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.

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.

Do I have ADHD (2) ?

I saw a therapist yesterday. When I described my experiences, he agreed that my behaviors are suggestive of ADHD in some form.

One especially interesting insight: When he looked at my scores from my neurological testing from 14 years ago, one thing popped out that the doc who tested me hadn't seen (and perhaps was not then well known) -- namely, that certain large gaps between specific sets of scores -- even though both were in the "normal" range -- were indicative of this problem as well.

He's also encouraging me to consider trying medication (he doesn't prescribe himself, but referred me to a couple of possible psychiatrists). I will think about that. We have a follow-up appt. set.

Meanwhile I'm drowning in an overdue project.

Do I have ADHD?

Regular readers know that I don't often go deeply into personal disclosure here. This post is an exception.

For years I have wondered if I have ADHD -- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Not so much because of the Hyperactivity part, but because I've always felt it extraordinarily difficult to focus, set priorities, and overcome inertia.

14 years ago I actually underwent a neurological exam for the condition. I recently re-read the report. It was negative -- as in, no indication of ADHD. Indeed on the various concrete tests (things with sorting cards, flashing lights, etc.), I held my own.

Yet also, reading the report, I believe I downplayed my personal behaviors and difficulties that led me to seek the test in the first place.

(I took the test as part of research for a first-person magazine article on adult ADHD. In a way, the fact that I was rated as non-ADHD helped advance a general spin in the story about how challenging it was to actually understand and diagnose ADHD in adults. I was not and am not a skeptic on the concept, to be sure. But I digress...)

In recent years it has seemed like my difficulties have become more intense, but they aren't fundamentally "new". I've tried many different strategies to overcome them, but have been unable to stick with any of them for long.

I was not someone labeled ADHD as a child; I got decent, though not perfect, grades in school. But I tended to be forgetful when it came to things like homework assignments, and to this day I seem to find that I can't concentrate and focus until a deadline is right on top of me -- in fact, probably behind me.

I've begun exploring a round of counseling for this, in hopes of dealing with it once and for all. I welcome any insights you might choose to offer.

Summer Camp

I'm writing this post overlooking a placid Missouri lake 90 minutes or so southwest of St. Louis.

I'm here for the annual, week-long gathering of several hundred Unitarian Universalists. This group has been meeting for some 60-plus years, most of that time on Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. Changes five years ago in the configuration of the facility that hosted them for most of that time forced a relocation, and this is now the fourth year that the organization has been meeting here in Missouri.

Summer Assembly was for a time an important part of my religious life and experience and a beloved community. My former spouse and I first attended 18 years ago, when DairyStateKid#1 had just turned 2 years old, and attended annually for years thereafter. It was there, in our 11th summer of attendance, that she told me that she had decided it was time for us to separate; by the time I returned the next year with my two sons, we had been divorced for months and I had met the person who would become the DairyStateMom of this blog.

The transition away from Lake Geneva was a challenge for this group of 500-plus UU campers, and it was followed by a period of true mourning. My sons and I continued through the camp's one-year interim site in 2007 and the first year at this new place the next year. For many reasons, I skipped the last two years, but now I am back.

Summer Assembly is as pure a distillation of the blessings and foibles of Unitarian Universalist culture and community as I think you will find anywhere. The spirit is generous and relaxed, the speakers tend to veer more toward the experiential and inspirational side of UU-ism than the dry and intellectual side. For children it is a safe and permissive environment, and there has been a special joy in seeing them grow over the years, many of them into sensitive, caring and energized adults.

So after two years away, here I am again. I am taking a workshop on photography to help me get more comfortable with the fancy new camera I bought recently for my work. I had hoped to take another workshop on Unitarian Universalists and Prayer, but that canceled at the last minute. And each morning we have a worship service featuring talks by Meg Barnhouse, one of our UU rock stars, who is our theme speaker.

Of late, much has been on my mind that all boils down to -- just what is it, anyway, that I want to do with my life? Summer Assembly has often been a time to contemplate that question, in various iterations, and so it is again.

So for that reason alone, I think this is a good place to be right now. And I am glad to be here.

A Meditation on Politics, Part 3: Idealistic Pragmatist? Or Pragmatic Idealist?

From the late 1970s onward, in my days of working for daily newspapers, I took the ethical admonition to stay out of political activism very seriously. So I would follow political campaigns on my own time, and I would vote my hopes (and my fears), but I stayed away from any deeper involvement.

In graduate school in 1982, students were assigned to one of several teams producing a newspaper or other news product covering the November '82 elections. Since we were in New York, the lead story was the govenor's race to succeed Hugh Carey. In that extraordinarily tight race, Democrat Mario Cuomo defeated Lew Lehrman, a Reaganite Republican who, if memory serves, funded much of his campaign with his own money. I think there was little doubt that many of us in the grad school privately preferred Cuomo, but I also would argue that, for the most part, the stories we produced for our journalism "laboratory" were fair and largely unbiased. (I do recall one of our number, however, speaking disparagingly of "all the cheering from the pressbox" -- a probably accurate if a bit hyperbolic assessment. And I don't even know that that guy was anti-Cuomo -- it's as likely that he, who like me had already worked in the business, just felt his professional ethic of objectivity tainted.)

In elections that followed, my choices at the ballot box reflected an evolving and not particularly organized or disciplined political outlook. In 1984, living and working in New York State, I was intrigued by Gary Hart's desire to modernize the Democrats' image, but in the primary wound up choosing Jesse Jackson, knowing full well that the vote was symbolic. That fall I voted for Mondale, hoping against hope that he might actually win. Four years later I voted for Jackson in the primary again, admiring his effort to add struggling blue collar workers -- whose travails I was covering in my daily newspaper assignments -- to his Rainbow Coalition. Yet when I pulled the lever for the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis that fall, I was not merely choosing some lesser of two evils or acting out of loyalty to the Democratic Party -- the practical, pragmatic, and technocratic ethos of his campaign appealed to me as well. It honestly struck an idealistic chord in me.

In 1992, after considering Tom Harkin, who had the strongest pro-labor message, I voted for Jerry Brown in the primary -- skeptical of his flat tax, but appreciating his outsider argument and his zeroing in on big money. I thought Brown had done a credible job, too, of speaking to workers and voters being displaced by the economy. It remains fascinating to me that his appeal fell flat with many blue-collar voters while capturing the interest of those of us with higher incomes and with college or professional degrees.[Here's an interesting summary, from two years ago, of Wisconsin's pivotal role in past Democratic primaries.]

