An Image of Hope

According to ancient Greek mythology, a curious woman named Pandora once opened a box.  Inside that box, sealed tight until her curiosity cracked the seal, were confined all the evils of the world.  As Pandora’s prying fingers pulled back the lid, those evils came pouring out to visit their destruction on the Earth. 

 

But something else came out of that box too.  The only good among all the evil, hope was the last thing to emerge and it remains to this day humankind’s sole comfort in misfortune.  Hope, that singular blessing, was a tiny wraith among so many other wraiths and a fragile thing indeed.  Hope also dies last, I’m told, enduring longer than the rest.  After everything else has spent its energy and seeped away, hope is the one thing that remains for the living to hold on to.  There is a photograph I have that proves it… proves to me, once and for all, that hope dies last. 

 

Even after extensive reconstruction and preservation, the picture is grainy and sepia toned.  Seventy-five years of time does that to photo paper.  It does different things to people, to families, to nations. Most everything has changed since the picture was taken, sometime around 1928.  Still, despite all that lies between the moment the shutter clicked and today, the image on the film remains one of vibrant come-hither youth, hope captured in its prime, life waiting to unfold. 

 

It is of a young woman, in her late teens, all decked out in her very best flapper girl regalia.  The wind is blowing just enough to sweep both her silky pleated skirt and the smoke from the rising city stacks off to the West.  She wears a string of pearls that hangs all the way to her waist, a bob just to her cheekbones, and a felt hat cocked ever so sassily to one side.  On her left shoulder is pinned a corsage of white roses, and her shoes are made of satin.  It is a special day. 

 

The photographer is visible only in shadow, and only vaguely against the sunlight can you see what I like to think is the outline of his hat, the kind they wear in gangster movies, the kind best paired with pinstriped suits.  Along with a few other grainy images as alien to me as old movies, that shadow is all I have ever seen of my grandfather.  But my grandmother, Dorothy McDonald, that pretty flapper woman with the mischievous glint in her eye and the rounded baby face so like my sister’s… her I will always know.

 

She stands there in front of a gravel road that is now a four lane highway, in a park that no longer exists, with her eyes totally focused on camera and photographer, leaving the mighty Ohio River to flow along unnoticed beyond her gaze.  But she knows where she is standing, right there with her back toward the swankiest hotel in the River City of Evansville, Indiana.  This country girl who early on learned lessons in futility as she tried to nurse her mother through the tuberculosis that killed her and her sister through a depression that ended in suicide; this country girl who while still a child took care of her family on virtually nothing; this country girl in the satin shoes, she knew where she was.  She was somewhere, standing there in front of the McCurdy hotel, where as a waitress she had met the bellhop who would become her husband.  It was he who would buy her flowers, promise to take care of her, and take her picture in the park one sunny afternoon.

 

The image, I said, is one of hope in its prime.  You can see it in her eyes. Right there on the Indiana riverfront seventy five years ago, everything was possible for that woman and her new husband.  Before Black Tuesday, and the depression settled down across America, Dorothy McDonald was not the only one who found it easy to hope. The world was expanding, the economy was booming.  The future loomed brightly ahead, and new beginnings seemed to be everywhere.

 

Of course, after the snap of the shutter, Dorothy McDonald must have turned around, maybe faced that grand hotel again and returned with her husband to their everyday lives, lives less grandiose, less romantic, than this still photograph can show.  They turned around to face the future, and the future did indeed unfold, in ways that she could never and should never have known there when hope was easy.  Like our own lives, inevitably do, hers took its own course.  The wonder of it all is that she endured.  The wonder of it all is that we can too.  

 

I know that they returned to that hotel.  My grandfather would slowly move up to middle management in the hotel business before he would die in his fifties with no life insurance.  My dad, the youngest of four sons, was four years old, and that starry eyed newlywed was now a tired eyed young widow with no money and no saleable skills except a warm smile and a willingness to work hard for her family.  She was back where she started.  Before the roses, before the camera snapped, she was back there…where she came from.  Caring for everyone else, for her children, her dead sister’s children, and her son’s children.  The pretty girl who had come so far standing in front of the McCurdy hotel now hitch hiked to her waitress job at the local cafeteria.  Starting the week after her husband died, she stood out on the side of the road in high-heeled shoes every morning for over a decade, hoping that someone would take her to work and get her home in time to lead the Cub Scout meeting. In the middle of it all, all the mourning, all the struggle, there was work to do, and she did it. 

 

Illumination in the midst of great pain was won not through optimism, not through the promise of a perfect tomorrow, but through action. 

 

In such circumstances, meaning is made and hope is found just by getting through each day.  When the preservation of self and others is on the line, hopelessness is not an option, because when hope goes, even the best of us give up, we lose the strength it takes to keep going.  We abandon whatever power we do have to make anything happen, weather its feeding our kids or speaking our minds. Hopelessness robs us all of the power to change.  To my grandmother, without help and without money, ceasing to hope would be the ultimate act of selfishness.  It would be letting death, the forces of control outside of her grasp, evil itself, win out because they had sold her on the idea that nothing mattered. 

