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Monthly Archives: September 2006
Duck
Carol and I were coming back from an evening walk down to the waterfront, walking across the pedestrian overpass that gets you over Route 18. Car horns blared below us, a couple of cars swerved. Carol said, “Oh, no, watch out, little duck!”
A duck was trying waddle its way across the four lanes of hectic Route 18 traffic. It made it, barely, without being hit. The human beings driving the cars may have been cursing the duck, but they had enough sympathy to avoid running it over.
“Let’s go down and see what’s up with that duck,” I said. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t fly up out of the way. Was it hurt?
We hurried down the other side of the overpass. There was the duck, waddling up the cobblestone street. “That’s a Wood Duck!” I said. I couldn’t imagine what a young female Wood Duck, a wary and secretive bird, would be doing in densely-populated downtown New Bedford.
It did not appear to be hurt. It just looked very scared. When it saw us, it headed back towards Route 18. We herded it the other direction, towards a patch of weeds. It almost flew towards the weeds, so we knew its wings weren’t broken. By the time we got up to the weeds, it was no longer visible. I suspect it was hatched this summer, making its first trip south, confused and scared.
“Poor little duck,” said Carol.
“Maybe a little rest and it will be ready to fly,” I said.
Carol started telling me about the movie “Winged Migration,” which depicts the death of more than a few birds during migration. Downtown New Bedford is not a good place for Wood Ducks; I hope the one we saw tonight makes it out alive.
Lost on Hawk Hill
The map showed a narrow trail that ran up one side of Hawk Hill, meandered three quarters of the way around its broad low peak, and descended quickly to the other side. I walked up the dirt road to where the narrow trail should have begun. I saw nothing but a small cairn on top of a large rock and no evidence of a trail. At last I decided that the trail must go up beside the cairn, and I headed up the hill in the general direction the map showed.
For a while it seemed as if I might be on a long-abandoned trail, until it petered out. The woods were open, and I thought if I kept going perhaps I would happen onto the trail. The hill got steeper; in places the hillside was strewn with rocks, in other places it was open bedrock, but mostly it was tall trees with a few lowbush blueberries growing underneath. Once or twice I struck a deer trail that I was able to follow for a few hundred feet until it disappeared.
The ground began to level off, as if I might be approaching the top of the hill. The ground began to be covered with low, shrubby oaks, which I had to fight my way through. I gave up on finding the trail, and enjoyed being mildly lost. I came upon an open area with a view of another hill, which I decided must be Buck Hill; for Buck Hill had had a brush fire this past May Day, and the hill I looked at showed several places recovering from effects of fire.
I climbed further up, walking across more bedrock, pushing through more shrubby oaks, coming across little openings and hidden glades here and there: a shady glen under a tall dense pine which cast such a shadow that nothing grew under it; a stretch of open bedrock with lanky late summer grass and little scraps of pineweed growing in its cracks; an odd little peak of stone almost hidden in the trees; some more open bedrock which, when I got close, turned out to be part of a well-worn narrow trail marked by a low cairn and a faded blaze painted on the rock.
So I followed the trail down the other side of Hawk Hill. It wound around the broad top of the hill, through an open ledge from whence I could see Buck Hill again, and further off the Interstate highway, and further still two reservoirs split in two by a narrow dike. Then the trail dove down into the trees, and brought me out on the other side of Hawk Hill.
On my way back to the car, I walked along that same dirt road from whence I had begun walking. I stopped and looked around the little cairn again, but no trail did I see. The ancient Greeks said that Hermes, god and guardian of the traveler, lives inside cairns to help guide people along. Hermes was also a mischievous god who even tricked the great Apollo; it would be no trouble for him to fool me. I considered taking down the little cairn so that others wouldn’t be fooled by it, but decided I better hadn’t.
Nor did I see any hawks on Hawk Hill; just an immature Peregrine Falcon at the top of nearby Chickatawbut Hill, starting out on it first trip to the south, who swooped down and sat in a tree top surveying the woods while all the other birds kept quiet and hid.
An affirmation of faith
I never have liked the “seven principles” that so many Unitarian Universalists use as an affirmation of faith. It’s a legacy of my liberal religious Sunday school years, I suppose, but I prefer an older affirmation of faith:
We affirm:
The fatherhood of God,
the brotherhood of man,
the leadership of Jesus,
salvation by character, and
progress onwards and upwards forever.
