Lessons from Paul About Successful Branding

Personal note:

When people reference your response as an example of overreaction to a proposed change, and you are in covenant with those people, you pay attention. When people in this same covenant show you alternative views of the proposed change, you look it again through their eyes. These things I have done. As to someone who said of complainers like me that we are just angry not to have been consulted, I reiterate that that is the essence of the Radical Reformation: the leaders look for God by listening to the people. But yes, it is probably harder to listen to someone who yells at you.

That said, I woke up this morning with one of my favorite books of the Bible open before my sleep-encrusted eyes. Not a physical Bible. Some words that I treasure, read, preach from — and criticize — so often that apparently they pop up in my dreams:

Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

Paul spent his life arguing about the image and form of a religion that was just arriving on its cultural landscape. One of the most amazing, and frankly cheering, developments in my lifetime is that Unitarian Universalism has now arrived on the national religious and cultural landscape. We have outlasted the better branded Unification Church, for which we used to be mistaken. Other liberal religions and interfaith-minded clergy include us without the long debates that mattered so much as recently as the 1980s. So, in effect, we are in the stage that Paul faced after the death of Jesus: a crisis of opportunity. Not “how shall we get started?” but, “which direction shall we go now?”

When liberal Christians talked about following “The Religion of Jesus,” they did not just mean, “not Islam” or “not Judaism,” they also meant, “not the religion of Paul.” But whatever you may think of him, Paul succeeded at what our denomination is trying to do: He stamped his brand on a religious movement in rapid ascent. That doesn’t mean he captured all of it, which was his intent. He did not win unquestioned adoration, either in his time or through the ages. Rather, he proclaimed some particulars that have stood the test of time. Some of his particulars were liberal, expansive, inclusive, and others were particular, judgmental, organizational.

Both sets of particulars have adherents today. We liberals spontaneously cite his sermon on Mars Hill (Acts 17:19-32) when we speak of the “unknown God within… in Whom we live and move and have our being.” Conservatives cite his admonitions placing men above women, particularly in marriage, and try to reconcile his claim that “women should keep silent in church” with his praising salutations to female church leaders of various congregations.

Now THAT is successful branding.

Romans is pretty much the place where Paul established the Cross (‘all have sinned and have no righteousness except through the resurrection of Jesus Christ”) as the preeminent symbol for Christianity. Even today, liberals who prefer Matthew 25 (“you fed me, you visited me in prison”) lift up the symbol of the double fish; you might find this in your congregation’s stained glass sermons. Thre’s a revival these days also of the dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit’s empowering visits to humanity in times of need or crisis. Old Christian tombs also had IHS (“In Christ is Our Hope”) and that fish with IXOYE inside it (also means “In Christ is our hope” but in Greek).

This is what the fight is really about: not whether Unitarian Universalists have a symbol that matters to the small groups who know it, but whether we can establish a symbol that dominates the conversation about the things we believe.  At this moment, the United Church of Christ and even the Vatican are “on top” of liberal religious imagery, with “Christ is still speaking” and the simple garb and life-shaping liberation theology of Pope Francis I. In the political arena to which Unitarian Universalism aspires, we already have launched “Standing on the Side of Love” as our contender in their league.

So who is this new logo addressing? Is Standing on the Side of Love going to be phased out or retired? Is this new logo going to compete with SSOL within our own houses and ranks? I mean, I don’t like SSOL, but I do recognize it, and it does seem to be popular with everyone but me, so I applaud that much, at least.

Although it has not set the world on fire, the flaming chalice has engraved itself on UU congregational culture far more than I ever imagined would be possible. If our current leaders have Pauline aspirations, perhaps they see the flaming chalice as a comforting message for house churches.

Does that mean they are going to keep trying logos on us until they come up with something that works like a liberal “Sword of Constantine,” in James Carroll’s immortal title?

If so, let me be the first to clarify: the problem with Constantine’s  Christian vision wasn’t the logo — which Paul accelerated and Francis is  trying to refurbish — it was the authoritarianism.  When Marxism landed on the trash heap of history, it was because Lenin had made of it an authoritarianism.

So before our leaders march one step further, let’s be clear about two things:

1) When it comes to cultural transformation, we are already far more successful than my generation of UUs ever dreamed would be possible, and

2) We are succeeding by participating in mutually respectful coalitions, not by taking them over.

Which brings us back to the question that plagued Paul’s ministry until the end, the issue his successors have not resolved yet:

How do you nurture, connect, but still coordinate the house churches?

 

Trees, Squash, Goldfish, and The Talented Tenth

Tom Schade has directed us to a marvelous sermon by Cynthia Landrum, which declares that the vertical “tree-planting” model of denominational growth does not fit with the “spreading squash” social patterns of today’s young adults. The new Millennial lifestyle challenges more than liberal protestant institutions: it gives us a framework for asking how middle class culture will recover from the social, financial, and ecological violence it has suffered since 1980.

