A family story

I’ve been trying to write up the story of Demeter and Persephone for a Sunday school class. It has a very dark side to it, as do so many religious stories; the dark side is one of the things children like best about these stories. They are like Grimm’s fairy tales, filled with all the horrible things that children know exist in the real world but can’t talk about: Hansel and Gretel’s parents deliberately lose them in the woods; Siddartha Gautama abandons his wife and young child; Lot throws his daughters out to the crowd to be ravaged; Jesus is sentenced to a bloody death on trumped-up political charges; Persephone is abducted by the god of death, and in retribution her mother makes innocent human beings die in a massive famine. Sometimes I think that even though we adults try to put some kind of moral gloss on them, what children learn from these stories is that life is essentially amoral.

In any case, as I sat here today sorting through the details of the Persephone story, as presented in the Homeric hymns and in Ovid’s Metapmorphoses, I realized that many of the main characters in the story are closely related. Persephone is the child of Zeus and Demeter; Hades, Demeter, and Zeus are all children of Cronos and Rhea, and grandchildren of Gaia, mother earth. Not only that, but the Homeric hymn makes it clear that Zeus and Gaia (Persephone’s father and grandmother) set up the situation where Hades can abduct Persephone. Talk about a dysfunctional family!

I don’t want to emphasize this aspect of the story in the version for children, and the only way I can get it out of my head is to inflict it on you. So below you will find the dysfunctional family version of the Persephone story….

Continue reading →

Pacific fog

This afternoon, while I was waiting to meet someone in Berkeley, I walked up the hills behind the Graduate Theological Union, up past the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, up further to where I got a view of the bay. Fog covered most of San Francisco, except for the tall buildings downtown, and a little bit of the waterfront; fog poured around the south side of San Bruno Mountain; fog filled the Golden Gate, so all you could see of the bridge was the very top of the north tower; fog rolled around the Marin headlands and streamed up inland towards the Delta. South of San Bruno down the Peninsula, the higher mountains held the fog back; I could see that San Mateo had no fog. And there was no fog in Berkeley; the city stretched out below me, and I could see little specks that were cars moving along University Ave., west towards the freeway. It was about three hours from sunset, and the way the sun lit of the fog from behind, and the way it shone on the silvery waters of the bay, was enough to make my heart ache from the beauty of it all.

Update on faith development Web page

I just revised and updated the “Annotated Bibliography on Human and Faith Development” that has been on my web site since 2003. In particular, I completely revised the section on James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, clarifying my criticisms of this book.

What key books have I left out? Am I right to be so critical of Fowler? Your comments, suggestions, and criticisms of this page will be much appreciated.

Pacific fog

There are places in Silicon Valley where you can stand along the edge of San Francisco Bay and look back at the Coastal Range, and during the summer you can watch as the fog from the Pacific Ocean spills over the low points in the ridge line. On the other side of the Coastal Range, an ocean current hits the shore line, and deep cold water comes to the surface where it meets warmer air, and condenses into fog. The fog will build up until it’s five hundred or a thousand feet high, high enough to spill over the low points in the ridge. You can watch the fog working its way down through the distant woodlands some miles away and hundreds of feet higher than where you stand, down at sea level, in the warm bright sunshine of Silicon Valley.

Farewell, Isaac Bonewits

Isaac Bonewits died yesterday. He was not only an influential Neopagan thinker and organizer, and a key figure in the North American Druid community, but was also affiliated with the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS). At The Wild Hunt blog, Jason Pitzl-Waters has links to tributes and obituaries, and his commenters have added other links.

To me, Bonewits was most important as a thinker. Back in the 1970s, he coined the term “thealogy” as an alternative to the term “theology,” which latter term may imply certain beliefs and biases; most importantly, linguistically speaking “theology” has a definite masculine gender (from its root “theos”), and forming a complementary word of feminine gender was a brilliant move in the ongoing feminist critique of religion. His writing and thinking deserves wider consideration, beyond the Neopagan circles to which it seems to have been largely restricted.

