In this week’s podcast, Joe Chee and I talk about leading discussions in children’s religious education classes. You can find the podcast here.
Category Archives: Liberal religion
Art and the chant workshop
We hosted our third chant workshop tonight; Chandra Alexander of Sharanya led us in Hindu Goddess chants. She gave us a handout with the words of the chants (in Sanskrit, with transliterations), and asked us which chants we’d like to try.
I asked for a chant titled “God Is Mother and Father”; the title alone reminded me of the mid-19th C. prayers of Theodore Parker, in which he often referred to his God as both Mother and Father. (The 1862 edition of Parker’s prayers, edited by Rufus Leighton and Matilda Goddard, is now online at Google Books.) Not that there is a precise congruence between the two. The Hindu chant can be translated as: “You are Mother and Father, you alone are friend and relation. you are wisdom and prosperity, O God of Gods you are everything.” Parker does not tend this far towards pantheism; his God is personal, God as persona: “O Lord, our Father and our Mother too, we know that we need not ask any good thing from thee, nor in our prayer beseech thee to remember us, for thou lovest us more than we can love ourselves…” (July 25, 1858, p. 185).
Either way, while I can appreciate the beauty of both chant and prayer, I can’t say that I a parental god-image does much for me. But that’s the way art works, isn’t it? I don’t have to believe in the reality of a thunder-god to feel awe and reverence in the presence of a Greek sculpture of Zeus.
The Golden Memory Box
For years now, I have been promising some friends that I would get this story up on my Web site. It’s based on a story told by Grace Mitchell, who wrote a column for many years in Early Education magazine. Mitchell was the founder of Green Acres Day Camp in Waltham, Massachusetts, a camp with a distinctly progressive Deweyan philosophy of education. I have adapted this camp story to church life; as I tell it, this story reflects my feeling that when church looks more like camp, it is more memorable to children. A good story to tell at the end of the church year.
Once upon a time there was a girl named Keilah and a boy named Kyle who lived with their parents in the second floor of an old house that looked out over the harbor. During the week, Kyle and Keilah went to school, and on Sunday they went to church. Kyle liked school, Keilah didn’t like school, but they both liked church. They liked going into the worship service with their parents and singing one of the hymns they knew as loud as they could. They liked listening to the things their minister read, even though they didn’t always understand them. They liked going to Sunday school to see their friends. They liked going to social hour where they drank hot chocolate and, when the weather was nice, went outside to play in the church’s labyrinth.
*****
On the first day of the new church year, Keilah and Kyle went to their new Sunday school class. Keilah was only a year older than Kyle, and this year they would be in the same class together. Kyle did not want to go to the new Sunday school class. “I won’t know any of the kids,” he told his father as they were getting ready to go. “Can’t I go back to my old Sunday school class?” Keilah was not sure that she wanted Kyle to be in her Sunday school class. “Can’t we go to different Sunday school classes?” she said to her mother. But in the end, they wound up going to Sunday school together.
As usual, they stayed in the first part of the worship service for fifteen minutes with their parents. Then they left when all the other children left. They walked more slowly than anyone else, so when they got to their new classroom, ten other children and three grown-ups, their new Sunday school teachers, were already there. A pleasant-looking man welcomed them and said, My name is Joe. You must be Keilah and Kyle. You’re just in time to play a game.”
The way the game worked, Joe told them, was that everyone had to pick something in a grocery store that had the same first letter, or the same first sound, as their name. “So I’m Joe Jumbo Juice,” he said. “That’s my grocery store name.” Keilah decided her grocery store name was “Keilah Cantaloupe,” and Kyle was “Kyle Kale.” Joe stood in the middle with a pillow, and one person started by saying someone else’s grocery store name. Then that person tried to say someone else’s grocery store name before Joe tapped them with the pillow. If you got tapped before you could say someone else’s name, then you went in the middle. It was a really fun game. At one point, everyone was laughing because Hong Hot Chocolate managed to get Sam Salmon with the pillow while he was talking to the person next to him. Keilah turned to Kyle and whispered, “This is a great game!” Kyle said, “Yeah, I wish it would go on forever!” Suddenly they both heard a voice, a mysterious high-pitched echo-y voice, say, “Put it in your Golden Memory Box!” (Except the voice dragged out “golden” so it really sounded like this: “Put it in your Gooolden Memory Box!”)
“Did you say that?” Keilah whispered to Kyle. Continue reading
Universalism for a new era
UU World magazine just put a good article by Paul Rasor on their Web site. Titled “Can Unitarian Universalism Change?” the article is an excerpt from the Berry Street lecture Paul gave last June.
Using demographic and other solid evidence, Paul makes the case that in an increasingly multiracial society, Unitarian Universalist congregations are predominantly white. In other words, we are increasingly out of step with the surrounding culture. In other words, we are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Paul goes on to say that our Universalist heritage offers a solid theological foundation on which we could build a truly multiracial, egalitarian religion:
Early Universalism was a communal faith. ‘Communal’ here means more than a group of individuals who share a common belief and come together for mutual support and worship, the way we might understand it today. Instead, in this form of communal theology, the individual was removed from the religious equation. Universalists insisted that our personal salvation was no more important than anyone else’s salvation. As Ann Lee Bressler, author of The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880, puts it, Universalism ‘encouraged the believer to think of his own interests as inseparably linked with the eternal welfare of the whole body of humanity.’
This theological core led to a radical egalitarianism. The American emphasis, shared by most Protestant denominations, including Unitarians, had always been on equality of opportunity, at least in principle, while in practice tolerating vast inequalities of outcome. But Universalism’s egalitarian theological doctrine became the basis for a truly egalitarian social doctrine — ‘an egalitarianism not of opportunity, but of desert,’ or outcome. In other words, Universalism was not simply pluralistic; it was radically inclusive.
