. Serious, serious work, even in the absence of death and violence. My primary assignment is to neurology and neurosurgery units. It occurs to me that my maternal grandfather died from an inoperable brain tumor and my paternal grandmother died from stroke. There is a gentle undercurrent of tending to the spiritual needs of family as I serve this population of patients and their families.

I jerked awake well after 7:00PM, changed my shirt, washed my face, and walked to temple at Central Reform Congregation, passing a house where an old man on the porch called out to me to have a blessed evening and "God bless you!" Rabbi Susan greeted me warmly as I entered, giving me a hug even though I was a bit schwitzy from walking in the heat. The crowd was lighter than I'd seen. A summer reality? Or had people who would normally come to greet the Sabbath together decided to come for the Shabbat morning service instead because of the bar mitzvah celebration that was scheduled then?

Central Reform Congregation
Corner of Kingshighway and Waterman, St. Louis MO

The service was what I needed to close the week and move into Sabbath. And a special treat for me was Rabbi Susan's teaching from the medieval Spanish book of Jewish mystical and practical Torah commentary called Zohar, the portion where Rabbi Shim'on explains how to look at Torah.

Of the angels it is written: 'He makes his angels spirits.' But when they dscend, they put on the garment of this world. If they did not put on a garment befitting this world they could not endure this world and the world could not endure them.

If this is so with the angels, how much more so with Torah who created them and all the worlds and for whose sake they all exist...

Torah takes on a garment to exist in this world. The garment consists in the narratives of the text. But under the garment there is a body, which Zohar presents in mildly erotic terms, and the body is the way of life - the law, if you will, the way of being in the world. But the body has a soul, the essence of the law. And the soul has a soul - God.

As wine must sit in a jar, so Torah must sit in this garment. So look only at what is under the garment! So all those words and all those stories - they are garments!

I sat listening to this teaching, hearing the voice of Consuelo Luz singing "Kabbalah: Torah," whose lyrics are taken directly from this passage of Zohar. Afterward, I told Rabbi Susan that I was hearing Consuelo Luz's voice singing the words from the Zohar as she was giving her teaching. She did not know the singer or song and said she would look it up online.

(View Video on YouTube)

She also asked me if I would care to give a teaching at Central Reform Congregation's Friday evening Shabbat service while I am here in St. Louis this summer... I've been invited to guest preach at the synagogue I've adopted as my home congregation for the summer!

After several conversations at the oneg after the service, I walked back to my studio, listened to Consuelo Luz and fell asleep on the couch almost immediately. At 3:00AM I woke and went to bed, sleeping until 9:30. I putzed around, reading a little, writing a little after breakfast, then ate a very light lunch and headed to the library to use the internet. Mid afternoon I headed to the art museum but found myself not at all in the mood. I, who can spend all day in an art museum, I just couldn't get interested. There was one Renaissance Italian portrait that I love and usually spend some time with that today just elicited a, "There's that portrait," with not the slightest interest in stopping. The crowds were too thick. Was I, perhaps, channeling Mrs. Moore in that Marabar cave? I walked through the German Expressionists in near horror and no desire to explore that emotion. No sooner had I entered than I found myself nearly racing for the exit, a shudder making its way down toward the coil at the base of my spine.

So I went back to the apartment, read a little, wrote a little, listened to some music...

At 5:00PM Saturday I went to mass with Therese of Divine Peace Inclusive Community, a very small congregation that identify as Roman Catholic, yet whose priests are women ordained in defiance of the Vatican; who have altered the liturgy to be completely gender neutral and inclusive, not waiting for the Council of American Bishops or the Vatican to authorize these changes; who proudly include LGBT persons fully in their community; and who practice open communion, stressing that ALL are welcome to partake. They do not recognize the authority of the Vatican to prevent female ordination or LGBT inclusion, yet they do include the Pope in their ligurgical prayers, just as every Roman Catholic church does.

View from the courtyard into the chapel of First Unitarian, St. Louis MO

The version of the Lord's Prayer that was used was explicitly gender-equal, referring to God as both father and mother and "kingdom" is made gender-neutral by changing it to "kin-dom," stressing the kinship of humanity rather than the patriarchal rulership of God. No gendered pronoun was ever used to refer to God. Similarly, the creed here begins:

We believe in God,
Creator of a world of beauty and promise,
the beginning and end of life,
father and mother in the love and nurture of all creation.

The number of God is not the issue dealt with here. Similarly, the section that in the Nicene Creed references belief in the "holy catholic church," this version says:

We believe in one People of God,
the forgiveness of all sin,
the resurrection of our bodies,
and life everlasting in the loving arms of God. Amen

These Roman Catholics are universalists! Forgiveness of all sin! Hosea Ballou would easily find common ground here.

This mass was for Trinity Sunday. The homily was an exploration of the theological concept and dogma of the Trinity that was liberal enough to be usable in a Unitarian Universalist pulpit. The congregation held hands for its prayers, all hugged each other for the passing of the Peace, and they were very welcoming. Their music was played by a flute duo and by flute and guitar trio. Naturally this small congregation wanted to know who the stranger among them was. On learning who I am, why I'm in St. Louis, and why I was visiting them, they were even more gracious - if that is possible. A Unitarian Universalist intern-chaplain and -minister was welcome among them - received with respect. This congregation meets in the chapel of First Unitarian Church of St. Louis.

Home. A call to Walter. A light supper. Out to socialize a bit...

Last night we had rain. So this morning I wasn't surprised to wake to cloudy skies. Cooked breakfast because I was out of milk. I prefer cold granola in milk to cooked breakfast, but toast and eggs works too. A big mug of New Orleans chicoree coffee. A little reading. A little writing. Ablutions. Then I drove to First Unitarian Church of St. Louis - even though it is very walkable - because the clouds were still threatening rain. No sooner had I arrived at church than the clouds cleared and the sun shone unimpeded for this 10:00AM service celebrating the summer solstice, which falls on Tuesday this week.

First Unitarian Church of St. Louis, corner of Kingshighway and Waterman
Educational wing (l) and Chapel (r), from Kingshighway

Summer services at First Unitarian are lay led. Clearly, attendance is also significantly reduced, as the service took place in the chapel rather than in the sanctuary. This was probably the better choice anyway for a summer solstice event, as the sanctuary has stained glass while the chapel has a clerestory all the way round with clear glass letting in the sun, and on the west a wall of clear glass looking out onto the courtyard.

The service began with a drumming prelude. In addition to the drummers, everyone in the congregation was given a shaker, turning us all into percussionists. After a few minutes of drumming, the pianist began with light staccato to use the piano as the percussion instrument it is, gradually working into an improvised staccato tune. A lovely beginning! The chalice lighting was an honoring of the elements: Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. A different person did a short invocation of each, with the chalice being kindled at the invocation of fire. It was an effective use of symbols and words. The service was a pastiche of music and readings - some from the hymnal, some created for the event. The first hymn was the lovely "When the Summer Sun is Shining" - #66 in Singing the Living Tradition. I especially liked member Lucy Vazquez's reflections on the sun based in her memories of summers in Puerto Rico with her grandmother. There were two guided meditations. Not really my cuppa. But if this congregation gains from them, who am I to complain?

Joys and Concerns were voiced only by one person who had a list of the congregation's items submitted before the service. This approach compiled the Joys and Concerns into something very like a prayer, unlike the newsy or sometimes kvelling tenor that sometimes is there when individuals speak their own joys and concerns. But it did seem strange, coming from an emerging congregation and serving a congregation that grew out of the Unitarian fellowship movement of the mid-20th century, where it is considered very important to allow everyone to express their Joys and Sorrows in their own voice.

I was greeted warmly. Several people seemed happy to have a future UU minister worshipping with them this Sunday. On my way out, I was invited to a potluck in the basement. I followed the flow of young adults, thinking they were headed that way but was relieved when they exited the building. I appreciated the invite, but really did not want to spend a sunny solstice Sunday in a basement. And it was only 11:00 AM - not lunch time yet for me. But it was good to spend a Sunday morning with my people, so to speak.

Home. Out to lunch at Rasoi, an Indian restaurant on Euclid. Grocery shopping at Schnuck's. Thinking of the rest of the day: doing laundry, vacuuming, going for a walk, Compline at Trinity Episcopal Church, just a few blocks further walk from my apartment than CRC and First Unitarian... Why do they do Compline only once a month?! Thinking of the coming week as a chaplain at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and reading a stack of articles for tomorrow's CPE class...

Each week of CPE, in addition to serving patients and their families, I complete an evaluation, write a verbatim (a word-for-word account of a patient encounter, with multiple levels of analysis and contextualization, amounting to eight pages or so), and have eight hours of class, which includes sacred text, a didactic based on assigned readings, one of the interns sharing a verbatim for constructive and appreciative critique by the group, and interpersonal group with us five Chaplain Interns and our supervisor exploring the issues that have come up for us and in us in the CPE experience. Each week also includes an hour-long individual session with the supervisor, discussing, i.a., issues that have come up in the week's encounters and progress on my negotiated learning goals. My learning goals relate to risk-taking, bringing patient encounters to an appropriate close, and prayer. These goals require additional record keeping, which will take additional time.

So far, sacred texts used in our class time have consisted of a section from The Velveteen Rabbit (selected by our Lutheran supervisor), a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke (chosen by my Catholic colleague), and a lyric from Rent (presented by my Methodist colleague). My two other colleagues are in the queue to select sacred texts before I do, as it happens. I wonder if anyone else will go biblical before I bring in the Lord's Prayer, specifically in reference to my learning goals and my current extracurricular reading that includes John Dominic Crossan's new book on this prayer. Bizarre that a Lutheran, a Catholic, and a Methodist select sacred texts like a Unitarian while the Unitarian selects from the Bible! Perhaps just the effect of everyone stretching in the interfaith environment? The process is for the person who has selected the text to read it, talk briefly about it in relation to the CPE experience and his or her learning goals, and then open discussion to the group.

Tomorrow the cycle begins again.

Happy Birthday to Me

2011-06-15T20:22:00.000-05:00

A Birthday Prayer

o georgia darmstatter of ike's auto park
seller of buicks nissans and hondas, you
hold bits of my life on split metal rings

xl7usa1 the mailbox at my summer studio
kw1usa1 the summer studio
hidiclass the fob that lets me in the building
gmrubbergrip my buick century
curtisy157 the minivan
kw1usa1 my home church
brent'slock&key594-3017 home
kroger plus shopper's card
extracare cvs pharmacy
staplesrewardspremier
goldcard gnc livewell
acekw153311 my friend mark's apartment
2aa33c123 my internship church
bbab30a the hospital spiritual care office
103emadeinusa my cpe desk drawers

duplication prohibited
patent numbers that boggle
my life is held in georgia darmstatter's
metal grip but none can duplicate it
bits personal private shared and guarded

how many other bits of serrated metal
protected my life? bits that georgia
never was witness to, never safekeeper of

how many vehicles houses apartments
how many trailers sheds toolboxes
how many lockers workplaces dormrooms
how many desks chests safes
and sardine cans...

safes
safe

o georgia darmstatter of ike's auto park
have you made me safe?
you let me in keep others out
or make them work to get in that's all
safe? that's something beyond the power
even of you
o georgia darmstatter of ike's auto park

fobs and rings decorated and plain
one with a buddhist temple charm
flit through my memory but leave quickly

stay with me awhile, stay
pretend for me i'm safe for awhile
safe keep me and pray for me
o georgia darmstatter of ike's auto park

© Copyright 2011 by Paul Kent Oakley

A Pentecost Visitor in St. Louis

2011-06-12T15:27:00.003-05:00

Saturday, June 11, 2011, 5:00 PM
Community of Sts. Clare and Francis
Ecumenical Catholic Communion (ECC)

I had considered a visit to this congregation for a fellowship fieldtrip as far back as two years ago. I knew then it was an inclusive community, accepting full ecclesiastical equality of men and women, straight and LGBTQ. I knew that lay members and ordained clergy shared the responsibility for and ministry of the congregation. I knew it observed the same seven sacraments as Roman Catholicism. And I knew that the line of apostolic succession of the ECC was through the Old Catholic Church, which had rejected the increased papal power enshrined in Vatican I and separated from Rome at that time. But when you live in Mt. Vernon, a fieldtrip to St. Louis is amazingly difficult to put together.

I already knew I was going to visit here during my CPE summer in St. Louis, but finding from one of my fellow CPE students that this was where he went to church, I knew I would go sooner rather than waiting till later.

Evangelical United Church of Christ
204 East Lockwood Ave., Webster Groves MO
Photo from the church website

This congregation meets in the building of a United Church of Christ congregation in Webster Groves, a few blocks down the street from Eden Theological Seminary (UCC) and from Webster University (Catholic). I arrived early and sat in my car as more people arrived. I was greeted warmly when I entered the building and told the greeter that a friend of mine was part of the congregation, mentioning him by name. A few minutes later, my friend's wife approached me and introduced herself. Such a lovely person! I knew my friend would not be able to come, but his wife seemed genuinely happy to meet someone who was going through the CPE experience with her husband. Before mass began, she pointed out the beautiful metal candelabra around the altar, saying that her husband had made them. In a former life he had been a blacksmith. The setting was casual, some in corporate casual wear, others wearing jeans and sneakers or shorts and sandals.

The mass was a guitar mass with two guitars, a saxophone, a violin, and light percussion. The guitarists also sang. Most of the music was familiar from a Roman Catholic setting, but the instrumentation helped make it the more informal style of mass that appeared in many Roman Catholic churches after Vatican II. Most of the congregation knew hand motions to accompany the songs; these were also led by a barefooted liturgical dancer.

The homilist was a lay member of the congregation who put together a very fine Pentecost sermon drawn not from the account of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles, but in the later-written Gospel of John, in which Jesus describes the coming of the Holy Spirit in the metaphor of a river that sustains life. The homilist pointed out that this river metaphor is one that flows through scripture from Genesis' Eden, whose rivers flow forth to water the earth, all the way through the Revelation of St. John, where the river flows from the throne of God, watering the tree of life, whose fruit is for the healing of the nations. He also very effectively illustrated his homily, talking of family travels to a desert area in southern Peru, where one travels miles without seeing any life, then, coming upon a river flowing from the Andes down to the Pacific, there is a ribbon of lush life on either side, with wildlife and agriculture flourishing even though surrounded by harsh desert. He also told of a work trip his wife, a journalist, took to northern Mexico, where her guide asked her to consent to a detour, where he cared for a tubercular old man whose family could not risk infecting themselves, but this young man was healthy and strong and unmarried, so he risked himself to care for this unrelated old man. It was a beautiful, meaningful homily that translates beautifully and without great effort beyond its tradition of origin.

The Liturgy of the Eucharist took place with the whole congregation gathered in a double circle around the altar, a modest square wooden table draped with red altar cloths, the liturgical color for Pentecost, matching the priest's robe. The chalice was rough earthenware. The host was a round whole wheat loaf, about 3/4" thick, and gluten free wafers were available for those who needed it. Similarly, there was alcohol-free wine for those who needed or preferred it. Communion was open to all, with no restriction even suggested. Offering each other the Peace of Christ took the form of hugs and handshakes with most people giving peace to nearly everyone present.