When a gardener wants to plant a tree or welcome spreading squash, the first step is not to find and clear an “under-developed location,” but to gather seeds and uproot seedings with which to populate the new gardens. Our national mythology applauds this self-appointing first step, and truly, it is neither good nor evil of itself. And it isn’t voluntary as often as The American Dream asserts: too many folks wound up here due to violence, injustice, bad fortune.

This morning on Turner Classic Movies, Frank Capra unfolded the tensions that affect a family when “a rising businessman tries to make his immigrant parents assimilate.”  His protagonists are Eastern European Jews with solid social ties and skills from the shtetl (the father’s jokes, the mother’s pushcart business), and son Morris has new world ambitions. He sells papers. When his tenement burns, he organizes a fire sale. Eventually he is able to move his parents and sister to Fifth Avenue.  Mother loves it, but Father pines for the old friends with whom he joked and worshiped; Morris’s sister marries her childhood sweetheart and has a baby.

Here is the fundamental question: Will Morris treat that baby as an offshoot or as a weed?

That question, rather than race, religion, ethnicity, even gender, defines the class war that splits today’s global population.  So far, Morris has been imitating the Northern European American Dream, casting off old social and cultural ties to establish himself in a culture-free community of success stories. Capra announces the English vision when Morris swaps his family’s Ellis Island name, Goldfish, for the English-sounding, “Finch.”

In Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, Eugene Robinson describes a transnational 21st century elite which does not battle, but rather appropriates, the most successful achievers in all demographic groups. Together they build a network of social bubbles wherein to encounter only each other while jaunting through every landscape and culture on the blue marble. This is the real class war: not between particular cultures, but pitting various Beta cultures — the followers, the familial, the local, the traditional — against universalizing Alphas.

Could he really mean, the Goldfish vs the Finches? To prove that Alpha culture isn’t the same as English culture, I offer a series on Masterpiece Classic,  “Lark Rise to Candleford.” Here we see plenty of very English Beta folk, hoping for any progress that increases security, convenience, amusement. At the same time, they examine with suspicion any novelty that eradicates (uproots) their social fundamentals. The premise of “Lark Rise to Candleford” is that these are people for whom life’s markers and measures are physically smaller but much more intensely felt. And why are those little Beta events felt so strongly? It’s not that Betas feel so much, but that Alphas feel so little. (As Exhibit A, I offer Lady Mary Crawley, who demonstrates every Sunday that some women can eat their own flesh and blood for breakfast more quickly than most males can swallow a Happy Meal.)

Finches appear on both sides of the class war divide; that happy discovery seduced New England settlers into an honest belief that they could engineer a nation which would prosper the offspring of Alphas and Betas. Our parent denominations, in their heydays, valued those now-despised “Big Donors” because everyone worshiped together, shopped locally, traded regionally at most, by which means many an industrialist rescued many a floundering parish. Unitarianism and Universalism flourished before the true Age of Alphas, by fostering what W.E.B. DuBois called The Talented Tenth: “the preachers, teachers, physicians” and local artisans who strengthen themselves in order to support weaker tendrils, nourish aspiring volunteers shade fragile seedlings from hot sun. But when plunder capital gutted local economies landscapes began to wear out, our English-based culture reverted to its ancestral model of self-preservation. “Strike out toward more fertile fields,” we told our young people, tempting them to uproot themselves by paying for enjoyable four-year colleges. (I won’t bore you with the details of how this pattern arose because of the particular way feudalism broke down in England, as compared to its death patterns in Germany and, most famously, France. But it’s an interesting story for another time.)

So contrast this English-based American Dreams with the versions lived and love by African Americans, Asian Americans, Roman Catholic and Jewish families. These cultures may alter their theologies and marital boundaries, but they still see reaching up and spreading out as mutually supportive. Cast upon these shores by Old World violence, and therefore not imprinted with voluntary self-amputation, these cultures relish family reunions, bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, wakes and funerals, Quinceañeras, Eid-al-Fitr, and Lunar New Year.  How different are their sprawling feasts from those tiny nuclear families dotting college graduations.

WASP culture defines success as having the resources “to send our children away,” while everyone else is saving their money “to show our children where they came from,” and, if possible, “spend more time with the rest of the family.” My own belief is that Unitarian Universalism will reach its stratosphere by aggressively multiplying and strongly supporting a regular calendar for each age group to return, to remember, to commemorate, to rededicate. “Prophetic vision” means nothing to me; I see it as a fancy disguise for that ancestral call to either uproot oneself, or if that’s not possible, torch the landscape one cannot escape.

Perhaps this religion has reached its apex of population penetration in Vermont because, although  our children usually have to make their money somewhere else,  we’re too small to forget them, and so fond of them that they strive to “make enough money to settle back home in Vermont.” Vermont has maple trees, Vermont has squashes, and it’s probably no coincidence that we also have the only legislature in the nation that has mandated universal compost collection by 2016. This is a state without weeds (Emerson’s name for a plant you don’t want where it is). What we try to uproot is the Alpha mutation, that anomaly in every species that gorges itself without ceasing on other people’s products, and decapitates every social network that threatens to limit Alpha self-perpetuation.

