The joys of living in the Bay area

A—— showed up for our meeting, and by way of greeting he whispered, “I can only whisper, I’ve got seasonal laryngitis.”

“Seasonal laryngitis?” I said.

“Happens about once a year,” he said. “My allergies get so bad I can’t talk.”

“My allergies have been bad this week, but not that bad,” I said. “My sinuses are constantly draining down the back of my throat. It feels like my brains have liquified and are draining out of my head.”

That made A—— laugh, which started him choking and wheezing, and I started choking and wheezing too, and when we finally managed to breathe normally again we started our meeting.

The Bay area is a great place to live if you don’t need to breathe.

New education blog

Recently, I’ve been having some great conversations about education with Joe Chee. Joe is a teacher educator (he teaches teachers how to teach) at Foothills College, and he’s also doing doctoral study in education. When you have a conversation with Joe, the conversation often turns into interesting conversational byways such as cognition and meta-cognition, the uses of social media in education, learning styles, and more. Conversations with him are always interesting, stimulating, challenging, and fun.

If you don’t live here in Palo Alto, you can’t have a face-to-face conversation with Joe. But now you can read his blog, Thinking, learning, and teaching. The blog is almost as good as having a face-to-face conversation with Joe — one of his posts has already got me thinking.

Missed opportunity

This past Sunday, September 19, was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. And I forgot about it. What an opportunity I missed! I was teaching Sunday school, and I told the story about how Theodore Parker didn’t kill the turtle, and learned to listen to his Conscience. But I could have told the same story in pirate talk:

Arr, ye scurvy little swabs, listen to what I have t’ tell ye….

Once upon a time thar lived a little lad named Theodore Parker. He was born a landlubber who lived on a farm in Lexin’ton, Massachusetts. His granddaddy had been one o’ th’ rebels who started the Revolutionary War, by shootin’ at the Redcoats (the scurvy dogs) on Lexin’ton Green. Ev’ry mornin’ when he was drinkin’ his grog, he could look up at his grandaddy’s musket hangin’ over the fireplace.

One fine day, Theodore’s father took ‘im to a distant place on th’ farm, then sent ‘im back alone. The little lad saw a turtle sunnin’ itself, and like the good little pirate he was, he raised up his stick. “Ah me beauty,” says he, “you’re dead meat.” But then he heard a voice, sayin’ to him, “Avast there, ye little bilge rat! Belay that! Shiver me timbers! ‘Tis wrong to strike that turtle!”

“Aye aye, sir!” says Theodore, an’ put down his stick, an’ ran smartly home to his mother to tell her the story. “Mother,” says he, “a voice told me not to strike the little turtle. What was that voice?”

“Sink me!” she ejaculated. “”Tis a dangerous voice, that. Some call it th’ Conscience, and some call it th’ Voice of God in th’ Soul. ‘Twill try t’ hornswoggle ye out of bein’ a pirate. Next time ye hear that voice, heave to, come about, an’ run as fast as ye can down wind. Set yer topgallants if ye can, for if that voice gets alongside ye, ’twill fire a broadside that’ll clear your decks. Nay, my lad, if ’tis a pirate you’d like to be, if ’tis the booty ye’d like to take, if ye want to feel the doubloons and pieces o’ eight running through yer fingers some day, IGNORE THAT VOICE!”

“So if it comes agin,” said little Theodore, “I’m t’ give it th’ black spot?”

“Aye, me bucko,” said she, roarin’ with laughter, “that’s the spirit! Next time yer Conscience comes, send it t’ Davey Jones’ locker! Put it in a hempen halter an’ hang it from the yardarm!” Mrs. Pirate Parker gave her little lad a tankard o’ grog to buck him up, and then she gave him a stout belayin’ pin an’ sent him back to kill that turtle.

An’ that’s the story of how little Theodore learned t’ ignore his Conscience. When Theodore became a grown man, he had long since stopped listenin’ to his Conscience,an’ he became one o’ th’ Transcendentalist scallywags, scourge o’ th’ respectable Unitarians, terror of th’ liberal theologians. Ah, he was a fine one he was, you may lay to that!

An’ that’s me story, my little hearties. Be ye like Theodore Parker. Ignore yer Conscience, so ye can grow up t’ be a theological Pirate like him. Arrr!

A new liberal religious hymnody

I’m bored with contemporary liberal religious hymnody. (Remember, hymns are the words that we sing, not the music itself.) We have a bunch of 19th century hymns which are pretty good, but which tend to carry the 19th century curses of sentimentality and niceness. We have some singer-songwriter hymns, and some praise-band songs, all of which I find vapid and overly individualistic, and sometimes cloyingly sweet, as if you’re drinking a glass of molasses. I like some of the old African American spirituals, but we religious liberals tend to remove some of the best imagery and the most striking word choices.

