Two more UU two hundredth birthdays

With all the attention that’s being paid to the two hundredth anniversary of Theodore Parker’s birth, I somehow missed two other two hundredth birthdays — one of a Unitarian and one of a Universalist.

The Unitarian first: James Freeman Clarke was born on April 4, 1810. Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and Harvard professor, Clarke also published the Western Messenger, which historian David Robinson has called the first Transcendentalist periodical; some of Margaret Fuller’s earliest work was published in the Western Messenger. Robinson adds, “Few Unitarians of his day or after have made a larger contribution to Unitarianism.”

In 1886, Clarke printed a revision of the Five Points of Calvinism into “Five Points of the New Theology,” an optimistic statement of Unitarian faith, in which he said he believed in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and progress onwards and upwards forever. This affirmation of faith became widely popular in Unitarian circles, and remained popular for decades — I remember hearing it in the Unitarian church of my childhood in the late 1960s.

You can read more about Clarke in the article at the UU Historical Society’s Dictionary of UU Biography. And tomorrow I’ll tell you about the Universalist who was born two hundred years ago this year — possibly the most famous Universalist that ever lived.

A call for beauty tips for male ministers

Mr. Crankypants loooves Ms. Peacebang, who writes the blog Beauty Tips for Ministers — she is smart, snarky, funny, and calls people out for wearing those clunky hippy Birkenstock sandals in the pulpit. Anyone who can rid the world of even a few public displays of Birkenstocks gets Mr. Crankypants’ undying devotion.

However, Mr. Crankypants notes with sorrow that Beauty Tips for Ministers is basically a femme-blog. Those of us on the more masculine end of the gender spectrum worry about things like Windsor vs. four-in-hand, wingtips and Oxfords, three vs. two buttons, trouser breaks and cuffs, etc. Search Beauty Tips for Minister for any reference to “Windsor” and you will come up blank. Yet even slobs like Dan, Mr. C.’s stupid alter-ego, are forced to think about such matters when they go to get a new suit (which has happened twice in Dan’s whole life) and the tailor asks, “Cuffs or no cuffs?” Alas: there is no blog to which slobs like Dan can turn for answers to such questions.

The well-dressed gentleman actually does spend quite a bit of time thinking about such things, and he will make judgements about other men based on things like whether they have French cuffs or not. And the well-dressed gentleman sitting in the pews (a rare bird indeed in these dark days when so few men bother to dress well on Sunday morning) will look up at a male minister and say to himself, “Humph, a Windsor knot with a button-down collar. Good grief, cuffs on plain-front trousers! What’s up with this guy?!” By the end of the service, this well-dressed gentleman in the pews will have been so distracted by by the sad state of the minister’s attire, he will have heard not a word of the sermon.

Mr. Crankypants wishes that Peacebang would find a male collaborator to address such knotty problems as the perfectly-tied bow tie (and yes, the pun was deliberate, deal with it). The world desperately needs a blogger who can help those male ministers who grew up in the sad days of “business casual,” teach them whether the tie should touch the bottom or the top of the belt buckle, and let them know what to answer when the tailor asks, “Dress right or left?”

Water communion, and the interconnectedness of all living beings

Story for water communion service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto:

Each year we do this water communion service. When we share our water in the common bowl, it symbolizes that while we are separate people, we are also part of an interdependent community.

You probably know about the water cycle. When it rains, water falls from clouds onto the ground, and eventually it flows into a river, and all rivers flow down to the ocean. Water evaporates from the ocean and forms clouds, the clouds drift over the land, it rains, and the cycle begins again. You’re in the middle of this cycle because you drink about 2 liters of water every day, and then you sweat or urinate and put water back into the water cycle. So water is constantly on the move.

You probably know that water is made up of molecules, and that each water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Water molecules are incredibly tiny, so tiny you cannot see them. If you had 18 grams of water, or a little more than half an ounce, that would be about 6 x 10^23 molecules. The molecular weight of water is approximately 18, and therefore 18 grams of water should have a number of molecules equal to Avogadro’s number, or 6.02 x 10^23.

This is a fairly large number:
602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules —
which is the same as 6.02 x 10^23 molecules, or we can also say 602 sextillion molecules.

