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.

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.

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.

In Memoriam: Daniel I. Pevar, 1976-2010

Grief hits us again.

My nephew Dan was a gentle, creative and caring man who died suddenly Monday, a victim of bipolar disorder.

I have no words for this. I am grateful that, after it looked like I would not be able to travel back east for his funeral, circumstances now make that possible.

Dan is the middle son of my sister Susan and her husband Marc. In honor of their Jewish faith, in memory of my beloved nephew, in shared sorrow with his parents and his brothers, I link to this prayer in that tradition, written by a college friend of mine.

It is called "For the Bereaved."

Last night, Dan's father told me: "Cherish your sons."

And so I say that to whoever stops by this place: Cherish your children.

Amen, and Blessed Be.

'Do as I Do...'

DairyStateMom directs me to this post by Andrew Sullivan, which in turn links to a Weekly Standard article.

The article itself is a review of a book aimed at Christian parents (and, by context, I'd infer mostly Evangelical parents more than Mainline ones). I'll stipulate that the book's author might define the "life-changing, culture-challenging demands of the gospel" a bit differently than I would, and instead just highlight the same quote that Sullivan does:

Parents who show, by their words or their actions, that the tenets and practices of their faith are vague, unimportant, or only tenuously related to daily life, produce teenagers whose faith is vague, marginal, and unlikely to shape their actions and plans in any significant way ...

Mormons, by contrast, challenge their teenagers and require a lot of time, study, and leadership from them. Mormon parents rise at dawn to go over their church’s history and doctrine with their children. More than half of the Mormon youth in the study had given a presentation in church in the past six months. They frequently shared public testimony and felt that they were given some degree of decision-making power within their community. They shape their plans for the immediate future around strong cultural pressures toward mission trips and marriage. Whatever one thinks of the actual beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it seems obvious that both adult Mormons and the teens who follow them really, really believe.

One thing that this quote skates over is the extent to which traditional Mormon beliefs (and those of certain other high-loyalty religions) are rooted at least partly in authoritarianism -- or at least, that's my perception.

So, a question for us UUs and Progressive Christians, and those of any other faith who seek to decouple our belief system from authoritarianism:

Are there lessons that we, too, can learn from this, that we can implement in a non-authoritarian way?

Some friends yesterday explained in a talk at my church why they (he raised Catholic, she raised as a secular Jew) opted for a UU church for their children (and themselves) instead of choosing a non-religious upbringing in which they would simply learn about religion on their own and make their own choices. He said, You can't really understand religion unless you grow up in a religion of some kind. And having that structure gives you something to question and even rebel against, which is healthy.

I liked that a lot. And I think there's a connection here...

The self as illusion? (Updated)

EmpireStateMom and I have for years had an on-and-off again dialogue about religion. She's an Episcopalian with strong Quaker leanings (but, she'll want me to clarify, not a pacifist). Knowing that I have had a passing fancy with (not anything like a disciplined study or practice of) Buddhism, she passes on thoughts relating to her reading about that subject.

In the Christian Century she read a favorable review of a new book, Without Buddha, I Could not be a Christian, by Paul Knitter, and sent the review on to me.

In her letter, she explained her continued perplexity with the Buddhist notion that "the self" is "an illusion" and her conclusion from trying to understand that concept (from having read certain Buddhist books) that it was a religion "for elites."

I wrote back saying that I didn't perceive it that way at all, that from the little bit of reading I have done (primarily some slim volumes by Thich Nhat Hanh), my understanding is that it is the barriers between people that are illusory. I suggested that, to me, it was a concept very much congruent with the idea of the Kingdom of God as explicated by people like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg (a favorite of hers, and lately, of mine).

Anyway. Checking out Monkey Mind today I came across this post from yesterday by James Ford. It said more clearly and articulately (and with far greater scholarship and spiritual experience behind it) what I was trying to tell ESM, so I printed it out and put it in the mail to her.

Update, Saturday, March 20, 2010

ESM called me this morning and said she was mistaken -- it was Hinduism she meant when she was talking about being "elitist," because of its caste system.

Oh, well...

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.

The Faith of my Father

"Dad, what's that?"

DairyStateKid#2 and I were headed out the door at way-too-early into way-too-cold this morning, getting him to his bus stop. I was still in pajamas and bathrobe, with boots and winter parka and hat and gloves to keep me warm.

"I'll explain in the car."

"That" is this:

Some 28 38 years ago, upon graduation from college with a degree in Anthropology, my sister won a prize, a small grant that would enable her to travel to a former English colony in Africa. Her husband, a wonderful amateur guitarist and folk music enthusiast, went with her of course. At the encouragement of our father (also an Anthropologist), she chose The Gambia, a tiny West African nation that is surrounded by the former French colony of Senegal. (About a year earlier I had been fortunate enough to go to both countries on a trip with my parents.)

In the Gambia my sister and brother-in-law wound up apprenticed for a year to a kora musician and praise singer who was Muslim.

It is the custom, at least among this particular group of Muslims, to write sayings from the Qur'an on a wooden tablet, then to wash the ink into a bottle. The bottle of inky water would then be worn on one's person as a sort of talisman.

Aware of a particular saying from the Qur'an, my father, through my sister, commissioned their host to make several such tablets--but not to wash off the ink (a request that, my sister later reported, their host found quite puzzling). Everyone in our family got one of these, and when my first marriage ended several years ago, I left mine behind, designating it as belonging to DairyStateKid#1. My mother kindly got me a second one, which, now that I think if it, has been designated as belonging to DSK#2.

