Brian McLaren in Madison

I was very fortunate to be able to hear Brian McLaren speak in Madison, Wis., this past weekend. I could only stay for his first session, but DairyStateMom stayed for the whole day (and got some good quotes from the evening lecture).

In case it's of any interest, here's coverage of the event in Isthmus, Madison's alt-weekly newspaper.

Guiding Stars

DairyStateMom's Presbyterian Church each year publishes an Advent meditation booklet, with short essays from members and friends of the congregation. Last year the senior pastor invited me to contribute, but that didn't work out, and so this year I took the opportunity to. Each year's booklet uses a theme as a writing prompt for the contributors; this year's theme was taken from the legend of the Star in the East from the Gospel of Matthew. Contributors were asked to reflect on personal guiding stars in their own spiritual development.

This is what I wrote.

We are an eclectic family, culturally, ethnically, and religiously. My father was an Anglophile and Africanist who taught Anthropology at a historically Black college. My mother, though born in America, spent her childhood in France and spoke French even before learning English.
            My sisters and I grew up in the Episcopal church, but our family was always close to the Religious Society of Friends – the Quakers. As adults we found our own paths: My sister Susan converted to Judaism, the religion of her husband. I found my deep commitment to religious pluralism honored in Unitarian Universalism, still my religious home.
            Meanwhile, my oldest sister, Joan, joined the Quakers with her husband, Ed, not long after they were married.
            Over the years I saw them live out daily the Friends’ commitment to nonviolence and peacemaking. Joan did social justice work for the Quakers. Ed volunteered as a community mediator in their poverty-wracked Philadelphia suburb. Both of them led the small Quaker meeting just a few blocks from their home. And Ed, who was black (when they wed in 1967, their marriage was still a crime under the laws of 15 states), became active in the Friends of African Descent, made up of Black Quakers.
            In recent years I have reconnected with my Christian roots while retaining my Unitarian Universalist outlook. The welcome I’ve always felt visiting Immanuel with my wife, Judi, and my exposure to Christian thinkers like John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Brian McLaren have helped make that reconnection possible.
            But what lit up this new path for me goes back much farther. It is the example Joan and Ed Broadfield have lived, grounded in the teachings of Jesus, witnesses to the light of Christ dwelling in all.
            Ed died three years ago, much too soon. Joan, I’m grateful to say, remains very much with us. But both of them shine, like a binary star that brings light and warmth, even on a cold winter’s night. 

The Honor of Being Present

LoneStarStateDad -- my father -- died 14 years ago this month. The anniversary of his passing was September 12.

I thought about him on that day. And he came to mind again today, when DairyStateMom pointed me to this essay at the New York Times website, by Joan Marans Dim, on the long journey she and her husband took over the course of his dying.

My father had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He had been in and out of the hospital with pneumonia more than once over the previous year. Sometime around Labor Day of 1989 he was readmitted, treated, then released back home.

I was still married to my first wife, then. She and I had planned a week-long trip to Pennsylvania that September in connection with her work. She would be in Philadelphia for most of that week, and so we had already decided I would spend those days with my parents. After dropping her off at her bed and breakfast, I drove out to the southwestern corner of Chester County.

Exactly when that was, and what happened between when I left Philly and when I found myself at my parents on the evening of Monday, September 11, I no longer recall for sure. I do know that sometime in that Monday afternoon or early evening, I had a chance to speak with my father. He was in bed, sleeping somewhat erratically, too tired and uncomfortable to respond much, but still essentially coherent. And I was able to speak to him, tell him I loved him -- and tell him of the many things for which I could be grateful to him.

Then I remember sitting with my brother-in-law in the kitchen. His own parents had died not that long before, after lingering illnesses; he warned me that my father could, like his parents, linger for quite some time.

I sat up most of that night, often with my father. I read the John Mortimer play, A Voyage Round My Father, which had been sitting on the bookshelf. (Some time before, my father had read it and commended it to me.) I probably dozed some, in the chair in his room, or perhaps on the couch in the living room, or in an adjacent spare room.

At one point in the middle of the night, he spoke some incoherent words. They were the last that I heard from him. The next morning, we called his doctor and the hospice nurse. The doctor pronounced him dead. Within a few hours, an employee from Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, where my father had arranged for his body to be donated for research, arrived and took him away.

