rivka

I don't know that I have anything profound to say about it, but I wanted to copy and preserve this bit from a sermon by my friend the Rev. Lyn Cox.

One of my professors in seminary, Rosemary Chinnici, told us that we come to a time when we realize the faith we have inherited is inadequate for what we are facing. She called this religious impasse. I don’t think she meant that everyone changes religious affiliation when hitting a rough spot, I think she meant that we have to change how we relate to our faith.

Another of my professors, Rebecca Parker, writes what she learned from Professor Chinnici about running into religious impasse. “[A]t such moments we have three choices: We can hold to our religious beliefs and deny our experience, we can hold our experience and walk away from our religious tradition, or we can become theologians.” Parker and Chinnici both recommend the third option.

I worry most about people who make the first choice, both for the sake of the effects it has on them and for the sake of the people around them, whose experience they must often loudly deny as well. I remember the woman who came onto a miscarriage support board to share a story about her near-certain miscarriage which was miraculously stopped by prayer - complete with quoted testimony from the Christian ER doctor, who said it had happened in many other cases that he had seen. It never occurred to her, I guess, to follow her particular version of faith all the way through to the end and see what it implied about every other woman on the board.

I know plenty of the second kind of person as well, of course, people who were once taught a cardboard set of beliefs and found that they didn't hold up very well to the weather. I don't worry about most of them. I may find it annoying to listen to the ones who say that they're atheists because it's stupid to believe in an old white man in a long nightgown sitting up on a cloud somewhere and peering into people's bedrooms with disapproval, but they're entitled to exclude the middle if they want to, and most people who have walked away from their religious traditions are more thoughtful than that anyway.

In Unitarian-Universalist churches, and I'd guess probably among some Pagan groups and other minority religions-of-choice as well, people of the second kind can pose a problem for the spiritual life of the community as a whole. What they want from religion is Not-Christianity, and it's hard to define something positive solely in terms of what it isn't.

I think the third option, "becoming a theologian," is what people are sneering at when they talk about "cafeteria Catholics" or make fun of people who pick and choose what parts of the Bible to believe. That's supposed to be taking the easy way out, but in my experience it's a hell of a lot more complicated and difficult to work things out for yourself.

Okay, I'm rambling. I'm tempted to just delete everything here but the quote, but I'll go ahead and post it. And then I'm going to bed.

Nothing is lost; the universe is honest,
Time, like the sea, gives all back in the end,
But only in its own way, on its own conditions:
Empires as grains of sand, forests as coal,
Mountains as pebbles. Be still, be still, I say;
You were never the water, only a wave;
Not substance, but a form substance assumed.

- Elder Olson, 1968

I just quoted a science fiction author to a client, for what I think was probably the first time in my career. Lois McMaster Bujold: "The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart."

I don't tend to use quotes or aphorisms much in general, but then again, it isn't often that a quote perfectly sums up a client's entire therapeutic journey of several years' duration. And comes to mind at precisely the moment when she can receive it as an apt phrasing of what she has already come to know in her heart, and not as a lesson or lecture.

She was really moved. I am really pleased. I like to think that Lois would be, too.

The Shortest Day
by Susan Cooper

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Any of my Minnesota friends know a folksinger named Peter Mayer?

We sang one of his songs in church this morning, and I thought it was really lovely. It helps that it's set to my favorite hymn tune, Hyfrydol - the one to which Unitarians sing "Earth Was Given as a Garden" and "Hail the Glorious Golden City," and which mainline Protestants might know as "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling." (midi file)

Here are Mayer's words:

Though below me, I feel no motion
Standing on these mountains and plains
Far away from the rolling ocean
Still my dry land heart can say
I've been sailing all my life now
Never harbor or port have I known
The wide universe is the ocean I travel
And the earth is my blue boat home

Sun, my sail, and moon my rudder
As I ply the starry sea
Leaning over the edge in wonder
Casting questions into the deep
Drifting here with my ship's companions
All we kindred pilgrim souls
Making our way by the lights of the heavens
In our beautiful blue boat home

I give thanks to the waves upholding me
Hail the great winds urging me on
Greet the infinite sea before me
Sing the sky my sailor's song
I was born upon the fathoms
Never harbor or port have I known
The wide universe is the ocean I travel
And the earth is my blue boat home

Edited to add: You can hear a sample of Mayer singing the song here.

This is a traditional Christmas Eve reading in many Unitarian-Universalist churches. I post it this morning thinking particularly of my friends who are currently pregnant - porcinea, tammylc, zencuppa - but also in honor of everyone seeking growth and new life as the year turns. Merry Christmas!