Recently, I’ve been reading Isaac Watts’s hymns. I find that I like many of his translations of the psalms in his Psalms of David: his verse is solid and sometimes poetic, his rhymes are fun to sing, and his imagery is often striking. But I don’t like his limitarian, non-Universalist theology one bit, and I don’t like the way he plays fast and loose with the Psalms — e.g., there is absolutely no mention of Jesus in the Psalms, yet Watts is constantly dragging Jesus into his hymns which are supposedly based on the psalms.

Before Watts, there was The Bay Psalm Book, another metrical translation of psalms from the Hebrew Bible, used by many of the 17th and 18th century New England churches that later became Unitarian congregations. In the first edition of this psalter, the translators tried to make as literal a translation as possible. This can make for awkward singing. Yet awkward though it may be, it has a directness and an immediacy that I find refreshing; and it retains all the vivid imagery of the Hebrew Bible psalms.

Scott Wells of the blog Boy in the Bands recently pointed me to Elhanan Winchester’s The Psalms of David. Winchester was a Universalist, so I’m much more comfortable with his theology. His verse is pretty good, too. He has his problems — like Watts he plunks Jesus down in the middle of old Jewish psalms that really have nothing to do with Jesus — but he’s a nice example of what good traditional Universalist hymnody could look like.

On the Unitarian side, there’s the 1865 Hymns of the Spirit by Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson. Some of these hymns are quite good, certainly better than anything written by later Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist hymnodists — we still sing some of these hymns today. These are definitely 19th century hymns, which means a little too sentimental and nice at times, but the verse is pretty good, and some of the images are also pretty good.

I don’t want to resurrect these old hymnals; I’ve been reading them to help me understand what I want in a new hymnody. I have no talent for writing hymns myself, but I know what I wish for in a new liberal religion hymnody. I wish we had hymns that addressed big religious issues like death, grief, illness and healing, ultimate reality, and religious ecstasy. I wish our hymns were in vigorous metrical verse with interesting rhymes and vivid imagery. I wish our hymnodists knew at least some basic theology so they could give us some real intellectual content (Watts was a Doctor of Divinity, and his knowledge of theology made a difference).

Most of the contemporary debate in this area has centered on musical styles. Maybe we should let go of the music for a bit, and focus instead on hymnody — on the words that we sing. Instead of encouraging musicians, maybe it’s time to encourage our poets and hymn writers. Once we have a body of good hymns, then we can work on finding the best composers to set the new hymns to music.

Do all religions share a common thread?

UU World magazine recently published “Do All Religions Share a Common Thread?”, a book review column I wrote in which I discuss God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter by Stephen Prothero, Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together by the Dalai Lama, and A Religion for One World: Art and Symbols for a Universal Religion by Kenneth Patton. You can read it online here.

You can comment over on that site, but realistically I am less likely to respond to your comment there. Therefore, if you want to engage me in conversation about that column, feel free to comment here.

Update, 2020: This article still appears on UU World’s list of top ten most accessed articles. Go figure.

Moral vs. immoral banking

In an article titled “Where’s Your Church’s Money? : Banking for the Common Good,” in the September 21 issue of Christian Century magazine, Scott Bader-Sayre quotes John Calvin as saying that “Usury [i.e., lending at interest] almost always travels with two inseparable companions: tyrannical cruelty and the art of deception.” Calvin was willing to allow lending at interest, however, as long as such lending adhered to moral principles; thus, Calvin said that if you lend money to the poor, you should not get interest.

Calvin’s words seem prophetic in light of the recent banking crisis, which exposed the immoral and predatory practices of the banking industry. Bader-Sayre then asks, What can we do about this? He believes that part of the answer is that local congregations should place their money in places where it will do good, e.g., in banks that invest locally:

Few … have any lingering questions or qualms about usury. Perhaps we should still worry that interest as such fails to serve a good human economy. But given that there are faithful precedents for brokering just loans in service of real need and given our practically inescapable participation in an interest-based economy, the relevant question may not be “Should Christians* loan at interest?” but “What would it look like today to participate in lending and borrowing in such a way that it served human good and benefited all parties involved?’ Such a question might, in fact, lead us to more radical proposals for social change than would come from simply rejecting capitalism from the sidelines.

* Obviously, this statement also applies to religious liberals who are not necessarily Christians.

Bader-Sayre points us to an organization called Move Your Money, which is encouraging people to move their money out of the six biggest banks into local banks. Here’s a video from Move Your Money, featuring George Bailey and Mr. Potter:

The problem with local congregations moving their money into locally owned banks is that many congregations have become overly dependent on receiving high rates of interest in order to fund their operating budget. If our congregations are going to use their money responsibly, maybe we’ll all have to start giving 5% of our gross income to our congregations to support our moral goals.

Case study: small groups

About nine months ago, a men’s group in the congregation here in Palo Alto made a decision to expand their membership. They already had a solid program in place, so when they came to me for advice I gave them the standard ideas for growing small groups: share your enthusiasm and extend personal invitations to others to join the group; assume you’re going to have newcomers at every meeting and plan how you’re going to integrate them; plan from the beginning to split into two groups when you get to ten members; constantly train new leaders; start the new groups at different times from the old group (different day of the week, different time of day) to accommodate different schedules. They asked me if I cared whether all the participants were members of the congregation. Heck no, I said, this is an important ministry we offer to the community, why would we shut people out?