This is a congregation whose values of inclusion are active within the celebration of the mass itself, as well as in the activities announced after communion, including a call for people to participate visibly in the larger St. Louis community in LGBT Pride events, including the big parade. It is a congregation that displays affection for each other in bonds of mutual service. As I was leaving, several individuals greeted me and asked me if I was visiting or scouting. One man, on hearing my brief explanation of who I am and why I was there, asked me for my impression of their community and its celebration of mass. I was a little surprised at the verbal survey, but I told him. Father Frank was gracious, talked with me, told me that in the intensity of the CPE experience, it was likely I would become close with my friend who is a member of Clare and Francis. And he invited me back any time I would care to visit.

On my way out the door, I saw the homilist and stopped to express my appreciation for his beautiful, meaningful sermon.

Sunday, June 12, 10:00 AM
Christ Church Cathedral
Episcopal Church USA

I had planned to go to the 9:00 AM service at First Unitarian Church of St. Louis this morning followed by the 11:15 service at Christ Church Cathedral, but yesterday, while walking past First Church, I discovered that they have posted only a 10:00 AM service, despite the 9:00 and 11:00 clearly posted on their website. (Fail!) And then yesterday afternoon I rechecked Christ Church's website and found that their schedule had shifted too. So First Unitarian had to wait, because today is Pentecost!

Christ Church is a member of Oasis and Integrity, both Episcopal organizations supporting the full inclusion of LGBTQ people. As I looked around the nave of this beautiful mid-19th-century gothic, I saw quite a few unambiguous gay male couples and lesbian couples and individuals. The congregation was mostly white, but there were several Black individuals and families, both African American and African immigrants, and one visible Latino family. Dress was widely varied, from t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers to suits, from corporate casual to kilts with ghillie brogues and sporrans. About a fifth of the congregation wore red, the color of Pentecost. While people were quiet as they entered, the passing of the peace and the social time after the service showed this to be a very friendly church.

Christ Church Cathedral
1210 Locust Street, St. Louis MO

The Cathedral is located in downtown St. Louis. Beginning today, Christ Church has moved to a reduced Sunday schedule, merging a 9:00 AM service and and 11:15 AM service into a 10:00 AM service. People who sat near me indicated they had some reservations about this since they were strongly attached to the traditional service with ancient wording and this was something of a mix. And, indeed, the mix was interesting.

The words were the venerable words of Rite II from the Book of Common Prayer (1979), but the music was mixed - old hymns from the blue hymnal (1982), a chanted Gloria, Psalm 104 chanted, the Doxology sung to the Old Hundredth tune, and in with that standard Episcopal fare: "Let us Break Bread Together on Our Knees" and Doris Akers' "There's a Sweet, Sweet Spirit in This Place." The gay man sitting directly in front of me told me later that they have been warned that this new 10:00 AM service may soon start using spirituals and gospel music in the mix, which leaves him worried that what he - raised Missouri Synod Lutheran and having later passed through the United Methodist Church and Metropolitan Community Church before finding a home here - values here may be diluted or lost. "Break Bread Together" and "Sweet, Sweet Spirit" were sung beautifully, but they did feel out of place in that particular mix.

Despite this, however, I felt like I'd been to church - you know, that formalized encounter with the transcendent that the liturgical churches, at their best, manage so beautifully. Nothing "common" about it! Yet it was completely accessible.

The procession started at the altar. Cross on a standard, clergy, the book of the Gospels, the choir and all the robed attendants and readers came down the center aisle, circled around the left side to the front, then the right side, coming back up the center aisle to the altar, and spaced through the procession, 10-foot standards with long red ribbons being swirled over the procession and the congregation as the choir and congregation can, to the tune Llanfair, "Hail to thee, festival day! Blest day that are hallowed forever, day when the Holy Ghost shone on all the world with God's grace!" It was quite moving!

The first lesson was from Acts 2:1-21. When the reader reached the point where the speaking in tongues occurs, she paused and about a dozen members spaced through the nave stood and all together spoke at some length, each in a different language. Starting as a cacophony, it receded as, one by one, they finished, were seated, and when the last one sat down, the reading of the lesson continued. This was amazingly effective liturgical drama!

When the gospel was read, there was a mini procession to the center of the nave, where it was read, the front half of the congregation turning toward the back so all were facing the reading of the gospel. This too dramatized the centrality of the gospel among the people rather than distant from it. Perfectly achieved without a world of explanation!

The sermon was preached by a guest priest, the Rev. Dahn Gandell. She is a former Southern Baptist minister, a Southerner with a noticeable accent, a red-head. Her stole was her own knitting, very fuzzy, in rainbow colors. Kind of a cross between a boa and a pride flag! It matched her effusive personality perfectly! Her theme was "Transformation not shared is wasted."

After the Liturgy of the Word, there was a baptism of a member's infant daughter. This was performed at the font near the entry doors to the nave. The entire congregation turned toward the back and gathered in close. At the end of the baptismal liturgy, the Peace was passed. Since many people were already away from their seats to witness the baptism, people were all over the place greeting each other.

People returned to their seats and the liturgy of Holy Communion began. This was more solemn and less dramatic than the preceding parts of the service, but beautifully done, people kneeling at the altar rail to receive the host and the wine.

Announcements were mostly focused on social justice and consciousness activities and events, and after the service, as the side of the nave, coffee and sweets and fruit were offered. People stood in comfortable conversations with friends and new acquaintances and were still at it when I left at noon.

It was a wonderful place to spend Pentecost Sunday morning.

CPE - Wk. 2

2011-06-11T15:06:00.004-05:00

It feels like I've been here a month at least! The second week of Clinical Pastoral Education was a flurry of learning and preparation for the day when we were pushed out of the nest and expected to fly. We had didactics on how to approach Jewish patients and Catholic patients, taught by a rabbi and a priest, respectively. We spent an entire day in a training to be Designated Requestors of tissue, bone, and organs. My response to that training brought on a poem but no joy.

And then... I shadowed an on-call chaplain on the evening shift. In that four hours of shadowing, I attended patients and families who were there for gunshot wounds, stabbings, and cancer. I was present for patients surrounded by loved ones and patients who were completely alone. I was at the bedside of a patient who died after life supporting machines were turned off. It was my joy to end that day by visiting in Children's Hospital as a private citizen, looking in on the daughter of a friend of a friend. My friend had asked me to check on this little girl who underwent heart catheterization that day. I arrived at her room near 10:00 PM. She was awake, lively, smiling, happy, and going home the next morning. I was good to be with her and her mother (my friend's friend) to end the day.

On Friday, the time had come, and we CPE students were sent out to our units to serve as chaplains. My assignment is primarily on the neurology and neurosurgery floors. This work is private and sacred. The need for confidentiality is paramount. So you will not hear stories from me about my encounters with patients and their families.

After the day of visiting patients came to a close, I stuck around in theological discussion with a second-shift chaplain for an hour, then headed to the apartment to scarf down some leftovers before heading to temple.

It was Social Justice Shabbat at Central Reform Congregation. In addition to singing the prayers that are the central element of the Shabbat Service, Rabbi Susan led the congregation in honoring two of CRC's commitments to inclusivity: interfaith couples, who make up a quite significant percent of the congregation, on the one hand, and LGBTQ individuals, couples, and families, on the other. From the Torah portion for the week, she centered in on the story of Eldad and Medad, which ends with Moses expressing a desire for everyone to prophesy, rather than leaving prophecy in the domain of a favored elite. The sermon, then, was delivered by someone she said was outside the tent with Eldad and Medad.

The sermon was a presentation by gay CRC member Scott Emmanuel about the prophetic work he facilitates with the organization Growing American Youth, a safe-space social organization supporting LGBTAQ individuals age 21 and younger in the St. Louis area. It was a very moving presentation, which he concluded by allowing young people who are served by the group to speak from their own experience. The mother of one of them also spoke, an African American woman who is an ordained minister. Very moving experiences from all of them.

After the oneg I walked the four blocks back to the apartment. With each step, the wind got stronger. It started sprinkling. Distant thunder grew closer. I was barely inside the door when the heavens opened, with heavy rains and frequent lightning and thunder. I loved it! Just wish I could have watched it from a porch. But then I wouldn't have been able to watch it unfolding over the city from my 10th-floor window. A beautiful end to an intense week.

CPE - Poem 1

2011-06-11T12:05:00.006-05:00

IN EARLY SUMMER HEAT

"Sweetheart, you are in pain.
Relax, take a breath,
let's pay attention to what is happening,
then we'll figure out what to do." - Sylvia Boorstein

I'm conflicted.

June seventh,
Ninety-seven degrees of steamy St. Louis heat,
Catered sandwiches on the patio
Just feet from chilly basement-level labs
And operating rooms for harvesting
Vascular organs and bone and tissue

I tell someone of going to lunch
At a French restaurant the day Gene died,
But the car stalled.
Of then being delivered to the mortuary door
In the cab of a tow truck
Gourmet lunch boxed in our laps.
We ate in the basement off mortuary china.

The trainer pushes hard,
Insists we be fully convinced,
Belief in organ or tissue donation
From every body, he says, is a job requirement.
Our goal: one-hundred percent donation rate.

I tell my colleagues I am conflicted.
But I'm not conflicted. I'm pissed.
I live in a country where I am not allowed,
Not allowed to give blood while I am alive
And well,
Plenty of it to spare,
But when I croak, they want next of kin
to donate tissue, bone, organs.
The icing on that cake is thick:
In most states my partner,
Twenty-five years we're together,
Is not recognized as next of kin.
Partner dearer than life, made a stranger.

Conflicted? No.
I am angry.

Then suddenly I'm back in that San Diego December.
Memories and overpowering laughter
Barely letting us breathe,
We gathered the night of Gene's death.
The waiter mistakes mourning for frivolity,
Trying to join in.
I want to slap him.
Why should we explain our grief
To a stranger?

I sit with my anger and wish
I could walk that December beach again.

Sunset and roaring sea on Coronado Island,
Lone joggers working up the sheen
Of a light winter sweat,
Lovers, arm in arm walking, briskly,
A youth and his collie sit, looking seaward,
Too much wind for frisbee.
I wait for the green flash.

© Copyright 2011 by Paul Kent Oakley

CPE - Wk. 1, et al.

2011-06-05T16:00:00.008-05:00

A week ago yesterday, I was in St. Louis to collect the keys to my summer apartment, a studio in a building built in the 1920s as a luxury hotel. It is no longer anywhere near luxurious, but it is in the first block north of Forest Park and is close to Barnes Jewish Hospital, where I am interning as a chaplain in an accredited Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program.

The Westmoreland, 425 Union Blvd., St. Louis MO

5:00 PM, Saturday, May 28, 2011
Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis (Roman Catholic)
After I collected my apartment keys and put a box of books into it, I headed down Lindell to start home to Mt. Vernon. But at the corner of Kingshighway, I looked at the clock and saw it was nearing 5:00 PM. Time for Saturday evening mass, and I was just a few blocks from the cathedral. Walter and I had attended concerts in the cathedral, but I had never attended mass there. So I parked and went in.

Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis
Photo by Colin Faulkingham (public domain)

The mass was perfunctory, nothing distinguishing it. The homily was conservative and political. And the acoustics made it so the organ drowned out all congregational singing. Even the miked cantor was only barely audible. The reader and the priest, though, not fighting to be heard over the organ were perfectly audible and quite good at pacing their readings to avoid getting muddied in the echo. The experience was an anonymous one. Even passing the peace seemed to avoid connections except with those one came with. People were dressed in jeans and shorts and sandals and minis, with only two suits visible in the entire cathedral. The priest smiled and shook my hand as I left. As I've said before, the acres of mosaics, of which the cathedral congregation are quite proud are of widely varied artistic value. Some of the scenes look like Protestant Sunday School literature's images of New Testament stories that I remember from my childhood. Rather kitschy, really. But other portions of the mosaiced surface is quite high quality.

10:30 AM, Sunday, May 29, 2011
Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship (Unitarian Universalist)
This was my last Sunday until mid-August at my Teaching Congregation. The service focused on the meaning of Memorial Day. My Teaching Pastor, the Rev. Bill Sasso, presided and preached at this service, but because it was my last Sunday there before a summer away pursuing other activities, he asked me to compose and deliver the Prayer of Remembrance and the Closing Blessing/ Benediction.

Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship, Carbondale IL

My benediction was as follows:

As we go our separate ways, some of us for a summer apart, some for only a few days, may we live into the values that we share and express to each other when we are together. May we honor those we remember today by fulfilling the best of their promise. While our chalice sits in dark anticipation of the time we come together again, may the light of love for each other and the world shine in our hearts without dimming. Amen and Blessed Be

Memorial Day
I spent the day doing laundry, packing, and moving into the studio apartment in order to be there to begin CPE the next day.

View from my apartment (eastward).
Barnes-Jewish Hospital is the farthest right cluster of buildings.

The panoramic picture, if magnified, shows the Gateway Arch and the cupola of the dome of the Basilica Cathedral of St. Louis, as well as the Federal Court skyscraper in the downtown distance.

Tuesday - Friday, May 31-June 3, 2011
Week one of orientation to Clinical Pastoral Education at Barnes-Jewish Hospital at Washington University Medical Center in the Central West End of St. Louis, Missouri.

Barnes-Jewish Hospital at Washington University Medical Center, St. Louis MO
Photo by Richard Chole, via US News and World Report - Health

We are a class of five intern chaplains: 2 men, 3 women; 3 in our 50s, 2 in their 20s; 1 gay, 4 not gay; 1 African-American, 4 white, 1 of whom is Jewish; 1 Unitarian Universalist, 1 Reform Jew, 1 Catholic, 1 United Methodist, 1 Baptist/ nondenominational Christian; 2 want to be chaplains, 2 want to minister to congregations, 1 is uncertain yet which path to follow. Our supervisor is a married white male somewhat older than I, ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

So far I have shadowed 4 staff chaplains to observe their styles and the differences between the departments/ floors of the hospital that they serve: a Buddhist/Humanist leader of the Ethical Society and member of a Vietnamese Buddhist temple, with many years experience as a minister in the Assembly of God, Southern Baptist, United Methodist and United Church of Christ denominations, who provides spiritual care for ICU and the Psych wards; a Christian man ordained in the Way of Life Outreach Ministries, with a prior work background in accounting and electrical engineering, who provides spiritual care to the Neurology, Neurosurgery and Neurological ICU floors; a United Church of Christ minister with experience providing spiritual care in other healthcare institutions, who provides spiritual care for Women and Infants floors and Gynecological Oncology; and a nondenominational Christian minister who provides spiritual care in Emergency, Urgent Care, and Trauma, with special expertise serving victims of violence and mass casualties. On Monday I will shadow a Jewish Renewal Rabbi who provides spiritual care in the Oncology department.