That’s something that stirs my soul, and it’s something that’s easy to remember. But I don’t like the gender-specific language. Plus I’ve grown leery of that last phrase, both because of all the evil that was done in the name of “progress” in the 20th C. and because I don’t want to have to wait “forever” for progress to happen. So I wrote a new affirmation based on that old affirmation, to use with my congregation this Sunday:
Here we gather in covenant:
nurtured by that which is highest and best in life, which some call God;
bound together by common humanity;
led by the great spiritual teachings of the ages;
finding salvation in character;
to the end that we may institute true peace and true justice,
here and now, here on earth.
This affirmation isn’t nearly as good as the old one, but it seems to me it’s an improvement on the “seven principles.” The congregation I serve is distinctly post-Christian, a real stew of Christians and theists and pagans and humanists. A more Christian congregation could, I imagine, use a pithier affirmation, something like this:
Here we gather in covenant:
nurtured by God;
bound together by common humanity;
led by the teachings of Jesus;
finding salvation in character;
to the end that we may institute the kingdom of heaven,
here and now, here on earth.
I would love your theological thoughts and critiques (to say nothing of your poetical thoughts and critiques), as I continue to search for alternatives to the dreary, leaden, uninspiring “seven principles.” I would love to hear from religious liberals who are not Unitarian Universalists — what do you use as an affirmation of faith, and why?
Buttonwood Park
My laundry was in the dryer, and I decided the evening was too pleasant to waste sitting in the laundromat staring at my clothes going around and round. I walked down to Buttonwood Park.
Plenty of people were out walking on the broad sidewalk at the west end of the park: two middle-aged women out for a fitness walk, a tall exceedingly fit-looking man jogging, a little boy riding a little bicycle with training wheels and his father close behind. Two young people stood in the middle of a gaggle of Mallards and domestic ducks at the edge of the pond, and even though they were right next to a sign that said “Don’t Feed the Ducks/ Por Favor….”, they were feeding the ducks. A pleasant-looking woman striding by looked over at them and said (pleasantly), “Don’t feed the ducks, now.” The two young people guiltily said, “We’re not. They’re eating something else.” The latter sentence was true: the ducks were snapping at big, slow, fat insects rising up from the edge of the pond. “They’re eating the bugs,” said the pleasant-looking woman matter-of-factly, and strode on.
I turned left down the road that bisects the north half of the park, ambling along, feeling logy. Two small girls, who looked to be twins, came tearing down a side path towards the road. “Don’t run out into the road!” shouted an adult voice from far behind them. Laughing, the two girls stopped one another, which involved one girl pulling the other girl’s shirt off her shoulder, and the second girl pushing away the face of the first girl. They got disentangled, still laughing, and resumed tearing along the path, coming to a dead halt at the very edge of the roadway (disconcerting the driver of a huge SUV that had fortunately come to a complete stop at the “Stop” sign at the crosswalk). They turned around in order to look back at the woman walking towards them pushing a stroller, and put on their best angelic faces as if to say, “See? We came to a stop before the road!” The angelic effect was spoiled when one poked the other, and the other whispered something back that made them both giggle.
A hoard of Ring-billed Gulls swirled around the edges of a soccer game, screaming and trying to steal scraps of food from each other, but now I am bored by the gulls that scream all night from the rooftops around our apartment, so I walked on by. Besides, I realized that my laundry would be done soon, and it was time for me to hurry back to the laundromat.
If you’re in search…
This afternoon, I got a telephone call from another minister. She had heard from a mutual minister friend that I was a good person to ask about going into search for a new congregation. I told her that it was sadly true, I do indeed know a great deal about searching for a new congregation because I spent three years in search, made lots of mistakes, got lots of practice, and finally wound up in a great congregation. I gave her some advice, and just for fun I’m listing six pieces of that advice here — for the amusement of other ministers, Search Committees, and those interested laypeople who would like an insider’s view of the current search process in the Unitarian Universalist Association.
1. Sell yourself.
The settlement process for Unitarian Universalist ministers is now totally open and transparent. That’s a polite way of saying that the settlement process is basically a open marketplace. In a marketplace, you have to sell yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to use high-pressure, dishonest sales tactics — when I worked in sales, I found low-key relationship-building to be my best sales tool — but I don’t care how good a minister you are, if you don’t sell yourself, these days you’re unlikely to get a good job.
Everything else I say follows from this first premise.
