Category Archive

Tomorrow is our sixth wedding anniversary and we celebrated with dinner out. We are now contentedly full of delicious sushi and our sleep-resistant child has been lulled into dreams by her babysitter. We even exchanged our gifts: an ice cream maker from me to Joy, and oh, amazing, an album full of our wedding photos, at long last, created by Joy for me (us). We’ll be too tired tomorrow, after a full day at the Maker Faire, and besides, we thought we’d better fit our celebrating in before the beginning of the end of the world.

Why do people think the world is going to end at all? In the eighties, when I was in high school and Reagan and the Soviet premier-of-the-month were playing chicken, I figured it would end in a full-scale nuclear war before I was old enough to have grandchildren, but I didn’t think it was going to end end. I didn’t even think human beings would be entirely wiped out. I just figured anyone within a large radius of a major city would die, either immediately or fairly quickly. Lots of the world’s people would still survive, some maybe even without significant ill effect, and the rest of the biosphere would reel but still be here. In other words, T. S. Eliot had it right: we would end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

And yet there is evidently something appealing about the scenario spelled out by Harold Camping and Hal Lindsey and all those Left Behind books, because end-of-the-world predictions keep on being made despite the obvious failure of all their predecessors. Heck, Christianity is founded on one such failure, when some people were sure the Messiah had come and it turned out he would have to come a second time.

I grew up Jewish, and such Messianism as I have comes out of that religion’s much more positive version. No lake of fire, no angry judge on the divine throne pointing some to the left and some to the right, no clash of armies, but peace radiating out from every heart and over the whole world.

I’m afraid I don’t believe that either disaster or universal peace is going to befall us tomorrow, but either one can begin then, depending which way we decide to steer this world of ours. The way I’m feeling right now, I’ll put my money on peace.

The progressive Christian organization Sojourners propelled this ad into greater attention, as the TV networks did for the UCC’s “bouncer” ad a few years ago, by refusing to run it. Their executive director, Jim Wallis, explained with a six-point essay that in my eyes adds up to: “The church is split on this and we don’t want to alienate either side.” They want to focus on their mission and not get involved in something that is not a “critical issue.” Aside from the insult of trotting out the existence of one’s own staffers as a shield (“We have been accepting and welcoming of gay staff here at Sojourners for many years”) while implying that the church’s ostracism of those staffers and their families is a minor issue, I’ll just note that if Wallis hoped not to have to spend any time on a controversy about LGBT issues, well, I’m guessing he has spent at least half his week fighting this fire, and it isn’t out.

He wrote, “Essential to our mission is the calling together of broad groups of Christians, who might disagree on issues of sexuality, to still work together on how to reduce poverty, end wars, and mobilize around other issues of social justice.” I can appreciate this point of view to an extent. They are building a coalition (as all social-change organizations do, some better than others), and that means setting aside issues on which the coalition members do not agree in order to make progress on the ones on which they do. However, in that case, they should define themselves more narrowly than they do, perhaps as an economic justice and anti-war organization. According to them, their mission is “to articulate the Biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church and the world.” That’s pretty sweeping. Also, the church is no more divided on homosexuality or even abortion than it is on the death penalty, war, and economic justice–and one can cite one’s Bible to defend a wide range of positions on all of them. So all Wallis has done is to beg the question, “Why do you take sides when it comes to our economic arrangements, but decline to do so when it comes to our exclusion of LGBT people?”

As Robert Chase of Believe Out Loud, the project that created the ad, has said, it isn’t even as if the ad is asking the church to support civil marriage for LGBT people, or to ordain LGBT clergy. It’s asking the church to welcome us as members–and especially, to welcome our children. Even this is controversial to some churches, but that it is controversial to Wallis and Sojourners is just depressing.

The fact is that Christian churches, particularly the largest and most powerful ones in the US–the Catholic and evangelical Protestant–have long led, and continue to lead, the ostracism of LGBT people. Wallis knows very well that the church has to take sides on questions like this; he’s one of the most eloquent voices against the idea that moral neutrality is desirable or even possible. And yet he is trying to justify neutrality here as a “third way.”

It seems to me that Sojourners wants to reap the advantages of being controversial (for example, appearing morally courageous by knocking powerful groups like the GOP leadership) without reaping the disadvantages (such as alienating some of your supporters). They should take a cue from Jesus: it takes as much courage to stand up to your friends as to your enemies. Oh, wait, that was Dumbledore. They’re so easy to mix up . . . Jesus is the one who defied his religious leadership by teaching his congregation to go beyond the teachings of the Torah and prophets; who alienated his disciples by welcoming those they despised into his circle: Samaritans, tax collectors, women. He believed that his God called him to go beyond what was comfortable for him or his followers. I’m not even a Christian, nor a theist except in the naturalistic sense, and yet I believe that too. What does Sojourners believe?

Events like this one ought to teach them, and all of us who try to engage in controversial issues, which is what all religious bodies are called to do, that when it comes to the most pressing moral issues of the day, you are eventually going to be asked where you stand, and then you will be hopping on the hot seat no matter what you do. Jesus knew all about that too.

