Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.
I first noticed the doll leaning up against a child’s grave back in August. The doll was a bit faded and weather-beaten even then, so it has been standing at the grave for some time now. The child died in 1862, so the doll could not have been left by someone who knew her. I like the fact that whoever cuts the grass has left the doll in place.
For the past month and a half, I’ve been looking for flowers in the aster tribe (Tribe Astereae). I’ve always liked asters. I don’t know why. There’s something about the off-white and pale lavender colors that gets to me.
I guess it’s a kind of spiritual experience when I see asters in bloom. Whatever “spiritual” means.
I’m not able to tell which species of aster I’m looking at. In the genus Symphiotrichum alone, there are 27 species native to New England. Go Botany has a dichotomous key for Symphiotrichum. However, for some species the key requires 14x magnification of the bracts and disk flowers, but all I have is a 10x hand lens.
Nevertheless, I should sit down with one of these plants and try to work through the key. Not that it matters what species I’m looking at. Not that it will make the flowers any more (or less) beautiful. But why not observe them more closely?
We left our rental in San Mateo, California, on June 20. From then until September 1, we didn’t have a permanent address. We were living out of our car from June 20 to July 17. Then we had a short-term and very inexpensive rental ($500 a month, plus work barter) on the south coast of Massachusetts. As of September 1, we finally have a permanent address on Boston’s South Shore. Even now, most of our belongings are still in storage, and we’ve been living with whatever we managed to pack into the car.
We’ve had a pretty comfortable summer, all things considered. But our experience has made me think about what I’ve heard from some of the homeless people I’ve known. Now most of the homeless people I’ve known have not been street people. There are quite a few different kinds of homelessness. There’s couch-surfing, where you do short-term stays with friends and family, often rotating amongst several people so no one gets sick of you. There’s living in an RV or converted van, which can entail parking at night with friends or family, or parking at night in state or county campgrounds, or parking on the streets; the latter option is where you’re the most vulnerable. There’s car dwelling, which less comfortable than RV or van dwelling, since you have to sleep in a seat not a bed. There’s living in long-term homeless shelters, where you’re guaranteed a bed in one place for at least a month at a time. There’s living night-to-night in homeless shelters, where you have to line up every day to get a spot in the shelter. Then there’s living on the street, where you’re sleeping outdoors pretty much all the time.
In the popular imagination, “homelessness” means the last option: living on the street. But really homelessness is a state of being where you don’t have a permanent address. It’s a state of being where you have a lot less control over your life, and a lot less predictability. Considered this way, homelessness is similar to being a refugee.
As I said, we’ve had a pretty comfortable existence. We have adequate income, and we knew we’d find a permanent place to live sooner or later. We have enough stability, and enough money, that we could be somewhat picky about our rental options.
As comfortable as we are, not having a permanent address caused a certain amount of stress. It can be difficult buying things online, and these days you almost have to buy some things online, but with no permanent address where are you going to have them shipped? (We solved that problem by renting a mailbox at a UPS Store, which is not inexpensive.) There’s stress associated with the ambiguity of not really having a permanent legal address. There’s stress because your clothes always look a little rumpled; even I, a slovenly dresser, have found this to be annoying. There’s psychic stress: sometimes you don’t quite know where you’re going to be next week, and that’s uncomfortable. There’s more psychic stress: you feel a definite lack of control.
Again, we’ve been quite comfortable in the last two and a half months, but all these little stressors have added up. I’m more tired than usual, and less efficient. Even though I have a solid job, and we have solid financial resources, living out of a car is tiring.
This tallies with what I’ve heard from the homeless people I’ve known. They’ve talked about how the uncertainty can wear you down, can make you less efficient. Then if you’re looking for work on top of that, or working a low-wage job (and low wage jobs are far more stressful than knowledge-worker jobs), it’s all going to add up. You’re going to be tired and stressed out.
This is something to think about when we’re thinking about how to help people who are unhoused. If you tell unhoused people to get a job first, or to kick their addiction first, I’m not sure that’s actually a pragmatic, practical approach. Based on my brief experience living out of a car, I tend to believe that it makes more sense to put people in housing first, then when they have some stability in their lives they’ll be able to address the other problems.
If I walk out the front door of the house we’re staying in, sometime after it’s fully dark, and look up, I can see the Milky Way. For the past thirteen years I’ve been living in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has so much light pollution that you’re lucky if you can see a few stars at night. In that whole thirteen years I probably saw the Milky Way fewer than ten times. So even though we’ve been living in Westport for a month and a half, I’m still amazed when I look up and see all those stars.
When I was a child, I remember seeing the Milky Way all the time. But gradually, light pollution grew worse and worse there. By 2003 when my father sold that house that we’d grown up in, you could see far fewer stars. And for most of my adult life, I’ve lived in cities or congested suburbs where I couldn’t see the stars.
It feels good to look up and see the Milky Way. I guess it helps orient me to where we are in the universe. By next week, we’ll be living in Cohasset. We’ll be in the midst of the massive light pollution of Greater Boston. I’m glad that I’ll no longer be spending three and a half hours a day driving to and from work. But I’m going to miss the beauty of the night sky.