My mother called my father's sister, his closest sibling (they were the two youngest in their family, and so she was "Sissy," for Little Sister, and he was "LB," for Little Brother). My mother said to Sissy, "Your little brother Harold has gone on his next great adventure."

That's when I wept.

I have always been firmly convinced that my father, knowing he was near death in those last few days, nonetheless hung on to life until I could be there in person.

Joan Dim's essay in the Times begins with her sharing her angst at having to endure the slow death of her husband and envying Joan Didion, whose husband died swiftly and unexpectedly. But by the end, Dim comes to the opposite conclusion:

We were married 52 years. What reasonable person could ask for more? And yet, if I had one wish, I’d add just five more minutes. Even though the last decade was a misery, I feel luckier than Joan Didion.

In my bereavement group, a participant mourning the death of his partner talked about the “honor of being present on the last journey.” I understand what he meant.

So do I.

A Song for Today

The hands that built the country we're always trying to keep out...

And a Prayer for today as well...

Happy St. Patrick's Day from DairyStateDad

A Brief Dialogue With Tom Schade

After a long absence from the blogUUsphere, I've been sidling back in. Thus it was the other day when I wandered over to The Lively Tradition, read some posts, and responded to one. Tom kindly replied ... More thoughts on this to come...

Michael Dowd, Distilled

Over the last four years I have been on an increasingly focused spiritual journey. I've documented much of it, albeit haphazardly, in this space over the last couple of years.

Most recently, Brian McLaren's book A New Kind of Christianity has marked an opportunity to more completely synthesize where I am now. Indeed, his work is turning out to be a significant touchstone for me.

I hope to say more about that here soon... But in the meantime, I wanted to revisit another significant touchstone: The work of Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution. This talk by him, which I just got a link to in my email, offers as good a distillation of what he has to say as any.

I commend it to your attention.




 (Post edited slightly to remove some inelegant phrasing and repetition.)

Culture/Counter-Culture

This is good to see. Episcopal Bishop Stacy Sauls ("chief operating officer" of the Church) incisively rebuts a Wall Street Journal columnist who accuses the Episcopalians of caving into the culture by, among other things, opening up marriage rites to include same-sex unions:

...The church has been captive to the dominant culture, which has rewarded it with power, privilege and prestige for a long, long time. The Episcopal Church is now liberating itself from that, and as the author correctly notes, paying the price. I hardly see paying the price as what ails us. I see it as what it means to be a follower of Jesus... 

The Episcopal Church is on record as standing by those the culture marginalizes whether that be nonwhite people, female people or gay people. The author calls that political correctness hostile to tradition. 

I call it profoundly countercultural but hardly untraditional. In fact, it is deeply true to the tradition of Jesus, Jesus who offended the "traditionalists" of his own day, Jesus who was known to associate with the less than desirable, Jesus who told his followers to seek him among the poor. It is deeply true to the tradition of the Apostle Paul who decried human barriers of race, sex, or status (Galatians 3:28)....

Related, somewhat: A rebuttal as well to Ross Douthat's recent New York Times column on liberal Christianity.

(via Sightings)

Summer Camp -- A Quick Postcard

Having a great time... Wish you were here!

Actually, you are, in a way.

I am at the Midwest UU Summer Assembly in Missouri. While I intend to offer more detail later, a couple of quick notes for now...

The first is, that I really am offering my workshop on liberal Christian theology and scholarship. Day One went well, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the week. Some of what I'll be speaking about and asking participants to reflect on comes from the things I've thought about and shared here, and heard from others here.

The second, is the accidental discovery of a bit of online opportunism founded on my URL here... if you miss one letter in it (leaving out the 's' in 'blogspot') you wind up at a completely different place -- some kind of gospel music portal.

I guess I'm at least a little bit flattered... but then I can probably be bought cheaply...

Hopeful Words for the Mainline Churches from a Progressive Evangelical

A favorite writer of this Unitarian Universalist Christian is the Evangelical writer Brian McLaren. He spoke this week at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), my "mother-in-law church," which DairyStateMom will be attending later this week.

This morning she emailed me this link and this one to stories about his talk.

Decline, he says, is not inexorable in the Mainline tradition ... and he sees hope for the future in the quality of young leadership coming into the PC(USA), often from more conservative Christian traditions.

Is there something we in the UU tradition -- whether or not we identify as Christian -- can learn from this, too?