2. Check out the congregations that other ministers are ignoring.
This year, as is true every year, there will be a few congregations that are considered desirable by lots of ministers in search. If it’s considered a “prominent” congregation, i.e., medium-big or large with a substantial salary package near a desirable metropolitan area, you’ll be competing with thirty or forty other ministers for the vacant position. But remember that many of these “prominent” congregations are more dysfunctional and soul-destroying than the less “prominent” congregations. When I was in sales, I looked for the markets other salespeople were ignoring — they snickered at me, but I wound up being top gross and top net in my department. Go thou and do likewise. Check your ego at the door and look for a less “prominent” congregation where you can do some good ministry. The brass ring is not a “prominent” congregation, it’s a congregation where you will grow and thrive and have a good time.
3. Look at congregations in the Midwest.
The Midwest is one of those markets the others are ignoring. Yet from personal experience, I can tell you that ministers are not respected and religion is culturally unimportant on the West Coast, and in the Northeast people often take their churches and ministers for granted — whereas in the Midwest ministers are held in relatively high respect in the surrounding culture. Sure, there are anti-clerical and dysfunctional congregations in the Midwest, but on average people just care about churches and ministers in the Midwest in a way that never happens in New England or California. (I am told this is also true for the Southern United States.)
4. The materials you produce at each stage of the search process function as different kinds of sales tools.
Of course you should always be scrupulously honest about yourself and your goals for your ministry. Having said that, here’s my take on how to sell yourself at different stages of the search process:
- The ministerial record that you put up on the Unitarian Universalist Association Web site is really a sales brochure that should be designed to invite congregations to exchange packets with you.
- Your printed packet is an in-depth sales tool that should be designed to attract “live prospects” while filtering out casual inquiries.
- The telephone interview should help you build relationships and develop trust, to the end that…
- …you can ask tough questions and bare your soul (as needed) during the face-to-face pre-candidating interview.
5. Create a good Web site as your add-on sales tool.
When they check you out, Search Committees will search for your name on one or more of the major Web search engines. Thus your own Web site can be a secret add-on sales tool for you. Make yourself a Web site containing a selection of your best sermons and other written work. Get someone who knows how to create a clean, simple design for you. Find out how search engines find and rank Web sites [link]. (By the way, your own domain name and a year’s worth of Web hosting will cost about $55 — I use this service.) In a competitive market, you need all the sales tools you can get — go create that Web site now.
6. Set goals for each stage of the search process by working backwards.
The best salespeople are heavily goal-oriented. Your ultimate goal is to find the best possible congregation for your skills and talents as a minister. So let’s work backwards from that. Ideally, then, you want to have at least two job offers so you have a choice. So you should aim for three “pre-candidating weekends” (face-to-face, weekend-long interviews). That means you want at least five or six telephone interviews. That means you should exchange packets with eight to ten congregations. And that means you should identify fifteen congregations on the ministerial settlement Web site that you will click on to ask them to review your online ministerial record.
There you have it — six pieces of advice for minister who are in search this year. Just remember that this is free advice, and therefore worth exactly what you paid for it.
Repairs and upgrade
While I was upgrading to WordPress 2.0.4 today, I finally fixed a few minor problems on the blog — most notably, the links just below the header now work properly. I also did some maintenance on the main Web site, including a tweak in the style sheet. If you run into any problems either here or on the main site, be sure to let me know about it via email (danrharper AT aol DOT com) — thanks!
In other site news, traffic on the site continued to climb slowly over the summer, with well over 2,000 unique IP addresses visiting in both July and August. I believe much of the increase is due the blog’s listing on the new Daily Scribe network of religious blogs. Daily Scribe is a nice collection of blogs written by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans, etc. — worth checking out if you haven’t already done so.
Manager or holy person? — part 2
Back on August 26, I asked the question “If you’re a minister, are you more likely to be mistaken for a corporate executive, or for a holy person?” [link] I didn’t have a firm answer when I wrote that post, but I think I’m getting closer to an answer of some kind.
As a minister myself, I tend to work more as a manager than as a holy person. But I’m not much like a corporate executive. Instead, I’m much more like the manager of a small non-profit organization. Managers of small non-profits typically have to be generalists, able to do a little bit of everything. Managers of small non-profits typically have to rely heavily on volunteer resources, because in a small non-profit there’s never enough money to accomplish the organization’s mission. Managers of small non-profits have to be consensus-builders, because unlike a corporate executive managers of small non-profits can’t wield nearly unlimited authority over volunteers and members (and often not even over paid staff whom they supervise). Thus, I have a significantly different set of management skills from the typical corporate executive. You could roughly sum up the differences by saying I am not in an authoritarian, hierarchical relationship with “underlings” and “superiors.” I’m definitely not a corporate executive.