And yes, we were originally mostly English.

Alternative Explanation of Our National Religious Journey

Alternative Explanation of Our National Religious Journey

It doesn’t get mentioned a lot, but the number one problem with having our denominational headquarters (The Unitarian Universalist Association) in Boston is that city’s long association with a particular view of religion and civilization, namely the City Shining on a Hill. It keeps us stuck in that characterization of what we’re here to do. Our publishing arm is called Beacon Press. We refer to our social justice efforts as Standing on the Side of Love — as if only the truly evil could hold countervailing political views. The university wherein we house our archives displays the simple word “truth” on its shield — although that used to be “truth and light.”

It’s all so Manichean, so “I’m right and you’re wrong.” You wouldn’t be surprised to find the leaders of such a faith in the forefront of the early twentieth century eugenics movement. You wouldn’t be that shocked to find out that folks who believe in a Shining City on a Hill feel comfortable with cultural genocide of other civilizations. It’s not such a stretch to realize that we’re incredibly inclusive of all visibly different human types, so long as they subscribe to the same few principles that we describe as “universal.”  “Common sense.”

Obviously, I subscribe to these principles,too. But it’s a choice, not an evolution. And I don’t believe that everyone who believes differently — even in the political realm — is evil incarnate. I believe I can learn from listening to them, that their ideas can often help me to improve my own.

But isn’t that why all the voluntary immigrants came to this country– to enter this shining city on a hill? Didn’t all the colonial Americans share generally the same beliefs about God and society? Except, of course, for slavery, but that’s mostly been settled…

Well, Massachusetts was not the oldest of the thirteen colonies, and it was not the most liberal. In particular, it was the least liberal on social and religious diversity. Europeans came to the other colonies for other reasons, and settled them around radically different metaphors.

My own favorite is New York, because the Dutch who founded it were a trading company expanding their network into a fast-growing realm. When the religious among their settlers wanted to exclude a group of Jews who sought refuge from Brazil in 1642, it was the trading company who forced compliance. Likewise, the Carolinas and Georgia were settled by investors who wanted anyone who could invest or provide labor. These states, with their huge unconquered expanses, soon found the most expedient course was “Grudging Toleration” of non-Christians and dissenting sects. (Roman Catholics, believed to be French and Spanish Fifth Columns, were excluded.)

Two colonies — four, depending on interpret the Quaker-influenced designs of Pennsylvania and New Jersey — advocated full religious freedom for everyone. The two clearly free states were Rhode Island, composed of religious refugees from Massachusetts, and Delaware, again heavily influenced by Quakers. Virginia, famously, worshiped according to the dictates of the British crown (as did the Carolinas and Georgia, technically, but they couldn’t find Anglican clergy willing to live there). These colonies, despite being official oppressive had inadequate means to enforce social conformity.

Massachusetts had foreseen that problem, which explains why it so quickly founded a local university to provide itself with “a learned ministry.” For the next two hundred years, young men of promise were spied out and educated by their local pastors, regardless of financial means. To ensure they could achieve the expensive education that Harvard provided even then, leading families would invite promising young men to live with them for a few years and teach in the village schools; often such settlements resulted in marriages between affluent daughters and previously penniless religious leaders. What once had been an Errand to the Wilderness was transformed into a carefully managed garden.

As the Shining City tightened its grip on the Bay State, much of the rest of the East Coast Anglo-European network was abandoning the dream of a religiously homogenous society. Sure the Great Awakening elevated orthodox Protestantism to a frantic level, but the paroxysms soon played themselves out, leaving behind a quiet piety known as the Second Great Awakening. Universalist rejections of the same Great Awakening theology swirled through so many regions, from Lake Champlain to New Pennsylvania — that it’s impossible to state conclusively where this religion was founded or planted as the nation claimed independence.

The First Amendment to the Constitution, rejecting establishment of any religion by Congress, might have been an outgrowth of the recent English Civil War and French Revolution (not to mention the Hundred Year War and Peasant Rebellions that were as recent to our founders as those founders are to me) — but it signaled the new nation’s intention to survive militarily and thrive economically. Yes, in many of these matters the founders were ruthless, callous sinners toward Natives and African Americans, but it must be said that among themselves they were working on “live and let live.” “Worship where you want, so long as I can do the same.”

This was the philosophy which conquered the City on a Hill and spread across the mountains, the prairies, reached even the farther shore. When we maintain our denominational headquarters on a hill still mourning its loss of primacy, the very stones under our feet, the water we drink, the beaches where we swim, reinforce an arrogance whose constant reappearance keeps us distracted from the fundamentals of religion. The legend keeps forcing us to sanctify our vision of access. But those we would welcome learned long ago, in other places, that they are fully equal, fully proud. “Can I come in?” is not their question. “What are you inviting me into?” is their reply.