 

Had she accepted it, hopelessness would have beaten her down, and so doing, it would have broken the chances that her children (and her children’s children) would have in the future that waited beyond her very painful present. Hopelessness would have crippled those who depended on her, killed the tiny flickering spark that kept her always at the work of living. 

 

Dorothy McDonald didn’t have time for decadent bitterness, nor excess energy to spend railing against her lot.  She was busy doing other things, most of which were work.  Grandma did have her fun, though, especially toward the end of her life.

 

She lived with us during the week when my sister and I were little.  When I was in kindergarten and pretending to be sick so I didn’t have to go to school, she squeezed orange juice and pretended to believe me.  But on the weekends, she would stay in her own apartment, away from all the people who wanted her to take care of them and giving my mom the much needed chance to have some say around our house in her absence.

 

We would drive her into the city on Friday nights, Dad at the wheel, kids in the backseat. My favorite part of the week was often the exchange we shared as she got out of the car to go up to her apartment.  “You girls be good, but not too good,” she’d say with a cackle to my sister and me.  “Stay out of them bars, Mom,” my Dad would announce for the whole street to hear, “Don’t you go dancin’ on any tables.”  “Hell,” she’d say, “If you had legs like these you’d be dancin’ too.”  And we left, we to go home to a weekend of TV movies and grass mowing, Grandma to walk upstairs to a weekend of instant coffee and romance novels.  It was just more fun to think that she needed warning not to dance on any tables.  Life was just better that way, fighting boredom and age and loneliness with laughter. 

 

In those days, she actively mined the world for things to laugh about.  Herself, her age, us… life itself was the mother lode, a constant source of half-serious amusement, and I think it’s saved us all a few times over.  It’s not that the laughter denied the existence of pain.  It’s not that it erased it.  To the contrary, the humor, the act of finding fun wherever she could, was an inroad to continuing hope. 

 

Hannah Arendt once wrote that, “Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination… [a light that] some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth.”

 

We have the right to expect some illumination, even if we cannot expect to stand in the sunshine of pure promise, we can expect that meaning is somewhere.  My grandma has expected it for her entire life.  She found the meaning it took to survive in work, in responsibility, and in laughter.  Her life, like the lives of so many real, struggling human beings, teaches us all about the persistence of hope, about its changing face, one moment pure and shining, the next rock solid, unmoving in the midst of pain.  Hope does not require ease.  Hope does not require naiveté.  Rather, it is real, tangible, and enduring even when the stories of our lives do not have fairytale happy beginnings, middles, or ends. 

 

Grandma died a year ago last week at the age of 97.  As the rains fall and the grass grown freakishly quickly here in Northern Virginia, I’m thinking about the rebirth of the earth and finding myself astonished that such a miraculous spring is possible without her in it. 

 

Proving Our Worth

I turned 30 this week.  I had anticipated that such a turning point would feel at least a little bit unsettling, but it hasn’t really freaked me out at all.  After all – I spent my 25^th birthday in the exact same place I spent my 30^th.  Namely, behind a pulpit.  I’ve been doing this work now for four years as a settled parish minister and four years before that as a seminarian in various stages of ministerial preparedness.  So, I pretty much spent my 20’s being people’s minister.  It’s not like turning 30 means abandoning my wild partying ways and only drinking three scotches on a weekend night instead of four. It basically just means I’m of a reasonable age to be doing the work I’ve already been doing for some time, so maybe it’s not such a big shocker for me.  

 

            Still, it’s made me think a little.  For some reason, turning 30 brought to mind a memory from the week I was a candidate for the ministry at the wonderful congregation I serve.  At one of the innumerable candidating week mixers, when everyone’s supposed to get to know the new minister, a young mother of two in the congregation came up to me with wide eyes and said, “You’re so young and you’ve already accomplished so much!  Here I am older than you and I feel like I’ve hardly done anything.” 

 

            For a second there, you could have knocked me over with a feather, because she said this while her two beautiful, kind hearted and intelligent children played respectfully with other kids right next to us.  Of course, I said something pastorally appropriate like, “what makes you feel like you haven’t accomplished much” and had a conversation with her, but a big part of me wanted to shake her by the shoulders and shout, “Are you a crazy person!  Look at what you’ve done!  How is it even possible for anyone to accomplish something like that! I’m a freakin’ preacher, lady!  You’re like, you know, everything real in the world!” 

 

            Over the years, I’ve come to love that whole family even more than I could have guessed when I first met them.  Those kids only get smarter and kinder as they get older, and that mom just gets more amazing, but remembering that makes me think about how we try to prove our worth in this life and what measures we use to tally up our worthiness.  For her, in that moment, worthiness what everything she was not – it was professionalism and public prominence.  For me, it was the miracle of actually raising a decent and loving child, and both of us stood flabbergasted by the strength and commitment of the other.  Of course, we were also both completely incapable of acknowledging our own strength and commitment.    

 

            Turning 30, I’m thinking about how I measure my worth these days.  Though I hate to admit it, clergy are as bad as anyone else when it comes to measuring worth through numbers and prizes and external measurements.  It happens in what I like to call the “my steeple is bigger than your steeple,” conversation which inevitably takes place in one form or another at most large clergy gatherings.  Somebody goes on and on about their new program in this or that, somebody describes their last sermon in extended detail, and somebody, inevitably, lets you know exactly how much their congregation has grown in membership during the last church year.  Sometimes I actually am that person yammering about this or that, but I try to resist the temptation whenever I can, mostly because such a conversation it just feels awful, like it’s bad for my soul. 