In addition to these staff chaplains, spiritual care is provided at Barnes-Jewish Hospital by a mix of men and women, black and white, American, African, Filipino, and Indian, Christian, Jewish, and other, and so on. It is an amazingly diverse group, amazingly amazing, and yet there are no East-Asian chaplains, no Native American, Latino/a, or Middle Eastern chaplains, no Pagan, Muslim, Hindu chaplains. I wonder about the representation of these groups at other American hospitals. But everyone I have encountered here so far has been wonderful. And my colleagues and I have quickly developed what promises to be a good rapport and mutual respect. I know the summer will be very challenging, but I feel comfortable with the instruction and structures of support that are already in place.

7:30 PM, Friday, June 3, 2011
Central Reform Congregation (Reform Jewish)
After Friday at the hospital, I went back to my apartment to rest for a few before walking the four blocks to Central Reform Congregation for Shabbat services. I arrived before anyone else except the person getting the siddurim ready for the service. I was told that the sanctuary was occupied with a wedding rehearsal but that the service that evening was a special one in recognition of a long-time choir member who was moving the next day to Philadelphia.

Central Reform Congregation, Waterman at Kingshighway, St. Louis MO

In addition to the usual sung prayers, there was special music and memories to honor the departing member. She and her husband gave memory-laden homilies. But that was just part of the service. That very day, three people had gone to the mikveh to complete the process of conversion to Judaism. At this service, each gave a teaching on a portion of the day's Torah portion. Each unique in style and insight, they were all quite good! The synagogue service concludes with members saying Kaddish for their loved ones on the anniversary of their death and with blessings for many situations. Among the blessings was a wedding blessing for a couple getting married two days later. The priestly blessing. Then everyone headed out to the entryway for the blessings on the challah and wine to commence the oneg - eating sweets and finger foods and schmoozing together. I had arrived early at 7:00 PM and left earlier than much of the crowd at 10:00. It was a warm and satisfying service.

Saturday, June 4, 2011
Errands to run, then home to Mt. Vernon.

10:00 AM, Sunday, June 5, 2011
Mt. Vernon Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
Today, for the first time since January 2 this year, I was able to attend my home congregation. Attendance was sparse. And in the absence of someone signed up to lead the service, it was an Open Readings service.

Mt. Vernon Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Mt. Vernon IL

Angela Czapiewski played some recorded music and led us in a hymn. Walter, Larry Sidwell, and Theresa Rowe read readings from the hymnal. I talked about the Central Reform Congregation's saying Kaddish for deceased loved ones and about the Memorial Day service at Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship last Sunday, then reading the Prayer of Remembrance I had led at that service. Then later, I led the congregation in a reflection on the Principles and Sources embedded in the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and which member congregations covenant to affirm and promote.

After the service, we shared coffee and cheesecake and fellowship with each other. I will be back at the end of June.

Now...
I have to work on a campus ministry project for my Teaching Congregation, coordinate the Pride Sunday service for my home congregation, check e-mail, finish laundry, read a chapter and various handouts for tommorow's orientation class at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, and return to St. Louis to sleep.

By the way, the grant check came from the UUA to fund the campus ministry project at my Teaching Congregation. When they had e-mailed me earlier saying the grant was approved, they told me that we would receive $500.00. The check that came was for $1,500.00! I wondered if it was a mistake, but the accompanying letter also said, $1,500. I think we can deal with that kind of surprise. In gratitude.

Sleep...

Prayer of Remembrance

2011-05-29T22:22:00.003-05:00

On this Memorial Day weekend, we turn our minds to acts of remembering.

We remember our family members and friends who died serving their homeland. We are grateful that they loved us and this country and pray that we become worthy of that love by pursuing better policies so that we put fewer of our loved ones in harm’s way. Let us remember them by name, as persons with dignity.

We remember our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, mentors and older friends who have died before us. Some died of old age, some of disease or injury that could not be healed. We are grateful that they brought us into the world. And we are grateful for the life lessons we learned from them or because of them. May we honor them by seeking to improve on what they left with us. But let us remember them, each for his or her unique qualities, imperfect but as persons of inherent worth.

We remember our spouses and partners, our brothers and sisters, and our friends whose absence has left us alone in a harsh world. Sometimes we have felt anger at their death, sometimes despair, but we are grateful that they traveled this road with us for part of our journey. Our concept of self is intertwined with our memories of them. We honor them for what they meant in our lives, but we remember them as individuals who, much as they loved us, were more than just what we allowed ourselves to see of them. May we learn to see those near us not as mirrors of us but as unique persons, each sacred in his or her own right.

We remember our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, children of neighbors and friends who died before their time. Their deaths were particularly painful. Sometimes it is hard to remember them for their individual qualities because they died so young. Sometimes they were so ill that the person was overcome by the symptoms and treatments. But we will remember the person not simply the pain. Let us work for a world where everyone has access to care. May we honor these children by continuing to improve that care, remembering each face, each voice that once opened the world to us.

Let us also perform an act of will, remembering those who died with no one left to remember them. We honor their individuality not by pretending we knew them but by holding that uncertainty in our minds, recognizing that no one was ever just a number but a living, breathing person of great value.

Today we remember not our losses but hold in our hearts those who have died before us. We remember them all. We remember. We remember.

The Sources We Draw From

2011-05-21T13:39:00.003-05:00

Many Unitarian Universalists have an appreciation for the principles that member congregations of the UUA have covenanted to in the Association's bylaws. Probably a significantly smaller portion know that our Seven Principles are located in the bylaws or know what comes next in the bylaws - the statement of the sources of our movement - or, more precisely, the sources of the values of our movement:

Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;
Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

Modern humans seem to like the short form of everything, exploding with incomprehensible acronyms that limit access to an in-group. Similarly, we take the full negotiated wording of our covenanted principles, approved by vote and affirmed by ongoing membership in the association, and reduce it to a list of phrases. Ask someone who remembers what our seven principles are, and you are likely to get something like this:

Inherent worth and dignity
Compassion
Acceptance of others
Free and responsible search
Right of conscience
Peace
Interdependent web

Or maybe you will get something like this:

Inherent worth and dignity
Justice
Encouragement to spiritual growth
Search for truth
Democratic process
World community
Interdependent web

And maybe it's good that we can see the principles that our congregations covenant to affirm and promote from such divergent perspectives. We don't necessarily disagree with anyone else's summary. It is a matter of focus.

But what about the sources of our living tradition? or, more precisely, the sources we draw from. That is, this is not a statement of historical genealogy. It is not a tracing of genetic lineage, of DNA. Rather, these are the wellsprings from which we irrigate our vineyards, the cups from which we wet our parched mouths.

I have sometimes heard our sources summarized as a list of nouns, more or less like this:

Self ( or Experience)
Prophets (or Prophecy)
World religions
Judaism
Christianity
Humanism
Paganism

If we summarize in this way have we said something different about who we are and who we aspire to be than if we list our sources according to the stated action value to be gleaned from each of the nouns? According to the values written into the statement of sources in the Association's bylaws, we intend and attempt to:

Renew our spirits
Confront evil with justice, compassion, love
Live ethically
Love our neighbors as ourselves
Be guided by reason
Avoid making idols of ways of thinking, being, and doing
Celebrate life
Live in harmony with nature

It is the rare person who is going to remember the text of our sources as stated in the bylaws. Certainly by culture and, I believe, also by nature as humans, we abbreviate. But every abbreviation originates in someone's choice. What do we choose? Do we choose to think of ourselves in terms of a genealogy of movements that birthed or nurtured our values? Do we list the "begats" of our spiritual heritage and set up little idols to each ancestor? Do we think of ourselves as some mixture of stated religions or as one, but with first cousins we love in the others? Or do we choose to make the genealogy into endnotes, focusing, instead, on the action plan unambiguously embodied in our official statement of sources?

To put it into the language of one struggle for the soul of Christianity: do we want a religion about Jesus or the religion of Jesus? That is, do we want to worship our ancestors or choose to take the best parts of their approaches as the basis for a coherent, values-laden action plan?

We irrigate the fields not by worshiping the water but by doing something with the water.

On Refusing Limitations of Heritage

2011-05-19T16:31:00.009-05:00

Rabbi Rami Shapiro blogged today on his doubts concerning the ability of current interfaith movements to bear much fruit because such efforts too frequently keep each contingent in its own box, frequently not even sharing in prayer together in an aim to keep the religious genetics unmixed. Rabbi Rami wrote:

I love religion the way I love literature and music, but I refuse to be limited to one author, composer or genre. Humans create religion, art, literature, music, science, etc. I am human—it is all my heritage.

I posted that quote and a link to Rabbi Rami's blog post on my facebook wall, raising the issue of misappropriation for a UU friend, who expressed both discomfort and resonance with the rabbi's position. Instead of tracing it more completely in the FB medium, here is my fleshing out of the issue for today:

The uncomfortable part, for me, is tied up in the ways in which I am part of the currently dominant global culture. I'm white, male, American, well-traveled, and over-educated, with eclectic, international, transcultural tastes in food, the arts, and much more. As far as those parts of my identity go, I have the privilege that comes with being part of a dominant group that has historically taken what it wanted with no concern for what that meant to those dominated and using what it took as a tool of that domination. That's clear reason to be mindful of the way I approach the human heritage.

But human culture has always engaged in gene-splicing as well as mutation, if you will. Human cultures, both dominant and dominated always shape themselves in response to what they encounter of various Others. Sometimes drawing the other into the self, other times defining the self by what it rejects in the other. There is no changing that. Christmas is Christian and Pagan and Consumerist and Political and Public and deeply Personal all at the same time, for example. Whatever we encounter, no matter its source, participates in shaping us, and we it, whether we love that fact and use it as a badge and accept it as part of our identity or, alternatively, cringe in rejection of the implication that our lineage is not pure.

I celebrate the mingling of the human waters. If we would mix DNA and culture for a moment, my physical and cultural ancestors come from across the full spectra of Christian (non)belief and (im)piety, and before them my ancestors were Pagan in every stripe of local variety, and before them we were animists and pantheists, and before that we had no words with which to nail down our experience of ourselves in reality. We engaged in human sacrifice and animal sacrifice and vegetal sacrifice and economic sacrifice and personal sacrifice and refusal to sacrifice and irrelevance of sacrifice. We reverenced the heavenly bodies, the forces of nature, deities narrated in stories that were quickly misunderstood, our societies, and ourselves.

And at every stage along my personal ancestral timeline, the system of identity and belief and practice was shaped and reshaped by contact with those at the periphery of those identities and beyond. My European ancestors had several periods of geographic displacement and migration during which they came in comtact with each other and with other Others. The history of Europe includes the fraught interplay of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and others, and between perceived races and ethnicities. Many of the encounters were life-and-death matters for the groups with less power. Both the most benign and the most dangerous encounters all shaped my ancestors. Whether my ancestors were the winners or the losers in a given interchange, they were changed. There has never been such a thing as pure, unmixed culture, religion, spiritual perspective, or identity.

And in the modern era, many of the countries of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and so on, have experienced encounters on a massive scale between immigrant groups and native societies, much to the detriment of the indigenous peoples, as well as between immigrant groups of different cultures, and between those willing immigrants and unwilling immigrants. Where we used to be proud of separate cultures disappearing into the overcooked mass of the melting pot, we now use metaphors that allow separate identities to continue. Something common is still shaped by our common encounters, but religious and other identities persist, changed by their positive and negative relations with others.

In UU congregations, some identify as U, some as U, some as UU, and a great many hyphenate UU with some other spiritual and religious path, while some do not even think of their identity as UU anything, but only as the part that would come after the hyphen. Many of our congregations illustrate that hyphenation with symbols of world religions on display in the sanctuary or on the minister's stole. For all protestation about "misappropriation," we regularly celebrate our identity as inextricably mixed with identities that are not part of our genetic heritage or direct religious lineage but are part of our environmental encounter with the human world.

Rabbi Rami says, "I am human. It is all my heritage." I would argue that that is exactly what the UUA Bylaws say when they define our Sources as:

Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;
Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

I am human. It is all my heritage. May I be mindful of how I impinge on the world, just as I become aware of how it impinges on me. May I celebrate it all, weigh it all, select what enhances who I am and grow from it, and bracket off what would bring me low or injure others, becoming a renewed me with each new encounter.

The Big Question - Love, What is this thing called

2011-05-14T13:15:00.001-05:00

The UU Salon Big Question for May is:

"I wanna know what love is..." or at least what it means to us. We use that word a lot, we Unitarian Universalists who are standing on the side of love.

In the comments, I supplemented the question with the additional query and observation:

"And what is the difference between "standing on the side of love" and loving? since the former seems to place the love in the persons we stand with not in us. So standing on the side of love, when it refers to advocating marriage equality, seems potentially to refer to a totally different type of love than when it refers to reuniting immigrant families, e.g."

Of course, "Standing on the Side of Love" came into the consciousness of many Unitarian Universalists as a piece of music:

(View on YouTube)

That was about Marriage Equality. So Standing on the Side of Love entered the UU lexicon as part of a specific campaign to belatedly recognize marriage not as a joining of houses or fortunes or a joining justified only by potential procreation and the need to care for its biological products, but as something that had been trying to emerge through the entirety of the Modern Era. The revolutionary aim was to recognize marriage as a joining of persons who love each other. Plain. Simple. Revolutionary.

Of course, other songs shape our concept(s) of love too:

Love is all you need...
Love will keep us together...
Safe in the arms of love...
Love divine, all loves excelling...
Love hurts...
Where is the love?
What's love got to do with it?

And since boy gets girl first entered the list of viable plot lines, stories and novels and movies have emerged from the sea of love, informing our image of "love."

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision." - Captain Corelli's Mandolin

"The best love is the kind that weakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants fires in our hearts and brings peace to our minds..." - The Notebook

Love is everywhere you turn. It is saccharin sweet and bitter fire, it is fickle, it is constancy, it is an emotion or a consuming lust or a promise... Like "God," its sometime synonym, "Love" has nearly as many meanings as it has people using it. So what good is it? Does it communicate or obfuscate?

When Jason Shelton's lyrics invite us to stand on the side of love, what is the love that is referred to? What love do we hold to be a justification for the state's licensing and registering marriage in its name, supporting it with a list of special rights the unloved apparently do not deserve?

When we expand the song into a campaign, what rights that we would continue to deny to the unloved do we support for immigrants in danger of being separated from family members as an action of the law?

It seems we think of the many "loves" as a kind of moral glue, holding people together - but only tenuously. The glue is not strong enough to survive without the support of the government. And the glue must be reinforced against the government. In short, the application of the slogan to the campaign is as incoherent and slippery as "love" itself.

However, standing "on the side of love" was originally the rallying cry of allies in a specific political struggle. The love on whose side straight allies of LGBT persons stood was a love between the oppressed. But the slogan was not the oppressed's cry. It belonged to those who covenanted to stand with the oppressed. Expanded to include immigration issues, Standing on the Side of Love continues to be a rallying cry for allies. And allies accept that the struggle in which they participate is not their own struggle to control and direct.