For the past month, we’ve been living in Westport, Mass., and I’ve been commuting to my new job in Cohasset, Mass. It’s at least an hour and a half drive, more if there’s traffic. By the time I come home, I’m often tired of driving. Fortunately, there’s a rest area almost exactly halfway between the church in Cohasset and our temporary place in Westport. I often find myself pulling into that rest area to stretch my legs and clear my head.
It’s not much of a rest area. The parking lot is too small for the amount of truck traffic, with big rigs everywhere. By contrast, the lot for cars is usually mostly empty. Inside the building, there’s a Burger King and a Dunkin Donuts. But they seem to sell most of their food at their drive-through windows, because there’s hardly ever anyone sitting in the dining area. In spite of all the tractor trailer rigs, the whole place feels oddly deserted.
I stopped there on my way home today. It was lunch time, and the dining area was as deserted as usual. A memory forced its way to the surface of my consciousness. Back in 2008, I was working in New Bedford, and once a month I’d drive up to Newton for Sacred Harp singing. Ted, whom I sang with in another choir in New Bedford, started getting into Sacred Harp singing, too. So we’d drive up together to sing Sacred Harp. But I’d often have missed dinner in order to sing, so on the way home we’d stop at this exact same rest area to grab a sandwich. We’d spend the long drives talking, and we’d sit in that deserted rest area — even back then, it was always deserted — and talk some more while we ate. Mostly we talked about music. I still remember how he said he used to sing with five different ensembles when he lived in San Francisco, one for each night of the week.
When I moved to California, I lost touch with Ted. I’m not a good correspondent, and neither was he. A few years ago, I learned from one of his siblings that he had died.
Ted and I both sang bass. He was a pleasure to sing next to, not just because he was a good musician and a good singer. Some choral singers are on an ego trip, wanting to show off how good they are. That kind of singer is not fun to sit next to. Ted was the other kind of singer, the singer who’s there for the music, who subsumes their ego in the music. Marge Piercy talked about something similar in her poem “To Be of Use”: “I want to be with people who submerge / in the task … / who are not parlor generals and field deserters / but move in a common rhythm / when the food must come in or the fire be put out.” Piercy was talking about work, not music, but you see the same kind of thing in music. As it happens, I did actually do physical work with Ted on several occasions, and he worked the way he sang: submerged in the task, rather than a parlor general. That’s the kind of person I like to spend time with.
When I was in the rest area today, I got to thinking about Ted. I guess for me, that’s now the Ted memorial rest area. Not a bad thing to think about while I’m stretching my legs and getting a sandwich.
My uncle Bob died late last month. I’ve been thinking about him a lot. I talked to my younger sister about him, even wound up talking to some cousins I haven’t talked to in a long time. Thinking back about parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents and great-grandparents. All the things I don’t know, the people in old photographs we’ll never be able to identify because there’s no one we can ask, “Who was that? and who’s that next to them?…”
A short film on Vimeo by twenty-something filmmaker Devon Blackwell captures some of these feelings. As she looks at old family photographs, Blackwell says: “It’s frustrating, longing to talk to people I’ve never met….”
That’s the feeling I get when I look the old photo sitting on the desk next to my laptop, a picture of my great-grandparents Bessie and Lew Harper. I know almost nothing about them; the only way I know they are the people in the photo is because my grandmother wrote their names on the back. The last time my sister and I talked with our Uncle Lee, he told us how Bessie, his grandmother, had lived with our grandparents before she died. “I was probably her best friend in those years,” Uncle Lee said. I never knew that before. It was after Uncle Lee died that I found the photo of Bessie and Lew Harper, so I couldn’t ask him about it.
I had a videoconference call with Uncle Bob the week before he died. He looked good and sounded great. In my head, I was making plans to visit him this summer, assuming COVID would allow. I had some questions I wanted to ask him….
Peter Kasin, the coordinator of the monthly sea chantey singing from San Francisco Maritime Historical Park, sent out a holiday greeting filled with fish puns.
I love fish puns. Even though they give some people a haddock, and other people carp about them, and still others say that puns are crappie — I love fish puns.
What I liked best about Peter Kasin’s fish-pun-laden holiday greeting were the fishy Christmas carols: “Cod Rest Ye Moray, Gentlemenhaden,” “Shark, the Herring Angelfish Sing,” and “Koi to the World.”
I trout you can come up with any more fishy carols….
Sometimes when I’m talking to someone who has just been through a major life disaster, they will say, “Well, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ right?” They find it comforting to think that life will turn out all right in the end.
When I’m doing pastoral counseling, my job is mostly to listen, and maybe to help people find at least a little hope in their lives. If the phrase “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”gives them hope, then of course I agree with them.
But I can’t help thinking about all the people who have suffered through one of life’s disasters, and come out of the other end weaker, rather than stronger. And I think to myself: “What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you.” That can still be an expression of hope, just maybe a little more true to more people’s actual experiences.
