One more thing about the working class

The cover article of the Fall, 2007 UU World, "Not My Father's Religion" has netted me more mail than anything I've ever written. Almost all of it was very thoughtful and some people told me their personal stories of being working class UUs or of having working class parents who don't understand why they became UUs. I didn't manage to write back to everybody who deserved a response, but I tried.

I keep thinking I'm going to do a summing-up post of everything I learned from the responses I got, but that seems to be one of those projects that is too grand and wonderful to actually manifest in this world. Instead I'll just toss this out to acquire more comments. As I remember things, I'll add them to this thread as comments.

Pete Stark: Unbeliever in Congress

My latest UUworld.org column has been up for about a week now. It's about Congressman Pete Stark from California, who last March came out in public as "a Unitarian who who does not believe in a supreme being." In September I attended a talk he gave at Harvard, in which he accepted the Humanist of the Year award from the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy.

It was an interesting talk, because Stark's spiritual journey points out the difference between two kinds of non-theists: Those for whom unbelief is a major part of their identity, and those who just never get around to thinking too deeply about God, because they're living life just fine without a deity. (In the column I refer to the two types as tooth-fairy unbelievers and purple-cow unbelievers.) Stark is the second kind, a purple-cow unbeliever.

It's an interesting question, I think, whether purple-cow unbelievers can be pulled together into a movement, and if so, whether it could be the same movement as tooth-fairy unbelievers.

There's no comment feature on the UUWorld.org site, so you can post your responses here.

Jesus has annexed my town

"Nashua belongs to Jesus Christ."

That's the slogan on the bumper sticker of a car in the parking lot of my apartment complex in Nashua, New Hampshire. I've seen it several times over the last few weeks. It's either a campaign of some sort, or else I keep noticing the same two or three cars. I'd ask somebody, but the cars are always either empty or moving.

To me it sounds like a threat, like non-Christians should get out of town or something. Is that paranoid? Maybe the people who drive these cars are just clueless and don't realize that it sounds that way.

What do the rest of you think? Have you run into this in your town? What's it supposed to mean?

Reflections on the Beginning of Another Church Year

It seems like an odd thing to do, when you stop and think about it.

Why give up a weekend morning, make yourself and your family presentable, and go to church? Why join its committees and work on its projects? Don't you have more urgent things to do with your time? Why contribute money that you surely could apply to some other purpose, money that you could put aside towards (say) a nice vacation or use to pay down that worrisome balance on your credit card?

Why church?

The traditional churches have a simple answer: Eternity. It seems like a good deal they offer: a little bit of trouble and expense now in exchange for eternal bliss. Or else take your chances on damnation. What's it going to be? You have fire insurance, don't you? Why not take out a little hellfire insurance?

But our church can't make that pitch. We've trained you (if you needed it) not to be so gullible, not to jump at every threat or promise that someone makes in an authoritative tone, not to jerk like a puppet at every thou-shalt or thou-shalt-not you read in some allegedly ancient text. Why shalt thou? Why shalt thou not? Who is this voice that calls itself God? Is there a man behind that curtain? Is there an all-too-human all-too-earthly church?

Why should we (who know better) make a church? Even a "free" church, as we call it? Would animals, taken back to the plains of Africa and released, build themselves a zoo? Even a "free" zoo, with cages that didn't lock? Would they surround themselves with wire and stay on moated islands just for old times' sake?

No.

So why a church?

You don't need another demand on your attention. Forget eternal life, day-to-day life is already more than enough to think about. Job, health, home, family -- couldn't you use a second 24 hours every day just to keep up with them? Or to get away from them and finally have some time for yourself? Maybe once there were homemakers who needed church as an excuse to get out of the house for a while. Maybe there were workers who were grateful to be told to sit down and do nothing on a Sunday morning.

But those days are over, aren't they?

Or maybe they aren't. You don't work 16 hours a day in the mines or the mills. You don't beat rugs with a stick or haul water from the well or bake your family's bread from scratch (unless you want to). But there's always something, isn't there? Something that a better version of yourself would be doing. Stuff to put in order. Plans to make, letters to write, things that someone is going to expect you to know and understand and deal with. Soon. Maybe already.

