Category: Religion

The Pool of Enchantment, part one

Rolf, Sharpie, Possum, and the gang decide to act out another story from the Ramayana.

Click on the image above to view the video on Vimeo.

Full script below the fold.

Rolf: I want to hear the story of the Pool of Enchantment!

Sharpie: Oh, yes, the story from the Ramayana. I’ll act out the part of King Yudhisthira.

Possum: The King, or rather the Queen, and her siblings were chasing a deer who had stolen the wood needed to start a Brahmin’s sacred fire. After chasing the deer for a long time, they sat down under a tree, so thirsty they couldn’t go on.

Sharpie: If we don’t find water soon, we’ll die. Nakula, climb this tree to look for water.

Birago: There’s water over there.

Sharpie: Go get some water and bring it back to us.

Possum: Nakula soon found a pool of clear water. A Crane stood at the far edge of the pool.

Birago: Water! I’m so thirsty!

Voice: Do not drink, O Prince, until you answer my questions.

Possum: Nakula was thirsty, so he ignored the Voice. He drank the cool water, and in a few moments lay dead beside the pool.

Sharpie: Where is Nakula? Sahadeva, you’ll have to go and bring us some water.

Castor: On my way!

Castor: Nakula, dead! I’m so thirsty, I’ll drink before I find out what killed him.

Voice: Do not drink, O Prince, until you have answered my questions.

Possum: But Sahadeva had already drunk from the water, and also lay dead beside the pool.

Sharpie: Arjuna, find our siblings, and bring us water.

Nicky: I’ll take my bow and arrows, just in case.

Nicky: My two siblings, dead! I’ll find who or what killed them. But first, I’m so thirsty.

Voice: Do not drink, O Prince, until you have answered my questions.

Nicky: Who are you? Come out and fight with me.

Voice: Bwa ha ha ha. Do not drink, O Prince.

Possum: Soon Arjuna, too, lay dead beside the pool.

Sharpie: Bhima, go find our siblings, then bring water back to me.

[Nods silently.]

Possum: Seeing his siblings, Bhima wondered what evil demon had killed them.

[Looks around in silence.]

Voice: Do not drink, O Prince, until you have answered my questions.

Possum: When the Queen realized that her siblings were not going to return, she went to the pool herself.

Sharpie: This must be the work of some evil spirit. But I am so thirsty, I will drink first.

Voice: Do not drink, O Queen, until you have answered my questions!

Rolf: They shouldn’t have drunk the water!

Nicky: Who’s that strange Voice that speaks?

Possum: We’ll have to wait until next week to find out….

Lend a hand

Many years ago, quite a few Unitarian churches (this was long before consolidation with the Universalists) had a “Lend-a-Hand Club.” These Lend-a-Hand Clubs grew out of a story written by Unitarian minister, “Ten Times One Is Ten.” In the story, ten people realize that they’ve all been helped by one man. But what if they, in turn, each help ten people themselves, and all those people help another ten people, and so on? Then perhaps helpfulness and goodness could circle the globe. This fictional story inspired real-life imitations. Hale tells of one such real-life imitation:

“Soon after the publication of ‘Ten Times One,’ with no expectation of mine, the parable of the story took form immediately in actual life. Miss Ella Elizabeth Russell, of New York, in the end of May, 1870, read this story to a class of boys whom she met every Sunday, in a Sunday School. They were of different ages from thirteen to seventeen. She writes of them, ‘They felt that they were too old to go to any Mission School, but the idea of a Club to meet Sunday afternoons seemed a more grown-up affair. I had read them the story of Harry Wadsworth and as the class was ten in number, they decided to call themselves the Harry Wadsworth Helpers, to adopt the “Four Mottoes,” and to see what they could do to “lend a hand”.'” [Preface, Ten Times One Is Ten, Lend-a-Hand Society Edition, 1917]

Many more Lend A Hand clubs and groups formed after the publication of Hale’s story; according to one source, there were as many as 800 of them in the early twentieth century. But they slowly died out, until there were almost none left at the end of that century. When I worked at First Parish Church in Lexington from 1997 to 2002, there was still a Lend A Hand Club there; it was the last one, so we were told, in a Unitarian Universalist congregation. In this century, the “Lend A Hand” legacy continues in the form of the nonsectarian nonprofit Lend A Hand Society, based in Boston.