No wedding bells this week

According to an article on the Los Angeles Times Web site posted about an hour ago, Judge Walker did not remove the stay on his ruling on Proposition 8, and there can be no immediate same-sex marriages in California until he does so:

Reporting from San Francisco — A federal judge Thursday refused to permanently stay his ruling overturning Proposition 8 but extended a temporary hold to give supporters time to appeal the historic ruling.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who overturned the measure on Aug. 4, agreed to give its sponsors until Aug. 18 to appeal his ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. No new marriages can take place until then.

Walker said the sponsors of Proposition 8 do not have legal standing to appeal his order because they were not directly affected by it.

That last paragraph mentions an important point. The fact that the State of California, in the persons of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown, refused to defend Prop. 8 puts the opponents of Prop 8 in a legal position that may not allow for an appeal. Having said that, given the current membership of the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s hard to believe they would let that stand in the way of their hearing such an appeal. Politics: endlessly fascinating, not entirely rational.

Comprehensive filing system

Carol has a book about managing large volumes of email, titled Hamster Revolution. In order to manage email, the authors of the book (Michael Song, Vicki Halsey, and Tim Burress) recommend using the same filing system for email that you use for all other files. To make filing easier, they further suggest using four broad filing categories: clients, output, team, and admin.

I liked the idea of using the same categories for email that I use for my other files. Of course, that raised another issue: I need to use the same filing categories throughout my computer that I use in my physical files in my filing cabinets. I also liked the idea of using just a few broad filing categories. And that raised another issue: those of us who work in congregations don’t really have clients, so that won’t work as a filing category. After a good bit of thought, I decided to use the following four big filing categories: 1 People including people in the congregation, and other stakeholders; 2. Output, including programs and ministries; 3. Team, including paid staff, volunteer staff, and lay leaders; and 4. Administration.

But which of my existing file headings should go into which of the four big categories? For example, do I put my files on rites of passage under Output, since they are a ministry of the congregation, or do I file them under People, since rites of passage are for specific people? In the book, Song, Halsey, and Burress point out that the first three categories can be arranged in order of importance, with the most important category at the beginning of the list:

People and Stakeholders
Output (programs, ministries, etc.)
Team (staff, volunteers, lay leaders, etc.)
Administrative

— where Team creates Output which serves and guides People and Stakeholders (with Administration as a necessary foundation to everything else). Now, when trying to decide between two filing categories, use the one highest up in the list. Thus, my files on rites of passage could go in Output, but I’m going to put them into People because that’s higher on the list.

I hope I’m making this clear, although I’m trying to explain this concept in a short blog post, while in the book this takes up an entire chapter. My most important point is this: although the filing categories proposed in Hamster Revolution are designed for the for-profit business world, I think they can be readily adapted to the world of congregations, using the modifications I suggest above. Of course, if you want, you can go read the book, or ask me questions via a comment. And for further clarification, I’ll give my complete filing hierarchy below as an example.

Continue reading →

“Sex with Ducks”

Back at the end of May, the music duo Garfunkel and Oates posted a music video on Youtube titled “Sex with Ducks.” See, Pat Robertson apparently once said that if you legalize same-sex marriage, pretty soon people would be having sex with ducks. When I heard that, I immediately wanted to know: which ducks? I mean, it’s hard imagining anyone being attracted to Anas clypeata, but maybe that’s what turns Pat Robertson on. Who knows?

Anyway, the music video by Garfunkel and Oates is very silly, and the song, with its bright bubblegum melody and oh-so-sweet harmonies, is a hoot.

Thank you, Jean, for pointing this song out! And UU Jester, I want to know how this applies to duckies! And, for everyone’s reference, here are some of the lyrics of the song, taken from the MySpace page of Garfunkel and Oates: Continue reading →

Overheard

Our church rents space to a private elementary school, and this summer they are running a summer school. I know a couple of the children in this summer program because also go to our Sunday school. One of them, a boy who’s about ten years old, is surprisingly good with words. He’s also, in his very talkative way, quite shy. He is one of the last children left at summer school today, and because the playground is four feet from my office window, I’ve been listening to him talk to one of the teachers:

“My eyes burn.”

The teacher laughs, so it can’t be that he got something in his eyes. So what happened? I can’t figure out what they’re talking about.

“They burrrrn! No, please delete that picture of me. Delete it!”

Ah, now I get it.