Sometimes life is like one of those dreams where you're running from something and don't believe that you're going to get away. You think you need to run faster, but what you really need is to wake up.

Wake up.

Eternity? You could use an excuse to step back and think about next month. Or a year from now. Or five. Where is it all going, this life you've made? Sometimes that question hits you in spite of the clothes in the hamper and the meeting tomorrow morning and the kids who are waiting for someone to pick them up. Where is it all going?

Maybe it hits you on a round-numbered birthday. Or out of the blue, when you spot a white hair or hear the news about that friend you haven't seen since almost forever.

Or maybe it comes after one of those moments when time seems to stop. The last sliver of the red sun peeks out over the ocean. Or the engine hums and the interstate rolls past and you know all the lyrics to the song on the radio. Or the symphony is over, but its last note still stretches out in your mind; you stay in your seat just a little longer so that you don't break it. The moment, for reasons of its own, doesn't run away. It lingers. And when time starts again, that's when it occurs to you to wonder:

Where is it all going?

It's not even about death, not really. If the thread of your life suddenly snapped, well, then it would be over and you probably wouldn't be anywhere where you could think about it. (Or if you were, then that would be a different thread, still holding.) That might even be the best way to die, to be racing through your life and then (suddenly) not.

No, it isn't death that hits you. It's loss. Something slips into the unrecoverable past and you wonder: Was I supposed to do something with that? The tautness of your face, the zip on your fastball, the youthful energy that you seemed to have only a few days ago. Were you supposed to do something with that? The mentor who always seemed to have an answer, the grandmother who knew all the stories -- now they stare at you blankly and you wonder: Was I supposed to learn something from them? Was there some message I was supposed to hear so that I could carry it and pass it on? Did I miss it?

Maybe. Or maybe you can still remember it, if you stop and think.

And it's not just time, it's space. Somewhere, right now, children are dying from diseases that have been curable for half a century. Or just hunger, maybe, which has been curable forever. Wars are being fought, and people are banging the drums to start new ones. Some people are committing crimes, while others are looking at the options society offers them legally and realizing that none of them are acceptable. The natural world is still killing people with floods and earthquakes. Somewhere, right now, a perfectly good and innocent person is helplessly waiting for a hero to come.

Who? You? You can't. The dishes are piled in the sink and the checkbook is unbalanced and a voice on TV is saying that everything would be fine if only you bought this product. The kids' homework isn't done and the yard needs mowing and the in-laws are coming over tomorrow.

It's huge, the world is. It's full of people and they all want something. Something of yours, maybe. Maybe they should even have it, and maybe you'd even be willing to give it to them if only you knew of a path from your door to theirs. But you don't.

Or maybe it's all just another reality TV show. Who will get off that island and win the million dollars? Will that promising young actress ever stop drinking and get her life together? Is that politician really gay? Did that celebrity really murder his wife?

What's real? What isn't? What should you care about and why? Who has the time to sort it all out?

Nobody.

At least, no single person does, if they have to do it all by themselves. Nobody has the time. Nobody has the knowledge. Nobody is smart enough.

Not alone. Not by themselves.

But what if a bunch of us got together? Think about it. We could set aside some time to meet. We could remind each other to take that step back and look at the bigger picture. We could compare notes about what's important and what isn't. Maybe, together, we could sort some things out. Maybe, if we met often enough, we could learn to know each other and trust each other, so that when I get running so fast that I can't remember who I want to be, you can remember for me. And maybe I can remember for you. Maybe once in a while we could give each other a good shake, so that we can stop running and wake up.

We could try it.

We could talk about what's going on in time and space (or even outside of time and space, if it seems important for some reason). And among us all, on any given day, there might be somebody who knows what we need to know and understands what we need to do. Not the same person every time, but somebody. Or maybe we'll all bring a piece of the puzzle, and put a few of them together. Maybe enough to make out a picture.

It might work. It'd be a start, at least. Maybe, while we were doing it, we'd think of something else, something better.

So what would we call it, this bunch of people getting together to remind each other of our best selves, to wake each other up, to pool our attention and try to deal with a world that is too much for each of us alone? We could make up a new word for it. Or we could recycle an old word that (as far as I'm concerned) has been sitting around uselessly for generations now.