If you’re a child who weighs about 77 pounds, or 35 kilograms, then you have about 20 liters of water in your body (adults, you can multiply up to figure it out for yourselves). That’s approximately 20,000 grams of water, or 6.02 x 10^26, or 602 septillion, molecules of water in your body if you’re a child. And if you drink 2 liters of water a day, you’re replacing about ten percent of that, or 6 x 10^25 molecules, each day. So if you are 3,650 days old (that’s ten years old), about 2.2 x 10^28 water molecules have already passed through your body. And here’s what that number looks like:

22,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules have passed through your body in ten years.

Because water is constantly cycling around, and because every human being has such large numbers of molecules of water cycling through them, there’s a very good chance that each one of us has at least a few molecules of water that were formerly in the body of Socrates, the great philosopher. We each probably have some molecules of water that were once in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and of the Buddha, and any number of great and wise people who lived in the past.

Thus when we say that we are all interconnected, that statement is quite literally true — we are all interconnected through the water cycle, not only with each other, but with all living beings past and present. Jesus, Confucius, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Eliza Tupper Wilkes who was the first Unitarian minister in Palo Alto — you might be literally connected with each of these good and wise people.

Tip of the hat to Steve Hersey for saying something much like this in the Watertown, Mass., UU congregation many years ago.

Dr. Watts

I’ve been reading through Isaac Watts’ Hymns and Spiritual Songs. He uses clear, vigorous language to present vivid and compelling imagery. I often disagree with his theology, but I think his hymns have rarely been surpassed in the English language. And sometimes I do I agree with his theology. Take, for example, this hymn:

Hymn 1:24.
The rich sinner dying, Psalm 49:6-9. Eccl. 8:8. Job 3:14-15.

1 In vain the wealthy mortals toil,
And heap their shining dust in vain,
Look down and scorn the humble poor,
And boast their lofty hills of gain.

2 Their golden cordials cannot ease
Their pained hearts or aching heads,
Nor fright nor bribe approaching death
From glittering roofs and downy beds.

3 The lingering, the unwilling soul
The dismal summons must obey,
And bid a long a sad farewell
To the pale lump of lifeless clay.

4 Thence they are huddled to the grave,
Where kings and slaves have equal thrones;
Their bones without distinction lie
Amongst the heap of meaner bones.

Now that’s what I call vivid imagery. Wouldn’t you enjoy singing that hymn? Wouldn’t it help keep you focused on what’s really important in life?

How to disestablish your congregation

If you’re part of any liberal religious community, your congregation is no longer a part of established power structure of the United States. We religious liberals are so far out of the establishment that the majority of U.S. residents don’t even know who we are. This is why so many people in the U.S. believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim — he’s actually a religious liberal (of the mainline Protestant variety), but more U.S. residents know what Islam is than know what liberal religion is, so since Obama is not a born-again Christian they assume he’s a Muslim. As for you, they probably think you belong to a cult.

Your liberal congregation has already been disestablished in pragmatic terms, so now it’s time to disestablish your congregation in terms of self-perception, and in terms of the way you organize. Here’s a handy checklist to help you accomplish this goal:

(1) Re-focus your energy on the core mission of liberal religious congregations: holding common worship services where we focus on that which is larger than our individual selves; raising our children in religious community; holding appropriate rites of passage when people are born, when they marry, and when they die.

(2) Recognize that what we stand for as religious liberals is extremely countercultural in today’s society: we distrust consumerism because it weakens and shrivels our best selves; we distrust the current economic system (which is supported by both liberals and conservatives) both because it is founded on consumerism, and because at present it is increasing the number of poor people in the U.S.; we reject the idea that born-again Christianity is the norm against which all other religion is judged; etc. These countercultural stands mean that we will never be fully accepted in the halls of established power. Continue reading →

Letters from UU ministers in SF Chronicle

Two letters from Unitarian Universalist ministers in today’s San Francisco Chronicle speak out against anti-Muslim acts, including the tiny-but-nasty Florida church which plans to burn copies of the Qu’ran on Saturday. Barbara and Bill Hamilton-Holway, ministers of the UU Church of Berkeley, call on non-Muslim congregations to include readings from the Qu’ran in their worship services this week. Amy Zucker Morgenstern, senior minister here in Palo Alto and writing for the Palo Alto Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice, calls for tolerance and invites people to participate in an Interfaith Witness for Peace in Palo Alto on Sept. 19.