We need to settle into a part of the nation where religious conversation hones, renews, progresses religious answers.

Closing Twenty Years

Earlier this week I resigned from the Unitarian Universalist Ministers’ Association. At the same time, I recommitted to the Unitarian Universalist Society for Community MInistries. But I’m not sure that will last, either.

My UU identity and work are stronger than ever, but they’ve become completely private endeavors. My daily reading is a wonderful resource from Beacon Press, Rabbi Chaim Stern’s Day by Day, an interfaith gathering of wisdom through the Jewish Lectionary Year. My history interest is still UU polity, in which I’m examining the immediate post-Roman Empire Western World for deep roots of elected governance combined with pagan ritual. Surprisingly, once you drop the Rome-centered view of the same regions, a coherent and unbroken story emerges. How much we could learn from the Jews about having a canon which tells that story, with all its contradictions and imperfect characters, week by week, every year, with no goal other than lifting our sense of self out of any particular time and place, into union with The Eternal from which our faith was given.

When I visit the local UU society on Sunday, I get none of this. The overwhelming sensation is that last residual of a dead faith, one from which God has moved on, leaving behind obligations that never end. The worship experience is delivered with excellence and commitment, and we had a huge turnout last weekend for our Beyond Categorical Thinking workshop — which means the ethical and spiritual core of our leadership stands ready to grow and serve — but I just miss a central presence of that God Who Unifies History.

As a caregiver, I need an unsullied message about larger concerns. Where does suffering come from? What will give me strength for one more day? As an aging person, I want to know who will mourn for me as me when I’m gone. Who will even know me well enough to say who I have been? A society that avoids discussing the God Who Unifies History — not just European history, not just national history, not just human history — cannot know my soul, any more than can a society that limits God and History to any one faith, place or species.

From the return of Jupiter and Venus this week through the quadrennial ritual of watching a Presidential debate, I believe in a God who speaks through knowable systematic theology. It is not chaos, it is not abstract or mystical. That doesn’t mean there are not mystical moments or chaotic disruptions to the sequence, it just means things return to that place of relationship, where Abraham and Sarah received the promise of descendents as numerous as sand in the desert or stars in the sky. Where Noah received the rainbow and the dove, and Jesus went apart to regather his strength through prayer. The place where Lao Tzu watched the butcher and cherry blossoms represent the fleetingness of beauty.

This place is not in the Middle East; it isn’t in the Far East. It isn’t on a timeline that historians can lay out and ask for on tests. This place is a one to one connection between Eternal and Mortal realms, in which each knows itself to yearn for and trust in the other.

I know there are many others who feel the same longing, which is why I bother to share. But as my partner sleeps longer and longer hours and my care-giving obligations grow, I need a religion that wants to take care of me, to reinforce its sense of my place in this larger realm.

Well, that’s it for today’s whining. The good news is, we had a weigh-in yesterday,and Lynne is back up to 140 pounds. The bad news is, her chorea is starting to fight back against the miracle drug we depend on to keep her going. We’re going to look into physical therapy, but we can’t deny that Huntington’s Disease remains fatal. Is it time to be grateful that we had this last good year? That we refuse to concede.

The Less Comfortable Diversity

Let me just start with the disclaimer that it is not the goal of this post to eliminate anti-racism as something all of us need to work on, both in our personal and public lives.  But while anti-racism needs to include seeing race as one dimension of power, it also needs to engage the opposite dynamic, of removing race to look at power more deeply.

Here is what some scientists have found by looking at a group which lacks power as conveyed through the medium of education:

Life Expectancy Shrinks for Less-Educated Whites in U.S.

Published: September 20, 2012 (New York Times)

The purpose of this blog is to comment on the religious institution in which I am an ordained minister, The Unitarian Universalist Association, using our basic principles as a corrective. This often leads me to attack our imbalanced emphasis on institutional educational excellence as a detriment to discovering what we call the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Usually I position that critique in the larger world of employment and education itself, and call for greater application of what we now know about the many ways of being intelligent. My challenge usually bemoans the few avenues for enough economic stability to nurture self-fulfillment for everyone in a family and community. This is certainly no lonely prophetic mission: our religious educators and UUs for a Just Economic Community are coworkers who educate and sustain what little I can say.

But too often, in making this effort, I feel thwarted by an over-emphasis in displaying the more comfortable diversity of anti-racism. And why is anti-racism “the more comfortable diversity” for us?

That’s because from 1900 to 1927, in the first era of corporate academic expansion, American Unitarian Association President Samuel Atkins Eliot undertook an active campaign to shut down less affluent congregations. Equating the association’s future stability with the environment in which he had grown up — Harvard University, of which his father was president and virtually everyone he knew was a professor and/or graduate — he actively closed out small congregations that eked out their livings on the bottom edges of prosperity.