 

            Sure, we can measure our worth by the size and prominence of our congregations and their numerical growth and fabulous programs – but we actually try to inculcate in our people measurements of worth that are exactly the opposite.  We try to teach our people the simple Universalist message that they, and their congregation, are loved and chosen no matter what, even when they aren’t great shining success stories.  We try to teach them to reach out and grow their faith because there are hungry people who need to be fed and their worth is assured in the eyes of a generous creation.  But then we ourselves hunker down over the numbers, obsess over the canvass figures, and try to tell a story that makes us shining stars after all.

 

            It’s tempting, at 30, to look back at my life and try to come up with all of the reasons these have been three decades of reasonably well lived life.  It’s tempting to try to justify the way I used those years and envision a new and improved me for the next 30.  But I tell my people that they are loved and chosen, no matter what.  Today, in honor of my birthday, I will endeavor to tell myself the same thing.    

Athiests With Open Hearts

I’m not an atheist.  Only among UU’s would a minister need to make such a confession with a tiny twinge of fear and a little sadness that someone might truly be alienated by my lack of un-belief.  But isn’t that what’s great about us, that nothing’s a given, that confessions here are always confessions of faith?  Daring to question means daring to disagree in love, to stand together with our differences and never turn away from our faith in one another.  Isn’t that what’s magical about us?

It’s true.  It’s obvious enough.  I admit it.  I’m not an atheist.  The word has harder edges and firmer boundaries, than anything I would ascribe to my belief system.  It purports a surety that is not my own.  My belief system is a guiding, clarifying, continually re-imagined house of steel and cards that holds me up when I’m not paying attention and sways gently under its own weight when I analyze it too closely.  It holds no pretension of absolute surety, no line in the sand which once drawn can never be crossed. 

An atheist believes that there is no God.  An atheist has found an answer to the eternal question.  And so I am not an atheist because I can’t bear the thought of letting go of the question.  I am not an atheist because one of the very few things I would gamble my life upon is the conviction that being human means not knowing everything. 

Not knowing the nature of the thing behind the thing - the force behind all the other forces, the beginning of the beginning – not knowing is an essential component of my religious imagination.  I am one of those people who think there might just be an elephant in the trunk of my car.  One of those people, as comedian Penn Jillette has so perfectly stated, who forgot to mention that “my personal heartfelt definition of the word ‘elephant’ includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire.”   

There just might be an elephant in the trunk of my car, or maybe it is only a spare tire, but who am I do define either one of them?  To me, being human is butting up continually against the edges of the mystery and not really knowing, not in the beginning or the middle or even the end of all my searching, who or what shaped the net that holds the stars together, or how, ultimately, the canvass of the nighttime sky was knitted out of nothingness. Not knowing if the architect of it all was God or time or our better angels or DNA, or more likely, believing that it was all of these things and more and that on some fundamental level all of these things are God.  That’s me.

I believe I shall never know, as Einstein once said, ‘what the old one thinks,” or weather or not the old one even exists to catch my house of steel and cards when it sways.  Perhaps I believe people have a better chance of feeling the truth than of knowing it, of responding honestly to the impulses of the heart than those of the mind.  And so I am not an atheist. 

But, as James Luther Adams said, “there is nothing more beautiful than an atheist with an open heart.”  Nothing more beautiful.  There is nothing more beautiful than an atheist with an open heart who, once having let go of God’s hand, reaches out to the world with his or her own. 

Our pews (or chairs, or whatever!) are full of such people, and it is just such people who hold great responsibility for making Unitarianism and consequently Unitarian Universalism what it is today, the godless many who sacrificed much to found our congregations on the assumption that freedom, reason and tolerance were the pillars of religion rather than devotion or piety.  The shoulders of giants upon which we stand are in some large measure the shoulders of the open hearted atheists who fought through the better part of the 20^th century to make real a religion where one didn’t have to check their critical and thinking mind at the door to gain admittance. 

The religious life of the open hearted atheist invites us all to see sunlight, almost tangible enough to grab, to recognize with awe that particles of dust that were once embedded in the rock of Mars are floating past our face each morning, natural-born star-stuff in the air we are breathing.  Wonder of wonders, the open hearted atheist thinks.  I am lonely, but I am not alone.  I am swimming in this cosmos, the untamed and untrammeled soup of spirit and star and element and earth, and I do not need Jesus or any other anointed one to open my eyes to the developing miracle of this flesh-filled moment. 

            This is belief, faith, wonder, awe, reverence for all that is precious, and it is very much present in a belief system which holds that the world is so wondrous that God’s smooth-handed divine sanction is utterly inconsequential.  In the lived experience of an open hearted atheist, the middle-man between the world and the human being has been swept away.   

                I am no atheist.  Mine is a faith that includes devotion and mystery and at least the enduring possibility of an elephant in the trunk.  Mine is a faith that usually but not always includes the word “God,” but I strive and I hope that we all can strive, to be open-hearted, generous of spirit and large of heart.        