Very soon after Brown narrowly lost the primary to Bill Clinton, I happened to travel to Peoria, Illinois, to cover the Caterpillar strike. While I was there that week, Clinton came in, met both with company and union officials to urge them to settle, then shook hands along a picket line and held a news conference at an airport hangar. Sometime before I'd heard on the radio some of a fairly lengthy talk Clinton had given at some sort of policy-wonkish forum and been impressed by his rhetorical skills. But I hadn't been especially impressed by him in the early rounds of the primary campaigns and was embarrassed by the emerging Gennifer Flowers scandal. All that changed in Peoria, where in just a few superficial hours -- and with no one-on-one exposure to him, just the news conference as well as a few brief opportunities to observe him close-up as he spoke with individual voters -- I had found him to be mesmerizing. The day after his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, I called up a former Democratic legislator in my community and privately asked how I might get a job with the campaign. He gave me some contacts, I faxed a resume, but I heard nothing and decided not to pursue it further. As the polls that fall showed a likely Clinton-Gore win, I started keeping track of the predictions in a file, mostly with the suspicion or fear that the Democrats might pull defeat from the jaws of victory and there might be a story to write in the aftermath about the inaccuracy of polls.

In fact, of course, the polls were largely accurate. And pretty much from then on, I've been inclined to believe them, whether I wanted to or not.

I found the Clinton presidency maddening. I admired his rhetorical skills and his gift for outwitting his ideological foes. I was frustrated by -- yet, paradoxically, I fundemantally empathized with -- his tendancy to compromise with conservatives over policies such as the admission of gays and lesbians to the military. I distrusted his free-trade economic philosophy but recoiled from the anti-foreign (in this case, meaning anti-Mexican and anti-Asian) language of some of free trade's harsher blue-collar critics. And I admired his choices for the National Labor Relations Board, for Labor Secretary (Robert Reich), and his appointment of a commission to examine labor law and policy -- a commission whose ultimate recommendations for easing the ability of unions to organize were a dead letter after the GOP takeover of Congress in the 1994 mid-terms. And don't even get me started on the Lewinsky/Starr episode.

Midway through the Clinton years I went from being a full-time newspaper employee to a full-time freelancer. Because I still wrote stuff that touched on politics at least some of the time, I continued to restrict myself from political activism. But I also continued to vote from a peculiar place of idealistic pragmatism.

When Bill Bradley sought the Democratic nomination in 2000, I found myself really excited -- and voted for him in the Wisconsin primary even though he'd already dropped out. (I had no interest in the Nader Green Party run, despite having several acquaintances who thought it was time for a real third party. I wasn't happy with the Florida outcome,of course, but I was also not as reflexively inclined to blame Nader for that as others were.)

You might think, based on the history I've already taken far too many electrons to lay out, that in 2004 I would have supported Howard Dean. Yet for reasons I'm not even sure of, he didn't really grab me. In the fall of 2003, I was far more interested in Wesley Clark, seeing him as a candidate who could more skilfully navigate the treacherous waters of an opposition presidential campaign in wartime. We all know how that worked out. But Dean? Nah. Dennis Kucinich? With sincere apologies to my dear sister, who was a Kucinich supporter that year, not a chance.

DairyStateMom and I were dating by this time, and a niece of hers (whom I'd met at Christmas 2003) was a campaign staffer in Iowa for John Kerry. But when the Wisconsin primary rolled around, John Edwards was still a contender, and I liked his economic message. As it turned out, both Edwards and Dean lost to Kerry in this state.

That fall, heartsick over the Bush presidency, I for the first time put a presidential campaign sign in my yard, for Kerry. In the days leading up to the election and election day itself, I forgot my polling lessons from 1992 and convinced myself -- along with millions of Kerry voters across the country -- that he really might win. In the personal depression that followed the outcome, I was all but immobile for days. But that, too, passed, and soon after the election I was on my way to Washington to profile an up-and-coming young member of Congress from my state.

And that is where I'll pick up the story next time.

PS: On February 26, 2011, I went through and edited the titles of this series slightly.

In Memoriam: Edward N. Broadfield, 1947-2010

I have two sisters. The younger, 7 years older than me, is now with her husband an observant Orthodox Jew. The elder, 9 years my senior, is a Quaker.

And now, a widow.

On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving Day, after four weeks or so of his not feeling very well and (if I have my facts right, and I might not) an inconclusive visit to a doctor a while back, my brother-in-law woke up feeling very ill. My sister rushed him to an emergency room. And there, After an overnight stay at the hospital, unexpectedly and of an as-yet-uncertain cause, he died.

Ed was a big teddy bear of a man, a soft-spoken African American who has lived most of his life with disability, having lost one eye to previously undetected glaucoma in basic training after he was drafted in the late 1960s. (He received a medical discharge and lifetime Veterans Administration medical care soon thereafter.) His work was primarily in a volunteer capacity, engaged in the operation of the Friends Meeting that my sister and he have been longtime members of, and as a community mediator.

He was as spiritually centered as any person I've ever known.

In my family, he was the person who took the greatest interest in, and most seriously, my love of trains and model railroading. He'd been a train buff himself as a teenager.

I remember him fondly as well for two other gifts he gave me in my youth. He explained American football to me (my father had little to no interest then in professional sports, although he watched the amateur Olympics with enthusiasm). And when my father was away on overseas study for a year and I began asking my mother and my sister about sex, Ed was drafted to explain it to me. He did so with grace, compassion, tenderness and deep respect that was worthy of the best OWL facilitator anywhere.

When my oldest son was born, it was no question who should be his godfather at his dedication, and Ed fulfilled the task in his own quiet way.

In a note to family and friends about this news, DairyStateMom said this:

Ed was at our wedding; those of you who celebrated with us that day might remember a big, soft-spoken African-American guy with an enveloping hug.  I think a regular hug from Ed for all would go a long way toward solving the most intractable problems of human relations.

I couldn't put it any better.

Rest in Peace, Ed.

A Meditation on Politics, Part 2: The Card-Carrying Anarchist and the Centrist

The Card-Carrying Anarchist had been an on-and-off friend since I was in 3rd grade or so. We had met in Sunday School at my Episcopal church; his father taught then at the same college as my father did. We later crossed paths again when I was in about 6th grade and he was in 7th. He was of Italian descent, at least on his dad's side; there were Pa. coal miners somewhere in his background, I believe.