Within a few months, their attendance had grown enough that they had to split that first group. Since the first group met in the evening, they added a second group for those who preferred to meet during the daytime. Both groups have continued to grow, and the leaders of the two groups are already talking about splitting the evening group. They’re expecting that they’ll be ready to split the morning group within six months.

The evening group invited me to attend a recent meeting, which I did with pleasure — and I was frankly curious about this group that had become so popular that they’re ready to split yet again. After the meeting (about which I’ll tell you nothing, since they have a confidentiality agreement for their group), the leaders asked me for feedback. I told them they did everything right: The first few minutes when someone walks in are crucial, and their non-verbal communication was open and welcoming — they greeted people, walked towards them, met their eyes, shook hands with them. The program topic was really rich, and the group leaders managed to keep a good balance between an open discussion, while at the same time urging men to talk about their feelings for this difficult topic. We did a little bit of problem-solving around specific situations that came up during the meeting — during which, I kept reminding them that leading a small groups is a balancing act where you’re always adjusting; therefore the time to worry is when you don’t feel a little off balance.

They’re proceeding with plans for continued growth. Nothing is definite yet, although there is talk about having a couple of meetings a year when all the men’s groups that came from that original men’s group get together on a Saturday and socialize.

Now, since this is a case study, here are some questions for reflection:

1. The Palo Alto congregation has about 275 members. How many men’s groups would you plan for? In other words, what do you think is the upper limit for growth?
2. If men from other nearby Unitarian Universalist congregations started attending men’s groups at the Palo Alto congregation, do you see that as a problem? Why or why not?
3. What percentage of non-Unitarian Universalist men do you think is allowable?
4. What could be done to keep the men’s groups connected with the congregation?
5. What can be done to maintain “quality control,” that is, to make sure the men’s groups that split off maintain the same high quality program as the original one?
6. Is it a problem that these are men’s groups? What about women’s groups? What about mixed gender, or non-specific gender groups?

The greatest Universalist on earth

This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the person who was arguably the most famous Universalist ever: the great showman and promoter, P. T. Barnum, who was born on July 5, 1810. His name still lives on in the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus; and his reputation lives on in a remark he supposedly made, that there’s a sucker born every minute (actually, there is no record that he ever said that).

It is less often remembered that Barnum was a great supporter of many reform causes. Most notably, he supported the temperance movement, and felt that his shows and entertainments helped provide recreational options that could keep people from drinking.

Barnum was also a tireless supporter of Universalism, and a supporter of Olympia Brown, the first woman ordained in the United States by a denominational body. He helped endow Tufts, originally a Universalist college, and for many decades Tufts displayed a stuffed elephant from Barnum’s circus. He even spent time with Quillen Hamilton Shinn, the great Universalist missionary of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and supposedly admired Shinn’s showmanship.

Not long before he died, Barnum wrote a moving statement of his religious identity, titled “Why I am a Universalist.” Some years ago, I adapted a portion of it so it could be used as a responsive reading in contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations:

I base my hopes for humanity on the Word of God speaking in the best heart and conscience of the race,
The Word heard in the best poems and songs, the best prayers and hopes of humanity.
It is rather absurd to suppose a heaven filled with saints and sinners shut up all together within four jeweled walls and playing on harps, whether they like it or not.
I have faint hopes that after another hundred years or so, it will begin to dawn on the minds of those to whom this idea is such a weight, that nobody with any sense holds this idea or ever did hold it.
To the Universalist, heaven in its essential nature is not a locality, but a moral and spiritual status, and salvation is not securing one place and avoiding another, but salvation is finding eternal life.
Eternal life has primarily no reference to time or place, but to a quality. Eternal life is right life, here, there, everywhere.
Conduct is three-fourths of life.
This present life is the great pressing concern.

I continue to be moved by the idea that eternal life is a quality, it is right living that can happen in the here and now. Though I am not a theist in the sense Barnum was, this basic concept remains a central part of my own Universalist faith today: this present life is the great pressing concern.

So happy birthday, Phineas Taylor Barnum!

More about Barnum and his Universalism here.

Paying up

The email message from the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA) was concise: “Your membership is going to expire in 60 days.” The question that now confronts me is whether I’m going pay their new, greatly increased fee in order to renew my membership. And therein hangs a tale.

A couple of years ago, the leadership of the UUMA made what seems on the face of it to be a logical decision: they decided that they were going to hire an executive director to oversee the activities of the association. There had long been a paid administrator of the UUMA, but the volunteer board saw great possibilities in adding another employee, someone who was more than an administrator, someone who could provide leadership to move the organization in exciting new directions. So far, so good.

Since the rest of this post will be of primary interest to a small number of my readers, I’ll continue it after the jump… Continue reading →