There are certainly congregations that ought to be closed, all the time and in every faith community. But using economic criteria to find them was a mistake. And to some extent, it may have been a smoke screen. A green velvet curtain concealing the more humble reality that the folks in such congregations often live life differently: they have a higher degree of hands-on contribution than financial largesse. In one of my favorite passages from his speeches, Eliot praised the women of one now-departed congregation for the industriousness — but his measure was that they were putting on food sales and such to raise money.

When folks got together to do gardening, painting, patching… this he tended not to see. Like me, he had a scholarly temperament, and, in fact, I very much advocate that all of us pay more attention to his praise of the role of scholarship in religious self-definition. But let’s not go overboard, like he did. Let’s use the one gift we get from the passing of time — the wisdom of hindsight — to see the bell curve of his perspective. His generation can and should be praised for opening books to so many who had not had the opportunity to enjoy them (he was even a strong advocate of prison and post-prison rehabilitation education and ministries), but they attempted to universalize that definition of human excellence. This led him into the cultural cleansing of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and many of his peers into the horrid false science of eugenics, and the forced sterilization of folks with mental retardation or the social underdevelopment that results from generations of total deprivation.

Those are still the folks who make us uncomfortable, and race does not define them. They are not the objects of occasional charity, but neighbors who need consistent and unequal engagement from our best selves. Our growth will always keep us ahead of their growth. But if we do not connect with them — when we cut those social ties to local parish — we get what these scientists are describing: a group which is actively falling behind in the raw statistics of life and death.

I have written before that anti-racism — a laudable long-term value in Unitarianism and much of Universalism — served us as an internal unifier during the difficult years after Reverend Stephen H. Fritchman was removed from Unitarian (pre-merger) leadership for allegedly using the denominational publication to promote Communist Party goals. It was my privilege to serve as researcher for Reverend Charles Eddis’s comprehensive reexamination of this subject. Inevitably, as my wind-up reading delved into the fallout, I was stunned to see how the emerging Civil Rights movement allowed any former AUA Communists– who had been the strongest voice against racism — to carry on part of their conviction in harmony with mainstream Unitarianism and progressive national vision.

But let us never forget that the leader of the Civil Rights movement was DR. Martin Luther King. The ranks he led most effectively were folks who already had achieved the military and educational background — often over many generations — to enter the middle class from which they were being excluded. As Dr. King extended his reach to the more intractably underprivileged, his movement began to fall apart. We will never know what would have happened to that Poor People’s March on Washington if he hadn’t been assassinated — while crusading on behalf of garbage collectors.

But we do know what happened to the UUA. We lost the narrative of comprehensive progress and became fixated on the whiteness of our culture. Yet by doubling down against that whiteness, we remain stuck in the first stages of the Civil Rights movement, looking for people of color whose educational attainments bring them quickly and comfortably into the educational milieu Dr. Sam had laid out in an era which is rapidly passing into the dim dust of time.

There is no question that when you look at studies within every demographic community of this nation — from the Republican Party to African American leadership –you see the same dilemma. Every single group is stuck trying to figure out what to do for the folks in its ranks who have lost the education race. We are not alone in this, and we are not particularly guilty in this. It’s a national — indeed, an international problem.

But my particular group is a religion, and what little I know about religion tells me this: we will be judged guilty if we just walk by. We must quit looking past these people, rendering them invisible to what little privilege we retain — just because they happen to be the same race as ourselves and our far more privileged founders.

Universal Access Single Access Health Care

Universal Access Single Access Health Care

Last week at Universalist National Memorial Church I preached the importance of Universalism as a guiding theological principle. I emphasized that when we evangelize this message, the enemy is not Christianity, or atheism or any other religion, but something our founders called “partialism,” Part of humanity is saved, part of humanity has some ability or capacity to order around the other parts of humanity…

I mentioned that I live in the home territory of homegrown Universalism (as opposed to the Universalism that George de Benneville brought from the scaffolds of France, that James Relly and John Murray brought from the debtors’ prisons of England), we have a US Senator (not a UU) who calls repeatedly for Single Payer Universal Access Health Insurance for all Americans. The point, I said, is not how you feel about Universal Health Care, but the fact that he is not afraid to use the word.

In reality, as I am sure the congregation surmised, I strongly support Senator Sanders’s plan to simply expand Medicare to cover everyone.

And yes, it IS a religious principle. We UUs have been on record about this, through our General Assembly Resolution process, since the 1970s. So to advocate for it in this regard, let’s learn from our Universalist offshoot, the Latter Day Saints, and our modern-day offshoots, the radical individualists.

Here’s how the Latter Day Saints hand out salvation: they have high walls for getting in, but once you’re in, that community cares for you big time, with large financial outlays. They pay no clergy, but carefully choose the layfolk who understand that pastoral care costs money. Who manage that money and hand it out. And every Mormon understands that as you have received, at other times so shall you give. That is one reason they push private enterprise and profit: they want to take care of their own.