I’ll include the full text of both letters below, or read them at the Chronicle’s Web site. Continue reading →

Two crows

When we were out walking in the city on Sunday, Carol and I saw two crows fighting over something. As we got closer, one crow won and rose up triumphantly, a long strip of furry gray squirrel pelt hanging from its bill. “Ew,” we both said together; I had been expecting the crows to be fighting over a scrap of food that some human had dropped at the side of the road. As for the crows, they didn’t care what we thought one way or the other.

This includes us

If you’re an anti-Christian Unitarian Universalist, hold on for a bit, because this post applies to you, too. In an essay in the most recent Christian Century magazine, the Christian theologian Douglas John Hall writes:

“I remember a conversation early in the 1970s in which a small group of clergy in the city where I lived were discussing the question, “On the pattern of Revelation chapters 2 and 3, what do you think ought to be the ‘message of the Spirit’ to the churches of this city?” I found myself answering this question almost without knowing what I said: ‘The Spirit writes to the churches of North America: Disestablish yourselves!’

“I’m afraid my words fell on the ears of my hearers as though I had been speaking in tongues. But I continued to pursue that theme in many lectures and a whole series of books on the future I envisaged, with the help of many others, for a Christian movement that had seriously tried to disentangle itself from the ethos and assumptions of the imperial peoples of the West, with their explicit or implicit racism, ethnocentrisms, militarism, and ideologies of power….”

So says Donald Hall. And the same thing applies to the Unitarian Universalist movement: we need to disentangle ourselves from the ethos and assumptions of the ruling powers of the United States, to disestablish ourselves (actually, in our case, part of the task is finally to understand how little political influence we actually have, and to re-conceptualize ourselves on that basis).

Discuss.

Urban hike: North Beach to Haight Ashbury

We started walking at about eleven, after buying some nectarines at the North Beach Farmer’s Market. It was a perfectly sunny day, and not too chilly. We climbed up Taylor Street to enjoy the views from Nob Hill (elev. 341 ft.) — we could see Alcatraz Island, the waterfront, and sailboats on the bay, but haze kept us from seeing across the bay. We passed Grace Cathedral where a man in a black cassock was showing off the Ghiberti doors to a knot of three or four people, down the hill, and over to Alamo Square. In the Alamo Square park, a young woman held out a camera asked us to take a picture of her and her two friends in front of the famous row of “Painted Ladies.” As we walked away, Carol said, “I didn’t even notice them until I turned to take the picture.” They were behind us as we were walking. “Neither did I,” I admitted.

There were swarms of people at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. We decided not to go in, so we went across the way to the DeYoung Museum. There were swarms of people there, too. Why pay all that money for admission fees (thirty dollars at the Academy of Science!) if you’re not going to be able to see anything because of all the people? We walked over to Haight Ashbury. I wanted to visit Forever After Books, but it was gone. I had never been to Haight Street before.

Except for the half a dozen stores selling drug paraphernalia, Haight Street would be just another upscale shopping district, thronged with upper middle class young people. A scruffy-looking white kid with a beard and a knapsack walked by us; from his knapsack hung a bright metal coffee cup and a red teflon-coated frying pan. He looked kind of dirty and a little bewildered. He had a cane, and he decided to hold it in front of himself, balancing it on his outstretched hand as he walked through the crowds. It tottered, he moved his hand to keep it balanced, and it almost hit the face of a girl with perfect hair and a fashionable tank-top. She gave him a look, part sneer, part scorn, part anger that he would intrude on her physical space. I didn’t blame her one bit. This poor neo-hippie kid was trying to go back to a mythical time when Flower Power ruled Haight Street, when guys could balance canes on their hand and girls would think it was cool. Today, being a hippie is just another consumer lifestyle choice that involves buying stuff at head shops.

On a quiet side street of Haight, a young woman was having a garage sale — really a sidewalk sale since her apartment didn’t have a garage. For months, Carol has been looking for a basic sewing machine that she can use to make some basic skirts — and there was a sewing machine, barely used, and still in its original box. For months, Carol has been looking for a duffle bag with wheels, so when she’s going to promote her books or work on composting toilets she has a big piece of luggage to carry what she needs — and there was the perfect duffle. She bought both for twenty-two dollars, put the sewing machine in the rolling duffle bag, and with the sewing machine rolling behind us we went over to Duboce Avenue to catch the trolley back to North Beach. It was the perfect ending to a ten-mile urban hike.