We Unitarian Universalists have dropped the Lend A Hand Club in favor of the Social Justice Committee; what worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries no longer works for us today. Today’s Social Justice Committee goes much further than the old Lend A Hand Club: today, we understand better how doing good deeds sometimes isn’t good enough; it may not be enough to offer a helping hand, because an unjust system can erase everything your helping hand has done in a very short time.

So I’m not looking to reinvent Lend A Hand clubs, but I do find inspiration in their history. I especially like the “Four Mottoes” that Hale wrote about:

Look up and not down,
Look forward and not back,
Look out and not in;
Lend A Hand.

Social justice work can feel overwhelming. It is often dreary and thankless work. You often feel like you’re making no progress at all. I think that’s why I like the relentless optimism of the “Four Mottoes”; in the face of all the problems facing us, I could use some relentless optimism.

Bullying and abusive conduct by ministers: what’s it look like?

Recent events have raised my interest in bullying and abusive conduct my ministers. What does it look like? How can we know the difference between ministerial grouchiness or a minister occasionally losing their temper, and outright bullying and abusive behavior?

First of all, we want to look for patterns of behavior. Every minister I’ve known has lost their temper at least once; ministers are human beings, and human beings lose their tempers. Of course it would be best if we ministers never lost our tempers, but losing your temper once in awhile is not the same as a pattern of abusive behavior. So we’re looking for a pattern of behavior that happens over time.

Second, we want to look at power differentials. If, for example, there were three ministers on the staff of a large congregation, the senior minister has power over the junior ministers, and it’s much easier for the senior minister to bully the junior ministers; similarly, most of the time (not all of the time) the minister has more power than a non-ordained congregant. Determining power differentials is not always easy, though, and we can’t just default to a position that says ministers always have more power than congregants. For example, other types of power differentials make it possible for a male congregant to bully a female minister, or for a white congregant to act abusively towards a non-white minister. Even white male cis-gender ministers can be bullied or treated abusively by congregants who are in an entrenched power position within their congregation; in fact, because the minister is an employee, the minister’s lay leader supervisors have the potential for bullying or abusive behavior towards the minister. So we want to look for power differentials, though in themselves they won’t be diagnostic.

Third, we want to look for certain kinds of behaviors. Warren Throckmorton, an evangelical Christian whistleblower, posted on his blog the charges against Mark Driscoll, an evangelical megachurch pastor who was forced out his position as senior pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle due to bullying and abusive behavior. These charges, which you can read here, catalogue a number of bullying and abusive behaviors Driscoll allegedly engaged in. I’ll quote from some of these formal charges to show you what bullying and abuse can look like:

“Pastor Mark exhibits anger and ungraceful ways of dealing with those with whom he disagrees and who disagree with him… by putting people down, caricaturing, and dismissing.
“Pastor Mark … has created a culture of fear instead of a culture of candor and safety….
“Pastor Mark is verbally abusive to people who challenge him, disagree with him, or question him.
“Pastor Mark uses words to demean, attack or disparage others.”

I’ll also quote from one piece of evidence used to support the charges, so you can get a sense of the specific sorts of alleged behavior that’s considered abusive or bullying:

“Mark’s response to that elder was bullying, with some elders present recalling language to the effect of: ‘I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m trying to be nice to you guys by asking your opinion. In reality, we don’t need your vote to make this decision. This is what we’re doing.'”