But I’m not trying to be the holy person, either. Why not? Because in a liberal church, everyone should be striving to be holy. Here we can turn to the concept of the “prohethood of all believers” as defined by Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams:
We have long held to the idea of the priesthood of all believers, the idea that all believers have direct access to the ultimate resources of the religious life and that every believer has the responsibility of achieving an explicit free faith for free persons. As an element of this radical laicism we need also a firm belief in the prophethood of all believers. The prophetic liberal church is not a church in which the prophetic function is assigned merely to the few. The prophetic liberal church is the church in which persons think and work together to interpret the signs of the times in the light of their faith, to make explicit through discussion the epochal thinking that the times demand. The prophetic liberal church is the church in which all members share the common responsibility to attempt to foresee the consequences of human behavior (both individual and institutional), with the intention of making history in place of merely being pushed around by it. Only through the prophetism of all believers can we together foresee doom and mend our common ways. from The Prophethood of All Believers, ed. George Kimmich Beach (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), pp. 102-103.
If prophets are holy people in the Western tradition — and certainly we would want to claim holiness for such prophets as Moses, Elijah, and Jesus of Nazareth — then Adams would argue that in the liberal church it’s not up to the minister to be the holy person. It’s up to every member of that congregation to be part of the prophethood of all believers.
If that’s the case — and I believe that is the case — then my job is to facilitate the members of the congregation becoming part of the prophethood. That’s the kind of skill a good manager should have, setting up institutional structures, and giving individual coaching at times, in order that each person may participate as fully as possible in the prophethood of all believers. I suppose you could say that the minister/manager is then a holy person too, because he or she must also find a place in the prophethood of all believers; but the minister/manager is not the holy person.
Of course, you might argue that you don’t like my definition of what a holy person is, because when you say “holy person” you want someone saintly like Mother Teresa or as meditative as a Zen master. But I still believe in the holiness of all believers, however you define holiness. It’s not my job as a minister to be the holiest person around. It’s my job to help the religious community be a place where everyone can achieve holiness.
Manager or holy person? Both, really, I suppose. But manager first and foremost.
A walk in the valley
I had intended to stay off the hilltops. My hamstrings were sore, and tropical storm Ernesto hovering to the south was making all my joints stiff. When I got to the Blue Hills, I avoided the steep climb up Hancock Hill and sauntered along the gentle grades of Wolcott Path, a gravel fire road that winds through the valley between Hancock and Hemenway Hills on the one side, and Houghton and Great Blue Hills on the other.
The sun occasionally shone brightly enough through the cloud cover that the trees cast shadows on the road. My muscles complained, and I slowed down even further, admiring the lowlands filled with bracken stretching on either side of the road. An intense smell of bracken, the smell of late summer, filled the air. A trail bore off to the right; the map showed it was fairly level; I turned off to follow it.
The woods were lovely, bright, and still. I hadn’t seen another person since I left that parking lot, and even the birds were quiet, except for some chickadees here and there. I turned right, and right again. The trail I chose wound upwards less gently than before, up to the low broad top of a hill, rocky and grassy with scrubby oak trees and a view of Great Blue Hill. I turned away from the view and followed the narrowest trail I could find down again into a valley.
The trail turned abruptly about halfway down the hill, and skirted a drop-off that appeared to grow steeper and steeper. I followed a small path to the edge of the drop-off: I was standing at the top of a rock face some thirty or forty feet above a small stream bed with a little thread of brown water babbling down it. The path dropped down to the stream, and I looked back up at the rock, heaved up I guess in some distant past when the strata had been nearly molten. Now it was impossibly picturesque, shaded by hemlocks and pines.
I thought about skirting the base of the next hill, but when I found the barely-visible trail to its summit, I couldn’t resist following it upwards. There wasn’t much to follow: a few places where the lichen on the rocks had been worn off leading to a narrow treadway still visible in the grass-covered ground between the rocks. In the next rocky stretch, I lost the trail, so followed the ridge line towards the summit. Then I saw a smear of black and gray paint on a rock. I looked closely, and saw the black and gray paint covered old orange paint. Had someone deliberately tried to paint out the blazes? Another smear of black paint, followed by a small cairn. Branches and bushes had grown over the trail.
