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. 

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?

What he said

Presbyterian minister John Shuck sums up his own beliefs -- and challenges traditional theology. Along the way, he quotes an apologist for the Trinity who insists that without a fundamental affirmation of it, "we have become functional Unitarians." Maybe, Shuck says, that's something worth emulating.

Trying to retrofit our belief systems to a modern understanding of the Universe, Earth, and Earth's inhabitants turns theologians and pastors into pawn brokers for ancient religious relics that fewer and fewer people embrace.

Read the rest.

Proud of my "Mother-in-Law Church"

For a very brief few years more than two decades ago, Garrison Keillor was married to a woman from Denmark and moved away to her native land to be with her. During that time he referred to Denmark as his "mother-in-law country."

For what I hope will be a much, much longer time (nearly six years and counting already!), I have been married to DairyStateMom, and for that reason, I have come to think of the Presbyterian Church (USA) -- and specifically, the congregation of which she is a member -- as my "mother-in-law church." The senior pastor of her congregation is a co-leader of one of three different Presbyterian organizations striving to open up ordination in the PC(USA) -- not just of pastors, but of church elders (who are the lay leaders of a congregation) to non-celibate gays and lesbians.

This week, the barrier fell. DairyStateMom wept with joy at the news, and I, too, felt overjoyed to see her church move toward becoming one "as generous as God's grace," in the words of the pro-gay Covenant Network of Presbyterians.

It's been tough to decide where I will worship this Sunday. Certainly part of me would love to be at DairyStateMom's church and to hear what their always-wonderful senior pastor says about this important new milestone.

But even more, I want to go to my own church and light a candle of joy and thanksgiving on behalf of my "Mother-in-law Church." So that is where I will be.