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I sang for my supper by preaching at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of San Miguel de Allende (UUFSMA) last Sunday. It turns out that in addition to the week’s stay at a home provided by the congregation, Joy, Munchkin and I were treated to lunch afterwards and got to take the day’s flowers home. Generous compensation for an easy morning; I prepared, of course, because I always do, but it was much easier preparation than usual because I’d given the sermon in essentially the same form two years earler at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto. Text version is here, audio here. They were a nice bunch, intelligent and friendly.
Ten percent of San Miguel de Allende’s population come from elsewhere, and 70% of those are from the US or Canada. There are a fair number of expatriates and retirees, and lots more who come every year for a few weeks or months, plus a goodly share of one-time tourists. That’s whom the congregation serves: English-speakers who are here permanently or transiently, that is, mostly norteamericano retirees, snowbirds, and visitors. It is therefore elderly–our hosts joked that we brought the average age of the room down significantly–and has no children’s religious education or child care. As a result, we won’t be going much, since we can’t go together; if one of us goes to church, the other has sole charge of the munchkin all morning, which is okay now and then but far from a desirable every-Sunday arrangement.
They have a weekly discussion group that sounds really interesting, and a Wednesday lunch that we found welcoming, and “Circle Cenas” (like many UU congregations’ Circle Suppers). Everything seems very well-organized for people to drop in, with all information in the weekly order of service, few of the activities requiring an ongoing commitment, and membership offered in various categories to reflect the fact that many members also have commitments to another UU congregation. It’s also organized to gather up the comparative wealth of the congregation and give it to the local community; the church gives away 75% of its post-expenses budget to various San Miguel organizations, and with an all-volunteer staff, its expenses are low.
I’ve run into a couple of people who only started going to UU church when they came to San Miguel, so I know the church is doing outreach (perhaps only passively, though it advertises its services and its location better than a lot of US UU churches). Its outreach, however, is only to English speakers. It announces its weekly services in the English-language newspaper. Services, classes, group meetings are in English.
It makes me wonder about the possibility of having a church here that serves the local population–not just in the sense of the support the UUFSMA gives to San Miguel, but in the full sense that any UU church serves its members: a center for shared worship, religious education, justice work, pastoral care, etc. The vibrancy of the little group of norteamericano UUs points up the lost (or shall we say, not yet taken) opportunity to make Unitarian Universalism known to the tens of thousands of Mexicans who live in and around San Miguel.
How does one sustain a bilingual, bicultural congregation? As someone at UUFSMA noted, to make the Sunday service bilingual would make it very long. But there are other models for bringing people together into one congregation without a common language; San Jose, CA, seems to be making one work, as do many congregations in other faiths. E.g., where I live (near San Francisco) many churches have large populations that speak only or mostly Tagalog, Tongan, Chinese or Spanish, alongside those that speak only or mostly English.
Or might UUs in San Miguel start a truly Mexican congregation, maybe linking the two congregations in some kind of partnership but recognizing that they will be quite separate? There are a couple of emerging congregations in Mexico City. San Miguel might be a candidate for another.
How would someone go about starting a Mexican UU church in San Miguel, given the UUA’s unofficial franchise system (not to mention its almost complete lack of engagement with the world outside the US and Canada)? What resources does the UUA or International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU) offer to help a new congregation start in a town that already has one, in a way that diminishes any sense of rivalry and increases the partnership between them?
We also frown on UU ministers starting up congregations that they will then serve. There are good reasons for this, but it means that the only way for a new UU congregation to get started is for a very devoted group of laypeople to work at it, probably for many years, before they have the resources to bring in even a half-time minister. It also wastes the tremendous resources that ministers have to offer. In the case of San Miguel, many ministers have come through and led a service or a class; occasionally they retire to the town themselves. Maybe one who was not yet ready to retire would want to plant a church here, if they could count on support. Surely there are ways to safeguard against the problems that can come along with a minister helping to found a congregation: say, a requirement that the minister serve for only a certain number of years (five?), then has to be voted in or out by the congregation, as in the late (and lamented, by me) Extension Ministry program.