              I don’t worry too much about who’s in what category – who’s an atheist, who’s a theist, who’s an earth-centered polytheist with a splash of Buddhist philosophy thrown in.  What I’m attentive to and hopeful for is that each of us can see in one another an open hearted atheist, a theist who also dares to question, and an earth centered polytheist with a splash of Buddhism who doesn’t look down their nose at those of us who don’t know our chakras from our belly buttons.    

Playing the Best Games Ever

I spent much of last week visiting with one of my colleagues in ministry who serves a church in Nebraska and spending time with his wonderful family.  My colleague is always telling me at collegial meetings that his life is just way more complicated than mine, and I understood that – at least I sort of understood that.  I got it.  I just didn’t really get it until this week.  See, my esteemed colleague and his venerable wife have got three kids.  The oldest is in kindergarten and the youngest is in diapers.  They’re awesome kids, and they’re exhausting, and it’s never quiet there.  Never, never quiet.  This is a bizarre feeling, coming as I do from my peaceful suburban apartment full of books. 

           

I did, however, have the good fortune of spending a good deal of time with the kids during my visit, including one afternoon consisting entirely of the very best games a person can play with three small children.  Namely:

 

1)      Fashion show – in which the girl dressed up as rotating version of the same lawyer/cheerleader/nun and the boy dressed us as a series of towel-draped super heroes including, notably, “Super Shopper Snowball Man.”  Super shopper snowball man, in case you are unaware, is a usually mild-mannered wielder of a shopping bag, which unbeknownst to the villains prowling the aisles of your local grocery is filled with snowballs ready to be courageously launched in order to save the proverbial day.   

 

2)      Cowboys – (no Indians, just cowboys) In which all three children and one bedraggled minister don cowboy hats and run from room to room herding a great thundering mass of imaginary (thus very real in the moment) mustangs.  Of course, the ponies get up to some very strange antics.  The children point and laugh at various rooms, toilets, and home furnishings, indicating the whereabouts of the ponies.  They say, “The ponies are hiding under the couch!” then “The ponies are running on the ceiling!” and “The ponies are in the microwave!”  Opening the door of the microwave oven, the minister/babysitter effects both a scowl and her best fake cowboy accent and says, “Well I never seen nothing like it.  You ponies are out of control. In my day ponies wouldn’t dare hide inside the microwave oven.  What kind of crazy ponies are you anyway?” All snicker. 

 

3)      Burial -  That’s right – burial.  In which the minister and the baby lay on the ground with their tongues hanging out while the other children cover them with couch cushions, fold their hands, and speak in elegiac tones the only religious words they can think of – “You are ashes and you are dusty and God is great and good and we thank you for our food.”  Then tickling ensues and someone screams, “Bury me now! Bury me now!”

 Intending to sit down a read for a bit, I fell asleep at 8:00 that night and didn’t budge until morning.  Yes, I now realize, my life with two cats is really different than my colleague’s life with three children. Not even just really different – unimaginably different – better and worse and so much more fun and then so much less.  I will say, however, than when I pulled away from the chaos of their busy house on my trek back to my tidy apartment, independent husband, and disinterested cats – I thought of Super Shopper Snowball Man, all bleary eyed in the morning – and reasoned that the chaos and exhaustion must be completely fair payment for such wonders. 

  

Never not the minister

So, last week my better half ended up in the hospital for four days.  His appendix burst in the middle of the night and he was being tough (as he is wont to do), resulting in the fact that we didn’t really get him to the hospital as quickly as we should have.  Still, it all worked out.  They got him into surgery, fixed him up, and got him home as quickly as they could given the moderate risk of infection with a burst appendix.  It was scary and stressful.  I’m still not over the shock of realizing he and I might not be invincible after all.  It was also the first time that I have been on the receiving end of my congregation’s big-hearted approach to pastoral care and I’m still reeling over how strange and wonderful that felt.

See, I’m the minister – right.  I’m the giver of pastoral care, not the receiver.  I am the font of comfort and the number one resource in my congregation for compassionate nods-of-the-head and hugs-only-when-appropriate.  I am the pastor and since I never remember my local priest comforting my family very much when I was a kid, I’ve seldom (if ever) really known what it was to be pastored to in a time of trauma.   Which is why I was confused this week, if honored and grateful at the same time.

 When hubby was in surgery, I was sitting on the floor of the only place in the hospital with reception grasping a cell phone in each hand while talking to our parents and family members, giving them updates and generally just trying to hold it together. As I sat there juggling these cell phones and wondering if I even had it in me to cry, one of my wonderful congregants walked by.  And here’s where the story gets surprising.  When I saw her, my first thought was not “Oh, how lovely that she’s come to see me,” but rather, “oh crap, there’s one of my congregants and I haven’t showered in a couple of days and am not really able to talk to her like a minister right now and I’m sitting on the floor in the pajama shirt I was wearing when we fled the house at three am and she’s probably got some relative in surgery and I didn’t even know about it and I hope she’s ok and, deep breath I need to get off of these two phones and talk to my congregant.”   

