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)