As a slogan of allies, "Love" cannot and must not be defined by the allies but by those whose struggle benefits from the support of allies.

Mother's Day Prayer

2011-05-08T01:52:00.005-05:00

Today we hold mothers everywhere in our hearts. Each of us approaches this day with our own unique mix of celebration of life and love and also recognition of imperfections. We have profound gratitude for the good and hope to release ourselves from attachment to the rest.

We lift up those for whom this day is painful because of memories or current realities. Unhappiness comes in many guises. May we allow people who are feeling pain today space that honors their reality and compassion for realities that some of us may recognize and others of us can hardly imagine.

We lift into our consciousness mothers who need more from us than just our good will:

Mothers of children in violence-ridden neighborhoods;
Mothers who depend on food pantries and soup kitchens to feed their children;
Mothers whose homes have been destroyed by recent tornadoes and floods;
And mothers whose families face many other needs and challenges.

May we express our compassion by helping these mothers get food for their children and justice for their families.

May we work for the healing of all painful experiences of motherhood.

Today we remember mothers at every stage along their journey.

We hold in our hearts mothers of young children, in the hope that they may nurture and raise their children to be good and faithful people in the world.

We hold in our hearts mothers of older children, in the hope that they may have the wisdom to know when to help their children hang on to their roots and when to spread their wings.

We hold in our hearts mothers of grown children, in the hope that they may feel satisfaction in a job well done.

We recognize that there are many paths of motherhood. Some mothers are only able to give life. Some are only able to nurture life.

For all the good experiences of motherhood, we are filled with gratitude.

We bless all mothers among us here today, recognizing each one for the special gifts she brings or has brought to her unique challenges and opportunities. We bless you who have given so much of yourselves for the good of your children and the benefit of our community.

Amen and Blessed Be.

NOTE: This prayer was inspired by last year's "Mother's Day Prayer" by the Rev. Joelle Colville-Hanson, a small-town ELCA minister in Iowa. The three stages of motherhood follow her prayer closely. The rest is an adaptation in my own words of the ideas informing her prayer.

The Family Circle

2011-05-03T19:12:00.003-05:00

On Sunday, May 1, 2011, it was my great joy to officiate at the wedding of Marianne Farrar and Gerhard Rybicki. I have known Gerhard for only a couple of months yet well enough to know him as a good, warm man who makes Marianne happy. Marianne, though, has been my dear friend for 30 years. I was proud to be able to participate in this celebration!

One part of the ceremony that many people commented on as especially nice was what we simply called the Family Circle. After Gerhard and Marianne had exchanged vows and rings but before I pronounced them husband and wife, I called their children, their children's partners, and their grandchildren by name to form a circle around them. It went like this:

Gerhard & Marianne Rybicki Wedding: Family Circle
(Picture taken by Becca Stearns' daughter Marlee)

The Family Circle

A marriage joins not just two people committing their love and lives to each other. Marriage also unites that couple’s children to the parent’s spouse in a new bond of family, added alongside all previously existing family relationships. This bond calls forth feelings that are sometimes slow, sometimes quick to emerge.

In recognition of this special relationship that is also part of the marriage we celebrate today, I ask Marianne’s children and grandchildren to come forward and form a circle around Gerhard and Marianne.

Forming this family circle are Marianne's children Nicole, Natalie, John David, and Joshua, her grandchildren Benjamin, Nathaniel, Noelle, Jacob, Little Guy, Savannah, and Charlotte, her daughter-in-law Celine, John David's wife, who brings something very special today - she is pregnant with twins Joseph and Lillian - Marianne's son-in-law Guy, Natalie's husband, and Paul, Nicole's partner. Gerhard's sons Marc and Alexander and Marianne's grandchildren Adam, Lucus, and Rebecka could not be here today; nonetheless, they too are part of this circle.

There is an ancient story that is often referred to at weddings. It is the story of Ruth and Naomi. Ruth was Naomi’s daughter-in-law. And her words of filial devotion to her mother-in-law are so beautiful that they are often used to refer to the marriage commitment itself: “Wherever you go I will go. …Your people will be my people.” But Ruth’s words weren’t marriage vows. They were words of commitment and support to someone to whom she had become related not by birth but through her marriage to her husband. In the spirit of Ruth, I invite the family here gathered to repeat after me:

Today we expand our family circle.
We stand with you today,
Offering our love and growing affection,
Trusting that your life together
Will be a blessing to all who love you.

Gerhard & Marianne surrounded by the Family
(Photo taken by Ann Spear)

It was beautiful! When Marianne had first asked me to officiate at her wedding, before I had yet met Gerhard, I wanted to find a way to visibly bring Marianne's children, who had played with my children when they were little and been as close as cousins, into the ceremony not only as bridesmaids and groomsmen but as family. And then Marianne asked if it would be okay to have her whole family come forward at some point in the ceremony. Of course it was okay!

I am so happy with the way it felt as it unfolded, a feeling that reached the gathered friends as well as those of us standing in front of those assembled. I told Marianne afterward that I'm not quite sure how I kept from crying. Must have been the fact that I had scripted it.

Twice on Sunday...

2011-05-03T02:13:00.007-05:00

Sunday morning, on the day when I was preparing to officiate at the late-afternoon wedding of Marianne Farrar, my dear friend of 30 years, to Gerhard Rybicki, to whom she had been engaged before she came to the USA as a young woman, and following on the heels of the superb presentation/workshop of Mark Morrison-Reed on The Perversity of Diversity at the District Assembly of the Central Midwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Association, I went to church. Twice.

9:00 AM - Central Community Church, Mattoon IL
CCC was formed in 1923 by members of a few small, separately non-viable groups of Christians who were looking for a non-denominational option in their town. For much of its existence it was reasonably successful at the numbers game and was able to build its current building in 1967.

Central Community Church, Mattoon IL; photo from the church website

In the the 1990s the congregation rather quickly began to decline so that, by the time the current minister, a man of upper middle age, was called in 2005, he was greeted on his first Sunday by just ten faithful members. The church website does not indicate what the sources of support were at that time, but somehow the tiny remnant and their minister engaged in improvement of the grounds and physical plant, including installation of audio-visual equipment. Within just a few years they had an intern minister whom they then hired as associate minister/ music minister in 2009. Also in 2009 the congregation sent mission teams to Jamaica, where they established a congregation closely linked to CCC. A truly amazing turn-around happened for CCC! And today normal Sunday attendance, from two services, is over 600.

All that is not just program notes/ filler. Rather it is important for even this casual analysis of what happens here on Sunday. In the 1980s my wife and I were members of a Community Church in the next town over. There we experienced largely traditional services with hymns accompanied by organ and piano, a choir singing mostly classical and traditional music, and offertories and recessionals played by Luwayne Arnold on the organ. The building trembled as she played! People still mostly dressed up for church. The minister was Lutheran and led the congregation through the liturgical calendar, beginning each Advent. That was my exposure to Community Church. And I left for reasons completely unrelated to the liturgical style before the 1990s decline began one town over at CCC.

I entered CCC right at 9:00 for the first service. A quick look around saw more people in jeans than anything else. I was the only person other than the minister wearing a sport jacket. Some of the older women had on nice blouses. A few of the older men wore short-sleeved sport shirts with dress slacks. But T-shirts were as much in evidence. Clearly the congregation took a casual approach to clothing.

As I looked about further, I saw that young adults were not present in any significant proportion. The largest demographic seemed to be the seniors, and then the middle-aged and high schoolers. Younger children had other classes during worship. I wondered whether young adults simply came to the second service or whether they didn't attend much, as many churches experience.

Despite the modest number of young adults, some of them in the 12-person choir, the worship style was praise band performing and leading songs that are currently popular on WIBI/ WBGL contemporary Christian radio. Each song's lyrics were projected on the large screens placed on either side of the chancel. At the beginning of each, its name and copyright date and recording artist was shown on the screen. None was older than 2005. Most newer. The choir provided backup vocals to the music minister, who played keyboard and was the lead singer, as well as providing spoken transitions between songs. There were a handful of musicians on stage with him.

Except for the energy level coming off of that style of music, the shape of the service was nothing unusual. Had hymns been swapped out for the contemporary music, it would have been a fairly traditional evangelical service. Indeed, if you check out the website, the portion where what they believe is outlined, it is a church with a solidly conservative theological stance.

Though the minister had an over-the-ear microphone and did not obviously refer to notes, he strayed little from the clear plexiglass pulpit while preaching, though he did make use of the technology-enabled freedom at a couple of other points in the service. His sermon was not stellar oratory and had no especially brilliant insights, but he was very personable, referring warmly in his sermon to members of the congregation, and being sufficiently engaging that his sermon was not a disappointment. His text was from Matthew 14, Jesus walking on the water, and he used the homophone of May Day and mayday the distress call to lace the calendar date with the story And he was very friendly in the receiving line afterward. It seems that his personality may be as much a draw as anything he would do in the pulpit.

It is impossible to guess what specifically brought the people back, or brought new people to this church. But other than the absence of young adults, this appears to be a thriving congregation now, despite, or because of, its brush with death. People of all ages present seemed to enjoy the contemporary music, not just the younger people. This first Sunday after Easter, this resurrected congregation seems very much alive.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After passing through the greeting line, I got in my car and drove over to Charleston, where I had lived for about 15 years. In recent years, I hadn't been there much and found myself unable to find familiar landmarks. There were new buildings and absent ones, the landscaping around Old Main (the administration building of Eastern Illinois University) concealed the building's features from the street, traffic lights were on different corners, and on campus itself, the streets had been reconfigured, so I actually got lost in cul-de-sacs that used to be through streets and through streets where there had been none. Many of the old buildings were still there, but others had been added in unfamiliar configurations. I realized any exploration of the campus would need to be on foot. Too much was different from the street. So I drove toward the church whose second service I had decided to attend.

11:00 AM Salisbury Church, Charleston IL Campus
I'm not sure, but I vaguely remember this church's building as a car dealership, positioned at the furthest edge of the one corner of town that has seen no development in probably three decades. It surely looks like a car dealership. Other than a modest sign at the road, this doesn't look much different than when it was a business. The large lot serves for sufficient parking for a large crowd. The show room has been transformed into a church coffee-shop and foyer. There is an island in the middle rather like an information desk at a mall. The sales and business offices are now the classroom area. And the auto shop that took up the bulk of the building at its rear is now the sanctuary. With not a single window and walls and ceiling painted black, it feels cavernous. The quality of the lighting throughout the sanctuary is rather like the lighting in convention halls, down-lighting that provides putatively sufficient lighting from above without really lighting up the space. Here it is clear that the reason is because the stage is the focus.

Salisbury Church, Charleston IL campus; photo from the church website

Here clothing was even more casual than at CCC. The praise band consisted of 5 male musicians and 1 female singer. There was no choir here. Of the band, one was in shorts, the rest in jeans, and one wore flipflops. Polos, T-shirts, and casual short-sleeve print shirts were worn untucked. The congregation, unlike CCC, was somewhere near half young adults and no significant senior population. Before the service, the minister, a man on the younger side of middle age, made his way through the sanctuary shaking hands and speaking with newcomers and members alike.

The music was much the same as at CCC, except that as the communion elements were being passed, the singer sang a traditional hymn with arrangement for guitars and keyboards. The lighting generally seemed to make this more of a concert than the worship leaders and musicians at CCC engaged in. But it appeared to do something else to - it gave license to more emotional expression. With more hand raising, louder singing along, more body movement than at CCC. Then again, this could simply have been a function of the young adult presence in worship.

With seats all positioned to face the stage, this was not a service where there was much interaction among congregants. But the weekly custom here is to take communion. It is in the form of tiny pre-cut pieces of the bread and individual cups of grape juice. It is passed for each person whose conscience self-identifies as Christian to take bread and juice, which are then consumed by the congregation all together. The minister stressed the importance of the stripped down, bare-bones quality of the ritual. a symbolic with all that differentiates people stripped away. While I might argue with him about how this form of the communion ritual relates to this group's relationship with other Christians, this congregation sees their communion observance as a place where difference is removed.

The sermon was more skillful than at CCC. The minister's topic was related to the congregation's motto, calling on the church to think in the first person plural in relating to Christians of other churches and from the spectrum of denominations, a sermonic exhortation based in the same message that informs their practice of communion.

The website indicates that this church is theologically conservative, being originally organized in 1837 as a United Brethren congregation. Salisbury Church was Evangelical United Brethren until 1964 when they chose not to participate in the merger that resulted in the United Methodist Church. Instead, they maintained their conservative stance as a nondenominational church, whose original campus, where worship is still in the traditional style, is located in the nearby town of Hutton. The sermon demonstrated that this church is not exclusive in its intentions toward other Christians.

As at CCC, the minister appears to consciously engage with newcomer and member alike. After an altar call which was issued as an opportunity to come forward and pray with someone, not as an emotional call to people fearing for their salvation, the last words out of the minister's mouth were, "Let's go... Be the church!" An exhortation that is over the door of the main exit, a motto for all to see as they leave.

It is amazing that two services that are in many ways so similar are so different as a function of the design of the space and the personal style of the minister. Both were fairly conservative places, but in some ways, the conservatism seemed less obtrusive in the less traditional space, even as it was not forceful in the churchy space of CCC.

It would be interesting to know whether the later service at CCC and the earlier service at Salisbury Church had any significant presence of young adults. Is this merely a function of young adult circadian rhythms? Or is it in the culture and style of the church both in services and in its evangelistic approach?

Nursery Rhymes Like You've Never Heard Them Before

2011-04-26T15:49:00.009-05:00

Edward Reid Sings Nursery Rhymes to Run backing...

No sooner had he auditioned to that standing ovation than Edward Reid was accused of plagiarism by Frisky and Mannish, a cabaret act whose repertoire includes this:

Frisky and Mannish: "Wheels on the Bus"
(View on YouTube)

So you tell me, is it plagiarism to adapt a concept? Reid's style is not cabaret while that style defines what Frisky and Mannish do. Reid's music selection is not the same as Frisky and Mannish's. And his selection of nursery rhymes and children's songs overlaps only on "Old MacDonald" (with a different animal) and one phrase from "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". Is that plagiarism?

And does it even matter? Reid was auditioning for Britain's Got Talent. Is one expected to use original material for such an audition? It was clear that he was singing to the backing music of Snow Patrol's "Run". And he clearly was not claiming to have written the words to "Old MacDonald", "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", "Humpty Dumpty", and "If You're Happy and You Know It" - any more than Frisky and Mannish wrote the material they mashed up into their parody version of "Wheels on the Bus".

Just enjoy each for its own qualities. Both are fun - though Frisky and Mannish's cabaret style doesn't do anywhere near as much for me as Edward Reid's audition does...