We could call it a church.

What do you think? We could try it. It might work.

See you Sunday, maybe? I think I'll be there.

Wild speculation

My second UUworld.org column went up Monday. It's called Drops of Water Turn a Mill and it speculates about the long-term effect that the Internet will have on religion. I also think it has one of my better opening lines:

I doubt I will ever forget the moment when I saw the White House destroyed by aliens.

The bulk of the column is about the relationship between media and how people think, a subject that shows up in Al Gore's latest book The Assault on Reason and in Neil Postman's 1980s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death. If the Internet gives us new experiences and changes the way we think, it's also likely to change the way we do religion.

Take a look, then come back here to comment.

The most subversive book I've read this summer ...

... is a children's fantasy: Un Lun Dun by China Mieville.

To get the gist of Un Lun Dun, picture this standard fantasy pattern: There's a parallel world (UnLondon) in which magic works, inanimate objects move and talk on their own, and so forth. This world is facing a crisis, but there are prophecies of a Chosen One who will save the day by performing a series of great ... oh, never mind.

Within about five minutes of the Chosen One's appearance, it's obvious that none of that is going to work. If the world is going to be saved, an Unchosen One is going to have to pick up the slack and make something up. And she's running out of time, so she's going to have to convince UnLondoners that they don't have to do things by the book, they don't need answers to all the questions they thought they needed, and they don't have perform the quests the prophecies describe. But they do have to get their act together and do something right away. And they're going to have to do it themselves, because the predestined messiah wasn't up to the job.

So inside a world of magic rich and imaginative enough to enthrall any 10-year-old runs the following message: We all thought we knew how the world was supposed to be and the way things were supposed to go, but that's not happening so we're going to have to think for ourselves now.

Even more subversively, the novel doesn't jump to the opposite extreme and support the anti-religious rants of Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris. One of the first allies of the Unchosen One is the book of prophecies itself -- which is animate, of course, and deeply distressed about its own failures. It turns out that the tales of the Chosen One, in spite of their overall wrongness, contain a great deal of useful information -- after you sift them through your common sense.

In other words, Un Lun Dun is a parable of liberal religion. In terms a child can understand, it models respect for scripture without subservience to it. After you challenge all the assumptions and throw out everything that isn't going to work, you still have something left. But what you have left is a useful member of your team, not an authoritarian leader.

So if you think of liberal religion as an insincere compromise between humanism and fundamentalism, or as an intellectual nuance that the rabble could never understand -- think again. It can be laid out in terms so clear and sensible a child can understand them.

Building Your Own Ecclesiology

The title says it all, right? Well, it does after it's defined: ecclesiology means "theory of church".

This is a big hole in UU adult religious education. We have "Building Your Own Theology" to help individuals figure out what they think about the big questions of individual human life. And occasionally we have workshops to help churches find a mission statement, or arrive at some other expression of their collective purpose. But there's no introspective what-I-think-about-us course. We need one.

As some of you know, I'm in the process of writing a UU 101 book for Skinner Press. Most of the time I'm just putting words around stuff that is widely known and understood. But when it comes to ecclesiology -- what a church is about and why you might want to be part of one -- I'm having to wing it a lot more.

And that speaks to a disconnect I find at my local church. On the one hand I sense a hunger for deeper involvement in a lot of people. On the other hand, there are a lot of things not getting done. There's a gulf between the people who are waiting for volunteers and the people who would like to be invited to participate in something important and meaningful. There's not a widely held vision of church that makes it natural to jump in here or there, or to create something new that the church needs.

So I picture BYOE like this: It presents a lot of different visions of what a church might be and the role it might play in someone's life. And then it asks you to claim such a vision for yourself: What do YOU think is going on here and how do you see the you/church relationship? What role could the church fill in your life and what role could you fill in the church's life?

Doing this in a group would have an added advantage of providing perspective. Somebody who is looking for allies in social action will be in a group with somebody who is looking for support in spiritual growth and with somebody who is looking for a village to help raise a child. Each of them could be inspired to envision a more holistic church than the one that fulfills their personal needs. (And that, I guess, is part of my ecclesiology: Church pulls us into something larger than ourselves.)

At the end you don't write a credo (I believe) you write a sumus: We are.