My father--we can call him LoneStarStateDad--had grown up attending an Episcopalian church, but when I was growing up he only attended on Christmas Eve and, perhaps, once in a while on Easter. (And when I was confirmed.) His real God was the God of the natural world, and his worship was simply to live in and learn about it as much as he could. But, owing to his personality or perhaps his choice of academic discipline or, more likely, some combination of both, I found him to be a strong influence for pluralism.*  Indeed, when I converted to Unitarian Universalism (and I accept that term for the process even if some don't), I was in some ways coming home to the inchoate faith of my father.

This is the translation of the verse on that tablet, typed out on my father's old typewriter, nearly 3 4 decades ago:

______________
*This is not to take anything away from my mother, EmpireStateMom, who herself is an open and pluralistic person on matters of religion.

Santa stories

This blog post at Free Range Kids, and the comments it generated, reminded me of a few largely-unrelated-to-each-other Santa Claus tales, offered here in no particular order.

1. About 20 years ago I had a boss (younger than I was, even then) who was an Evangelical Christian. Three details that I recall in particular. One, as a young father, he and his wife had occasion to take his child one Sunday to be christened. What I remember specifically is they didn't call it baptism, but a "dedication" -- which was intriguing to me, because, of course, that's what we UU's typically call it. (I was myself not yet a father, but had already witnessed several beautiful dedication ceremonies at my UU church.) Now I knew better than to assume he was "just like me" because of that -- I fairly quickly inferred that his non-denominational church was a practitioner of adult baptism, as is common among many Evangelicals. Still I was intrigued by the commonality, however superficial. A second detail was his disapproval of Halloween as a holiday -- something I had not at that point come across among Evangelicals. But the third detail (and really the point here) is that he and his wife made a point of not telling their children about Santa Claus. His reasoning actually made sense to me. He felt that telling kids about a mythical supernatural being, knowing that sooner or later they would learn the truth of its non-existence, would simply set them up to lose faith in God in a similar fashion later. By not pretending in the existence in Santa, he felt, they were not creating the sort of cognitive dissonance or breach of trust between child and parent that could prompt later skepticism in the existence of God.

2. In a somewhat similar vein, I had a high school English teacher who also wouldn't tell his children about Santa. He had a very different reason, however. He described growing up in relative poverty. When he was in 8th Grade (I'm pretty certain about this detail), his family got for Christmas an expensive television. He was absolutely certain that there was no way his family could have afforded that, so his only explanation, even at that late age in his life, was that it was from Santa and that Santa, therefore, was real. Eventually he learned the truth (and just how they were able to get this expensive TV, I don't think he ever told us); he was so ashamed at his credulity that he decided it was wrong to perpetuate the Santa myth with his own kids, and so he didn't.

3. And now to the story I thought of first when I read the FRK post. Some years ago, my church had an intern minister. One Sunday in early December she preached a sermon in which she made direct reference to the shedding of the Santa myth. It was mostly in passing, in the service of a larger point that, quite frankly, I've forgotten. Fast forward to the end of the service. Out in the vestibule, as people are getting ready to leave, I see friends consoling one of their children, who might have been as old as a 4th grader at the time. He was sobbing. Later, I learned why: he had skipped Sunday school that morning and sat upstairs with his parents -- and not until he heard the sermon did he realize that Santa was, indeed, an imaginary being. To say that he was completely flummoxed by the experience is an understatement. (I believe that the intern who had been inadvertently responsible for his disillusionment was taking part in the effort to console him.) Now, I want to point out that the parents involved did not hold it against the intern minister in the least for having accidentally shattered the myth (nor, I think, would I have, nor did anyone that I know of). But, more to the point, they acknowledged that they didn't even realize that their son still believed it literally at that age.

I do have a fond, wistful recollection of when DairyStateKid#1 first figured out that Santa might not be real (at about the age of 7 or so), and diffidently brought that up with his mother* and me. It was a very sweet moment. If I remember rightly, he actually expressed a bit of sadness about it all and decided to willfully believe a little longer because of that, even though he knew "the truth." DSK#2, meanwhile, I think pretended to believe to a much older age, and we all dutifully played along. I see no big problem in the Santa myth myself, obviously. I suppose if I wanted to rationalize it intellectually I'd say something like, well, it is an opportunity to help teach about how myths and stories come about, represent deeper truths, or blah blah blah. But mostly, it's just harmless fun, as far as I'm concerned.

Besides, I always rather liked what a friend used to tell his kids about believing in Santa: "You know what happens when kids stop believing in Santa? Their parents have to buy them presents!"




*not DairyStateMom, for regular readers...

Shameless nepotistic promotion

DairyStateDad comes from a religiously eclectic family. We grew up in the Episcopal church with close ties to the Quakers. As adults, the three of us have found different paths. I'm a Unitarian Universalist; one of my two older sisters converted to Judaism, while the other has been a pillar of the Quakers, a/k/a the Religious Society of Friends, for virtually all of her adult life. She is also one of the mostly deeply spiritual people I've ever known.

And today she holds forth on a topic dear to her heart and mine as she makes an appearance on a blog that interprets Quaker beliefs and practice for a broader audience.