A Sermon Introducing a Focused Initiative

2011-03-20T12:00:00.029-05:00

Young Adults without Children Need UU Lovin’ Too!
by Paul Kent Oakley, Student Minister
Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship
March 20, 2011

There is an old joke that asks, “What is a Unitarian Universalist? …Answer? …An agnostic with children!” Or maybe you’ve heard it the other way around “What do you call an agnostic with children?...” It is a little bit funny and a little bit revealing. Like many well-known jokes, it has made the rounds for so long that I haven’t been able to discover who told it first. Though it is funny, it may also annoy some of us because we recognize that, at best, it points to a half truth. After all, we are theologically diverse. There are agnostics here, to be sure, as well as atheists, a group often paired with agnostics in conversation. But we are also humanists, Christians, pantheists, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans… the list certainly does not end there. Most Sundays as part of our welcome statement we explicitly include theological diversity in telling who we are and whom we value. We include more than just agnostics. But there was the other part of the joke… not just an agnostic… but an agnostic with children.

I’m going to ask for a show of hands, but don’t feel like you have to identify yourself unless you are comfortable doing so. Please raise your hand if you first started attending this fellowship or another Unitarian Universalist congregation because you decided that you wanted your children to receive a liberal religious education. Okay. Now, in your mind, think about people who aren’t here, some who have moved away. Tally up how many people came to this congregation to begin with for their children’s benefit. What a wonderful, forward-looking, caring reason to come to this fellowship or other Unitarian Universalist congregations! Changing your life for your children’s benefit! This story is an important part of the story of this fellowship and of our movement. Yet others also came at different times in our lives and for varied reasons.

I invite you to look around the congregation gathered here today. Take stock of who makes up this fellowship. Who is not here – or in the Religious Education wing – today or any Sunday? Which group of people is underrepresented?

Let’s see… In our Religious Education wing we have a wonderful bunch of children we can all be proud of, as well as their dedicated teachers. Out in the fellowship commons and in this space, we see lots of middle-aged people at or nearing the height of building their lives, but also people who are going through difficult times, people experiencing unemployment and other challenges. We see people nearing the end of their working life, repositioning for the future. We see people who have been retired for some time and now need to make other changes. We see young adults whose children are in our Religious Education classes. But there are fewer young adults among us who have no children. We are a caring, compassionate congregation who genuinely welcome people of different stations in life, people of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity, people of different ages. In good faith we say we value age diversity, but some reality exists that doesn’t seem to appeal to young adults. Young adulthood seems to be a time when more people wander away than wander into our congregation.

In the Gospel of Luke in the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is shown at the temple at age 12, discussing the Scriptures with the elders, and then he isn’t mentioned again until he is 30 years old beginning his ministry. Do we have a kind of, well, “Jesus effect” here? We might look at the Gospels and say, with grand exaggeration, that the absence of young adults from church life is a two-thousand-year old tradition.

…But seriously, what barrier exists in this fellowship to greater participation of young adults with no children? The Unitarian Universalist Association classifies ages 18 through 35 as young adults. It is certainly useful to recognize that within this age grouping there are subgroups with different needs and interests. But it is an age range that typically is not yet at the point in their lives when the concerns of middle age and mid-career development set in. Recent data compiled by the US Census Bureau shows that young adults age 18 through 35 account for approximately 25% of the US population of citizens and resident aliens.

25%! One quarter of the population!

I like to think that a church, a fellowship, a religious congregation would reflect the demographic reality of the community it serves. If women make up just slightly more than half of the general population, I think many of us would hope that we would have a narrow gap between male and female members. The same may be said for other demographic realities. I hope, and I think many of you hope, that the diversity that is in our community will be reflected in the diversity in our congregation. And there are many forms this may take.

Are 25% of the people who participate in this congregation young adults?

One Sunday last fall here at Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship, a young man and woman were attending for the first time. They were twenty-something with no children and had moved to town for the man’s education at SIU. They had enjoyed the service and stayed to talk afterward and learn more about us. Their outlook on life, their commitment to equality, their changing spiritual path, as they told it, appeared very compatible with this congregation. But their final question to me that day was whether the fellowship had a young adults’ group they could join. I tried not to appear embarrassed as I explained that there was not. The one thing that they specifically asked for from this congregation we were not set up to provide. It was not even on any formal to-do list. Certainly we cannot do everything, but I was embarrassed to tell this reality to this young couple on their first visit.

Despite our not being set up to provide what they asked for, that couple attended several more times. Let us hope that they will return again! But their question requires our attention – whether they come back or not. It suggests that there is a barrier. Maybe not a great wall that looms over us. Maybe more of a ha-ha. “Ha-ha” is lovely word for a ditch with one side that is vertical like a wall. When you pass through the English countryside, you will see some estates surrounded by sheep in pastures that have no visible fence. There is instead a ha-ha – pasture sloping off into a ditch with a vertical bank holding the sheep in. It provides every bit as much a barrier as a wall, but it is invisible as you look across the landscape. Some invisible barrier, it seems, makes it difficult for many young adults without children to participate.

I was entering young adulthood as the disco era was winding down. Though the conservative churches I knew at the time tried hard to hang onto their young people, there seemed to be a widespread understanding that young adults were uninterested in spiritual things. I was married with children, attending church regularly. But my brothers went to college as single men. They quickly slacked off in attendance at worship and became less interested in church life than before. Even with such anecdotal evidence, the generalization that the mainstream of young people were not spiritual probably wasn’t true then. And it definitely is not true now.

We live in a time when ordinary university students organize themselves for spiritual practice in ways that might have seemed fanatical when I was a young adult. For example, at Vanderbilt University a few years ago, a couple of Catholic students started praying Night Prayer in their dorm room. Night Prayer, also known as Compline, is the last of the daily prayer liturgies of the ancient Liturgy of the Hours. Very soon these young men were joined by some of their friends and then by friends of friends. And it kept growing. In the course of a year, it had to move to larger locations a couple of times and even developed to include non-Catholic Christians in an ecumenical prayer experience. Sunday through Thursday evenings, ordinary college students gather to pray a calm into the end of their busy day. The assumptions of a generation ago concerning the spirituality of young adults no longer apply.

Almost three years ago now, Rabbi Rami Shapiro blogged about the spirituality of the generation sometimes called millennials. Rabbi Rami teaches Religious Studies at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. In his own words:

I have been teaching this population for the past few years, and find that millennials are looking for a dogma-free faith that honors diversity and life in this world, something they don’t find in conventional churches and synagogues. As one of my students put it, “I can’t reconcile the narrowness of my birth-religion with what I am learning about other religions. It seems that my religion is afraid of the world, but I’m not afraid at all.”

…When asked, my students will share mystical experiences they have while painting, or writing poetry, or walking in the woods. They will speak about the shrinking of the “I,” the ending of time, and the sense of connectedness with, and love for and from all things. They may or may not use the word “God,” but the sense of the divine is present in their words and their experience.

No, yesterday’s stereotypes about young adult spirituality are just not a valid way of seeing young adults today.

So what stands in the way of our reaching young adults who do not have children? The question from the young adult couple last fall highlights the fact that nothing in our programming is directed at this population. We do not have a young adult group or any active ministry to, by, or for young adults. We are glad for their presence, yes, but we do not provide structures that recognize their importance or focus on the realities of their lives. In addition, we have a great deal of variety in some aspects of our Sunday services, but is it variety of a sort that appeals to young adults, or does it mostly satisfy the tastes of members who are already here. Many Unitarian Universalist congregations and mainstream Christian churches too are wrestling with issues of style, how style can be shaped to support a congregation’s goals for greater inclusion. And, finally, we meet on a traditional schedule that may not mesh with the lifestyles of some young adults. Some congregations have adapted in a variety of creative ways to this aspect of young adult life.

Structures that recognize young adults without children.
Worship and music styles that speak to young adults.
Times that fit young adult lifestyles.

No matter how we respond in these areas, they are areas we must be aware of if we wish to reach a larger population of young adults without children.

As part of my internship in this congregation and part of my seminary education, my focused initiative, my project beginning next fall will center on building with you some sustainable ways to extend this congregation’s ministry to young adults without children. Over the course of the next few months, I will be asking for your ideas and your participation in reaching young adults, overcoming those invisible barriers that make us unavailable to them. Let us work to bring them into this beloved community in ways that meet their needs and find ways to meet them where they are. Make no mistake – there are young adults without children who share our values, who would be valuable members or associates of this congregation, who would value this community once they came to know us.

It is not right that we hide our light.

I invite you to join with me in working to overcome the invisible barriers that have made us less hospitable than we intend to be to many young adults without children. Let us turn our ha-ha into welcoming laughter.

Amen and Blessed Be.

A Sermon on Food Ethics

2011-02-13T12:00:00.032-06:00

Toward an Ethic of Eating in the Global Era
by Paul Kent Oakley, Student Minister
Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship
February 13, 2011

Do you eat to live or live to eat? Not too many years ago one would hear this question fairly often. The answer was supposed to say something about a person’s attitude to life. I used to think I was in the live to eat camp. As a child at family dinners, I ate whipped cream from a bowl. Surely I lived to eat! But then several years later, a friend asked me what the best meal I’d ever had was. When I answered his question, I described the restaurant terrace, the water of the bay, the silver moonrise over the water, and being there with my partner Walter. “But what did you eat?” my friend asked. And I couldn’t answer. Somewhere along the way, eating had become more complex than what I ate. It was about to get more important too.

Comfort food. Soul food. Ethnic cuisines. Kosher. Hallal. Vegetarian. Vegan. Organic. Diabetic diet. Reducing diet. Gluten-free diet. No Carbs. Low-fat. Fast food. Slow food.

Those represent a small portion of the bewildering food possibilities that are available to 21st-century Americans. But what do they represent? Comfort food refers to a psychological dimension of eating. Soul food is identity based, drawing sustenance from traditions that grew in the face of a history of slavery and racial oppression. Kosher and Hallal point to religious and spiritual dimensions of eating. Vegetarian, vegan, and organic are term that fit into an array of concerns – ecological, animal cruelty, animal rights, and health concerns. Diabetic, reducing, gluten-free, no-carbs, and low-fat diets relate to diseases, allergies, general health, and even cosmetic concerns. And the conflict between fast food and slow food is largely cultural. How is one human in 21st-century America? What makes us who we are?

Before the rise of global markets, food choices were set by the norms of the culture we lived in. The French sometimes ate things the Germans usually avoided, like frogs and snails and artichokes; south Indians tended toward a spicy vegetarian diet, Jews didn’t eat shellfish or mix dairy and meat in the same meal, and Japanese ate rice and fermented beans. The person who ate outside hir cultural norms was an oddity. Now that globalism is here, though, what used to be a cultural norm becomes a market choice. And our choices have a global reach that has increased in it impact continuously since the era of European colonial expansion. On the one hand, our food choices affect how we define ourselves in our global marketplace. As residents and citizens in a powerful nation, many people like to go to restaurants to eat the food of peoples who have benefited less from the history of colonialism than mainstream America, peoples with less power than Americans have. American food choices frequently affect land use, ecology, labor issues, the use of resources around the globe. Choices here weaken or strengthen life everywhere.

Now, let’s back up just a little bit here. I started eating whipped cream as my self-gratifying dessert of choice as a child at family dinners. And all of a sudden, what I put in my mouth is an expression of privilege? My favorite food is part of a system of inequity among the peoples of the earth? What I eat affects some else’s well being? Whoa! Let’s go back to the basic reality of eating. All living things chemically transform energy from outside themselves into the building blocks of their own bodies. Plants photosynthesize, transforming energy from the sun into new forms of energy to build their plant bodies. Animals consume plants or other animals to build their own bodies from the already transformed sun energy of their food sources. That is basic. What could be farther from the realm of ethical consideration? It’s food, right? Not war or consumer goods. We need it, right? Except that human consciousness, once removed from immediate need, requires individuals and societies to make choices. And every choice we make has consequences both for ourselves and for others, indeed, for the world as a whole.

The Seventh Principle that this congregation has covenanted to affirm and promote, together with other Unitarian Universalist congregations is: respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. It often seems like this is our best loved principle. And used certain ways, it has a certain feel-good aspect. We know that, when we walk through the woods like our Transcendentalist forebears, we are one with nature. The web of life that has expanded through genetic mutations to fill the globe is part of our cosmic story of belonging and hope. The dust of the stars is recycled in our bodies, and we feel connected to the creative power of the Big Bang. We learn from the peoples of India to say Namaste, recognizing the divine in all. But the Seventh Principle means something more. It means that our choices and our actions affect more than just us – often in ways we can hardly imagine.

Let’s illustrate with just one example. America’s taste buds have a love affair with beef. The global nature of our food network means that the beef that meat eaters consume here was quite possibly raised in Brazil. Brazil’s increasing productive capacity depends on increased shifts in land use in that country. Since 1970, a quarter-million square miles of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed.[1] The majority of this deforestation has been for the purpose of raising cattle for the global market. And while the rate of deforestation has mostly decreased each year since 2004 [2], the process continues. We’ve probably all heard political conservatives or reactionaries who respond to these losses with a sarcastic “Boo hoo!” Why indeed does it matter that a world away forest is being lost in order to put beef on American tables? How does this fit in an ethic based on the value of respecting interconnected life?

We know that 137 species of plants, animals and insects are lost each day to the effects of rainforest deforestation.[3] Biologist and religious naturalist Ursula Goodenough suggests our system of ethics must find its grounding in the continuation of life. This is also implied in our attachment to and reliance on the interconnected web of existence. If we accept that as the ground of our ethical commitments, then each year there are upwards of 50,000 significant, permanent ways in which our society’s collective food choices violate our ethics. 50,000 species lost from the web each year. Add to that the fact that food choices that favor foods produced through rainforest destruction also have the potential to hinder the progress of medicine’s fight against disease. And every cow raised in Brazil for consumption in Carbondale has to be transported thousands of miles, consuming precious fossil fuels that add to global warming. In addition, Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest is sometimes called the "Lungs of our Planet" because it continuously recycles carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen is produced in the Amazon Rainforest.[4] Without purposeful intervention, the rainforest will disappear, just as the primordial forests of Ireland and India were stripped away as human population and human appetites grew. Earth’s human population has doubled in my lifetime, and even though the trend is in the process of stabilizing, population is not expected to return to early 20th-century levels. And a continuing high population continues to need and want and take. Everything about food choices that favor the continuation of this production system works in direct contravention of a food ethic based in the continuation and prospering of life on this planet.