Now, in my junior year of high school (his senior), we ran into each other again, in my psychology class. In the years since we had first met, he had immersed himself in radical history and politics. He had read Bakunin, the Russian anarchist theorist, and was already a member of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World -- hence my nickname for him. (I kind of wish I'd been clever enough to think of that as a nickname for him at the time, but alas it was only in retrospect.)

We wound up sitting together at lunch most days. It was election season and I wore my McGovern button

every day in a school where "Nixon Now" and "Nixon -- Now more than ever"

buttons were far more common. The CCA wasn't impressed. "Don't Vote -- It only encourages them," was his motto.

The CCA was my principal tutor on the subject of radical politics and class consciousness. One day when I used the disparaging term "redneck," he corrected me, pointing out that the term was a dismissive insult to working-class whites. From our conversations -- and from some of the reading it inspired -- I began to learn a bit more about some of the obscured parts of American history. When I returned to the Quaker high school in my senior year, he was still in the area; I did a report for my history class on the IWW and brought him in as a guest speaker. My classmates didn't quite know what to make of him.

We corresponded for a time when I was in college and he had moved to New York to become a union organizer for the Garment Workers. But when it came to politics, while I found his ideas intriguing and ideals inspiring, I never made the commitment he did to fundamental radicalism. The closest I came was a brief flirtation with joining the Socialist Party, headquartered in Milwaukee at the time, and another with the equally brief presidential aspirations of populist Democrat Fred Harris in 1976.

But just as I had cast off the Nicene Creed as too constricting in describing my religious beliefs, I found myself reluctant to commit to any particular political party platform. To be sure, I always preferred Democrats when it came time to cast a ballot, but I wasn't drawn to the active organizing activities for any of the candidates on my campus.

Instead, I stumbled into journalism via the campus newspaper. Many things appealed to me about that craft. I loved writing, but I felt hopelessly incompetent at having to be "creative" (even though I was a composition major and took classes in Fiction and Playwritng). The best short story I ever wrote was basically an only lightly fictionalized account of the personal turmoils of another high school friend. Working for the college paper, I didn't have to make things up.

And I liked the idea of "getting all sides" to a story -- and the detachment it required. I absorbed the then-dominant ethic of "objectivity" with ease.

Degree in hand, I found a newspaper job. I payed close attention to national politics, but as an observer more than a partisan. I had voted for Carter in 1976, and largely admired his attempts to emphasize human rights in international affairs and energy conservation in the domestic sphere. I didn't particularly understand the economics of the time, from either a socialist or a capitalist perspective.

By 1980 I was subscribing to The Nation and Mother Jones, but I read them with the same reserve that I approached politics -- sympathetic to their basic outlooks, interested to learn more, but not deeply immersed in their world view.

Ted Kennedy challenged Carter from the left for the Democratic nomination that year, but I wasn't all that engaged with that fight. Instead, I was intrigued by the campaign of a local congressman, John Anderson, who was challenging Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination. Illinois had an open primary, allowing me to choose either the GOP or the Democratic ballot, and for the only time in my life I took a Republican one, voting for Anderson.

By now I had become completely disenchanted with Carter, and thought I would probably vote for Anderson's third-party candidacy in November. But when the time came to enter the voting booth, I thought to myself, "well, if I'm going to vote for a loser, why not one that I can feel a wholeheartedly support?" And so it was that in 1980 I picked Barry Commoner of the newly formed Citizens Party.

Looking back on that time, I find myself regretting, a lot, that I didn't vote for Carter's re-election. Not that it would have made a difference.

And this is where I'll try to pick up the story next time... even as I absorb the political changes of November 2nd, 2010.


PS: On February 26, 2011, I went through and edited the titles of this series slightly.

A Meditation on Politics, Part 1: Hating Politics

This is a post I've been putting off writing since practically when I started this blog.

I've been putting it off because I don't know exactly what I want to say. I've been putting it off because what I want to say covers such sprawling territory I don't know where to start. I've been putting it off because I know so painfully well how much I don't know.

But I've come to the point where I can't not start saying something.

This is likely to be pretty raw -- in the sense of not being more than very lightly edited. As a writer I often massage my message before I unveil it. That's been less true of this blog, and I think it will be even less true of this post or series of posts.

So. To begin.

I've come to hate politics. I engage in what's going on just enough to do my job as a journalist, some of which involves writing about the media. But otherwise I keep myself at an ever-increasing distance. When NPR comes on in the morning at 5 a.m., I shut it off, and DairyStateMom is kind to indulge me. (Of course, she will get to hear the same cycle during her 1-hour commute to The Big City a couple of hours later, but still -- I appreciate her accommodation even so.)

I do occasionally get sucked in during the day to certain political news items, whether on the NY Times or Washington Post websites or on more specialized sites, blogs, etc. Sometimes I post a link on Facebook to some matter that I find especially trenchant, but I'm fairly restrained about that, too.

But for the most part, I tend to push away from my mind much contemplation about what's been going on politically.

I am constrained from direct activism on account of my journalistic work. I'm a freelancer, so that is arguably more of a personal choice. (I could, after all, choose to freelance in areas that don't overlap politics.) But because of the topics I tend to write about -- maybe even want to write about, it could be argued -- I feel it more appropriate to keep arm's length. (Two exceptions: In 2004 I put up a Kerry sign on my lawn; in 2006 I would wear a discreet button opposing the state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage -- but never to interviews.)

That seemingly necessary detachment may contribute somewhat to my aversion to politics these days, because to some extent that aversion is driven by a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness. If I worked in another field, perhaps I might find myself throwing myself into some volunteer political activism, so that I might be able to say to myself, "I'm doing all I can to help bring about the outcomes I prefer / stop the outcomes I fear..."

As I have on other subjects, I find it most helpful to start with autobiography.