I’m not interested in the job (at least, not for another thirty years or so), but the questions make me want to do a little research into the other faiths represented here in San Miguel. I bet some of them, other than the Catholics of course, came from somewhere else and offered their message and their service to Mexicans. Maybe some of them even did it with the respect for the local culture that I’d expect from UU outreach. I’d like to see how they did it and how it’s going.
I thought of adult Unitarian Universalists and our congregations’ children when I read this passage by the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson this morning:
In Israel I had repeated conversations with older members of kibbutzim bewailing the fact that their children do not want to “follow in their footsteps,” choosing to leave the kibbutz, even live abroad. “Did you grow up on a kibbutz?” I would ask. “Oh no, my father was a shopkeeper in the city and very religious.” The parents had left home to found the kibbutz, and now the children are following in their footsteps by leaving. (Peripheral Visions, New York: HarperCollins, 1994, 80)
Most adult Unitarian Universalists either grew up in another tradition or none at all. In either case, as much as we may wish our children to remain UUs, some of what we convey to the next generation is bound to be very different than “stay in the tradition of your upbringing.” This entire chapter of Bateson’s book is on continuity and change, and she counsels neither one or the other but a balance—and a recognition that what may look like change is in fact a deep continuity.
Oh dear, over a month since my last post. Erratic is about what we can hope for here, I think, especially if I’m going to tackle big questions, like appropriation and our place in the liberal Christian tradition. After this I’ll get back to easier topics for a while.
I said on 12/22, “We UUs do want to sing ‘Silent Night’ without really embracing the theology. We want to tell the Christmas story, own it as part of our tradition, without saying the words we don’t believe, that ‘Christ the Savior is born.'” Some of us singing in my church on Christmas Eve were Christians, others not, and I doubt there was a single person there who agreed with the theology of every line of every carol we sang. Many liberal Christians, not only the UU variety, would take issue with “virgin mother and child” and the assertion that Jesus was “born that man no more may die” (or, as we sang it, “that we no more may die,” which fixes the gender problem but not the theology).
So we don’t need to embrace the entire Christian message before celebrating Christmas. Christianity is extremely diverse and includes many internal contradictions, as one discovers very quickly if one innocently asks a multidenominational group of Christians about the propriety of infant baptism. And we stand in that tradition, doing what Christians have always done: try to be true to what they see as the core teaching. Fred Small quietly staked this claim (and with admirable grace toward his congregation’s petulant guest) in his response to Keillor: we seek to live as Jesus did and as he urged us to do. It is not only UUs who find that, in order to do so, they have to interpret much of the New Testament metaphorically and flatly disagree with other parts.
As regards the carol-rewriting question, this leads me to two complementary conclusions: (1) we may go ahead and rewrite; the Christian tradition is neither uniform nor finished; (2) we don’t need to sweat it so much if we don’t agree with every line, UUs’ famous need to read ahead notwithstanding.
Ah, but what about me personally? I’m not Christian. The traditions of Christmas, to me, are akin to Buddhist meditation or Nawruz: wisdom and beauty that come to me from a history that is not mine except in the sense that I’m human. Christmas is part of the world’s heritage, something we should learn from and celebrate, always showing due respect to those for whom it is their one guide, but not ignoring it because it “belongs to someone else.” (The fact that it is the dominant religion shaping our culture, not a small religion driven almost into extinction by the dominant culture/religion, makes the dynamics of appropriation different than with, for example, Native American religious practices, though that doesn’t obviate the need for care and respect.) And what I found this Christmas was that I was moved to tears by the meaning I found in the story, as I always am, year after year and with a different meaning each time.
Here’s what I think we (that is, those UUs who are not ourselves wholehearted followers of Christianity) need to do to be respectful of Christian tradition:
One, go ahead and draw the conclusions from the story that we see there. For me they include the idea I voiced in my homily Christmas Eve, that salvation may begin with a child’s birth but it can’t end there; it doesn’t end with the arrival of a savior; we have to complete it, just as we have to raise a baby to adulthood. It is a heterodox, by some standards a heretical interpretation, but on the other hand, I doubt my words would have shocked everyone in a liberal Christian church.