And yet, this system of production does not appear in a vacuum. It is part of the complex global economy that encourages various negative behaviors as hedges against the real threats to individual and national economic health. The exchange rate of Brazilian currency against the dollar increased the price of beef produced in Brazil for the American market. This gave ranchers an enormous incentive to expand cattle production at the expense of the rainforest. Improved disease control in Brazilian cattle further increased the demand for Brazilian beef. Improved infrastructure in Brazil has made it easier to transport the beef produced in remote areas. High inflation in Brazil gives an incentive to clear rainforest as a speculation, a protection of resources against lost value of savings. And, because of land ownership laws that make it possible to claim title simply by clearing forest and making it productive, raising cattle on former rainforest lands makes land ownership and financial independence possible for those who otherwise have fewer options.[5]

So what do we do? THIS IS IMPORTANT! How can we make ethical decisions about something like the source of our beef, if we have decided to eat meat, for example? Buying Brazilian beef destroys species, permanently erasing genomes and future productive potential while increasing global warming. We know that. It is pretty convincing. And we should find ourselves quite moved by this reality. On the other hand, what is the effect on the well-being of Brazilians if our ethical food choice removes their possibility of protecting themselves against the uncertainties of their economy? Their economy is, after all, a component part of the global economy, of which the United States is a prime beneficiary. So what is our responsibility to the economic wellbeing of a certain Brazilian population whose economic situation is part of the same system that gives us Americans relative ease and prosperity? And, MOST IMPORTANTLY, how can we wrestle with how to balance these two things: our ethical obligations to populations who provide economic benefits to us versus our ethical obligations to preserve the biodiversity of our planet. An ethic that values life cannot help but be an ethic that is conflicted about how to preserve and promote life. And it is nearly impossible to solve on our own. That we must learn. And beef production provides only a sampling of other similarly complex systems of food production and distribution.

In recent years, there has been greater awareness of the social justice issues surrounding certain non-essential items coming from the developing world. We can now find certified fair-trade coffee and chocolate without working too hard. But if our food ethic is about facing the realities of how our food choices impact life on this blue planet, then we must also recognize that we cannot afford to structure ethical actions in ways that the majority cannot afford. If I can afford fair trade coffee but you can’t, it cannot work as a primary solution to global inequities. If you can afford fair trade chocolate, but I can only afford a Hershey’s bar, then what we would like to think of as a solution won’t do the work of justice without other help. If the realities of the global market mean that a person in, say, south Chicago has to commute to another neighborhood to locate fair-trade coffee that will then cost hir more than the alternative, then the success of the noble aims of fair-trade certification are severely undermined. Even for more basic fare, large areas of our cities, areas where minorities and the economically challenged live are food deserts. Not a grocery store to be found. Only more expensive convenience stores. Our ethical aims will never be achieved if ethical action is affordable by some of us but not by all of us.

There is some improvement in the information available to us. Society, generally, is becoming more aware of the emotionally devastating reality of the cruelty to animals raised for food in the factory model of food production. Information is widely available about the staggering increase in natural resources that are required to produce the same food value in the form of animal products as opposed to plant products. There are increased efforts to eat local and organic, but we need to pay close attention to whether these too are currently luxuries that allow a certain class to feel good about their choices rather than options everyone can choose. We read that many agricultural methods are not sustainable for the long term. We may benefit from genetically modified crops, but intellectual property rights could be the undoing of subsistence farming and developing-world crop production. Each point is filled with as many complications and contradictory messages as beef production in Brazil, which is why none of us can make our choices or decide on an action plan completely alone. We need each other.

With something so personal as what we put in our bodies, we necessarily make individual choices based on preferences and our limited understanding of consequences to what matters to us. But we know that what we eat has consequences positive or negative for economic justice, ecological justice, and health. We are part of the interconnected web of all existence.

In fact, the issues are bigger than a project for just one congregation, which is why the Unitarian Universalist Association is involved with the issue. At General Assembly 2008 in Ft. Lauderdale Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice was selected as the Congregational Study/ Action Issue (or CSAI) for 2008-2012. The UUA has provided many resources on their website to guide congregations through their study process. Each year of the four-year process there are workshops on Ethical Eating offered at General Assembly. Late last year, that Commission on Social Witness made public a Draft Statement of Conscience on Ethical Eating that will be the basis of a Statement of Conscience to put to a vote at General Assembly this June in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Ethical Eating, though, is not an issue that will be finished when the Association’s process is finished. In many ways it will still be beginning. Instead, this is an issue that will call on us to continue to educate ourselves and find new ways to work for economic and ecological justice while eating healthful food that transmits the culture of justice that we want to build.

I encourage you, if you haven’t done so, to check out the resources on the Social Justice portion of the Association website. And study the Draft Statement of Conscience. The Statement of Conscience does not tell us what to do but, rather, contextualizes the issue and then presents calls to action for individuals and congregations. It is only three-and-a-half pages long and very readable. The calls to action require study and use of various resources to flesh out but are an outline for action. The saying goes that there is no free lunch. These calls to action require us together to study how we can best put them into practice. And they require commitment.

We carry both our experiences and our values with us in the effort. I still love a big bowl of whipped cream for dessert, but now I must evaluate whether the impact of my choice is good for the worker, for the environment, for the animals, and my health. I have to weigh and balance, not just between my taste buds and the price but between my appetite and the full range of costs. Am I perpetuating oppression? Because there is no free lunch. Building up a shared tool chest of information and practices to support ethical eating can help us to evaluate the true cost so that we may pay for what we eat rather than passing the cost on to other segments of this interconnected web of existence.

May we learn to see the world’s complexities without fear and to respond with ethical determination, looking beyond expediencies to the continuation of life – human and non-human – on this beautiful, frightening, awe-inspiring planet in an amazing cosmos. Standing on the threshold of a dream of no more hunger, no more injustice, may we learn to work together to understand what we can do to build a culture of eating that holds and transmits our values of justice.

Amen and Blessed Be.

__________

[1] Butler, Rhett A. “Deforestation in the Amazon.” http://www.mongabay.com/brazil.html.

[2] World Wildlife Federation. “Update: Falling Amazon deforestation rates create opportunity for other damaged forests.” http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/media/press/2009/WWFPresitem14352.html.

[3] Raintree Nutrition, Inc. “Rain Forest Facts” http://www.rain-tree.com/facts.htm.

[4] Raintree Nutrition, Inc. “Rainforest Facts.” http://www.rain-tree.com/facts.htm.

[5] Butler, Rhett A. “Deforestation in the Amazon.” http://www.mongabay.com/brazil.html.

The Big Question - God

2011-02-04T11:27:00.000-06:00

The UU Salon Big Question for February is:

What do you believe about God? (Regardless of whether you believe in God or not.)

God is a sometimes useful metaphor or symbol, a representation of ultimate mystery and unfathomable power, or a necessary thought on which to balance other thoughts that are useful to the organization of society, sometimes an obfuscation or excape. And in general, I would agree with Gautama Buddha that questions of God are distractions from what is more profitable to pay attention to. Furthermore, even Christian theologians from fairly early on have known something about God that the Christian faithful have often missed: that while God can be said to BE, God cannot be said to EXIST.

If that doesn't clarify for you (and how could it unless you're already thinking that way), here's what I said recently to to a mixed-faith bunch when they oversimplified UU positions in less than positive ways:

"There may or may not be a God. But if there is a God, there is no question but that God loves all creation, including each individual human being. There may or may not be a heaven. But if there is a heaven, there is no question but that everybody goes there. There are more hells than there are humans. Each of us lives our hells - or escapes them - in this life. Ethical living garners no eternal reward. It is for here and now - to make greater happiness and to fulfill one's obligation to act to secure the conditions for the happiness of generations to come."

The great mystery, the ground of being, being itself, the source, the force, the isness in all, the all itself - some beautiful myths inhabit this area. If those myths help one live a stable and ethical life here and now, they are good for that person. But knowledge? there is none in this. God? Maybe, maybe not. We can put off worrying about it until after we solve the things that we can have knowledge of.

January Worship in Chicago

2011-01-31T00:04:00.012-06:00

I have been in Chicago for the month of January, attending convocation and taking three intensive classes at Meadville Lombard Theological School. It has been a full month in many ways! Classes that are simultaneously draining and invigorating, being with friends and colleagues, weekly Vespers at First Unitarian Church in Hyde Park, daily worship opportunities. To fulfill an assignment, I even visited Rockefeller Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago one afternoon:

And, as if I hadn't got enough, how did I spend my weekends? Just like last January, I went on religious field trips, worshiping with and observing four synagogues and eight churches:

SYNAGOGUES
Chicago Sinai Congregation (Reform Jewish, old-style)
Congregation Or Chadash (Reform Jewish, LGBT congregation)
Central Synagogue of Chicago (Conservative Jewish)
Chicago Loop Synagogue (Traditional, non-denominational Jewish)

ORTHODOX/CATHOLIC CHURCHES
Christ the Savior Church (Orthodox Church in America)
Church of the Ascension (Episcopal, anglo-catholic high church)
Assumption Catholic Church (Roman Catholic)
St. John Cantius Church (Roman Catholic, liturgical apostolate)

PROTESTANT CHURCHES
Grace Episcopal Church (Episcopal, low church)
Fourth Presbyterian Church (Presbyterian Church USA, jazz service)
Urban Village Church (United Methodist, “Reconciling Congregation”)
LaSalle Street Church (Non-denominational, moderate Evangelical)

The following is a compilation of notes I wrote immediately after returning from each of these experiences, only slightly modified or amplified:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Friday, January 7, evening
Just returned from Shabbat Eve service at Chicago Sinai Congregation (Reform). The service followed the Union Prayerbook Sinai Edition, music sung by a robed quartet, accompanied by organ. Rabbi David Levinsky preached on "The Fluidity of Religious Life in America."

The quartet sang all the parts in Hebrew, the rabbi and the congregation reading in English. The Mourners' Kaddish was read/ recited unison in Aramaic.

Very nice service in a fine modern octagonal sanctuary. The sermon took a good liberal approach to the individual construction of religious identity as people move within and between movements in Judaism and between Judaism and other religions. He noted that people fluidly move to find a religious experience that fills their need and that, just as the rabbis created the Pesach Seder as it has been known through the ages to adapt to the reality of the destruction of the temple, changing with the material and cultural reality of the times, so Judaism today has to adjust to the fact of fluidity - in part by providing Jews with the good religious experience they are looking for. Nicely delivered.

The one thing though that was lacking, other than the person handing out the siddur at the sanctuary door who told me which page to begin on, no one greeted me.

Chicago Sinai Congregation

15 West Delaware Place, Chicago

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Saturday, January 8, afternoon
Just back from Great Vespers at Christ the Savior Church (Orthodox Church in America). Wonderful small choir. Some of the chanting was so fast that I could only make out every fifth sentence, and I certainly didn't know the kinesic norms. But everything was in English and in the sung parts, intelligible. Beautiful, mystic space... Low light and candles and icons. The icon screen was perfect for the space, beautiful but not overwrought. No pews in traditional Orthodox style. Seating for those who need it only around the periphery.

Small attendance: choir of 5 led by perhaps a deacon (I don't know how to read Orthodox vestments); a priest and two very young altar servers; one older priest who did not participate in the liturgy; myself, and four attendees. But the priest announced at the end that today the parish had gained three new catechumens.

It was a lovely space and, though I didn't know what to do, a nice service. Again here, no one greeted me. It was unmistakable that I was a newcomer, and there was no rush out the door, yet no one acknowledged my presence. One wonders how they gained the new catechumens. But then, attendance was miniscule. More in the choir than in the congregation.

It was just that juxtaposition - they have three newbies yet they don't greet the stranger... so how does that work?

No, mainly I think of greeting as simple human activity - acknowledging the other's existence and presence. It is more basic than hospitality. And on another level, you'd think someone among them would be curious why the outsider was making incursions into their space.I guess I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a nod and a smile at five paces if a "Hello" and a handshake are too extreme. I mean literal greeting not conversation.

On Michigan Avenue on the way home after Great Vespers, temperature in the teens, wind whipping fiercely, homeless people wrapped in layered sweaters and blankets, evidently coatless, up against the buildings... In front of me, three college aged people - an Asian-American man, an African-American woman, and a European-American man (probably gay), the young people, ignoring the homeless people, are talking. One says without any vocal cues signaling irony: "If I can get a job that pays a quarter million per year, I'll be able to manage."

Christ the Savior Orthodox Church

927 N. LaSalle Drive, Chicago

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Sunday January 9, morning
Bundled up and out the door before sunrise in 5F degree weather to walk the 1 3/4 mi. to Grace Episcopal Church for its 8:00AM service labeled on its website as "Quiet Communion" (read, not sung, Morning Prayer and Eucharist). The liturgy this morning deviated from the Book of Common Prayer to change masculine language referring to God to feminine.

The church is on Printer's Row in a reworked warehouse loft space. Beautiful use of exposed brick and wooden beams.

The service was quiet, as advertised, with 12 present including the rector and deacon. Intimate. Gathered in a semicircle around the altar for the Eucharist.

The rector invited me to go to breakfast at a nearby bar with the group. We talked about our stories and a bit of theology in a group of seven. Very open and pleasant people.

I went back for the 10:00 "Communion with Music" service, which had about 40 in attendance, including families with small children. Piano accompaniment. The first hymn was Bring Many Names, which was the hymn that opened UU hymnody to me when I came to UUism. Moving service and a thoughtful sermon that focused on the importance of how we choose our words in politics, relationships, and religion.

Over coffee hour had a good conversation with one of the library staff at Meadville Lombard, who is a member of Grace Episcopal. Then open discussion for those who were interested about the service's focus on feminine metaphors for the divine used in the service. The rector introduced me as a seminarian at Meadvile Lombard and asked me specifically to add my take on it.

Wonderful experience in every respect!!

Grace Episcopal Church

637 South Dearborn Street, Chicago

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Saturday, January 15, morning
This morning I went to services at Central Synagogue of Chicago, a traditional, egalitarian, Conservative synagogue, that meets in a suite in the professional plaza of Water Tower Place. Their website said that introductory prayers led by a congregant began at 9:10, with the Shacharit service led by a hazzan (cantor) beginning at 9:40, so I arrived at 9:00.

The introductory prayers began with me the only one present in the congregation. That felt a little strange and I thought that maybe this wouldn't be the experience I was expecting. After a while, a second person arrived. By near the end of... the introductory prayers, there were a total of eight present, including me. They needed two more to make a minyan, since this small congregation counts its Torah scrolls as a person for calculating the minyan, the quorum that must be present to say the Mourner's Kaddish and some other parts of the service, as well as the number of adult Jews who must be present to read from the Torah scrolls. So we waited.

Counting the Torah scrolls as a person was an interesting detail. When they told me I saw a hint of a smile. Then one added, "We only cheat a little bit." It seemed likely to me, given the size of the congregation, that this interpretation came into play as a very practical one. If you can't make a minyan, you can't say Kaddish for your loved ones on their Yahrzeit. So slightly fudging it on one count allows you to fulfill another mitzvah. But they made clear to me that they weren't being too lax in their application: they have four Torah scrolls, but they only count the Torah as One toward the minyan.

In the half hour of hopeful waiting, the lay leader of the introductory prayers and a young man sitting near me talked with me. This congregation had once been a large congregation, and then the members moved to the suburbs. Current membership is around 40, and they have committed to maintaining a presence downtown, in part so that businessmen visiting from out of town will have a Conservative option for synagogue worship downtown. There are a couple of families with children, not present today, with whom the hazzan will work to prepare the children for their bar mitzvah...

