Three views of Chinatown

For dinner, I had boiled lettuce with oyster sauce. From where I sat, I could watch the cook make it: drop half a head of iceberg lettuce into a big vat of simmering sauce, leave it for a moment, fish it out with a big strainer, put it on a plate, put some oyster sauce on it. I also had a big bowl of fish congee (rice porridge), with toothpick-sized slivers of ginger and a few chopped chives thrown on top. It was perfect food for a New Englander, not too flavorful and even bland, but very comforting. We were the only roundeyes in the place, so they gave us forks, just in case.

After dinner, we heard music, and followed the sound to the Chinatown Night Market. There were two ensembles playing: I’m not sure, but maybe this was Cantonese guangdong music. The singers seemed to know the people who stood around in the chilly night air to listen. One of the singers, a woman of indeterminate middle age, had a voice that wasn’t particularly sweet, but she was musical and expressive. She sang one song that everyone else seemed to know; people were nodding their heads and singing along. In the ensemble behind her, a man playing a lute-like instrument brought his little boy along, and the boy tried to feed him a lollipop while he was playing. Someone wandered in and started talking to a man playing a two-stronged bowed instrument (an erhu?); the musician smiled, and shook him off so he could concentrate on his playing. The woman finished the song, and the man selling old coins at a nearby booth cheered and clapped his hands over his head for her.

We stopped to look at an installation done under the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art in Storefronts project. Artist Cynthia Toms created an installation in a building that had served as a boarding house, nightclub, and restaurant. We looked at all the objects that were designed to evoke memories of Chinatown, but what really stood out for me was the the slide presentation off in one corner of the store window, housed in something that looked like an old television set: a 1970s photograph of a Chinatown streetscape, a snapshot of a birthday party, a vintage photograph of Chinatown showing some people freeing a woman who had been enslaved in a brothel, a picture of that very building as a restaurant, and so on. We watched for five or ten minutes, then Carol stood out in the middle of the street to take a photograph of the store front.

Fear, pt. 2

Today’s San Mateo County Times reports that employees are now paying more of health care costs: “The average employer-provided health plan now costs workers nearly $4,000 a year, up 14 percent from last year…. At the same time, workers also saw average co-payments for routine office visits rise 10 percent and deductibles continue their surge upwards.”

From my own experience, here are two other things to wonder about: (1) My last two employers could no longer afford to pay for health care for spouses of workers — in many couples, both spouses need to work, not for the additional paycheck, but in order to be able to afford health care. (2) Twice in the past three years, my health insurance provider refused to pay $1,000 of a health care bill, once for a doctor’s office visit, and once for a visit to the emergency room — even if you have health insurance, you can no longer be sure that your insurer will actually pay your health costs.

And here’s something else to wonder about: Both the liberals and the conservatives have been completely unable to address the problem of how to pay for health care. The conservatives offer free-market solutions, when it’s quite clear that the health care industry is not a free market. The liberals offer government health plans, when it’s quite clear that the U.S. government is not presently able to fund additional health care. So what’s going to happen? No one knows. At this point, the only thing you can do is stay perfectly healthy. And that’s when fear creeps in: what will happen if I develop some serious illness? How much of my care will I have to provide? Will I become another health care bankruptcy case?

Fear

We were talking about some matter of church politics today, doesn’t matter what, when the subject of fear came up. Some sense of fear seems to be driving some people, we decided. But why? We thought about it for a moment, and I said, There’s always the lousy state of the economy; I know that’s injected a fair amount of fear into my life.

In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt is famous for saying that the only the we have to fear is fear itself. As we struggle to emerge from the Great Recession, there’s a different quality to the fear — it’s mingled in with fears of terrorists, fears of foreigners living among us, fears of losing our honor in Iraq and Afghanistan, fears of looming environmental disasters — but I still would like to have some catchy phrase that helped bring my economic fears out into the light of day where I could look at them clearly.

It’s all about religious tolerance

Joe Volk of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) just sent out an email message encouraging all Quakers to “state publicly that you stand with our brothers and sisters in the American Muslim community” in the days leading up to September 11.

I heard about this from my friend E, a Quaker and a yoga teacher, who writes on her blog: “It has been heart-rending for me to read about the growing rancor and bigotry about religion and race…. My great grandparents fled the pogroms, and my parents felt free to become members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)….”

We’re not quite at the level of pogroms yet, but Rev. Meredith Garmon, minister at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville, Florida, writes in a blog post today that anti-Muslim hate crimes are increasing; in addition, “Here in my home of Gainesville, Fla., a local fringe church known for its anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT rhetoric has been getting national media attention for their planned ‘Burn a Qu’ran Day’ on Sept. 11th.”

Whatever you may think of the proposed Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan, I know you’re not going to burn a copy of the Qu’ran, or pee on a mosque, or stab a Muslim taxi driver. Whichever side of the issue you’re on, I know you’re not going to spout increasingly inflammatory rhetoric in the days leading up to 9/11 (which this year are the final days of Ramadan). Nope, we’re all going to show the best of religious liberalism, and spend the next two weeks thinking peace and publicly supporting the principle of religious tolerance.

Below is the text of the FCNL email message. Continue reading →

Here come the Assyrians

When we last left them, Batman, Robin, and Batgirl were about to be burned to death by the evil King Manasseh [cue dramatic music]….