Therefore, since Congress shall make no law establishing a religion, if any individual or religion wishes to provide medical services, they are free to do so. However, at the moment they choose to be guided by their principles, they give up two rights: one, to monopolize any aspect of medical care in any community, and two, to receive government income for services they provide or receive.

In order to give every institution and individual the means to make a free choice about not using the government system of Universal Access Single Payer, every individual will have a day to read a detailed list of what they are giving up, including government reimbursement for any emergency service they receive unexpectedly. When they sign this contract, they receive a card — just like an insurance card — which informs any medical provider outside the system they chose — how to access their wages, bank accounts, retirement accounts and physical assets, such as their homes and houses.

There will, of course, be annual Open Enrollment periods, in which these folks can change their minds. Every contract to forego government insurance will be subject to the three-day Think It Over rule.

Every child is automatically enrolled in Single Payer Universal Access for life-threatening medical emergencies. Every adult will sign as an individual; even two spouses in the same marriage.

The nice thing is that this plan takes state budgets and legislatures out of the picture. And it doesn’t take out private insurance companies, who want to cherry pick their customers and give them more. But it does make clear that when it comes to health insurance, as in government, we shall be what Theodore Parker described for us: of the people, by the people, for the people.

Applying the Lens of Congregational History to the UUA-UCC Meeting

One way UUA President Reverend Peter Morales explained his recent meeting with his UCC counterpart was by rightly noting their continuing presence with UUs in various social justice campaigns. The UCC caught a lot of UU attention with a television outreach campaign that welcomed same sex couples, and got censored in several major markets. They’ve also taken the most fundamental theological tenet of the Reformation “God is still speaking” and made it look, to our ignorant eyes, like some special form of religious progressivism. As a lover of the Reformation, and living in a same-sex couple, these are certainly good things.

But here at the local level, in 2012, we’d be sadly remiss in believing that the UCC is unique among Protestant faiths in either of these positions. I bowed for ashes last night at the local Episcopal Cathedral, where the homilist was a victor in the long, slow legal campaign for the right right to marry the man he loves. Just as we do at the UU congregation, they include on their order of service — even on Ash Wednesday — a reminder of what they’ve committed to provide for our local food shelf. When I went down to chaplain after a shooting at our Occupy Vermont-Burlington camp last autumn, my call came from a Lutheran Youth and Young Adult Minister serving a coalition of liberal Protestant congregations: Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian. As both our state mental hospital and prisons reach out for spiritual support in new locations, we get updates and plan responses in large part around our local interfaith clergy table.

Which brings us back to the question, in these hard but hopeful times: If God is still speaking, is the voice coming into each humble local heart and ear, to be shared by reaching out and reaching up — or is it being parsed out in scant, broad instructions, vouched safe to special leaders for us to carefully handle with the guidance of these leaders’ most trusted emissaries?

Local history teaches that there’s a bumper sticker truth for our religion as well as our society:

If the People Lead, The Leaders Will Follow.

And maybe that’s why the Association’s top levels don’t invest in lots of academically solid congregational histories: the evidence suggests liberal religions doesn’t really need with a Moses or a College of Cardinals. God is still speaking, and the Universalists were right: God speaks to everyone, with clarity, energy and an emphasis on local practical service to neighbors.

 

After Categorical Victory

We watch a lot of c-Span at our house. Huntington’s Disease means Lynne’s body doesn’t move as fast or as often as her mind, and we were both poli sci majors, so all weekend long, we pretty much flip between BookTV and American History tv (until, of course, Downton Abbey).

So what a treat to wake up this morning and see a panel of GLBC(cross-dressing) active and former military service members discussing life since the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. As befits BookTV these are now journalists, of OutServe Magazine and Josh Seefried, active Air Force, has published a book. How did coming out work for them, and what were they hearing?

It was all good, and as always, that includes the questions. What caught my attention was the clear language of a veteran named Cathy (?), who had graduated with the first class of women at West Point and served the Army 5 1/2 years, surviving one witch hunt and leaving before she faced another. And this wonderful woman used language that showed me how to deal with a quandery I’m facing in anti-racism: How do you talk about the structural inequalities that remain in place after there has been a major shift forward in categorical justice?

She used a key phrase: “benefits justice.” In other words, yes, we can now bring our dates/partners/spouses to social events, but if we die they can’t collect our pensions.

With this phrase, she has solved a dilemma I’ve been pondering in anti-racism: yes, we have our first African American president of the United States, but African Americans who made the middle class during the last two decades of bubble and boom face disproportionate impacts in two specific mechanisms: they are more likely than Caucasian Americans to be steered into devastating rather than partial personal bankruptcies, and they are more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure.

Since it’s Superbowl Sunday, I’ve been using football metaphors all week to recover spiritual clarity as I  watch political developments day after day. Yesterday, I advocated using our wonderful and prophetic GA Resolutions from the first half century of our Association to define the end zones. Now, thanks to this heroic veteran on BookTV, I have language for marking first downs.