And I thought all of those things in about two seconds flat.  It took me a good ten minutes to realize that she was actually there to see me.  That’s right.  I assumed she had her own traumas or issues to attend to and just happened to be here, in the surgical waiting area, for reasons utterly unconnected to my suffering husband. For ten solid minutes.   While my husband was in surgery.  I found it inconceivable that someone might be there to see me.

Once I figured it out I was touched and so glad that she had come, not just because it turned out to be lovely to have some company right then, but because it taught me something about myself and the nature of ministry.  Reflecting on it, the mental block that kept me from seeing her generous offer of care was strong.  There is, apparently, a significant enough piece of my self-identity as a minister connected to my role as care-giver and I couldn’t move very smoothly from that role to another one. 

As leaders, pastors, people of faith – how do we manage to be both caregivers and care receivers?  How do we let the good work of the church not only emanate from us but come back to us?  People forget at their peril and the peril of their congregants the fact that a minister is never not the minister.  When people forget that, that’s when the really bad stuff happens.  Those in ministry do no favors to their churches when they let their professional boundaries and ministerial identity slide away.  It’s not a costume you can take off or a role that can be shed like a snake’s skin on Friday night and picked back up on Sunday morning.  Even sitting on the floor unshowered and frightened in a pajama shirt with the man I love in the operating room, I’m still the minister.   And yet, there are times when the minister must allow for the possibility of being cared for in appropriate ways by the people she gives her love and labor to. It needs to cross our minds that the good people of our churches may just be there for us when we need them, that even the minister with good professional boundaries and a strong sense of her own calling can stand to be on the receiving end of the love of a church community from time to time.  That is, after all, what a church community is for.

Hubby’s fine, by the way.  And my congregation is busily taking good care of others among us who are in need of thier love.  And I’m left both surprised by my response to their compassion and infinitely grateful for it.  Sometimes church life just shines with grace, doesn’t it?         

Weather or not we save the world…

There is a story David Bumbaugh (who is one of the best preachers ever to grace a pulpit among us) told me once that made me cry.  I’m not even sure if I remember it right.  I probably don’t, but I remember how I heard it anyway and what it meant to me. In my mind, it was a story about blessed irrelevance, a story about doing not because of the expected end result, but because not doing just wasn’t an option.   

You may have heard it before, I think it came from a naturalist named Loren Eisley originally and probably had a completely different point than the one I’m making – but here’s the way it mattered to me, so let me tell you my version of the story of the star thrower.  It’s about a biologist on a working vacation on some distant lovely coast who walked the beach every day when the tide went out, watching as local shell collectors scour the sand picking up the abandoned prizes of the sea, the sand dollars and conch shells and starfish that the receding waters had left behind.   

Knowing that the thriving tourist market in this lovely idyllic place would pay handsomely for these small treasures, the collectors came each day to make their living from the sea, piling the little creatures high in great buckets, carrying them with work-worn arms over to bonfires that would boil away the dirt, the muck, the very life from them, converting the starfish and the sand dollars into a saleable commodity.    

As all of this happened, the biologist watched every day, from little distance away.  He didn’t make any grand pronouncements.  He just watched, as little deaths, the tiniest of deaths, scattered out along the beach in front of him.  Seeing them there, dried and dying, in the early light of morning before the collectors came, this man who had no particular pre-existent love of starfish, no great compulsion to ban the collection of ocean creatures, no nothing except a morning walk, suddenly started to feel an overwhelming sadness, an unnamed sadness, a sadness that might have had something to do with the meaninglessness of things and of people, and the next morning he got up again before the collectors, went out to one tiny portion of a beach which was itself vaster than his imagining, and threw some starfish back into the sea.  He threw them back even as the tide drug them back in. He threw them back even as the collectors gathered their baskets for another day. He threw them back knowing that that he was not their savior, for fate and death and the tides were not his to control.  He threw them back not because he was sure to save them, but because he had arms for throwing and because he could do no other.   

Though that same afternoon would bring with it just as full a beach of little deaths as the afternoon before, the thrower of starfishes, knowing that his work would yield little tangible results, threw those starfishes anyway. Every morning, in defiance of the tides, in defiance of death itself, because he had to, he threw those starfish anyway.   

There’s a reading by Catholic author Henri Nowen which says that “the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.”  Now I know we’re not the Christian leaders of the future, but we are religious practitioners of today, and I cried when I thought about the star thrower because I was aching, aching, for something in our Unitarian Universalist tradition which recognized the deep power of an act of complete, blessed, vulnerable irrelevance.   

I have preached to my congregation that moral acts are purer when they are done without reward or the expectation of reward.  It’s Dick Gilbert’s idea that we should all aspire to be “good for nothing,” people who do good for no reward, but for the thing itself.  In preaching this, I have found it easy to reassure Unitarian Universalsits that their ethical decision making could be purer than that of those who labor under the promise of a final theistic judgment in the form of heaven or hell.  I have found it easy, deceptively so, to communicate that good works done by those who do not expect a heavenly reward are just a little better than those who do the same in order to build an impressive report for St. Peter at the gates.  But Nowen reminded me that, even without the lure of heaven and the stars in our celestial crown, we liberal religious people still have a ways to go before we can claim ourselves as being anything close to “good for nothing.”  For even without heaven, we can find ourselves lured into action not by the purest motivation of the act itself, but by the grand temptation to be relevant, to be spectacular, to be powerful in our wholly temporal game of justification by acts alone.  