It’s fairly clear that this kind of behavior should be characterized as bullying and abusive. But it’s wise to remember that there will be a continuum of potentially bullying and abusive behavior, and there won’t necessarily be a bright shining line between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior. In my historical researches of local congregations, I’ve uncovered a number of instances of behavior that aren’t easily categorized. In one example I researched, from the 1960s, a male minister was shouting at a female Director of Religious Education (DRE). There was a clear power differential here: male full-time supervisor and minister shouting at a part-time female DRE and employee. But while it may have a pattern of behavior, I couldn’t document that for sure. Obviously the minister should not have shouted at the DRE, but since I couldn’t document a pattern of behavior, I couldn’t be sure whether this was a momentary lapse on the part of the minister, or verbal abuse.

Which leads me to one final suggestion:

Fourth, we want to look at whether the congregation openly addresses momentary lapses of civility, or whether a lapse of civility remains hidden, secret, unaddressed. We are all human — ministers, too — and being human means we will make mistakes; we will do things like shout at people. Bullying and abuse in congregations — whether by ministers or by lay leaders, or by white people, or by whomever — is a pattern of behavior. If a congregation directly confronts lapses in behavior when they happen, I think it’s much less likely that the congregation is going to fall into a pattern of bullying or abusive behavior. But if people look away even once, I think that’s going to open up the possibility of establishing a pattern of behavior.

Update, 25 Feb. 2022: I’m closing comments on this post. Another post on the same topic started getting off-topic comments, which are not allowed, so I’m taking preventive measures. My sincere apologies to those of you who may have on-topic comments. But after two years of COVID, I don’t have the patience to deal with trolls any more.

Another kind of misconduct

I recently received one of those emails from Sarah Lammert, the Executive Director of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC), saying that a minister has been removed from fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). This email, sent to “Congregational Board Leaders and UU Religious Professionals,” informed us that Scott McNeill “was removed from UUA Fellowship by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee on April 11, 2021 for misconduct involving bullying/abusive behavior in the workplace.”

I can’t remember hearing about any other minister removed from fellowship for bullying and abusive behavior in the workplace. I’m not able to confirm that, because apparently the MFC doesn’t maintain a comprehensive, publicly available list of who’s been removed from fellowship. But in combing through old email, here’s what I came up with:

In 2020, the MFC removed Todd Eklof from fellowship “based on the Rev. Dr. Eklof’s refusal to engage with the fellowship review process.” In 2019, Jason Shelton resigned from fellowship “due to self-reported [sexual] misconduct” (and the MFC infamously sent out Shelton’s self-excusing explanation of his resignation). In 2018, David Morris was put “on a three-year probation” due to “a complaint of child abuse.” In 2017, Ron Robinson was suspended from fellowship following his arrest on child pornography charges, with the proviso that if he were found guilty, he would be removed from fellowship (I have no email stating he was removed from fellowship, though I found news stories stating that he pleaded guilty).

Prior to 2017, the MFC sent out these notifications via U.S. Postal Service. Thinking back, I don’t remember any other removal from fellowship due to bullying and abusive behavior in the workplace. Based on my research into UU history, I’m pretty sure workplace bullying by ministers is nothing new, but in the absence of a comprehensive listing of ministers removed from fellowship I can’t be sure how many ministers were actually removed from fellowship by the MFC for bullying and abusive behavior.

So the question for me remains: Is it a new development for the MFC to discipline a minister for bullying and abusive behavior?

In a subsequent post, I’ll write about what bullying and abusive behavior by ministers looks like.

Update, 25 Feb. 2022: All of a sudden I’m getting comments on this post, from people who obviously did not read the post. It looks like I have to explain to careless readers what this post is about…. This was the first time I remembered hearing about the MFC removing someone from membership for bullying. That is all this post is about. This post is not about whether the MFC make the correct judgements in any of these cases, and if you want to argue about that you’re going to have to go somewhere else because I’m closing comments. Why am I closing comments? Simple. I don’t allow off-topic comments.

The Story of the Flower Communion

Dr. Sharpie, Rolf, Possum, and Nicky ask to be told the old story of the UU Flower Communion, or Flower Celebration.

Click on the image above to view the video on Vimeo.

Full script below the fold.

Rolf: Dan, can you tell us the story of the Flower Communion again?

Dan: Don’t you know that story already?