The hazzan and her husband were sick and could not make it, and no one else arrived, so the lay leader started the service with the adjustments for the absence of a minyan. All prayers were chanted in Hebrew (other than a prayer for our nation). But Sim Shalom, the siddur (prayerbook), had translations on the facing page. The parasha (the day's Torah portion) and the haftorah (the service's apointed reading from the non-Torah portion of the Hebrew scriptures) were chanted from the Chumash (a book rather than scroll of the Torah and the haftorah portions, with parallel translation and commentary). The Torah portion for today were Exodus's account of the delivery from slavery in Egypt and the sending of manna and quail. The Haftorah portion was Judges' account of Jael and Sisera and the "Song of Deborah."

The president of the congregation did an impromptu talk on the grumbling and lack of faith of the Children of Israel, accepting questions and comments from the congregation.

After the service, I was invited to stay for lunch with the congregation. The person who issued the invitation apologized for the failure to make a minyan and said he hoped I hadn't come to say Kaddish, since that cannot be done without a minyan. I thanked him and told him I am not Jewish.

Blessings over wine and challah. Then a spread laid out by one of the members. Wonderful conversation over lunch. A very nice experience despite my earlier misgivings and the absence of a minyan.

Water Tower Place
845 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago

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Sunday, January 16, morning
What a wonderful January day! I just walked the 2 miles back from church, the air calm and crisp and filled with lightly falling big white flakes! Beautiful! I went to the Church of the Ascension (Episcopal), the flagship Anglo-Catholic church in the Midwest. The service was a Solemn High Mass with all the smells and bells you could ever ask for!

The organ and the choir were fabulous! In a loft at the back, not on display as performers. The men of the choir also did Gregorian chant in Latin. And the congregation, joining the choir for hymns and some chants, sang with full voice, fully familiar with the territory.

This was the most formal service I had ever attended. Very majestic! Full formal vestments. Procession. Ultra-liberal use of incense! A whole lot of time on one's knees and on one's feet and not much sitting. And a lacy arched rood screen between the altar and the congregation. For communion the congregants knelt at the altar rail behind the rood screen. And the altar was oriented for the priest to have his back to the congregation, that is, to face the same direction as them in the performance of the sacrifice of the mass.

The sermon was very tightly based on the Gospel reading and was illustrated by reference to the priest's experience as a chaplain in a hospital psych ward.

A lay person read the Old Testament Lesson in regular scripture reading voice; a subdeacon chanted the Epistle in a monotone chant; and a deacon chanted the Holy Gospel in a slightly more complex chant.

The hymns were "The sinless one to Jordan came," "Round the Lord in glory seated," "Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life," and "Songs of thankfulness and praise, Jesus, Lord, to thee we raise."

Chants that the congregation joined in were "Gloria in Excelsis Deo," the Nicene Creed, the Our Father, as well as some short responses. The men's choir chanted in Latin "Omnis Terra," "Misit Dominus," "Laudate Deum," "Jubilate Deo Universa Terra," and "Laetabimur."

The mixed choir sang in English a "Kyrie Elieson" and "Sanctus and Benedictus" by Charles Wood, "Jubilate Deo" by Benjamin Britten, and "Beati Quorum Via" by Charles Villiers Stanford.

The organ prelude was "Il Pastorale" from Alexandre Guilmant's Sonata in D Minor. The magnificent postlude, GP da Palestrina's "Ricercari on the Fifth and Sixth Tones." Wow! Zip Zam Zowie! Just the thing for an organ lover.

The congregation was a thorough mix of adult ages, with some people dressed in very formal church clothes, but others were in Jeans and sneakers. It didn't seem to matter. Directly behind me were a young gay couple who were confident being open about who they are.

There was a coffee hour afterward, but the organ music said go forth! to me. So I went forth into the beautiful snow, walking the last leg of my 2 mile walk back along the Chicago river. Amazing! Beautiful!

I really don't know how everything fit into an hour-and-a-half service. But it did. And once home I made myself a lunch of lobster-cheese ravioli with zucchini. Now for a nice black New Orleans-style chicory coffee.

It's a beautiful day in the city!

Church of the Ascension
1133 N. LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago

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Sunday, January 16, afternoon
At 3:45PM as I walked up in front of Fourth Presbyterian, a block north of Water Tower Place, the bells were ringing in the bell towers of this imposing neo-gothic edifice. I stepped inside and found a seat for Fourth at Four, aka Jazz at Four, aka Jazz Service with Communion. The bells continued ringing for five minutes. I'd attended Jazz Vespers at General Assembly 2 1/2 years ago in Salt Lake City...

Otherwise I had not experienced a fusion of jazz and worship. The integration was, I think, more successful here. The music was great. And the two hymns, the doxology, and the sanctus were not only also rendered in jazz, but also in a jazz that the congregation could actually sing with!

The sermon was preached by Associate Pastor Adam H. Fronczek, a quite young minister in appearance. He is a quite good preacher, and preached extemporaneously without notes from the floor of the nave rather than from a pulpit or lectern. His text was three brief episodes from Mark 1-3. It was interesting to hear him unambiguously point out that, though Jesus often had disputes with the Pharasees, the Law that the Pharasees promoted was not some antithesis to God's Grace, as Christians through the ages have often believed. Rather, he said, the law was a good thing. It was the undergirding of the society of a people in covenant with God. Jesus wasn't against the Law even when he make ethical challenges to certain interpretations of it. This young pastor not only learned something in seminary, he's preaching it in a downtown church!

The printed 12-page order of service/ bulletin included a welcome statement that, though not spoken aloud, was an important presence in this service. It reads: "Inspired by the radical hospitality of Jesus Christ, Fourth Presbyterian Church welcomes all of God's children into the life of the church regardless of gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical limitation, educational background, or economic situation." It is a church that also makes explicit that its opens doors every day of the week welcome the homeless to enter and get warm. They operate a soup kitchen at least one day of every week year round. Welcome and service are important to them.

The bulletin also notes that their services use gender neutral language for the Divine. They also announce that they practice open communion. All are welcome to receive with only their own heart to judge.

The Prayer of Confession, said in unison at this service, went like this:

"Gracious God, we confess that we have not been the people you want us to be. We are deceptive and dishonest, shortsighted and mean. We have been impatient with out loved ones and we have not tried hard enough to understand those who are different from us. Forgive us, Lord. Help us to grow into our better selves. Help us to act with charity and compassion; help us to love our neighbors and reach out to strangers. Help us to forgive ourselves and forgive others as you have forgiven us. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen."

I might change two words. But in its setting at Fourth Presbyterian this afternoon, it was perfect.

Out into the dark chill of evening to walk the mile back and then fix myself a meal of Italian Wedding Soup. Mmmm.

Fourth Presbyterian Church
126 E. Chestnut Street, Chicago

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Friday, January 21, evening
This evening I attended Erev Shabbat services with Congregation Or Chadash, Chicagoland's only LGBT synagogue (Reform). I chose the right week to attend there, as they celebrated yesterday's "New Year of Trees" with a Tu B'shvat seder after the service and kiddush.

I took the Red Line north about 25 minutes and then walked two blocks to the building of Emanuel Congregation, also a Reform congregation, where Or Chadash rents a chapel. I settled in and the service began about seven or eight minutes after the posted time. The space was like a round stone silo, seating most of the way around the outside wall, with pews in the center. It was an intimate space, and people clearly knew each other.

There was no accompaniment and no choir leading the music. Rather, the rabbi led the congregation in chanting/ singing most of the liturgy in Hebrew from the congregation's own loose-bound siddur, Prayers of Our Heart: Tefilot ba-Leyv, which has Hebrew, transliteration into roman letters, and translation into English. I knew some of the tunes and was able to sing along with the Hebrew transliterations, but with only the words and not the music, there were some of the liturgy I couldn't sing with.

With the focus on Tu B'Shvat, one lay leader read several poems and other readings through the service that related to this holiday, the day in the society of ancient Israel, when the productive trees were taxed, which doesn't sound so spiritual. And then the early Zionist settlers of what became modern Israel adopted the holiday as a sort of Jewish Arbor Day, planting trees as part of their effort to green the desert. But in the middle there were Kabbalists in Safed who gave a mystical, spiritual interpretation to the New Year of Trees. It is this medieval mystic approach that inspires many contemporary American Jewish communities to some degree.

After the service and after the blessing of the wine and the challah, the congregation gathered around tables for the Tu B'Shvat seder. This included a recognition of the "seven species" known to have been productive in ancient Israel and then turned to the kinds of fruits that are specifically celebrated in this ceremonial meal: fruits (including nuts) that have a hard or inedible shell and an edible interior; fruits that have a soft skin and flesh around a hard pit; and fruits that are completely edible. Each table had plates of each of these categories and, as the seder was read, each fruit group was blessed then passed around to be eaten. There were also little songs that went with each of the groups.

The three types of fruits correspond to the lower three of the four Kabbalistic worlds of creation. No fruit is eaten to correspond to the hightest of the worlds, because it is the realm of pure spirit where one is sustained by the presence of God. The Tu B'shvat seder, the liturgy claims, is the one ceremonial meal of the Jewish year that requires no death of a living thing. Not even the yanking of a radish root from the ground. "The Tu B'shvat seder is the meal of Gan Eden, the garden of delight."

Around the table where I was sitting, a couple of people commented on the shamanic origins of the linking of the four worlds, the three fruit types plus spiritual sustenance, to the four directions, the four elements, and so on. There was no disagreement here. People here know of the interconnectedness of their traditions with other and older traditions. They also told me that for a couple of decades in their early existence, their congregation was hosted by Second Unitarian Church in Chicago's Lakeview area.

Friendly people, great conversation, and afterward, in order to continue conversation, one member gave me a ride to the front door of my building! Wonderful visit!

Emanuel Congregation
5959 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago

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Sunday, January 23, morning
Theodicy 101 - or "if there is a good God, why does bad stuff happen?" - was the theme of the service this morning at Urban Village Church, a new congregation affiliated with the United Methodists that meets Sunday mornings in the Feinberg Theatre of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies on Michigan Avenue across from Grant Park in Chicago.

Urban Village started meeting weekly on Palm Sunday 2010. It is a Reconciling (LGBTQ-affirming) Congregation. The bulletin cover reads: "whoever you are - believer or doubter, gay or straight, Republican or Democrat - you are welcome here."... Looking around the theatre space, I saw mostly young adults, but some middle-aged people, at least one retiree, overwhelmingly white but some Asian Americans and African Americans, some people sitting alone, others with a friend or partner, some fairly obviously LGBTQ, others not. No pronouns were used to refer to God, and no masculine analogies such as "Father" or "Lord" were used either (except in the recitation of the Lord's Prayer), thereby intentionally avoiding gendering of the Divine.

Worship was led by a band of four musicians and three singers in a contemporary/praise style, congregation standing, lyrics projected on a screen. Early in the service, during the Passing of the Peace, the different ways people did this, from saying words such as "Peace be with you" to "The Peace of Christ" to an ordinary greeting like "Good morning" reflects the fact that this congregation is made up of people with all manner of religious or unchurched backgrounds. Indeed, the church website does not emphasize the denominational affiliation but the open, inclusive nature of a congregation grappling with issues relevant to the people.

Co-Pastor Trey Hall preached, gently easing into questions of how bad things happen, gently pulling apart the common answers that "everything happens for a reason" or "it's God's punishment" or "God's trying to teach us a lesson" etc. In easily accessible language, he concluded that the self-punishing assumptions that lead to such explanations are explicitly contrary to the teaching of Jesus in Luke 13. Free will and natural processes include results that hurt, but God is with us as we live the experience. His sermon concluded with an extended illustration from an experience he had on a gay cruise. He told it with a lot of humor in the beginning and wound up at a place that brought tears to my eyes. All preached extemporaneously, without pulpit, notes on a stand to the side and only referred to once. Beautiful sermon that was designed to meet people with a variety of backgrounds and understandings where they are.

I had the wonderful opportunity to have depth conversations with Trey, as well as with intern Emily Jones and Pastor of Discipleship Anne Williamson. This congregation appears to be everything it presents itself as. Amazingly, for a startup in its first year, it has two co-pastors plus the pastor of discipleship and three interns who are seminarians from U of Chicago Divinity School, Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, and Chicago Theological Seminary. They received a grant from the denomination to support them for three years, after which they will need to be on their own two feet. Their offerings from members are growing, along with membership. And they have some churches and individuals from other churches who are also providing support. Otherwise they would not at this stage of their development be able to present as a full service congregation.

On a couple of bulletin boards at the door into the theatre space were lots and lots of signup sheets - for small groups, dinner parties, social action, discussion and interest groups, and so on. In addition to Sunday morning services downtown, there are Sunday evening services at a Wicker Park location. It is their plan to grow into having services regularly also at other times and locations through the city.

A very nice contemporary service and welcome.

On the walk back to the apartment, I came upon a Shiite Muslim group marching, an annual event commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet. Young women in black hijab were handing out fliers and answering questions about what the event was all about. The woman I spoke to told me that in this commemoration they want to stress the values they share with the rest of America, of freedom and justice. A very pleasant group, marching to the sounds of chanting up Michigan Avenue...

Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies
610 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago

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Sunday, January 23, evening
The Church of the Assumption (Roman Catholic) is one of the old churches of the city, built in 1886 for the first Chicago parish formed to minister to Italian immigrants. The exterior of the church is an unremarkable box with a weak facade, but the interior is well decorated with statues, frescoes, bas relief Stations of the Cross, and stained glass in a manner influenced by the original ethnic congregation.

Mass was sparsely attended - I would guess because of a combination of the weather and the game between the Bears and the Packers, which it seems people here are crazy about. I have no idea what a normal Sunday evening crowd looks like here....

The music was dominated by a well-played pipe organ, and the cantor, an older gentleman, had a very good voice. The homily was based on the Gospel reading about the calling of James and John and focused on questions of what it means to be called and how we can know what our call is.

By-the-book mass with no surprises. The priest shook hands with everyone as they left, clearly knowing most and asking them about things going on in their families, and parishioners smiled and greeted me briefly.

Assumption Catholic Church

323 West Illinois Street, Chicago

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Saturday, January 29, morning
This morning I went to Shachris (morning prayer service) at the Chicago Loop Synagogue, a Jewish congregation unaffiliated with any denomination but following the older traditions of worship. Soon after I arrived, Jerry, an elderly gentleman, a retired engineer and lawyer, introduced himself and took me under his wing, explaining the service to me as it proceeded, never assuming I knew anything. What a mensch!

On first entering the synagogue, I was greeted by a late-middle-aged African American security guard, who asked me if I had been there before, showed me the cloakroom, asked me if I had brought my own tallis and yarmulke, I told him that since I'm not Jewish I only needed a yarmulke. We chatted a few moments. He told about one time when the late afternoon service was waiting for a minyan, the quorum of 10 adult Jewish men required for some prayers and reading from the Torah. They waited and waited and were only missing one. The security guard said he told the rabbi, "I can join you to make a minyan. I worship the God of Abraham and Isaac, the God of Moses as you do." He said the rabbi smiled and replied, "You can't make the minyan. I'd have to cut you first." The security guard chuckled at the memory.