I grew up in a politically engaged home. I often say my parents were Stevenson Democrats (as in Adlai -- the guy who ran against Eisenhower in 1952 and '56), but it would be just as accurate to say they were Roosevelt Democrats, too. It's probably pretty safe to bet they never voted for a Republican in my lifetime, but that didn't keep my father from paying close attention to the other side. I recall listening to the Republican convention on the radio with my father in 1964, and hearing Clare Booth Luce ("Mrs. Luce," my father said, telling me who was speaking) giving what must have been an endorsement speech for Barry Goldwater. (My clearest memory from that time is when she referred to him as "the wave of the future," and my father recoiled, recognizing the title of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's book that saw Fascism as inevitable and counseled submission to it. I was in 3rd Grade that year. That fall My Weekly Reader had an article about the election with big side-by-side head shots of LBJ and Goldwater on the cover. A friend of mine drew pictures of devil's horns on Goldwater and a halo and wings on Johnson, and I followed suit. There may have been kids who did the opposite; I cannot recall with certainty.

In 1968 I went to bed on election night not knowing for sure who had won the presidency; it was the first question I asked my mother when I awoke the next day. Of course, we weren't happy.

In 1972, a junior in high school, I volunteered for the McGovern campaign. I have three specific memories from that time: A Saturday morning spent calling voters to identify their preference ("You gotta be kidding!" said one woman when I asked if she planned to vote for McGovern in the election, before slamming down the phone); a trek through some neighborhood in my [very Republican] rural southeastern Pennsylvania community to hand out fliers; and a depressed election night at local HQ watching the returns on a black and white TV (as I snuck sips of beer from the refreshments cooler). I wrote a morose, rambling and probably not very coherent memoir of the evening -- the very next day, if memory serves -- and showed it to my English teacher (whose politics were very definitely not left of center).

That junior year was fateful in certain ways. From 8th grade through 10th grade, I had gone, instead of to the local public school, to a Quaker school in Delaware. For 11th grade -- for reasons that were, I believe, mostly financial (certainly not academic ones) -- I was sent back to the public school, with the promise that I could return to the Quaker school in my senior year (which I did).

As it happened, that junior year back in the local public school re-united me with a childhood friend, whom I will call The Card-carrying Anarchist (The CCA for short). And that's where I will resume my story next time.

PS: On February 26, 2011, I went through and edited the titles of this series slightly.

It's My Birthday

It's my birthday today. A warm and loving card from the always thoughtful DairyStateMom was at my place at the kitchen table.

And an old college friend who maintains a blog of prayers that he composes growing out of his Jewish tradition just happened to post a link to this April prayer today on his Facebook page.

Follow the link for the whole thing. It's called "Regarding Old Wounds" -- and it seems right for a birthday taking-stock time.

Amen, and Blessed Be.

I am a Christian

I've actually been contemplating making this declaration for months. But I've been on unofficial and unplanned hiatus from this blog for most of the summer -- a product of distraction, an erratic schedule, vacation, more kid-time, and a thousand other things.

I am a Christian.

I am also, still, a Unitarian Universalist, and I do not consider these two declarations of faith to be mutually exclusive.

I know there are millions of Christians who will tell me that, no, I am not a Christian. But I take comfort in the millions who will accept my declaration of faith on its face.

I do not believe that Jesus died so that I might be saved, by a vengeful, sadistic and petty tyrant of a god, from an eternal torment as a result of an act committed by a mythical ancestor 6,000 years ago.

But I still declare myself a Christian.

I do believe that the planet and the Universe are indeed as many millions of years old as the best scientific evidence appears to show them to be. I believe my ancestors emerged over eons, increasingly complex from once-simple organisms. I believe that their actual coming into being, the entire universe's coming into being, was an act of creation by a supreme and not entirely knowable, distant and overarching yet intimate, creative force and personality for which God is the most familiar name, however imperfect and insufficient.

I believe that many people have walked this planet and been acutely in touch with that force, that personality. I believe that one of them lived about 2,000 years ago, a working class man born into a humble family in the Middle East, in a country under the grip of a foreign oppressor, who grew up to preach a radical message of love, equality, humility, and sharing, a message that called on all to transcend boundaries established by social norms and structures of hierarchy. His message was not, in itself, unique, but it was rendered in a powerful and distinctive voice

That message speaks deeply to me. And so I call myself a Christian.

I do not know in what way Jesus transcended his death on the cross 2,000 years ago. I don't dismiss out of hand the possibility that some sort of real resurrection occurred, although if it did I wonder why it was not more widely recorded even in that time. But, more likely, I believe that what transcended death was the force of his example and the force of his radical egalitarian vision.

These ideas that I embrace are not the product of any original thought. For the last two years I've been on an autodidactic journey through a handful of works of contemporary Christian scholarship. And so I've read, mostly, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, both Jesus Seminar scholars; and Michael Dowd; and Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakishima Brock. The most recent installment of my curriculum was Brian McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus: a distillation, in a voice and tone that rings with the familiar cadences of the Evangelical pulpit, of the radical teachings I described above. All of the works I've described spoke to me, but Message spoke with the most fervor and enabled me to say:

I am a Christian.

And what now? What next?

While I'm sure I will read more in that vein in the coming months and years, that journey has reached a pause, as I synthesize what I've encountered and make sense of it in my own life.

I will have more to write about some of this, I'm sure, in coming days, weeks and months. For now, it just felt it was time to say what I have said.

And so I have.

Evangelical Christianity and Me (Part 2)

I've touched on the role that the Friends (Quakers) played in my mother's religious life. Before we joined the Episcopal church when I was about 5 or 6, my mother was attending a Quaker meeting, and I was going to First Day school (RE) there. I remember that only vaguely. At some point we must have been going back and forth between that and the Episcopal church, because my mother is very fond of telling a story when, coming home from the Friends meeting one Sunday (where I had apparently been very bored), I said to her: "I want to be babatized and go to the Episcopal church!"

I don't have a clear memory of this. Sometimes it seems familiar to me, but I'm not entirely confident that it's indigenous to my memory as opposed to residing there from repetition of the story.

Even after we did join the Episcopal church, my family remained very close to a number of Quaker friends, some of whom taught on the college campus where my father (and later my mother) taught, others whom they'd known from Philadelphia, where my mother had worked as a teacher at a Quaker school.

Then, starting in 8th grade, I attended a Quaker school as well, further cementing my ties with that faith. I think I got three particularly strong messages from my experience with the Friends: Their strong commitment to social justice, the concept of the light of God in everyone, and a respect for pluralism (which I know may not be universal among Friends). Meanwhile I continued to attend the Episcopal church, was confirmed therein when I was 12 or 13, and remained quite happily engaged with it through high school. I also was active in an ecumenical Christian youth group in the community, which had representation from Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists. Our own priest had been a driving force in putting that group together. I am not sure, in retrospect, whether the Baptist church involved was American (Mainline) or Southern (Evangelical), but I rather suspect the latter.