Suddenly the faint trail emerged into an open area, exposed bedrock with grass and small plants growing in the hollows. I looked behind me, and there was Boston Harbor with the empty horizon line of the Atlantic Ocean in the distance. I climbed higher, followed the open rock away from the trail, and found a place to sit and look. The towers of Boston were off to the left, looking somehow ominous today. Beyond them, I thought I could see the hills of the Middlesex Fells. A few white dots on the waters of Boston Harbor: I wasn’t sure they were boats until one disappeared behind one of the islands. Chimney Swifts soared idly overhead. I walked further along the rock and noticed a small plant at my feet. I got down on my knees to look at it: red buds carried on much-ramified, almost leafless branches of a plant that wasn’t more than a few inches high, growing out of cracks in the rock. A few of the red buds were just opening up into yellow flowers that were perhaps an eighth of an inch. It was Pineweed (Hypericum gentianoides) just beginning to bloom.
When I looked up again, the Chimney Swifts were gone. A moment later, I saw why: a Red Hawk floated by, not too far above me but high above the valley. The hawk flexed its wings and tail, riding the air currents; I could see its head moving back and forth, scanning the trees below it.
The trail continued up past a small sheltering oak tree. I say it was sheltering, although it had few enough leaves that it couldn’t have sheltered much under it; but the shape of its bent trunk and curving branches somehow reassured me and made me feel sheltered, for no reason at all. Beyond that tree, I lost the view until I emerged onto the main trail.
A small pond glistened darkly in the trees in front of me, and the trees had already begun to lose the deep green of midsummer; Great Blue Hill loomed off to the west; gray clouds mounted high into the sky beyond Great Blue Hill. To the south, towards where we live, the land was flat, and a line of gray-white cumulus clouds hung low on the horizon.
It was all almost too beautiful to bear. Abraham Maslow popularized the phrase “peak experiences,” meaning those moments in life when when you achieve sometimes unbearable clarity. Later in his life, Maslow wrote that he wished he had not concentrated so much on peak experiences, and I think he felt responsible to some extent for the excesses of the drug culture of the late 1960’s, with young people indiscriminately seeking “peak experiences” from hallucinogens and other more destructive drugs. So later on, Maslow defined “plateau experiences” as those times that fill your soul with wonder and awe but that extend beyond the momentary to fill hours; and he said the plateaus could be as intense as the peaks. The paradigmatic plateau experience is the mother who nestles quietly with her baby, lost in the baby’s smell and sound and new being; an experience far more intense than a hallucination from a drug, because it is real and because in some sense it never really ends. I headed back down a gentle path into a valley, having had enough of summits just then, even the low broad summits of the Blue Hills; I felt I needed a valley experience just then, not a peak experience.
But that gentle, downward-trending road was just as heart-achingly beautiful as the summit of the little hill I was coming down. The path followed an old woods road. The land had obviously been clear of trees not too long ago; it was now covered with coppice and small trees. Among the thickets of saplings, and the more open spaces under the larger trees, I saw a great slope covered with shattered rocks the size of my head; a small rocky ridge rose up into almost open sky on the other side, and the path wound around to the bottom of that ridge, which was covered with huge shattered rocks and slabs. In one area, the rocks appeared to have scales: loosely hanging dingy brownish-gray scales, lichen of a type I hadn’t seen before. I followed that path back down to the fire road from which I had originally diverged, passed the little road that had tempted me onto that detour, and kept walking.
Eventually I came to a small field that opened up in the woods. I stood quietly on its edge, admiring the huge gnarled oak that towered amid the goldenrod and yellowing late summer grass, comparing the openness of the field with the openness of the hilltops. Something snorted; startled, I turned, and two deer took fright, showed their white tails, and leapt into the trees. I could hear them crashing away through the brush.
The fire road intersected the paved road to the summit of Great Blue Hill, so I went almost to the observation tower at the summit, but there were too many people there. I had seen no one all afternoon, until I started up Great Blue Hill. Instead, I cut over to the head of the ski slope, and looked west from there. The course of the highways below me were marked out by the huge roofs of corporate and manufacturing buildings, gray and beige expanses sticking out of the tree cover, covering acres. Further off, three or four church steeples marked an old town center. Away off to the west stood Mt. Wachusett; beyond it to the north, a line of hills led up to the distant peak of Mt. Monadnock; and I knew that even farther north, hidden behind Mondanock, lay the White Mountains.
The walk back to the car was short and uneventful; but tonight I think I will dream of mountains.