Possum: You tell it better. But you don’t have to tell us that Unitarian churches in the Midwest did flower services starting in 1875.

Rolf: Just start with Maja Oktavec, when she came to the United States from the Czech Republic.

Sharpie: And we already know that she was a librarian in the New York Public Library.

Nicky: And she fell in love with Norbert Capek, and they married in 1917.

Dan: OK, I’ll start there. Norbert was a Baptist minister, but he started to doubt his Baptist beliefs. Maja encouraged his doubts. After they married, he resigned from the Baptist ministry because of his doubts.

Rolf: They sound like Unitarians to me!

Dan: One day, their children wanted to go to Sunday school. Each week, the children chose a church to try. Afterwards, Maja and Norbert asked them what they had learned. It always sounded like the same old religion they had left behind, so they’d ask the children to try a different church next week.

Possum: Until the children went to a Unitarian church.

Dan: And they told their parents that they had been encouraged to wonder and to ask questions. So of course they returned to the Unitarian church. And Norbert and Mája decided that they’d attend the Unitarian services, and then they became Unitarians.

Nicky: Meanwhile, back in Europe….

Dan: The Capeks’ homeland became an independent country. The American Unitarians helped Norbert and Mája to go back to Czechoslovakia to start a Unitarian church in the city of Prague.

Sharpie: And they didn’t want to be reminded of the religions they had left behind.

Dan: In 1923, Norbert and Mája created a new Unitarian ritual that wouldn’t be like anything in any other religion. They called it the Flower Celebration.

Possum: Now we call it a Flower Communion.

Rolf: Yeah, and everybody gets to exchange flowers.

Nicky: Exchanging flowers symbolizes how all we are all connected to one another.

Dan: Soon the Unitarian church in Prague had three thousand members. It was largest Unitarian church anywhere. But next to Czechoslovakia, in Germany, the Nazis had taken over the government. In 1939, the Nazis began invading nearby countries.

Rolf: This is the scary part.

Dan: Maja came to the United States to raise money to help refugees who were escaping from the Nazis. While she was here, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Norbert was arrested because he spoke out for freedom. The Nazis put Norbert into a concentration camp, where he died in 1942. After the Nazis were finally defeated, Mája stayed in the United States. Norbert’s death made her sad, but she watned to keep working to make the world a better place.

Nicky: Now for the good part!

Dan: Maja decided to bring the joyous Flower Celebration to Unitarians here in the United States. What better way to remember Norbert, and all the Czech Unitarians who fought for freedom?

Possum: I’m glad Maja Capek brought the Flower Communion to the United States.

Sharpie: I like the way the Flower Celebration honors the connections between all beings.

Rolf: I like the flowers!

Nicky: Now I can’t wait till next year’s Flower Communion!

Mind-numbing

The State of California has been updating its COVID regulations over the past three or four weeks. As a religious educator, I have to familiarize myself with three separate sets of regulations: “industry guidance” for “places of worship and cultural ceremonies,” “cohorts for children and youth in supervised settings,” and “daycamps and other supervised youth activities.”

Reading through these regulations is a mind-numbing experience. Many of the regulations start off saying “you have to do thus-and-so” but then refer you to another Web page or PDF which says “you have to do this-and-that,” where the two different sources don’t exactly contradict each other, but don’t seem to be in full agreement either.

And sometimes the rules are vague. In my favorite example, the state rules frequently say that “physical distancing” is required, but then they don’t tell you exactly what distance is required. Are we supposed to assume six feet? But a year ago, some of the physical distancing requirements were greater than six feet, as for example the distance required to be maintained between two stable cohorts of children. And now federal recommendations from the CDC are saying that three feet might be enough physical distancing; is the state trying to be deliberately vague about the amount of physical distancing, so they can decide later whether to adopt the CDC guidelines or not?