And it was during this time that I continued to encounter strongly fundamentalist peers. Most of them were through the Boy Scout troop to which I belonged, but one of them was a classmate at the Quaker school -- an African American -- who had had a born-again experience in about 11th grade or so and in my senior year tried mightily to convert me. We had many earnest -- and mostly good-natured -- arguments/discussions, but he never did succeed in converting me.

Yet the impact of his persistence was ironic. He had come to believe certain things in the Bible literally, and as I reflected on my very clear understanding that the Bible was not to be taken that way, I found myself examining the creed that we recited every Sunday in my own church. "Born of the Virgin Mary." "On the Third Day He rose again." It was one thing to read the Bible symbolically, but here we were, reciting those phrases and stating unequivocally, "I believe..."

Could I really believe these things? I asked myself. And if I couldn't, wasn't it as absurd to be stating them as articles of faith as it was to believe in the literal creation story, the literal forecasts of Revelation, or the literal notion that only by asserting personal belief in salvation through Jesus Christ could I be spared from eternal damnation?

Although I had only a superficial awareness of other religions (besides Judaism -- my sister had married a Jew when I was a high school freshman), it was at this time in my life that I became very clear on one principle that has stayed with me ever since: With so many religious faiths in the world, I just could not believe that Christianity was the only "right" one and all the rest were "wrong." I concluded that in some way all must have a piece of the greater cosmic truth, whatever that was.**

In my first semester of college, I went once to the Episcopal church near the campus. It was the fall. A guest priest was there that day. I remember nothing of the sermon except one line. Well into his delivery, the priest acknowledged that there were some who sought a "Copernican revolution" in religion, placing Christianity alongside other faiths and taking away its primacy. I found myself nodding in agreement -- and then he followed up: Well, he said, that was absolutely the wrong idea.

I stayed for the end of the service, but when I left the church, I didn't go back. I attended the Episcopal church a few times after that, back home (once because I went to Christmas Eve services with a girl I briefly dated); I attended Quaker meeting once or twice over the next several years, but was bored, missing the liturgy of the Episcopal church if not the wrestling with dogma, however gently couched. I took a Religious Studies 101 class in Interpreting the Bible in my senior year of college -- a class I liked very much. But I felt little interest in returning to the church of my childhood, or to any Christian church in those days. Eventually I found my way, some seven years after I graduated from high school, into a UU church (as I've written about here.)

But over the years, I've continued to harbor a bit of a grudge toward fundamentalism and Evangelical/"Jesus Saves" Christianity.

Why is that?

I've come up with three answers--none of them mutually exclusive, all of them probably a piece of the answer.

1) I felt it both anti-intellectual (especially the rejection of science) and monstrously unjust. (It was only fairly recently -- within the last decade I think -- that I connected the fundamentalist insistence on the literal Adam and Eve story with the Jesus Saves Christology: Without the literal fall, the atonement theory has no meaning. I mention that in passing here.)

2) Somewhere deep down, I may have harbored an irrational fear -- what if the fundamentalists are right? And resented them for sparking that fear.

3) And I resented them for tainting even Mainline Christianity for me, contributing to my loss of faith in a source of real comfort, guidance and meaning during my growing up.

There may, indeed, be yet other reasons I have not managed to articulate for myself. Some days, I think 1) is the most powerful source of my resentment. Others, I find it is 3). Sometimes -- not much any more if at all -- even 2) has raised its head.

The last two years, however, have seen me on a journey back to Christianity. Certainly not the Christianity in which I never believed, and to be sure, not exactly the Christianity of my own childhood and teen years. But Christianity -- in a form that I can claim and embrace wholeheartedly -- nonetheless.

I will write more about that another time.

__________________________

** Indeed, when I first read Forrest Church's metaphor of The Cathedral of the World (first presented in the book he co-wrote with John Buehrens, A Chosen Faith) some 15 or more years later -- and long after I had become a UU -- the image in that metaphor brought me back to the insight I'd had in high school. I don't have any kind of diary from when I had reached that earlier conclusion, so I have no way of knowing for sure whether I had arrived at it through the same or at least a similar metaphor. But it felt very at home with me.

Evangelical Christianity and Me

I've said this before. I was never a fundamentalist, or an Evangelical. But for most of my young adult and adult life, I've harbored a special wariness of the fundamentalist and even the Evangelical approach to Christianity.

I grew up attending an Episcopal church, and also with close association to the Quakers, in Southeastern PA. My mother's father was an Episcopal clergyman whose primary vocation was teaching and writing. He was an associate of some kind of John Dewey (by interesting coincidence, I've been a consultant for the last 10 years to an education scholar who is very much a latter-day Dewey disciple). And his principal written work (besides some letters to the New York Times around the time of WW 1 that I happened to stumble across) was a two-volume history of Christianity. I have a re-bound copy of it in my bookshelves, and I actually managed to read about the first 4 or 5 chapters a few years ago.

My mother (a/k/a EmpireStateMom for those of you who are coming in late) says his basic outlook was that of the Gnostics. I've not gotten a clear understanding of why that is or what about his outlook she equates with the Gnostics.

I open with this digression because my spiritual biography really starts with hers. My mother went to a Quaker college and for years afterward found herself alternately worshiping with the Quakers, the Congregationalists, and ultimately the Episcopalians. I was about 5 or 6 when I was baptized in the Episcopal church and I felt quite comfortable there as I grew up.

My father was an anthropologist who taught at the college level after a few years of doing research in Western Africa. He had grown up attending an Episcopal church, I believe, although I vaguely recall his family might have identified as Presbyterian. They lived in Texas.

From a very early age my father made sure I knew about and understood evolution. He was not hostile to Christianity, but pretty much by the time I had reached an age in which I could understand and appreciate Myth, I understood the earliest Biblical books to be Mythical.

I was in about 7th grade when I began to realize that some classmates in my heavily fundamentalist/Evangelical pocket of the world were not of the same point of view -- that they were absolutely certain that Adam and Eve were real, historical figures. (I even recall some of them quizzing a science teacher on the subject -- and I also recall her saying to them that she was more inclined to believe the biblical version, or something like that. It was a conversation I didn't get involved in at the time.)