So I was pleased to read about Kate Bowler’s new book, No Cure for Being Human (and Other Truths I Needed To Hear). Bowler’s earlier book, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved) gently showed up the mistakes of the Prosperity Gospel, that strange vaguely Christian theology which interprets any misfortune as some kind of personal failing that has invoked God’s disfavor.
Bowler’s new book continues in the same vein. Religion News Service says the book “is a broadside against a culture obsessed with the power of positive thinking.” Bowler is a professor at Duke University who has written academic studies of the Prosperity Gospel. And she survived stage 4 colon cancer while in her thirties, and “her health is fragile and will likely remain so.” So she is someone who can see just how damaging the prosperity gospel can be. And she’s out to provide a popular, friendly, optimistic alternative.
And boy, do we need an alternative to the Prosperity Gospel. Because it’s not just Christians who believe in the Prosperity Gospel. I have atheist friends who think this is the best of all possible worlds, that you can improve your life by making more money and “taking care of yourself,” that if anything goes wrong in your life it’s your own fault. I have Buddhist friends who believe that you wouldn’t suffer if you’d just meditate more, so if you feel bad it’s your own fault. And I have Pagan friends who are convinced that it’s negative thinking that causes life’s problems, meaning if you have any problems, it’s your own fault.
But of course it isn’t your fault. When bad things happen to you, more often than not it just means that bad things have happened to you. (Of course, if you do something foolish like storming the Capitol building and you find yourself in jail, then yes it actually is your fault.) I’m glad there are people like Kate Bowler who are willing to point out that the Prosperity Gospel in any form — Christian, atheist, Buddhist, Pagan — is wrong. There’s a better way: learn to live with life as it is, and instead of manufacturing fake hope, find real hope instead.
Update, October 10: Turns out when I wrote this, the anesthesia was still clouding my brain — my prose is even more confused and incoherent than usual. I’ll leave it up as written, so to show what anesthesia can do to you.
In college, I took a class with Lucius Outlaw, Jr., in which we read Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Husserl’s book opened up the possibility of observing the stream of one’s own consciousness, something I’ve been interested in, and have practiced, ever since. So when I went in for a colonoscopy yesterday, I decided to take the opportunity to try to observe what happened as I was given anesthesia, and later how I came out of anesthesia
Thinking back to a previous colonoscopy, I realized that I simply couldn’t remember some things I knew had happened after coming out of the anesthesia. I couldn’t, for example, remember getting dressed, though I knew I had done so. Before I underwent anesthesia yesterday, I wanted to see what I could retain in memory from the time I went under anesthesia until I arrived back at home.
I have a clear memory of when I lost consciousness. One of the nurses asked me to settle myself slightly differently on the gurney, which I did, and then — nothing.
Continue reading “Anesthesia”I became aware of feminism as a teenager, back in the 1970s. After some initial resistance, feminism wound up appealing to me not only because it held out the hope of equality for women, but also because it challenged existing gender norms and gender roles. I’ve never been comfortable with the stereotypical gender norms for men in the United States. I’m not the strong silent type. I’ve always liked working with children. I kinda like doing housework (except cooking, I’m bad at cooking). I didn’t know the term “toxic masculinity” back then, but I knew what toxic masculinity was, I knew it was hurting me, and I wanted to change it.
But we mostly remained stuck with the old gender norms throughout the 1980s, and the 1990s, and the 2000s. In 2002, I took a battery of psychological tests as part of my preparation for ministry. On one of those tests, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), I scored well out of the normal range on gender identity. Worried that I had some kind of pathology, I asked the psychologist who administered the test what that score meant. Oh, the psychologist said, don’t worry about that, men going into ministry often test out of the normal range on that scale. I found the psychologist’s reply even more disturbing than the thought that I might have a pathology — because the psychologist’s reply meant that men trained to be empathetic, caring, and group-oriented were considered pathological by society.
So when non-binary gender finally emerged as a viable option, I felt we were taking a step in the right direction. Biological females who happened to be assertive and articulate and willing to talk over men didn’t have to get pushed into a gender role that required them to be deferential and self-deprecating. Biological males who happened to be caring and empathetic didn’t have to get pushed into a gender role that required them to be strong, silent, and unemotional. Non-binary gender gave the promise of allowing a wide range of gender expression, far beyond these two examples.
Non-binary gender is a step in the right direction. It has opened a tiny and fragile space between male and female gender roles. But across the U.S., only a small percentage of people now consider themselves non-binary gender. For most people in the U.S., the old gender norms remain intact. I feel hopeful about that fragile open space where non-binary gender exists. But I’m discouraged that the old gender norms still wall in that tiny open space. I’m discouraged that non-binary gender has to be a matter of individual choice for just a few people, rather than a change in the way society understands gender. I’m discouraged at the thought that as a man, I’d still probably test as pathological on the MMPI. And I’m especially discouraged that non-binary gender people face wide social discrimination.
When non-binary people are discriminated against in much the same way the women are discriminated against, it seems to me that we’re still stuck with toxic masculinity running the show. We have taken a step in the right direction, but from my feminist perspective, it’s only a baby step; I wish we could grow up, and take adult-sized steps.