The congregation has about 800 members, but I was told it serves as a second synagogue for most of them. This synagogue, located as it is downtown, serves religious Jews who work downtown. They commute in from the suburbs and pray the thrice daily weekday prayers here, Shachris in the morning before heading to work. The downtown population that also comes on Shabbat is the smaller portion of the congregation, with suburban members typically attending a synagogue closer to their homes on Saturday. This service was attended by 14 men, 5 women, and three children. Among the men, a Mexican Jew who is in Chicago while his baby granddaughter is in the hospital here for a surgery following on complications from meningitis.

The synagogue sanctuary is beautiful. Modern and ancient all at the same time without that reality presenting as a clash. The wall behind the Ark of the Torah is a dramatic stained glass window facing the sunlight on Clark Street, when the sun is out. Even on a cloudy day like today, the window is dramatic.

The service felt simultaneous familiar and strange. And the strange part manifested in two main ways, one that felt very good to me, one that was uncomfortable. In this synagogue, the women sit separated from the men in a balcony. They are not hidden behind a mechitza, a screen or curtain, but they are not able to participate in the same way as men. This is ancient tradition, but it feels uncomfortable in the early 21st century in a land where women are legally and morally and to a growing degree socially not separated from or treated differently from men.

But as if to balance that awkward reality, I was surprised at the collegiality of the men and the way the service incorporates several men gathered on the bimah around the Torah for the Torah reading. Some reading, others, not qualified linguistically to read the Torah, chant blessings on the torah portions

The Torah portion for today was a reading of civil laws of ancient Israel, as presented in Exodus. Most of it seemed, well, like a law book. A really dated law book. But there were tidbits of it that seemed to me, as I read along in English in the Chumash, to translate fairly well into contemporary life. Like the command not to curse the leaders of the people. (Hear that, Glenn Beck? Hear that, Rush Limbaugh? Or anyone else who takes rhetoric of criticism too far...)

The Rabbi's sermon focused on the verse from the Torah reading that he said has given antisemites some of their greatest ammunition against Jews - a verse about making reparations when your ox gores a neighbor's ox. Among the Talmudic interpretations is the idea that one only need make such restitution to fellow Jews. The Rabbi referred to the interpretation, instead, of Maimonides. He affirmed the meaning that one is bound to deal justly and fairly with all people. The exclusiveness of this verse simply means that one is bound to go farther in dealing with one's own family than is required by the demands of simple justice and equality. You may charge interest when you make a loan to just anyone. But if you lend to family, you deal from an increased loyalty and support and do not charge interest. Justice for all. Doing more for family. A good sermon, well presented, and challenging the congregation through examples of famous, important Jews who have gone too far the other way, choosing to be harsher on fellow Jews than on the larger population.

After the service I was invited to join the congregation for kiddush and lunch. I was made very welcome and enjoyed the conversation greatly. After nearly an hour at table, I took leave of my hosts, thanking Jerry for being my "guide," shaking hands and wishing them Good Shabbes. They responded in kind and asked me back whenever I'm in Chicago. On the way out, I shook hands with the security guard, wishing him a good day. He smiled and also asked me to come back.

Chicago Loop Synagogue
16 South Clark Street, Chicago

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Saturday, January 29, evening
What a wonderful evening! My friend Mark and I started the evening attending a truly amazing performance of sacred music by the Nordic Choir of Luther College at Fourth Presbyterian, Chicago. Cajun dinner. After dinner drinks. Then a couple of miles walk, including a dramatic night time walk around "The Bean" in Millennium Park.

Luther College is a Norwegian Lutheran college associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, located in Decorah, Iowa, a small town in the far northeast of that state. The school has 2500 students, of whom, 1,000 are involved in the schools many musical groups. The ethnic heritage of the school was clearly reflected in the appearance of the choir, with a super majority of the singers being blonds. Not a single person of color. It seems the school must shelter its students from the realities of multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multicultural America. I wonder how these very talented young adults will fare when they take jobs in that larger reality that is not represented in the choir.

About a third of the audience were Luther College alumni or parents of Luther students. Conducted by the elegant Allen Hightower, the choir's program consisted of:

"Hosanna to the Son of David" by Orlando Gibbons
"O Sacrum Convivium" by Thomas Tallis
"Caritas et Amor" by Z. Randall Stroop
"Our Father" by Alexandre Gretchaninoff
"Lass dich nur nichts nicht daueren" by Johannes Brahms
"Festival Te Deum" by Benjamin Britten
"Richte Mich, Gott" by Felix Mendelsohn
"Like as the hart desireth waterbrooks" by Herbert Howells
"Os Justi meditabitur sapientiam" by Anton Bruckner
"Sing Unto God" by Paul Fetler
"The Lamb" by Ken Neufeld
"Autumn Landscapes - 5. Tuul lonnumaa kohal; 7. Kanarbik" by Veljo Tormis
"Danny Boy" arranged by Roger Wagner
"Sinner Man" arranged by Howard Roberts
"Ezekiel Saw de Wheel" arranged by Moses Hogan
"O Lord God" by Pavel Chesnokov
"Here I am Lord" arranged by Ovid Young

The choir was perfectly balanced with clear, open tones, and always, always on pitch. Very expressive. And Fourth Presbyterian's space had the perfect acoustic qualities for choral performance, as well - to say nothing of the combined visual aesthetic. This performance moved me deeply. Wonderful selections, all! But if I had to choose a favorite, it would definitely be the Veljo Tormis!

Nordic Choir of Luther College 2010-2011
photo thanks to the choir's FB page
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Sunday, January 30, morning
This morning I went to church at LaSalle Street Church, a moderate evangelical church with a social action thrust. I arrived at 10:42 for an 11:00AM service and found the entry, the sanctuary, and the social area still crowded with people from the 9:00 service. Turns out it's a 1.5 hour service, so no wonder.

I made my way to a pew to wait. The people standing around talking were in no hurry to leave. At 11:00 there were only a handful of people in place for the second service, but pretty soon, people started settling in. And continued to arrive for the first half hour of the service, eventually pretty much filling the space! A bit unusual, perhaps, but it seems to work for this church.

There were a guitarist, a pianist, a bass guitarist, and a drummer to lead the music. All in the contemporary praise style, with clapping but without hand waving. At first I was turned off because the 7-person "choir" was completely drowned out by the musicians, but when the choir finished their part, they were seated and the worship leaders used microphones, and the balance was restored. I wonder that no one seemed to notice that the choir was essential inaudible!

The worship leader introduced the service as the first in a series of six leading up to lent when, perhaps in the vein of Mardi Gras, the services will be a little louder than usual and will attempt in the early part of the service at least to incorporate humor and drama. The theme of the series is "second chances." The lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures, which the minister took for the text for her sermon, was acted out rather than simply being read - in a style reminiscent of Monte Python.

For a moment I was on the verge of being mortified, and then "I relaxed into it." It clearly was a crowd pleaser, and there was a heavy presence of young adults here. This was the first in the series, so presumably they weren't coming to church for the comedy skits. But they clearly loved it. And the story, despite the outlandish humor was, in the essentials, faithful to the text. And it was in people's minds enough that it was not necessary to constantly refer back to book-chapter-verse through the sermon.

The Rev. Laura Truax, Senior Pastor, preached for 30 minutes, extemporaneously, without notes, on the story of Naaman in II Kings 5. Her pulpit style is something to watch! She uses widely varied speed in her speech, uses massive expressive gestures. And she knows right where she's taking her congregation.

In her interpretation of the story of Naaman, she concentrated on an aspect I had missed and had never heard expounded before: Naaman's being healed of leprosy, as the story goes, hinged on two instances of listening to the voices of those on the margin. The first was a young, foreign female slave captured from his enemies. The second was his servants. If he had not listened to these voices from the margin, he would not have done what the narrative requires in order for him to be healed. Nice interpretation! Though the sermon's explicit illustrations were interpersonal, this interpretation has major use value in racial, ethnic, and class issues. We can't find healing without taking seriously the voices at the margins.

Very good preaching! And though the service was unusual, it was lively and seemed to work well for the congregation that was present.

LaSalle Street Church
1136 N. LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago

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Sunday, January 30, evening
Mid-afternoon, I walked to St. John Cantius because, planning on going to Compline there in the evening, I wanted to get a picture while it was still light. After taking my pictures, I walked up the steps and entered. In the narthex, I was greeted by a young priest in a black cassock who then informed me that they were locking up right then.

I thought I was going to be asked to leave, but instead, the priest showed me where I could exit when I was ready and continued with locking doors and shutting off lights. The air was filled with the scent of incense as I sat in this Polish-cathedral style building that has been lovingly restored over a couple of decades when it was once expected to close. The huge Baroque reredos dominated, as I sat in the dim winter light, filtered through muted stained glass. I had the entire church to myself, unextinguished votives the only added light.

Later I walked the three miles back for 6:00PM Compline, arriving and being seated with five minutes to spare. The canons regular entered and sat in the front two rows, from where they chanted the liturgy of this final office of the day. I was absolutely stunned. The nine priests and brothers chanted Gregorian Chant in Latin in voices that resonated through the structure, as strong as if a much larger group were chanting. Perfectly in tune. Perfectly timed. I was in heaven. Compline is my favorite office of the Liturgy of the Hours. Only the Psalm and the lesson from Revelation were in English.

At the end of Compline, the priests and brothers processed to an icon of the Virgin where there was a ceremony with professing of vows to admit one of the nine to the order of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius.

Excellence in liturgy is the heart of the apostolate of the Canons Regular. St. John Cantius Church celebrates all the accepted forms of the mass, low mass and high, Tridentine (Latin) and Novus Ordo (in English or in Latin), but the intent is to keep each of these liturgical forms at its highest possible level of execution. Included in the apostolate, this order of priests and brothers prays the Divine Office, as the Liturgy of the Hours is also known, in a sense on behalf of the apparently many priests today who, despite there formal obligation to do so, do not pray the Divine Office regularly.

And it must be the best kept open secret in Chicago. I was the only person other than the nine priests and brothers present tonight for Compline - this beautiful version of the office that chants a calm and prayers for a safe night at the end of day.

St. John Cantius Church
825 N. Carpenter Street, Chicago

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OBSERVATIONS

I didn't want to approach this as a simplistic exercise in "what I learned about doing religion," yet to some extent, I have to reflect on the complex of experiences together as well as one at a time.

I found that it is possible for a small congregations to exist in a major urban area, despite high real-estate costs. Grace Episcopal, for example, rents space in its non-traditional-ecclesiastical building to subsidize itself while maintaining a small urban congregation.
I found that, while location is important, that may be trumped by visibility. Central Synagogue of Chicago rents space in Water Tower Place, right at the heart of public life in the city, but because they do not have a street presence, such as a facade or a sign might offer, they do not have access to those people who might learn they are there by walking or driving by. This is not the only way to spread the word to interested parties, but for a congregation that chooses to settle in a location, both visibility and accessibility can play an important role.
I found that sometimes a congregation's mission makes attendance at the "main event" of lesser importance. Take the Chicago Loop Synagogue, which serves religious Jewish commuters with a place for weekday prayers, a place supplementary to the synagogues where they attend Shabbat services.
I found that the number of people present is not the deciding factor regarding whether the newcomer is made welcome. Christ the Savior Orthodox Church, with its handful of attendees at Great Vespers, and Chicago Sinai Congregation, at its well-attended Shabbat Eve service, equally ignored my existence.
I found that young adults, including those without children, are present across the range of religions sampled. However, the church where they were the majority population was one that deemphasized its denominational identity while emphasizing its mission to reach beyond categorical thinking and include people traditionally marginalized in mainstream Christianity. Music style also helps. Urban Village Church is less than a year old and already has a very good attendance of young adults, at least in part related to their openness to frequently marginalized populations, together with a contemporary praise band. And the church where young adults were a very large if not majority portion was nondenominational with a focus on social justice.
I found that "bells and smells" still appeals to a broad range of people. At the Church of the Ascension, old-style pomp played to a pretty full church, with people of all ages and sexual orientations.
I found that a congregation whose mission is aimed at a particular subset of the population may have to re-identify its mission as demographic and social changes take place around it. Congregation Or Chadash, a congregation for LGBT Jews, realizes that more and more people are now fully accepted in their synagogue of origin and never feel the need that earlier generations of LGBT folk did to find or found their own congregations. Or Chadash is not dying, but it is slowly shrinking, according to one board member.
I found that, even in this very diverse population that is Chicago, these congregations are mostly a racial monoculture. Everyone may be welcome, but not everyone feels at home.
Part of the dynamic of religious life is growth and shrinkage and mergers and spin-offs and angry splits and church planting and attention and neglect. This ferment and tension is unavoidable because societies change. It is how it is managed that determines success or decline.
I found that meeting in a warehouse or meeting in a cathedral makes not so much difference to a living congregation.
I was reminded that, in addition to all the good things that can and must flow from a congregation that has a strong foundation in worship, liturgy well done also has stand-alone value that cannot be measured.

So much is swimming about my mind. I am very grateful for the opportunity to sometimes participate, sometimes observe these twelve congregations at worship. I feel enriched.

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The Choir of King's College, Cambridge

Maurice Duruflé's "Ubi Caritas"
(Watch video on YouTube)

Ubi caritas et amor Deus ibi est
Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor
Exsultemus et in ipso jucundemur
Temeamus, et amemus Deum vivum
Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero
Ubi caritas et amor Deus ibi est
Amen

Where charity and love are, there God is.

The love of Christ has gathered us into one flock.

Let us exult, and in Him be joyful.

Let us fear and let us love the living God.

And from a sincere heart let us love each other

Votives at St. John Cantius Church
- after the priests locked up for the afternoon -
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Mythos, Logos, Belief, Faith

2011-01-25T19:30:00.001-06:00

"You have to do faith in order to get it." - Karen Armstrong

(View video on YouTube)

The Big Question - Polity

2011-01-04T12:00:00.005-06:00

The UU Salon Big Question for January is:

Has Unitarian Universalism outgrown congregational polity?

I respond:
The fundamentalist independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ have 1.1 million members in the USA and are far more completely congregational in polity than the churches of the UUA are with our less than 0.2 million book members, as they don't have any central or regional organizations comparable to the UUA and our districts. So, if we with our numerical stability that is not growth decide congregational polity is no longer for us, it would absolutely not be because we have outgrown it but, rather, because our goals and/or our willing participation have changed.

Or maybe the question is concerned with maturity rather than numbers? "Have we matured as an association to the point that we need central control rather than local freedom?" Seen from the angle of maturity rather than growth, the question is only ludicrous.

If and when we exercise our congregational polity to eliminate congregational polity, it will be because we have decided that we no longer want the responsibility that comes with freedom - not because we have "outgrown" it.