For so many of us, it is relevance that we are after rather than heaven.  It is irrelevance that we fear in the place of perdition, and the great reward at the end of it all is not pearly gates, but purpose, not salvation, but success.  Too often, even we liberals, just like our more theologically traditional counterparts, do because we get something out of the doing and not because the doing is right. 

And yet Henri Nowen, grounded in the love of his Christ, musters the courage to stand bare before the world, to work tirelessly for justice in that world, and yet never imagine himself its’ savior.  And yet the thrower of starfishes manages to rise every morning and go about his appointed task, knowing all the while that what he does cannot be measured by achievement, knowing all the while that he will not be celebrated, and yet also knowing all the while that he must do. 

I guess all this is my way of saying that I fear we Unitarian Universalists, in learning again to claim our power in a world so in need, run a dangerous risk of focusing too much on the hoped-for fruits of our own labors and not enough on the motivations behind those labors, motivations which existed and will exist weather or not we find success, weather or not we grow our churches, weather or not we prove ourselves to be so deeply important, so deeply relevant.  

Can a newly empowered liberal religion, so focused on achievement, on advancing the causes and fighting the good fight, so wonderfully intent on getting results for our beloved Walden that’s burning, dare to be irrelevant and bare before the world with nothing to offer but our vulnerable selves?  Or are we so attached to the importance of our own relevance that our actions are only worth only the sum total of their tangible results?I know why Nowen can be so brave.  He says it beautifully.  It’s because the greatest message he has to carry “is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love is the true source of all human life.”He’s held, even in failure, even in irrelevance, by a love that will not let him go. For him this love comes through the birth and redemption of Jesus.  But my heart tells me that Unitarian Universalists such as ourselves can only dare to imagine ourselves as something more than our tangible results if somehow, someway, we feel the presence of an enduring love of our own. 

Weather by Jesus or in sunsets or in the extraordinary wonder of the everyday, we too must be held by something, lest we find ourselves making idols of our newly-found politically, religiously, and culturally relevant selves.  Because the story of the star thrower still makes me cry, because I can’t talk myself out of believing there has to be more in the doing than just the results at the end, and because I want to believe that the end reward is not the measure of the act, I harbor a hope that we can find the face of the holy even in our own irrelevance. 

Could we believe that we are loved and we are worthy of that love not because of what we do or what we accomplish, but because we are held by a love that will not let us go?I think so.  I hope so, and I hope that we as a people can stand together before that ocean of injustice that is vaster than our imaginations.  Some days we might just be spectacular, and some days all of our labors will be washed ashore again at our feet.  Come what may, may we buoyed in the good work not merely by the measure of our own successes, but by the fact that we are loved beyond measure, weather or not we save the world.     

Know thyself, then get over thyself

I have spent a great heap of my life trying to be and become myself, guarding against those whose authority could diminish my selfhood and rob me of my strength, against a world that would do anything in its to change me and turn my unique voice into silence or complicity or cliché.

I have tried to endow myself with some backbone when confronting the powers that be.  You know, the usual suspects that merit standing up against - the patriarchies and the orthodoxies and the ready-made boxes full of ready-made answers. Luckily, in all of that backbone-having and self-finding, I’ve managed to choose a path for my life that usually makes me pretty darn happy to be who I am.  That feels like an accomplishment.

But these days I find myself growing weary of the excessive emphasis put on self-love and self-knowledge among liberal religious folks.  It feels like the self-help pop-psychology jargon of Dr. Phil and Oprah sometimes becomes an end goal of our spiritual journeying rather than just one point along the way. 

Find yourself.  Go along your own path.  Build your own theology.  Be yet lamps unto yourselves.  Go confidently in the direction of your dreams – blah blah blah.  Our emphasis on self-empowerment and self-knowledge just gets a little jargon-y after awhile, like a slogan that ought to be printed on a cheesy inspirational poster on a doctor’s office wall.

I mean, is the whole point of religion really to know ourselves better?  Are we really doing this church thing just so that we can be happier and more self-aware and at one with our deepest selves?  I don’t think so.  I think we do it so that we heal some of the things in this world that are broken.  Self-knowledge is a tool that makes such work possible, but it’s not the end goal.        

What good is being self actualized if I’m not able or willing to make a difference for others?  What good is it to “know thyself” if all I come to know is that I’m selfish?  What good is it to be a lamp to unto myself if I’m not a lamp for anyone else?

Sure, we should be proud of who we are.  We should claim our voices and name the things we value and shout our truths from the rooftops if we really want to – but let’s remember the next step that comes after “know thyself.”  

My gripe, I think, has something to do with the occasions when we sometimes fail to turn self-empowerment into service.  Maybe my new slogan is, “Know thyself, and then get over thyself and do something for somebody else.”

Now, with the reminder of my Tuesday, I’ll take a hearty dose of my own medicine, stop griping, and go do something for somebody else.  Isn’t that what liberal religion really challenges us to do?        