Yet another reason to thank a vet. Her service did not end when she resigned. No vet ever really resigns: despite a few bad apples, and many more with tragic and unjust scars, the retain the military training, community and integrity. We are lucky so many of them share this throughout our society.

The Next Direct Access

If George Huntston Williams were alive today, he would be trying to turn the Radical Reformation into a single or multiplayer computer game. George drove book publishers crazy by demanding that every character be remembered, every picture be printed, every document be quoted. And pictures of the towns, please, so readers — he always believed there would be readers — could visualize these individuals walking through these streets, assembling in this buildings, fleeing into these forests.

I had the privilege — and agony — of spending two years in search of these pictures. Creaky elevators lowered me into sections of Widener Library where I’d starve to death if those escape tubes ever gave out. Huge carts of books stood outside his door, by special permission with the Librarian, with bookmarks bristling out of them like flycatchers or bottle brushes. And always there came the mail, the dreaded mail, with publishers pleading for George to set priorities, consider the expense of inserting plates, the trouble of all those copyrights.

Even at the academic level occupied by Harvard and its like, famous scholars whispered about George’s brilliant mind. Who else could command so many details, call them up so instantaneously, weave them together so extensively? Perhaps we should just say he was born into the wrong species: his mind, to the admiring, was a computer.

It took no time at all with George to see that he was no computer; this fevered man was a complicated, highly articulate mystic. And therein lies the value of turning his work into a game. His was a Reformation heart, forever  stuck in these Ember Days of Advent, believing, preaching, worshiping, a God who would soon stand before us, dwell within us, work among us. What got George out of bed every morning was a passionate commitment to the truth which drove the Reformations, Radical, Ecclessial, Magisterial (well, maybe not Magisterial): I was born to open an ossified world to a God who is dying to get back into it, to liberate hearts made into wombs from which God is shouting, “Let me out! I want you to see me, hold me, receive all this love I have for you.”

In 2011 the best way to communicate God’s urgency to these long-ago people,is a computer game. What once were bursting hearts are now restless fingers, itchy to click. What once were ravenous readers, seekers, writers are now eyes widening over graphic options, scanning the toolbar for links, dropping the history bar to catch one’s breath. In this age of endless pre-trial hearings, of bails and appeals that last for years, only a computer game can replicate a culture of soldiers snatching prophets into custody without warning or warrant, moving them into quick trials and deaths, usually horrible, within days, weeks, months, seldom years.

The Reformation era sparkled with the passion that animated George ‘s soul: an insistence on God’s right to show each person directly that God has inhabited their own neighborhood, sits at their table daily, will come again, year after year, no matter that each of us dies, no matter that time erases our stories in a parade of offspring who cannot know us, and whom we cannot know.

This is the message of the Ember Days: we will die,our children will come, generation after generation, trampling most of our details into obscurity. But this is the core of our being, an essence which will not change: each new face is a new face of God, each heart a new-made messenger of God’s love.

Covenant vs Universalism

How many times have we UUs attended a stirring Sunday service which ended with Theodore Parker’s exhortatory call “May ours be a religion, which like sunshine, goes everywhere…”  Today, under tons of rain, I woke up thinking how much is wrong with that mission.

Its first problem is theological. Although Parker carefully says, “like sunshine,” he then calls on us to model our behavior on the characteristics of an immeasurable sacred essence. We are finite, each of us, not only individuals but religious communities, and cannot be God or God’s body. We can only be a part of it. And to be a part of something is to humbly, with experimentation and dialogue, fit oneself into a niche. Eventually a joy comes from being in that niche, and there excelling in providing a service the whole body requires.

To go everywhere is to wander. Not all who wander are lost, but neither are they reliable to those they have encountered. That is where covenant comes into it. Covenant means, “I will be back at three different times: in a rhythm you can count on (because I have other places to be as well), in your times of need, and in times of memory, hope and vision as you make your own journey.”

If we really were sunshine, there would be no problem with constantly meeting and serving new people, communities, purposes, because we would be immeasurably large and energetic. We are not sunshine. We are not immeasurably large and energetic. And behaving as if we were sunshine has set up a counter-covenantal pattern of service that’s throwing off our numbers faster than water floods down a deforested hillside. Ministry is a zero-sum proposition, not because God and goodness are finite, but because we, the servants, are very much so.

The opposite of covenanting is abandoning. Here are the communities which, by my calculation, we have abandoned — and the new communities to which we made our next jump.  I do not include here examples of outright racist rejection, which have been so well and accurately chronicled by others. I am talking about folks we started to work on uplifting, and then left behind because, as James Ford puts it so well, we are so “easily distracted by shiny things.” And our shiny thing is the next group that seems to need our uplift. In every case, what I write seems as true of other faiths as of our own. This social justice thing is not a denominational community, but an interfaith one which moves on at the point when it has to either filter back into its own faith community, or move on, as a group, to a new location. The faith communities themselves reject this alternative rooting process, because it seems to syphon energy from the normal pastoral work of living, working, raising kids, caring for elders and dying.