Batman somehow gets one hand free,
Reaches his utility belt, presses
The Assyrian army activation device.
Soldiers appear on the streets of Jerusalem,
Commandoes cut Batman and the others free.
It’s another fighting free-for-all!
Crash! Ka-blam! Manasseh goes down!

Batman swoops over and jumps on Manasseh;
Batgirl and Robin put Bat-manacles on him.
“Time for Plan B,” Manasseh says to himself.
The Assyrians and Batman take Manasseh to Babylon.
Manasseh looks up, and calls on Elohim.
“Elohim,” he says, “I repent! I’ll be good!”
So Elohim lets him go back to Jerusalem.

The Assyrians groan, “Not again! Every time
We think we’ve won, the Judeans repent.
Then the guys writing the Bible badmouth us again!”
Batman just grinned : he’s got Batgirl and Robin.
Manasseh grinned too : the idols are gone;
Elohim gets bribed with burnt sacrifices;
And Manasseh still sits on the throne of David.

2 Chron 33.10-20

Manasseh meets Batman

Manasseh became the king of Judah
When he was at the awkward age
Of twelve: neither child nor man.
He reared up altars to Asheroth,
And to Baal, and other idols.
What was worse was when he burned
His son. Old Elohim was pissed.

Gotham City, capital of Judah,
Is now corrupt. The Caped Crusader
Suddenly appears, out from his cave,
prowling the streets in his Bat-chariot,
Robin at his side, Batgirl offstage.
Manasseh doesn’t know what to make
Of Batman’s tights and weird mask.

So he hauls off and hits him. Pow!
Robin fights Manasseh’s wizards.
Wham! Batgirl swoops in next.
Bash! Ka-zam! Fists are flying!
But wait! Batman is tied to a stake!
So are Robin and Batgirl! They struggle.
Manasseh lights a fire around them….

2 Chron 33.1-9, with thanks to Erp and Jean.

Part II

The punishment of Prometheus

Another in a series of stories I’m writing for liberal religious kids. As always, your comments and criticisms are welcome.

Once upon a time, the immortal god Prometheus stole fire from the other immortal gods and goddesses, and gave it to mortal human beings.

Zeus, who had just become the new ruler over all the other gods and goddesses, was very angry. To punish Prometheus, Zeus commanded him to be nailed to a cliff in Scythia, a distant place at the end of the world. Zeus told two of his henchmen, a demon named Might and another demon named Violence, to take Prometheus to Scythia. Prometheus had taken the fire from Hephaestus, who was the god who made things out of metal for the other gods and goddesses at his forge, so Hephaestus had to go along to make shackles of bronze to hold Prometheus tightly against the rocks.

After traveling many miles, at last they came at last to a high and lonely cliff. Hephaestus began working while Might and Violence watched to make sure Prometheus didn’t get away.

“I don’t have the heart to bind another god in this desolate place,” said Hephaestus to Prometheus, as he hammered bronze nails into the cliff face. “Yet I have to do it because it’s dangerous to ignore the commands of Zeus. Prometheus, I don’t want to do this to you. The sun will scorch you during the day, and the cold will freeze you at night. This is what has happened because you opposed the will of Zeus. This is what you get for giving fire to the human beings.” Hephaestus paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “Zeus is a new ruler, and new rulers are harsh.”

“Why are you delaying?” said the demon named Might. “Why do you pity this god who has betrayed all other gods and goddesses by giving such power to mortal beings?” Continue reading →

Happy 90th birthday, 19th Amendment!

Yesterday marked the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. Ninety years is a relatively short period of time: within memory of people I know, women did not have the right to vote in federal elections.

Unfortunately, by the time that women were gaining the right to vote, women ministers were finding it nearly impossible to find settlements in Unitarian or Universalist churches. There had been a period of a few decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when a few dozen women would get settlements in our churches. But by 1920, that period was over. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Unitarian Universalists began ordaining — and settling — women in significant numbers once again.

Maybe we’ve done better in politics than we’ve done in religion. In politics, the fact that we have powerful female politicians on both the left — Nancy Pelosi is a liberal powerhouse — and on the far right — Sarah Palin is a central figure of the Tea Party — is remarkable. In religion, however, most religious groups do not have gender equality among their clergy or equivalent leaders; many religious groups do not allow women to even serve as clergy at all. Sure, Unitarian Universalists have more women ministers than male ministers, but we constitute a tiny fraction of the U.S. population.

In her preface to a 1992 reprinting of Sexism and God-Talk, Rosemary Radford Reuther wrote: “The starting point for feminist theology, perhaps all theology, is ‘cognitive dissidence.’ What is is not what ought to be. Not only that, but what we have been told ought to be is not always what ought to be” [SCM Press: London, p. xix].

The feminist revolution is not even complete within Unitarian Universalism: men still dominate the highest-paying ministry jobs. In many other religious traditions, the feminist revolution has barely begun. Sure, I’m ready to celebrate the 19th Amendment: break out the cake and cookies! And while we’re celebrating that political achievement, let’s figure out how we can do a little cognitive dissidence in religion. Maybe we can figure out how to reach out to feminists in other religious traditions, to offer support if they need it, to learn from them so we can keep moving forward in our own feminist revolution, and perhaps to make progress towards a world where all religions recognize the equality of women and men.