And I’m glad I don’t have to deal very much with the “industry guidance” for “places of worship and cultural ceremonies,” because those regulations contradict themselves. Due to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, California is not allowed to have regulations for places of worship that differ from the regulations for other large gatherings. And the first page you hit on for “industry guidance” for “places of worship and cultural ceremonies” basically says to see the guidance for large gatherings, which should make things easier, right? — but then there’s also a link to a PDF with rules from 2020 that are clearly not acceptable under the Supreme Court ruling, but because they’re linked to from the current “guidance” mean that still you’re supposed to follow them — I guess?

I understand that this must be an incredibly difficult time for state regulators and state employees. I’m sure they’re doing their best. But as it stands now, the regulations are so disorganized that I sometimes find it impossible to understand what I’m supposed to do. I sometimes feel like they wrote these regulations assuming we’re all big corporations who can hire full-time staffers to sort through this mass of material. The things is, if you’re a small nonprofit or a small business and trying to figure it out on your own, the staffer who’s trying to make sense out of the regulations doesn’t have hours and hours of spare time because we’re already working overtime trying to deal with everything else the pandemic is throwing at us.

To top it all off, they keep updating the regulations. So I have to figure out if I should put in a lot of time now trying to figure out the regulations, or wait and see if they change things again next week.

My mind is numb.

Who writes the sermons?

Religions News Service (RNS) ran a story recently about sermon plagiarism in U.S. Christian congregations — and then, a few days later, they ran a story about why some U.S. Christian pastors feel they need to plagiarize sermons.

And before you say, “Oh those Christians, Unitarian Universalist (UU) ministers would never do that” — UU ministers do indeed plagiarize sermons, and some have been caught doing it.

So why do Christian pastors — and UU ministers — plagiarize sermons? The RNS story suggests a couple of reasons. Well, writing sermons is exhausting and local preachers have other big demands on their energy (pastoral care, raising money, administration, etc.). And then people in a local congregation now get to hear those Big Name Preachers online, and they make it clear that their local preacher just doesn’t measure up.

But on the analogy that church musicians don’t write all the music they perform, the RNS article asks: shouldn’t local preachers be allowed to preach other people’s sermons? (That is, assuming they give credit to the actual writer, so it isn’t plagiarism.) Or at least, shouldn’t local preachers be allowed to rely on third party sermon prompts or outside sermon researchers to help them out? If we want congregations to hear the best, highest quality sermons, it makes sense for preachers to be able to search for, and use, the best sermons they can find.

On the other hand, maybe a sermon shouldn’t be understood as a weekly performance put on by a professional voice actor. In many Christian congregations, the sermon is often considered to be God’s way of speaking to one particular congregation, and the preacher’s sermon preparation includes both time spent ministering to the congregation, and time spent in prayer listening to God. UU congregations will understand this a little differently: I was trained to think of the sermon in a UU congregation as kind of conversation, where the preacher listens to what is going on in people’s lives and connects those personal events and stories to the big moral and existential questions.

I suspect that several pressures will drive UU congregations towards turning the preacher into a voice actor who puts on performances of the best sermons they can find. First, preachers have a limited amount of hours they can work each week, volunteers now have less time to devote to the congregation, so using other people’s sermons can free up the preacher’s time for other crucial tasks. Second, congregation members are increasingly aware of the excellent preaching available online, and this puts pressure on the local congregation to have a preacher who meets those high standards. Third, congregations compete for people’s leisure time in an increasingly crowded marketplace, and the demand for authenticity will not be as strong as the demand for polished production values. Fourth, as more congregations are unable to pay for full-time ministry, there’s going to be less time for sermon-writing and a greater demand for third-party sermons. In short, there are strong — maybe irresistible — economic forces that will change UU ministers from sermon-writers into voice actors.

I still prefer a preacher who writes their own sermons. I just don’t think most UU congregations will be able to make sermon-writing a priority as they budget money and staff time.

Dancing on May Day

It’s time for the annual Maypole dance, and the annual Morris dance — virtual, of course, in these pandemic times. But if the Morris dancers don’t dance on May Day, the sun won’t come up!

Click on the image above to view the video on Vimeo.

Full script below the fold….

