Thursday, June 25, 2009

Greetings from Salt Lake City

I'm blogging at GA again this year. You can find my (and Dan Harper's and Sara Robinson's) posts here.

1 comment:

kimc said...

I know I'm a little late, but I just read Message or Culture. I'm glad you have caught up with what I've been saying for years. You said it much more clearly.
Now, the work is figuring out what we want to keep and what we can let go of. Is anyone working on that?
Can we let go of bad singing? Dan Harper just wrote about the possibilities of teaching us to sing together. http://www.danielharper.org/blog/?p=4851
Can we be both intellectual and emotional? Can we learn to swing and sway and clap even without explicit permission? Can we learn to evangelize the Good News rather than hiding our light under a bushel basket? Or, at least, let people know we are UUs....
Once, we went to Glide Memorial in San Francisco for a service. It was lively and emotional, and pretty close in message to UUism, though a bit more "Christian" sounding -- not much though. But people were having real EXPERIENCES there. So many were crying with joy that ushers pass around tissues as part of their duties. It was moving, and joyous. I think we can do that and still have a great intellectual message. I say that as a person who loves ideas (as Huston Smith described it; a person "for whom ideas dance and sing".) I also quote Sarah Light, a teenager at the time, who said, "I want a sermon that will make me cry."