But Unitarians have plenty to be proud of, and in much of it, we did indeed form a key part of a leadership phalanx. Despite some egregious problems, we actually got off to a pretty good start on anti-slavery work. Not that we were unique in this, but we were persistent, and we did stay the course, even to the point of giving up our lives, until the work was done. But after the Civil War, the valiant efforts of Radical Reconstructionists to radically equalize the races in the South petered out. These efforts were tremendous, and one group who have received far too little attention are the northern women who went south to teach freed hostages how to read, write and cipher. If they couldn’t have forty acres and a mule, at least they might have the skills to hold their own in the monetarized economy.  Up here in Burlington, Vermont, one young lady sallied forth, and received occasional donations for her supplies.

As lynchings set in — targeting the men, and sometimes women and children — who were building success by application of these tools, northern Unitarians discovered a new group of the dispossessed: urban slums of Eastern and Southern Europeans. And for the less adventurous, there was the question of women’s suffrage. Yes,those were serious problems. Those who solved them sometimes paid with their lives, and I am the beneficiary of everything they did. But nothing had happened in the South to improve the lot of freed hostages; in fact, during the Social Gospel years up North, the Southern Black situation got worse. Is that a coincidence?

In these same years, as European-American culture, with some African-American co-participants, spread West, a new wave of attentions began. Even as Asian Americans suffered outright rejection, including “back to China” laws, massive sums of money and attention were put into providing First Nations children with an “education” we now understand to have been pure cultural genocide. But again, as misguided as it was, it represented a turning of attention away from the covenant with the South, both Black and White, which had been desperately degraded by the war, and into the issues of the West and urban North.

This is not to say that African Americans did not have their own abilities to be fulfilled, only to say that no one makes it without allies.  It is as allies that we proved difficult. And as Eastern and Southern Europeans, along with African Americans, unionized the Midwest and Northeast, Unitarians and Universalists redoubled our efforts to get our own sons and daughters into universities from which they would join the ranks of management. Samuel Atkins Eliot made this explicit in his call for closing down urban churches — some of them great landmarks — in favor of suburban and university-tied communities. This conflict erupted hugely during the 1960s and 1970s. Good-bye to all that Social Gospel harmony. Hello, we hoped, to a new era of common cause with African Americans.

But with African Americans we ran into exactly the same problem we had experienced with European-Americans: when it was time to bring the comforts of their culture into our culture, we balked. Not because we are bad people, but because our congregations still consisted, as all congregations do, of people looking for support in the exhausting work of growing up, launching their adulthoods, raising their kids, struggling with their jobs, dealing with elders, illness and death.

Happily, as this mission got difficult, Stonewall and the GLBTQQ movement gave us something to work on. Those early victories glittered — not because they were easy, but because they were so obviously necessary.  Thank God young people no longer know the devastation which AIDS wreaked in the 1980s, wiping out an entire generation of promising gay men. How unfortunate that we’ve forgotten this pain as AIDS has spread itself into communities we no longer serve, the urban poor, especially African American.

Then came equal marriage. This mission is not yet finished, but once again, once we picked off the low-hanging fruit, UUs as a movement have moved on. Once again, we’ve abandoned our own, as congregations in states and territories seek our support to pass these laws, state by state, and our media-driven denominational staff has moved on to the immigration rights of Latin Americans among us.  Somehow, a pattern of discrimination which has plagued our country for generations has suddenly gotten its moment in the sun, and UUs, pretending once again we can be everywhere, have caught its glitter, donned their yellow teeshirts, and hit the picket lines.

Meanwhile, what about our parishioners in Rhode Island, whose chance at Equal Marriage just went down? What about our community in New York, where it is the governor, not our president, who leads the charge?

“We will get back to you at some point,” is not the definition of covenant. I write this facing a window which opens onto a sky of heavy clouds. From the local news (Vermont is one news district, so this includes the whole state), I know of two or three congregations whose parishioners might well be in shelters right now due to flash flooding. Where is our network for that project? Why is my district staff not sending out, right this minute, a flash message letting me know what has happened to the Universalists of Barre and St. Johnsbury, and the UU Fellowship under Mt. Mansfield, since their valleys got yesterday’s five inches of rain in two hours? All night long, my television station was blaring out its warnings to them, “Take shelter, don’t drive on flooded roads.” Why does my religion have no way to tell me how they’re doing?

Unitarian Universalism is a lovely vision — so long as one combines it with humility. Even sunshine doesn’t always pour itself out as abundantly as is needed. How much less can we do so. Only by acknowledging the role of interfaith and denominational alliances — not so much in league with the national media as with our local communities — can we undo the devastating floods of bad luck and injustice.  Somehow they have managed to form the penetrating root systems at which our social justice leap-frogging has totally failed.

In fact, they have succeeded because of our social justice leap-frogging. All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good folk to do nothing. A related corollary is, to find some other place to spread their goodness.