Eric: Welcome everyone! It’s time for the annual UUCPA Maypole dance. This year’s dance will be a virtual dance. Everyone take a ribbon.

(Outdoor sounds)

Eric: You want a blue one? … If you’re following along at home, it’s fine to grab a virtual ribbon or an imaginary ribbon. When the music starts, half of you circle around one way, half of you circle around to the right. And make sure you weave between each other. OK, go!

(Music)

Eric: Over! Under! Weave!

(Music)

Eric: Over!

(Music)

Robert: Good morning. Morris dancing is an ancient English traditional dance form. And today’s dance is inpsired by one observed in the village of Adderbury about a hundred years ago. It’s meant to be danced in the spring to encourage the earth to wake up and produce goodness, fertility. So when it comes to whacking, you might want to whack something. All right Maestro, let’s dance.

(Music, and sounds of sticks hitting)

Eric: You know, of course, that spring will only arrive if the Morris dancers dance at May Day. Now that we’ve danced, spring can come. Welcome, spring time!

Anti-racism failure in a liberal college

My Philadelphia cousin sent me a link to an article from The Philadelphia Inquirer he thought I might find interesting: “Haverford College students launched a strike last fall after a racial reckoning. The impact still lingers”:

“In 1972 … [Haverford’s] Black Student League announced a boycott of campus activities over institutional racism. … Fast forward nearly 50 years: A 2018-19 campus report found that Black and Latino students at Haverford were less likely to feel they had meaningful social interactions on campus and that their academics were well-supported.”

That’s the college where I took my undergraduate degree in 1983. Reading this article makes it look like one thing hasn’t changed since 1983: the student body is still overwhelmingly white. Another hasn’t changed: in spite of its woke rhetoric, Haverford College still hasn’t confronted the systemic racism that was painfully obvious decades ago ago when I was a student.

Sadly, this is probably true of many of the so-called elite liberal arts colleges. As Haverford student Rasaaq Shittu put it in an op-ed piece published in The Inquirer back in July: “Primarily white, outwardly liberal institutions like Haverford have such a long history of talking the talk without living up to it.” Which is another thing that hasn’t changed since my day. No wonder non-white students called for a two-week student strike last fall to protest the systemic racism at Haverford.

However, one thing that has changed since my day is the cost of an education at one of these elite liberal arts colleges. Today’s students at Haverford pay an astonishing $75,000 per year for tuition, room, and board. When I was there, the inflation-adjusted cost was about $17,000 per year, so the inflation-adjusted cost has quadrupled. Thus while I completely agree with the goals of the student strike, I did not agree with one of the strike strategies. The strike organizers asked students to miss two weeks of class, and also to stop eating at the dining center for two weeks, and also to stop working at their campus jobs. If that strike had happened in my day, I wonder if I could have afforded to participate.

And maybe this reveals that another thing has not changed since my time as a student in an elite liberal arts college: as elite institutions, these colleges are pervaded with both racism and classism. Compare the Haverford strike with the Black Panthers, who provided both food and shelter for people in their organization. Or compare the Haverford strike with unions which build up a strike fund so they can give financial assistance to striking workers. This lack of awareness on the part of strike organizers about the financial realities of less affluent students demonstrates the enduring classism of elite liberal arts colleges like Haverford College. Since all oppressions are linked (as we used to say back in my radical days), we should not be surprised that an institution pervaded by unacknowledged racism is also pervaded by unacknowledged classism.

One conclusion: For those of you looking for a college to attend, be wary of elite liberal arts colleges. Very wary. Instead, try looking at community colleges and state university systems, where you can often get excellent teaching (from professors with degrees from excellent graduate schools), in company with a far more diverse student body (from whom you will learn more than from a heterogenous student body), for a hell of a lot less money.

And I will freely admit my bias: My older sister, who is an excellent teacher (I’ve observed her in the classroom and her pedagogical skills are superior to any of my Haverford professors), teaches in a branch campus of Indiana University. Well, maybe that’s not bias, maybe that’s just first-hand information.