Two, be willing to set those conclusions against any other story that may be told, even those in the Gospels themselves. In my view, Luke’s conclusion, and Matthew’s, and heaven knows Paul’s, were each wrong in their way. They led to some beautiful theology, and a whole lot of bad theology, and quite a lot of murder and mayhem (notably of Jews, another reason Keillor needs to put his religious persecution problem into perspective). But they are not the only interpreters of Jesus’s life. We are interpreters too, and we may be better ones than even the people who created Christianity to begin with. Jesus, after all, was not a Christian either.
Three, don’t call the result Christianity unless you truly regard yourself as a follower of Jesus or of a Christian tradition (they’re often not the same thing–actually, I wonder if they are ever the same thing). I’m really neither one. But you don’t need to be a Christian to rejoice in what Christmas has to tell us.
Here’s what I said on Christmas Eve. Props to our minister of religious education, Dan Harper, for bringing us (from Dana McLean Greeley, no less) the candlelighting ceremony that gave such a beautiful shape to the service and informed my thoughts.
I’m a new UU blogger! Surely I must have something to say about That Article in Salon! Actually, I do. A few things, in fact.
Keillor has made fun of UUs for years. I think we tend to dismiss his mockery–or misinterpret it as gentle joshing–because so many of us love his radio show and want to believe he’s really one of us. Since I don’t love the show, or even like it anymore, I’ve never felt the inner conflict. It seldom features music I like; when it does, it is too often ruined by Keillor’s self-indulgent habit of making himself the star singer (I guess no one in his inner circle wants to break it to him that his voice could charitably be called mediocre); the jokes are tepid, and I hate his habit of repeating a line if it didn’t get a laugh the first time. The man can write when he’s a mind to, and I have sometimes been moved by the News from Lake Wobegon segment–the one in “the last show,” twenty years ago, was beautiful–but it too is swamped by unfunny attempts at humor.
JMHO. But my point is not to criticize the show (I’m just enjoying doing that along the way). Rather, I’d like to ask, does it really matter if Garrison Keillor turns out to have serious objections to our religion? Sure, it hurts when someone one likes is critical. Clearly, for many UUs, Keillor is someone they see as a kindred spirit, perhaps even an exemplar. But Thomas Jefferson enslaved people, Albert Schweitzer was patronizing well past the point of racism, Martin Luther King was a compulsive philanderer–we all know all this, so I don’t need to list dozens more, but you know I could. Even our heroes are complicated, which is a nice way of saying they’re far from heroic in every aspect of their lives. So even if Keillor is your hero, why be shocked when he gets something wrong?
Whether he is wrong is a question for us to ponder, even if he doesn’t make a very good case for himself. Keillor is off the rails here; you can see it, if nowhere else, in his sideswipe at “all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck.” I’m sorry, are you saying Irving Berlin somehow tainted the sacred day with “White Christmas”? The whine that follows about how Christians don’t mess with Judaism (uh . . . right) verges on anti-Semitism, and doing it in Yiddish makes it worse. (Dear Garrison: don’t like Jews influencing “your” culture? Then please remove “dreck” from your vocabulary.) And his writing is a mess, reeling from charges of spiritual piracy to Lawrence Summers’ bad investments to admonishments to eschew perfectionism, and throwing in a snarl at elitism for no apparent reason. I guess it’s always a winner to accuse people of elitism. But none of this answers the question that I think is really the reason this half-baked piece of writing is getting under our skin: is he right about us?
We UUs do want to sing “Silent Night” without really embracing the theology. We want to tell the Christmas story, own it as part of our tradition, without saying the words we don’t believe, that “Christ the Savior is born.” To that extent he is correct, but the real question is whether it’s all right to do.
I think so . . . but this’ll have to be continued in another post. I have to write my Christmas Eve homily.
Sermons in Stones 
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