Later, and separately from that realization, I came to understood the essential principle of fundamentalist/Evangelical Christianity: That the sole, or at least primary, reason for Jesus's coming to earth was to be crucified and resurrected in order to in some way absolve humanity of sin, and that that "salvation" could only be achieved by "accepting Jesus as personal Lord and savior."

As I've noted previously, that was not the message I got from the church I grew up in. The message that I did get was much more indirect -- in retrospect, and not at all certain that I'm getting it right now -- I would say that we were taught that Jesus was God come to earth to help us understand God better. But it was nowhere near as explicit and cut-and-dried as that.

I never bought into the personal savior theory as articulated by the fundamentalists, and I never bought into the closely aligned view that the book of Revelation was a reliable forecast of the future of the world. In high school I first discovered the work of Jack Chick, the fundamentalist cartoonist, specifically from an anti-evolution tract called "Big Daddy." (My father pointed out the many inaccuracies in its reading of the scientific data, and also pointed out the likely intentional way in which the pro-evolution professor is depicted in line with Jewish stereotypes.) I fantasized instead trying to write a tract that would rebut fundamentalist dogma with a liberal Christian social gospel, but couldn't get very far because I really couldn't articulate the message in such simple terms.

But something about my encounter with this strain of Christianity marked me for the rest of my life. I was always on the lookout for it; in my late 30s and early 40s I even subscribed for a time to an anti-fundamentalist newsletter. That dogma is a trigger for me, in fact -- provoking a visceral reaction that I don't fully understand.

This didn't set out to be a multi-part post, but I will leave off for now and continue anon.

The Why of Jesus

smijer has a long and interesting post today on the topic of Penal Substitution (which I tend to refer to as Substitutionary Atonement). It's a topic that's been on my "to-blog" list for almost as long as I've had this blog. What I'm writing now isn't that idealized/imagined blog post, but a start.

Growing up an Episcopalian, the notion that "Jesus died for our sins and paid the price to ransom us from hell" was not really the dominant interpretation I got from my church community as a child or as a teen. That's despite the lines in the Nicene and Apostle's creeds that suggest as much, although not as baldly.

But that same message was all around me. I grew up in a rural pocket of Southeastern PA that was culturally akin to the Bible Belt, with a strong fundamentalist and Evangelical presence. So starting in about 6th or 7th grade and through my teen-age years I started coming across tracts setting forth this message and friends for whom it was their central understanding of who Jesus was and what his mission was.

It never made sense to me. In a way that I could not even articulate, it struck me as irrational and even monstrous. Just the requirement that all you had to do -- and the only thing you could do -- to avoid eternal punishment was to make a statement that you believed that Jesus died for your sins seemed absurd on its face and more absurd the more I tried to contemplate and understand it.

The priest who was probably most influential in my religious upbringing -- a wonderful man who arrived at our church when I was about 11 and retired when I was about 16 or 17 -- also didn't think much of it. Not long after he arrived in our town, he asked me about the prevalence of "Jesus Saves" messages all over; while I cannot recall his exact words, it was very clear from the way he asked that he was quite dismissive of that approach. And this was not any kind of closeted atheist, either; he was deeply devout, even for a priest, and it was natural and authentic for him to refer to Jesus, whether in the context of his life on earth or in the context of the eternal, as "Our Lord."

At the same time, however, the fundamental idea of Substitutionary Atonement (although not the term -- in truth, that label is less than a year old in my consciousness) has had a near-obsessive hold on my imagination for all my life -- a consequence of how completely monstrous a concept I felt (and feel) that it was and is. Every once in a while I find myself in the religious section of the bookstore and gazing at new (Evangelical) titles in the subject of basic Christian theology, and I often pick up one or another and quickly comb through for evidence (which I almost always find) that it's serving the same old Substitutionary Atonement wine in a new bottle. When I poke around on the web for church websites (something I do occasionally just as a matter of curiosity, or perhaps because I'm following a link from somewhere else), I'll almost always look first at the "What We Believe" section (if there is one) and then assess how much it does or doesn't follow the SA model. And when I read The First Paul, by Crossan & Borg, last year, it was a revelation to me to learn that the whole notion of Substitutionary Atonement could largely be traced to Anselm, nearly a millennium after the Crucifixion.

Perhaps that's why reading Brian McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus -- the book I'm currently on -- has been such an absolute delight. It's the first work I've seen by an Evangelical that offers a real alternative to that model. (And from some Amazon reviews I've been reading lately, it appears his newest book, A New Kind of Christianity, may actually reject the Subtitutionary Atonement model outright, although I can't yet say that with any first-hand knowledge.)

Some years ago I heard (second-hand) that Garrison Keillor, in an amusing discourse about the New York subway system, explained why the only preachers on the trains were fundamentalists: You just don't have time for a complex message, so the simple one -- "Jesus died for your sins! Give thanks to God!" or something like that -- wins out.

As I've been reintroducing myself to Christianity through its Progressive strains in the Mainline church, I've thought back to my childhood. I'm glad that my Episcopal upbringing offered an alternative to the fundamentalism in the community around me. I just wish, sometimes, that it had offered an equally succinct and clear statement of that alternative.

Thinking Out Loud: Noodling a Story Idea

This is something I've never done before on this blog.

The last few days especially, and for much longer than that generally, I've been following discussions about the anti-racism movement, and disputes over its inclination to ignore or dismiss the subject of class, over on Will's blog. (Here's the most recent such discussion.)

It's a topic that intrigues me journalistically. A big reason for that is my own personal biography. On the surface I'm a suburban white man, and that's mostly how I live my life. But I grew up on the college campus (literally -- we lived in campus housing) of a historically black college that was adjacent to a rural, black village. I have immediate relatives of African descent.

A decade of covering labor and workplace issues for a metropolitan newspaper (and, more sporadically, since that time as a freelancer) has given me insights as well into issues of class and the economy's impact at the street level.

Add to that my sometimes annoying tendency to be pathologically even-handed, a holdover from my newspaper reporting "get both sides of the story" days.

Anyway...as I said, I find myself interested in writing something on this topic, but of course, first, I have to know just a whole lot more than I do right now. And then the question is, for whom? I've got two primarily regional publications I write for, and there's one in particular, based in my state's capital city, for which I think something could be fashioned. And then, what? what's the hook? What's the lede? What's the angle? Especially, the local angle?

Feel free to chime in in the comments. The usual commenting rules apply...

A Daily Spiritual Discipline

Something I've never done is embrace, and stick with, a daily spiritual practice or discipline. (I've also never stuck with a long-term exercise program. There might be a connection here.)