However, a radical Universalist inclusivity is going to ruffle lots of feathers of current Unitarian Universalists who place an extremely high value on personal and individual freedom. In my reading of the Treatise on Atonement, Hosea Ballou’s foundational theological statement of Universalism, Ballou places great restrictions on free will: you don’t get to choose whether or not you wish to be saved, you will be saved no matter what. Unitarians placed much more emphasis on free will:– Continue reading
Power outage
When I arrived at the office this morning, the power was out. A plane crashed just after taking off from the Palo Alto airport, killing all three people on board (all were employees of the Tesla electric car company), clipping a power line, and apparently taking out a couple of transformers. It took all day for PG&E and the Palo Alto municipal light plant to get the power back up, but just as it was getting dark this evening the power came back on.
When I first started working in churches in 1994, I had a computer on my desk, but I spent less than a third of my time working at the computer. Now I think I spend about two thirds of my time working at the computer, and I’ve gotten so accustomed to working at the computer I had to stop and think how to work without a computer. I had a curriculum planning meeting in the morning — no going online to look up curriculum resources; no bringing up the database to check enrollment trends — we had to look at actual pieces of paper and books instead of at lighted screens. Once that meeting was over, I had to figure out how to spend my day. No email, the phone system goes down without power, no electronic documents — so I did some filing, cleaned out a storage closet, wrote up next year’s curriculum grid by hand, had another meeting, talked to a couple of people who stopped by the office, took a walk, did some planning.
With no phone, Web, or email all day long, I felt cut off. On the other hand, it was nice not staring into a lighted screen all day, and I realized that I wished my job did not require me to spend quite so much time using a computer.
Podcast on telling stories
In our latest podcast, Joe Chee and I talk about telling stories in Sunday school classes.
This new podcast prompted me to update the collection of stories on my Web site. These stories have all been used either in Sunday school classes, or in worship services. Some earlier stories have been revised, some new stories have been added.
Documents pertaining to the origins of the “child dedication” ceremony in Universalism
Universalists have used a number of ceremonies to welcome children. Some early Universalists started out as Baptists, and so were probably wary of infant baptism. Other early Universalists worked on the frontier of Euro-American settlement of North America, and were more flexible about the ceremony they used to welcome children; in fact, some early Universalists also practice adult baptism. Universalist views changed over the years; baptism was less popular in the early 19th C., almost universal in the late 19th C., and waned again in the 20th C. An excellent overview of Universalist views on baptism may be found in “Baptism on the Universalist Frontier,” by Lewis Perry, Journal of Unitarian Universalist History, vol. XXIX, 2003, pp. 3-18.
John Murray, arguably the central figure in the founding of institutionalized Universalism in North America, did not approve of infant baptism since, he said, it had no scriptural warrant. Upon his arrival in North America in 1770, some of his early converts to Universalism asked for baptisms; instead, he developed a ceremony which called “dedication,” in which he named the child, and dedicated her or him to God. The following documents describe early child dedications from the late 18th C. to the mid-19th C.
How John Murray developed the dedication ceremony
More from John Murray on dedications
Judith Sargent Murray describes child dedications
A Universalist dedication ceremony from 1855
Midwestern Unitarian christening ceremonies of the late 19th C.
The christening ceremonies of the Western Unitarian Conference contain many elements still used in contemporary Unitarian Universalist christening and child dedication ceremonies, including gender-inclusive language, the incorporation of flowers, and even the language of “dedication” rather than “christening.” You’ll find two complete christening services below:
1893 “Service of flowers and christenings” using gender-inclusive language
1884 “Christening service” including the term “dedication”
Creation myth of northern Ohlone (Coastonoan) Indians
I’m still working on stories for liberal religious kids, and I wanted a creation myth that comes from this region, the San Francisco Bay area. After some research (thank goodness for Google Books), I found a creation myth that mentions landscape features that we can see, if not from the church, at least from here in Palo Alto. As usual, this is a rough draft, and your comments are welcomed.
Once upon a time, there were no human beings, but there were two spirits, one good and one evil. The two spirits made war upon each other, and at least the good spirit overcame the evil spirit. At that time, the entire world was covered with water, except for two islands, one of which was Mount Diablo and the other of which was Reed Peak [i.e., Mt. Tamalpais].
There was a Coyote on Mt. Tamalpais. He was the only living thing there. One day Coyote saw a feather floating on the water, and, as it reached the island, is suddenly turned into an Eagle. Spreading its broad wings, the Eagle flew up onto the mountain.
Coyote was much pleased with his new companion, and they lived together in great harmony. Sometimes they would make excursions to the other island, Coyote swimming while Eagle flew overhead. This went on for some time. Then they consulted with each other, and decided to make human beings.
Together they made the first human beings. Soon the first human beings had children, and the level of the water went down so that there was more land for the human beings. Soon the children of the first human beings had children, and the level of the water went down some more. Then the grandchildren of the first human beings had children, and so on, and the more human beings there were, the more the waters decreased, until at last where there was dry land where there once had been water.
At that time, what is now known as the Golden Gate was a chain of mountains, and you could walk from one side to the other side without getting your feet wet. The water that came down from the east had to go out through some other rivers somewhere. But then a great earthquake struck, and chain of mountains was cut in two, forming what we now call the Golden Gate. Then the waters of the Great Ocean and the Bay could at last come together, and the land became as we now know it.
The above tale is adapted from “Tradition of the California Indians,” by H. B. D., in Hesperian Magazine, vol. 2-3, (ed. F. H. Day, San Francisco, vol. III, no. 1, September, 1859), p. 326. H. D. B. says this tale came “from the lips of one of our most venerable pioneers, and I give it as I heard it.” Continue reading