For so the children come
And so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come
born of the seed of man and woman.
No angels herald their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
No wisemen see a star to show where to
find the babe that will save human kind.

Yet each night a child is born is a holy night,
Fathers and mothers--
sitting beside their children’s cribs feel
glory in the sight of a new life beginning.
They ask, “Where and how will this
new life end? Or will it ever end?”
Each night a child is born is a holy night--
A time for singing,
A time for wondering.
A time for worshiping.
--Sophia Lyon Fahs

I was flipping through the hymnal today at church (boring sermon), and was utterly charmed to find that mixed in with the paeans to the fellowship of humankind was a hymn celebrating potential fellowship with extraterrestrials.

No, really:

#302, Children Of The Human Race

Children of the human race
Offspring of our Mother Earth
Not alone in endless space
Has our planet given birth
For across the cosmic skies
Countless suns in glory blaze
And from untold planets rise
Endless canticles of praise.

Should some sign of others reach
This, our lonely planet Earth
Differences in form and speech
Must not hide our common worth
When at length our minds are free
And the clouds of fear disperse
Then at last we'll learn to be
Children of the Universe.

I had previously spotted another stfnal reference in the hymnal, a hymn called "For the Earth, Forever Turning" which has as its last verse:

For the world, we raise our voices
For the home that gave us birth
In our joy we sing, returning home
To the blue-green hills of earth.

I particularly like the idealism of #302. It's very Unitarian-Universalist to be concerned about fostering acceptance of outsiders even before those outsiders have been proven to exist. And "For the Earth, Forever Turning" seems perfectly suited to be a lovely traditional hymn for a spacefaring people nostalgic for their ancestral planet.

I wonder who was responsible for putting these in the hymnal. I wonder whether #302 ever gets sung in church.

In all persons there is the possibility of decency, however it may have been warped and deadened. The greatest adventure is to seek it out and establish it.
-George O'Dell

This is one of my articles of faith as a therapist. I heard this quote yesterday, at church, and seized upon it as an expression of something I have long believed. I used to say that my therapeutic skill rested on my ability to find a grain of likeability in just about anyone, and my belief in the possibility of change. But I like this way of expressing it better, because I can believe in the possibility of decency (however deadened) even in people for whom I can't find a single present thing to like.

I'm not sure that this is a particularly common article of faith. In some circles I move in, I get the feeling that the reverse is true - that there's a usually-unvoiced belief that real people, decent people who matter (because they're highly intelligent, and read for pleasure, and weren't popular in high school, and don't believe in silly things like Christianity or mainstream culture) are a small minority, while the majority of people are pretty much wastes of space. Deadwood. Sheeple.

How to explain the eagerness to believe that "most people" are everything you despise?

We went to services today at the First Unitarian Church. It was the first time since the tragedy that I came together with a large group of people, with the structured purpose of mourning. It was painful, but it felt important - and it helped.

At every service there is a time for people to come forward and light candles in silent commemoration of their joys and sorrows. This morning the line stretched most of the way around the sanctuary. I lit a candle for banesidhe, clairaide, fimbrethil, Harry, and Brigid. May their hopes be fulfilled, and their spirits be comforted.

Later in the service, the ministers read the names of the Maryland dead. There were a great many of them - people who worked at the Pentagon, people on the flight out of Dulles, people who left Maryland for New York. We read together a litany of remembrance, reminding us that those lost will always be with us. We gave offerings for disaster relief. The sermon was about struggling to come to terms with an American self-identity, about longings for home and security, about being fearful of differences, about struggling with anger and avoiding hate, about refusing to turn away from Muslims and Arab-Americans, about the goodness of the human spirit, about the dilemmas faced by people of good faith in trying to decide between calling for nonviolence and supporting a military response.

We sang a hymn, one of my favorites. The tune is Sibelius' Finlandia; you can find it here.

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

I tried to keep my voice steady through the hymn, but broke on the last line, and sobbed. Really sobbed for the first time, although tears have come to my eyes before. Continued to cry as they asked us all to hold hands and form one large circle around the cavernous sanctuary, as we stood for the blessing, as we sang God Bless America a capella and in unison. As we were embraced by friends and by total strangers.

It really helped. It was achingly painful, but it helped. It helped to grieve with others, and to hear others struggling with the same questions about peace versus justice. To hear someone else articulate the ambiguities of American identity. To hold hands.

"If women ran the world, there wouldn't be any war. Nations would tease each other until they developed eating disorders."
- Nancy Lebovitz's button catalogue