On the one hand, I find myself admiring people who adopt such a practice, and who, to me, seem very centered and spiritually mature. On the other, I find myself chafing at making anything a "requirement" or an "obligation" in this way -- and then berate myself for seeming shallow or self-centered.

Several years ago I spent some time doing daily "morning pages" as prescribed in the book The Artist's Way, but didn't stick with that for very long, either.

These days I've been feeling a desire to embrace some kind of daily discipline or practice to help focus and center myself for the day. But I draw back -- for the aforementioned reasons, and because I don't want it to be just another personal fad.

So why am I posting this in this semi-public space? More than with some other blog posts, I'm interested in (on-topic) feedback and reflections from others for whom this topic resonates. If this sparks any thoughts, or you have any related wisdom from your own experience to share, I'd be interested in hearing it.

Easter

Strange Attractor ponders how to experience Easter from a non-Christian perspective, and both her remarks and the comments that follow make for interesting reading.

As it happens, DairyStateMom and I both attended her church this Easter, and I found the entire service very moving, notwithstanding my non-orthodox interpretation and belief around the resurrection. Spectacular music (they bring in timpani to accompany the organ on this day) was one reason, but not the only one.

A special feature of the morning was an anthem based on the Emily Dickinson poem "Hope is the thing with feathers" -- a completely new setting for the poem, with a soaring soprano solo at the end, that had its world premiere on that day and in that place. The senior pastor's sermon began with Dickinson's story, focusing with great empathy on how Dickinson was viewed as a failure religiously in her adolescence, admitted to Mount Holyoke Seminar for Girls as one "without hope" for salvation:

From the Emily Dickinson Museum's Web site:

Mount Holyoke also believed that students’ moral and religious lives were part of its responsibility and conducted revivals that encouraged students to profess their faith. Students were organized into one of three groups: those who professed, those who hoped to and those who were without hope. Dickinson was among eighty without hope when she entered and was among twenty-nine who remained so by the end of the year.

The sermon then made a segue to note the anniversary of Martin Luther King's last speech, and quoted extensively from King's sermons over some 20 years in which he called upon hope for the future and for justice.

And that, she said, summed up the Easter message: hope for the future and in the justice of the universe.

It was a message that I found resonated very deeply with me. One in which the supernatural miracle of Easter was muted in favor of Easter as a state of mind--yet one that I think someone for whom the Resurrection story as a more literal event could still feel at home with.

A week later I'm still turning it over in my mind. (In fact, I delayed publishing this, having begun the draft of it a couple of days ago, in hopes I could write something a bit more definitive and complete here.)

I am very much a pluralist and very much a Unitarian Universalist. I'm a skeptic, at best, on the supernatural elements that have traditionally been a part of Christian belief. I emphatically reject the traditional atonement theology that requires me to believe Jesus died for the sins of the world in order to ransom us from eternal damnation.

But in recent years, owing in part to sharing in some of DairyStateMom's faith life, and driven by that to do the reading I've been doing of late, I do find myself reconnecting with Christianity. Not Christianity as traditionally defined, mind you. But one in which I see a deep and inspiring meaning in the life and words ascribed to Jesus.

And I find myself taking great comfort in that turn of events, even as it challenges me in my day-to-day life.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day has never been very high on my list of holidays. Nothing against it, just it was never particularly special.

A couple of random recollections.

I was in China for 3 weeks some 8 years ago, part of a team of mostly teachers (plus a couple of ringers, including me) from Wisconsin and Northern Illinois who were teaching in a summer school program to offer English language and American cultural immersion. Each of us prepared a lesson on a particular state or major city of the U.S. Having gone to graduate school at The World's Greatest Journalism School, it was natural for me to pick New York City. When it came time to pick a holiday associated with the city, I chose St. Patrick's Day, and on one of my presentations I talked a dear friend and fellow teacher into serenading the class with "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

Red hair, of course, is associated with the Irish. DairyStateKid#1 once won a red-headed-kid contest at Irish Fest in Milwaukee. But years before that, he had the greatest comeback ever to a nosy question about his hair. Neither his mother nor I have red hair (I don't have much hair at all, to be sure), and in a restaurant with his mother for lunch one day when he was about 3, he was approached by a well-meaning older woman. "Where did you get that lovely red hair?" she asked.

"It started growing on my head when I was a baby," was his reply.

Finally, here's a lovely little essay on today through an Interfaith lens.

Top o' th' mornin' to you all.

What I believe

I saw this bumpersticker a few years ago on a pickup truck outside the local post office:

I laughed. It probably sums up my own frame of reference more succinctly than anything else.

I actually think it's a delightful rejoinder, not just to cocksure theists of any kind, but also to most hardline and smug atheists. And it appears that some hardline atheists are noticing.

As I say, I like it. Yet I don't consider myself, in formal terms, an agnostic.

What I believe in is the Mystery, and the metaphor.

When DairyStateMom and I first met a little more than six years ago, our religious differences were something we looked at directly fairly quickly. She was a committed Christian who happily belonged to the Presbyterian Church. I was a committed Unitarian Universalist and long-time active member and lay leader in my own church community. Despite creedal differences we found that we could appreciate and respect each other's perspectives. Her Christianity is not of the "Believe in Jesus or you Go to Hell" variety. I do not share the scorn of Christianity, especially Mainline Christianity, that I hear from some people in UU circles. I belong to a religious movement that was the first in the nation to celebrate gay unions and has been on the forefront of the fight for Marriage Equality, and to a congregation that is one of many in our religion to have an openly gay minister. She left one congregation because its pastor was overtly hostile to opening Presbyterian ordination (which includes lay leadership, not just the clergy) to gay and lesbian people, to join first one, and later a second, congregation whose pastors are at the forefront of the fight to do just that. We found very close congruence in our deepest values and attitudes.

Sometime during our courtship, we had an earnest telephone conversation that revolved around our beliefs. I honestly don't remember how it got started, but at some point it became clear to me that it was necessary for me to lay out what my own rock-bottom beliefs were. It was a little scary: I know that I worried that I might "say the wrong thing." And, indeed, I had not had the occasion to articulate for myself even exactly what I was going to say now.

This is what it came down to:

I believe that there is more to the universe than we are capable of seeing or knowing. That is not a supernatural belief. It is simply a reflection of the limits of our senses, experience and insight.