No Small Callings

“Do you have a vocation?” the poster in the hallway of my childhood church asked every Wednesday evening as I arrived for catechism class. Do you have a vocation? On that poster, in addition to the large white letters of that question, there was a photograph of some beaming young people.  The women’s apple cheeks peeked out from beneath black veils and white wimples and all of the young men had the kind of haircuts dads generally want their daughters’ boyfriends to have. Clean cut and strait backed and seeming to glow from the inside with the light of whatever or whoever called them, the young happy people and their vocations jammed together on that smiley poster and asked their eager question to whomever chanced to pass by.

“Do you have a vocation?” literally meant, “Is God calling you to be a sister or a priest,” but that question, for all of its intended depth and probity, didn’t really make my elementary-aged self think much about convents and chapels and Sunday mornings. For better or worse, that question and those glowing faces made me think of nothing so much as the gumball machine at the local K-mart.

That’s right.  Not a typo.  I said, “the gumball machine at the local K-mart.”

I have always been a sucker for the gumball machines of the world. Even now, I can scarcely walk past one without pulling out a quarter or begging one off whoever happens to accompany me to the store. At that time it was always my mom who fed me the quarters, and the gumball machine at the K-mart has probably drained away the equivalent of a few mortgage payments a quarter at a time over the years. The machine at the local K-mart, situated in the highly visible front lobby of the store, was full of multi-colored gumballs.  Though all of these gumballs looked quite different, they pretty much tasted exactly the same. There must have been hundreds of gumballs in there, but even a connoisseur such as myself couldn’t really differentiate one from another, and believe you me, I tried. Sometimes I would even close my eyes while the gumball rolled out and have my sister hand it to me just to keep the experiment as purely scientific as possible. I tried every color and never could tell them apart until I stuck my tongue out in the rear-view mirror to see if it was in fact blue or purple.

Yet for all that scientifically tested sameness, a few of the gumballs inside that great mass of pink and white and green really were different. Maybe a dozen out of all the many hundreds stood out in their great glass globe because they alone were the “Golden Gumballs” which deserved their glamorous name because they were colored a sort of freakishly bright canary yellow and had the words “winner” stenciled in red on one side.

The game went like this - you put your quarter into the slot, cranked the handle, and hoped for the best. If you got a golden gumball, the one marked from its creation as special and different and important, you were supposed to take the gumball up to the returns counter and collect a wonderful prize. Oh how I went after those golden gumballs. When my eyes were closed in the name of science, it was only on the condition that they would be opened immediately, experiment be damned, if it happened that I would actually get the golden gumball. I never did win the prize. I don’t remember what it was, so the prize must have been nothing as exciting as the pursuit.

It was a powerful image for me, those golden gumballs alone retaining some individuality in that sea of multicolored monotony, the sugary sameness punctuated by bright spots of yellow. And because, apparently, the front lobby of the K-mart was one staging-point for my budding religious imagination, it was golden gumballs I thought of every time I saw that poster with the bright shining faces asking me if I had a vocation.

Those people on the poster were the ones with a calling, a special purpose, a pre-ordained something that they were supposed to do. The way I figured it, they, with their starched collars and gleaming grins, were like the golden gumballs surrounded on all sides by the unwashed masses, the uncalled everybody-else’s that didn’t have a vocation. Their poster was asking if any of us in Wednesday night catechism class might be golden gumballs to, marked from the beginning of our existence with some kind of special-ness on our insides, maybe red stenciled letters that spelled “winner” on our hearts. The chosen ones, the ones with the vocations, were special because they were chosen by God to do God’s work in the world. They were golden gumballs, and I did wonder if I might be a golden gumball too.

I wondered so much, in fact, that I followed that notion of vocation strait into a Dominican convent in my late teens. It was a sort of summer camp for vocational discernment, and I didn’t stay long, but for at least awhile I really thought I might. I was checking it out so that I could check myself out, so that I could try to answer the question that had never let me go. Do you have a vocation? Do you have a calling? At that time in my life it seems as if I spent all my days and nights with one ear cocked imploringly toward the heavens, waiting for a sign, waiting for the celestial phone to ring and my true nature as a golden gumball to reveal itself in a calling.

But the phone didn’t ring, and curiously, it felt right that it didn’t ring; so right that after a time I stopped thinking it should ring and began to understand that the silence itself was a calling. The no-answer, the nothingness, the expanse of the unknown that met me when I asked if I had a vocation was actually something. It was a calling away and a calling forth.

There is much talk of calling in the profession of the ministry. Sometimes there is so much talk of calling that I find it a bit overdone, requiring a certain amount of posturing to uphold. We clergy are often asked, “How did you know you were called to ministry? or “When did you first discern a call to ministry?” Those questions make me think it ought to have been something even more dramatic than a celestial phone call… a lightning bolt maybe, or a flock of doves hovering over the future clergy person’s cradle… something really juicy. With a little bit of self-importance, questions like that are always around for those in my profession, yet we don’t often ask schoolteachers and accountants and lawyers and stay at home dads the same things. Things like, “How did you know you were called to be a mother?” or “When did you first discern a call to volunteer for the Red Cross?” “How long have you known you were made to be a keeper of goats, or a husband, or a member of a Wednesday evening bowling league?”