'Not Your Daddy's Jesus' Update

revdawn asks about my workshop on Jesus so, for her and for anyone who might be interested, a very brief update...  I will be presenting a 10-hour workshop on contemporary liberal Christian scholarship and theology at the Midwest UU Summer Assembly in July... a goodly number of people have signed up, and now I'm in the final stages of preparation. I did not so much a test drive as offer a rough-draft/brainstorming version of this in March at my home church, and it was well-received. But this summer's version will be a more polished approach.

Because I've been so preoccupied with many other things in my life, my blogging has dwindled to almost nothing. I do hope (and have been hoping, for months!) to change that, but just when isn't certain... If it seems appropriate, I might do some blogging from MUUSA, though...

In Memoriam: R.D. Munro, 1914-2012

DairyStateMom's father died last night. We miss him already.

It was certainly his time, as much as any passing can ever be. In the last few years, his health had been seriously in decline, exacerbated by steadily progressing dementia, presumably Alzheimer's. Yet an ironic benefit of his decline was a family decision to move him from Indianapolis, his lifelong hometown, up to assisted living facilities very near to us, where we got to see him much more frequently in his last few years than we otherwise would have.

When I met him, a few months after I began courting his youngest daughter, he was already a bit stooped and frail looking. But he still completed the Daily Jumble in the paper and listened with interest as I described my work.

I called him "Mr. Munro" in those days, when we would see him in visits every three or four months in which we would drive down to Indianapolis. At some point, he took me aside and kindly told me, "Just call me R.D."

And when his daughter and I drove down on a weekend in the middle of the summer of 2004 to announce the happy news of our engagement, he beamed quietly.

The DairyStateKids got to know him a little bit as a new step-grandfather, and when the time came that his cat had to be taken to the vet to be euthanized, my younger son drew him a picture of the beloved pet. We gathered that up last night from my father-in-law's room at the assisted living facility where he died, surrounded by family and under the immensely kind care of wonderful hospice nurses.

Had life been different in so many ways, perhaps my sons could have known him as the strong and steadfast gentleman he was for most of his life. But I'm glad they got to at least meet him -- and he them -- in any case.

We also took home his copy of one of our wedding pictures. And from that same day, I will always treasure one memory especially: the man who, at the age of 91, slowly, but with great patience, dignity and pride, walked his youngest daughter down the aisle to marry me nearly seven years ago.

Rest in Peace, R.D. You were a good man, and I am so grateful that I got to know you.

Eyesight to the Blind

Goodness, weeks and months of silence, then two posts in one day...

Almost every week I take a look at the sermons of John Shuck, the progressive Presbyterian pastor whose church in Elizabethton, Tenn., is where I suspect I'd worship if I were living in the area.

I think his sermon yesterday on the story from the Gospel of John about Jesus healing a blind man is one of his best.

Martin Marty on 'Religion for Atheists' ...

I saw this item from Martin Marty this morning, whose twice-weekly newsletter I receive and usually read.

I haven't read either the book [Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion] nor the articles he references; they're going on a very long list of when-I-get-to-it stuff to peruse.

But for all who contemplate both the past and future of Unitarian Universalism, our recurrent debates over whether we can expect to really become, in the words of our president, "the religion for our times," and the perpetual sorting-out of whether we are too syncretic, too rootless, too vague, or too-whatever... the Marty essay and the issues as well as the readings to which he points seem highly relevant to the conversation.

Why I've been so silent for the last 3 weeks

Let's just say I was way ahead of the curve in going dark to protest SOPA. Yeah! That's it!

A Different Kind of Christmas Song

For 23 years, this song has been as much a part of my Christmas as any of the classic carols.

Christmas Eve at my church probably shares much in common with the service at other UU churches: It is, first of all, an amalgam that blends the Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, and the Christmas Story itself into one grand festival of light. Yet even with that characteristically Unitarian Universalist syncretism, it is one time (not the only one necessarily) when we happily read familiar tales from the Bible and without apology invoke the names of God and Jesus.

Most years, our minister takes the pulpit in the guise of one who was there on that Bethlehem night of legend 2,000 years ago. He's been a shepherd, one of the Magi, Jesus's cousin John, an angel, and, I think, even the innkeeper. Some roles he's played more than once. In 1990, as American troops gathered in Kuwait to launch the invasion that would become the First Gulf War, he spoke as a Roman centurion. And in whatever persona he adopts to retell the story, I find myself moved beyond measure, my eyes welling with tears of comfort.