I believe that all religious doctrine is ultimately metaphor -- allegory: Our attempt to explain and understand the mystery we cannot fully know.

And I believe that all religious scripture is the work of human beings, not dictated by any outside supreme being.

Those underlying principles make room for pluralism: to accept one particular religious truth does not have to lead one to say that all others are false. But they also make room for discernment: This is not a statement that all religions say the same thing; moreover, it allows for the judgment that some metaphors and scriptures are healthier and closer to the mark than others. It allows for eclecticism, even a so-called "cafeteria religion" -- a concept often derided but one that I openly embrace. And finally, I honestly admit I cannot prove it. It is the product of a lifelong hunch, the cumulative result of experience in the world, exposure to a wide range of ideas and belief systems, and my own contemplation.

I do not pretend to think that it is going to satisfy anyone who firmly believes their creed is the only, absolute belief system and one that must be accepted and understood in literal terms. Such a person would, quite understandably, dismiss my claims, telling me: "What I believe is true, not just some metaphor."

But I do think it helps advance the conversation beyond the statement that "well, everyone can't be right in their beliefs. If you believe X and I believe Y, one of us must be wrong."

Needless to say, my "faith statement" didn't shock DairyStateMom. She didn't even argue with it. Our courtship continued and the rest is history.

When we married, our ceremony was officiated by one of her favorite Christian ministers and my favorite UU minister. We lit a chalice (the one that is now the symbol of this blog) and stood before a stained glass cross.

And since then we have attended each other's churches. DSM loves my church's minister and appreciates our services -- but she misses the anchoring in Jesus and God that she gets in the Presbyterian Church. Meanwhile I have enjoyed visiting her church and getting to know its members and pastors. I've also grown from getting reacquainted in a meaningful way with the story of Jesus and of the God of the Old and New Testaments as a window into the Mystery of the Universe. But I remain a UU, and would miss the insights from my own church that are drawn out of sources as diverse as the ancient Jain tradition, neo-Paganism, Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism and Rational Humanism.

I feel blessed that neither of us has to make such a trade-off.



A Happy and Meaningful 2010 to One and All.

"Thank God for Evolution"

Some months ago I started reading Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution. Didn't get very far, but that's not the book's fault; I'd been reading a series of books on theology and Christian history, and I just needed a break. I have picked it up again and I'm about halfway through it.

Dowd is probably familiar to many UUs. He's spoken at many of our churches; his wife and collaborator, Connie Barlow, is a UU herself. And he's been featured in UU World. I first heard of him when he spoke at my church about 5 years ago. He gave a great talk, and I admire the work he's doing.

A one-time Pentecostal who believed the Bible literally and later evolved his own thinking and theology, Dowd is now an "evangelist for evolution." His basic position is that a major obstacle, at least in our culture, to the acceptance of the indisputable evidence that science has produced about the age of the earth and how life and even the universe itself have evolved over time is that people long for and even need a mythopoeic (or mythopoetic, if you prefer)approach to information like this that touches so deeply our human identities. He's part of a group of writers, scientists, and others in the loose Epic of Evolution movement for such an approach to convey the science of evolution.

Evolution is a particular hobby horse of mine. As the son of an Anthropologist who grew up in a rural part of the country in which Bible Belt fundamentalism was quite pervasive, I got quite accustomed to arguing the topic with my schoolmates. I read in 8th Grade a terrific account of the Scopes Monkey Trial, written by the science fiction and science fact writer L. Sprague DeCamp; that led me to Irving Stone's biography of Clarence Darrow, who in my high school years, when I eagerly looked forward to becoming a lawyer, was my hero.

But I never had any difficulty in reconciling my acceptance of science and my belief in God. Certainly that wasn't an issue in the Episcopal church where I grew up. And I know there are millions and millions of Christians who feel the same. Indeed, as I've posted before, my experience of awe and wonder at the findings of science have in their own way reinforced my basically theistic worldview. (I recall sometime in my middle-school or teen years arguing the point with a fundamentalist friend, and making the analogy between God and evolution and the many changes in shape a ball of clay might take under our hands as we made a clay figure.)

It's worth noting that in the church in which I grew up, the notion of Jesus as "personal savior" was also not emphasized. Jesus as the Son of God, yes. Jesus as resurrected on Easter, yes. But the meaning of his crucifixion and resurrection were far, far more obscure and complex. "Redeemer" and "reconciliation" were favorite words. But when a new priest came to our parish when I was in, I think, 6th grade or so, he asked me about the popularity of "Jesus Saves" billboards, tracts and bumper stickers -- and in such a way that it was very clear to me he was a bit scornful of the theology they reflected.

By contrast, the fundamentalists around me had a very clear, concise understanding, embedded in that "Jesus Saves" message: Jesus died as the punishment for our sins--but we had to accept that death on our behalf, or we'd get the punishment we deserved, eternity in hell, when we died. That's why, to them, it was so critical to "accept Jesus as your personal Savior."

I don't know when it happened, but sometime over the last 10 or 15 years, a penny dropped for me about why the fundamentalists were so invested in the literal interpretation of the Creation Story: Because it was the fundamental underpinning of the Jesus Saves theology, or, to use the bigger word I've been using these days, Subtitutionary Atonement. Their understanding/definition of Jesus's mission was rooted in the literal Fall, the literal Original Sin of Adam and Eve. Take away that story literally, and it pulls the rug out from under the whole Jesus Saves/Substitutionary Atonement theology.

I recall making that point to Dowd during a talk-back when he visited my church, and I remember he, while taking note of the point, seemed not to think it was that big a deal. And reading his book, I now understand why -- and I see his point.

Among Dowd's goals is to reach out to the fundamentalist and evangelical communities and help them accept the science by reframing the old literal doctrines as meaningful metaphors -- rather than simply rejecting them as silly superstition. Indeed, he's attempted to make this book accessible to Atheists and Evangelicals alike. The details of his approach and argument I'll save for another time. But it's a fascinating and even audacious endeavor, and given his background, if anyone can do it he might be the person.

Thank God for Evolution is a sprawling book, and tries to do many things, perhaps too many. It is part popular science book, part popular theology book, and even part self-help manual, all wrapped up in a polemic on behalf of pluralism, diversity, the environment and science itself. At times the earnestness with which he writes can become a bit much, but I suspect that is for an audience for whom that earnest voice is critical to reach.

I'm looking forward to the rest of it.