The reason we don’t tend to ask these questions of each other is that, too often, we understand calling exactly as I did when I looked at the golden gumballs. We understand it as something reserved only for the sanctified, special super-pure few with the word “winner” written somewhere inside. Too often, we don’t recognize the myriad callings that move in every one of our lives because we mistakenly figure that callings are for somebody else.

But there is nobody else. There is nobody but us to make this world something closer to our own visions of what it should be. Like I said, I never did get some big phone call from God telling me to be a nun. I also never got some big phone call telling me to be a minister. My calling to ministry began like a lot of callings, as nothing more or less than an idea.  Maybe it was an idea given my by God or the Holy Spirit or some such benevolent idea-maker, or maybe it was just an idea.  Any way you slice it, it was an idea to which I eventually said yes and an idea that has now become a reality. Callings are like that. The miracle of a calling happens in the moment that an idea forms, and we begin to imagine that such an idea might actually be possible in the real world.  A calling is a “yeah, I could do that” sort of moment.

The power of those “yeah, I could do that” moments never ceases to amaze me. A calling begins as idea, a thought, a glimmer of a possibility, and the amazing thing is that that idea, that seemingly insubstantial glimmer, can be the framework upon which each of us may build a new or significantly changed life. The idea, the calling, is the skeleton of who we will be, the structure upon which we are invited to build our futures. In answering our callings, we layer flesh and life upon that skeleton of an idea through our actions and our words, creating something tangible from what was once only a thought.

At some point in our lives, maybe many points, we have all been called, called to be leaders in our own professional, personal, and church lives. Called to step away from what feels in our guts to be wrong, called to carry on, called to begin anew.

All of those callings began as ideas, ideas to which we human beings are capable of saying yes to and by counterpoint, capable of refusing. I heard an accomplished mentor say once that much of her life has been a process of saying “yes,” to the good ideas that have come to her, both from within and from others. The callings come, from within and without, the callings pour in, and, you might wonder… from where do they come? They rise up from our own lives and they stream in from our own environments. There are callings even for atheists, even for the unsure. There are callings even when the celestial phone doesn’t ring. Every call is embedded in our own personal history, lying right where past and future come together. It is who we are, our most honest selves, telling us what rings true and inviting us to act on it.

God or no God, UU author Kimberly Byer-Nelson argues that we are called from sources outside of our own personal histories as well. She finds herself called by nature and writes that, “In the hours before the birds stream airborne with chiming voice, a silent breath rests in the pines… and I think, this is how we are called.”

How are you called? From whence do you gather the ideas that have formed and will form your future… and are you answering those callings? Answering a calling requires saying yes, but I do not believe that destiny weaves a fabric of calling that precludes our ability to say no. A calling is an idea. It’s answering is a choice, a choice not pre-ordained by history or by God, but granted to each of us right now in this moment.

There are callings aplenty, even for me, especially for us. What else, after all, is a free and responsible search for truth and meaning but a series of jumps from one calling to another, from one direction that feels right to another, until one day we wake up and find that we have actually gotten somewhere in our pursuit of greater peace?

Callings are not all earth-shattering, but even those that seem small are great callings when they bring us closer to the sources of our own joy and responsibility. The strongest calling I got this week happened when a really good song came on the radio on my way to work. Right then, I let myself have the idea that it really was possible for me to follow my bliss, be five minutes late to work, and take an extra trip around the block just to listen to Gladys Knight and the Pips sing “Midnight Train to Georgia.” In those five minutes, singing and dancing in the car and feeling alright in my skin, I was answering a calling. Does that make me a golden gumball after all?

Maybe, maybe not. The truth is that the golden gumballs almost certainly tasted exactly the same as rest of them, and while I never did get to go home with a golden gumball, I did get to go home with lots of other ones. Every bright round orb in that gumball machine was going somewhere. Whether it would get warmed up in the pocket of a tired child, be popped into the mouth of an old lady with a sweet tooth, or ground into the brand new carpet of a mother who has had better days, each of those gumballs was headed somewhere, each just as super-special as any other. And so, maybe I am not a golden gumball. Maybe you aren’t either, but each of us is headed somewhere. May all of us, blue and green and golden alike, see to it that our own callings, the only ones we have, do not go unheeded.

 

Today’s Credo

Today’s Credo

Nancy McDonald Ladd

I believe that “god” as an external reality is a construct of the human imagination, and I believe that I should pray to God every single day.

 

I believe that religion is a metaphor, a fragile and flawed container that tries in its own small way to hold within itself a vast an unnamable mystery.  And I believe that religion is absolutely essential to my life and the well-being of our world. 

 

I believe that human beings are complex animals driven mostly by bodily needs and societal demands.  And I believe that each one of us has a soul worth saving.

 

I believe in paradox, in seeming contradiction, in the wholeness that lies behind all opposition.  God is a construct.  Religion is a metaphor.  People are complex animals – and all of it – the whole mundane mess, is a miracle.  All of it is, or can be, holy.  All of it is worth bending my knees and folding my hands for from time to time. 

 

I am a non-supernatural theist, a Christian who never did buy the resurrection, a linear Western thinker drawn to the riddle of the Buddhist koan, a mystic content to connect to nothing more concrete than a mystery.

 

I don’t need the answers, but I need my God, my church, the people who love me, and an abundant creation that challenges my complacency and dares me to be better than I am.