Tonight, he was Joseph. (In case you were wondering, he firmly pointed out that he was Jesus's real father -- despite the stories that later made it into the Bible.) He told of how much he learned to be a parent from his son, and how hearing not only the local shepherds, but even visiting astrologers from afar, speak of the promise that the infant represented made him see his own child differently -- an attitude that he recommended to parents everywhere.

When the message is over, and after we sing "Silent Night" with the traditional words, then comes another musical tradition. For reasons that I don't really know, we always close the service with a song that doesn't mention Christmas anywhere in its lyrics, a song sung by a little green frog with a banjo and a nasal voice.

It was an odd touch, I thought, the first time I experienced it more than two decades ago -- odd, and yet somehow perfect in its reflection of the hope and mystery and promise of Christmas. Now I have trouble imagining the night before Christmas without it.

When the older DairyStateKid was less than 6 months old, I began singing it to him every night as a lullaby. And the tradition continued when his younger brother came along five years later.

Tonight, we all went to church: The two DairyStateKids, their stepmother DairyStateMom, the older DSK's Buddhist girlfriend, and me. We heard the stories, basked in the warmth of the candlelight, sang the old familiar carols, and then joined together in this song.

Later, as he lay in bed in the darkness of his room waiting for the sleep that will bring Christmas Morning, the younger DairyStateKid, who will be 15 in one month, asked me to sing the first verse one more time. Of course I did.

Searching for My Voice

More than a year ago I began a series of posts on politics. After the 2010 elections, I got stalled.

The reasons were many: family responsibilities, my struggle to manage a growing an overwhelming workload, but also an emotional paralysis that arose from the events that unfolded in my home state and in the nation over the last year.

I knew what I wanted to say, sort of, but I couldn't find the words or make the time to lay it all out.

Today I read this article in Yes! magazine. It comes as close as anything I have found to articulating where I have been moving, spiritually and politically, in recent years:

I participated because I have witnessed overwhelming evidence that the economic and political systems of my country stand against those people who the God I worship stands for. My conception of God, inadequate as it may be, is better described as the Love that generates creativity and community than as a super-man judging us from some heavenly skybox. Such a Love contrasts with everything that reserves power, dignity, wealth, or the status of full humanity for some while denying these things to others. My commitment to Love requires me to challenge the increasing consolidation of all these good things in the hands of a few, and to collaborate for the creation of something that Love would recognize as kin.

Read the whole thing here.

ETA: I'm not commenting here so much on the specifics of the Seattle event that the YES contributor referred to. Christine, in the comments, makes some good points about that. I'm speaking rather of the overarching spiritual and political point of view from which the writer comes, and to which he speaks.

Now, where this leads me day to day remains, for now, unclear.

I don't think it leads me out of either of my spiritual homes. It does sharpen my longing to live in both of them, together, more fully.

I don't know what it might imply for my professional life of 30-plus years or for the direction it might take going forward. That's a particular challenge because, given my very real life circumstances and responsibilities, I don't see the sort of freedom that might allow me to simply abandon my livelihood as it is now.

I almost didn't bother to write this post. As I said, I've been trying to put into words, for a very long time now, a collection of experiences, feelings, beliefs, yearnings, resolutions that are still too inarticulate for me to be able to put down on paper or keyboard. I'm not there yet, so what's the point in writing anything?

But I guess I have to start somewhere. So let it be here.

Oh yes, and Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, and a Happy 2012 to all.

A retired, Southern police officer writes about #OWS

...and what he says might surprise you. (h/t, The Rev. John Shuck)

Isn't This What We're Here For?

In the New York Times, Eric Weiner writes:

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

Surely this is where Unitarian Universalism fits in today. Or has the potential to. At least that's how I've always seen it -- and it's what drew me to, and keeps me in, this religious movement.

But, if it doesn't, why doesn't it?

A Thought for Advent

Stephen Lingwood has posted these Advent thoughts on his blog for a couple of years now.

Jews, Obama, and #OWS

If you think that Obama is anti-Israel...

And if you think that American Jews care only about the president's stance toward Israel...

Or...

If you think that Occupy Wall Street is rife with anti-Semitism...

Read this.