But it’s easy to pick on someone else. I think what Chase and his organization are trying to do is push self-described Christian progressives to take a stand, not just on the issues they’re comfortable with, but on the ones that challenge them. So I’ve just assigned myself a re-reading of “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” so that the most vivid writer on the topic can goad me again to answer the tough question: on what issues am I playing the good wishy-washy liberal, when I should be challenging myself and my church? What does the divine require of us that we are shying away from doing?

Jesus said to love our enemies, and I try to live by that, but it’s one of his toughest demands, and I admit that I am happy that Osama bin Laden is dead.  However, I have no desire to dance on the man’s grave.

Sad or hopeful?

(Translation: FPS=”first person shooter,” i.e., the kind of video game where you pretend to be killing people. Mod=modification.)

This is pretty much my approach to ethics in a nutshell. When we allow ourselves to be aware of the consequences of our actions, we act differently–that is, better. Two ways to become a better person are therefore: Come closer. Use your imagination. Come closer to the lives that intersect with your own so that you can see how you affect them; if you can’t actually see or hear those other lives, use your imagination. (There’s a psychological and ethical term for the capacity to imagine other lives: empathy.)

This week I met with Almaz Negash, the director of Step Up Silicon Valley, a project whose aim is to halve poverty in our area. I thought people in our congregation might be interested in working with them, and asked her what we would do to become involved. For the first step, she recommended a poverty simulation, a two-hour exercise in which participants are given pretend money and scenarios that place them in the roles of poor members of the community. It looks like Ms. Negash, xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe and I see things the same way.

Some of the ways I “mod” my own life to become more aware of others’ lives are: read (good fiction is just as effective as non-fiction); listen to the news; ask people about their lives and try to listen to their responses with complete attention; do tonglen meditation. What do you find works for you?

• Write case study for seminar.
• Write newsletter column and upcoming service description, already late in violation of my promise for my ¨43 things in year 43.¨
• Pack.
• Pick up friend, colleague, and guidemother of my daughter, Darcey Laine, at airport.
• Clean interior of car to the point that Darcey and I can both fit our stuff in it for the drive to the conference center, beautiful Asilomar.
• Respond to those absolutely can´t-delay e-mails.
• Do too many other little items too boring to mention.
• Post to my blog that I won´t be posting until next weekend at the earliest.

Once at Asilomar:

• Walk on boardwalk.
• Learn a lot from seminar.
• Reconnect with lots of colleagues.  Eat dinner at PassionFish with five of them (reservations already in hand).
• Cry.  It´s been a sad and stressful week.

Federal judge dead, Congresswoman among 12 wounded in shooting

I’m watching the events in Tucson unfold and thinking about what to say for tomorrow’s service. There are a lot of places in the world where the one with the biggest guns makes the rules, and when public officials live under the threat of death, we edge closer to that reality.

It’s my dad’s district, and I believe he worked on her last campaign, which was a squeaker. And I was a little afraid to write that, in case some lunatic looks him up. I know that that is paranoid, but this is what I’m talking about: the chilling effect violence has on open conversation.

I put my favorite serious sites on my blogroll, but I also have a bunch that I visit every couple of days for sheer laughs, such as Cake Wrecks. Its very funny author, Jen Yates, displays disastrous cake-decorating attempts by so-called professional bakers. (Sundays, she posts “Sunday sweets,” the opposite: spectacularly beautiful cakes. So Cake Wrecks the rest of the week isn’t just someone snarking amusingly about other people’s incompetence– it’s someone who appreciates great craftsmanship snarking amusingly about other people’s incompetence. This somehow takes the site to a new level for me.)

Today’s Cake Wrecks not only featured the usual horrible cakes and hilarious commentary, but kicked off twelve days of giving. Last year, just by suggesting a charity each day and creating links where her readers could give a dollar to them–and most donations were a dollar–she raised well over $50,000. I’m glad she’s making it an annual event, and I’m giving daily this time.

Apologizing in advance for the time suck I have just introduced to your life, I offer this, one of my favorite Wrecks, in compensation.

When I came up from the subway yesterday and walked up the United Nations Plaza on my way to pick up the munchkin from school, I was startled to see that San Francisco City Hall was drenched in red light. I walked along thinking of the people who vanished from this city when AIDS struck, and of the ones in places like southern Africa, where it’s getting worse. I didn’t know until later that monuments all over the world were going red in honor of World AIDS Day.

Photo by Troy Holden

This one provided some excitement for the munchkin, who wanted to know how it got that way, and why. I explained that there’s a disease that’s made a lot of people very sick and the building was lit up with red to remind us that we need to do something to help them and find a way to cure it. She got very concerned: “But I want to get home to Mommy and have Hanukah.”

Right, sweetie. We don’t need to eliminate AIDS right this moment, before we go home from school. But oh, how I wish that was all it would take.

My day on September 11 was occupied with two pleasant events: a picnic for the Munchkin’s new preschool, and the West Coast celebration of the East Coast, June wedding of two lovely members of my congregation. So I not only failed to post on that day, as I had intended to do, but failed to carry out what has become an annual ritual of reading John Ford’s poem “110 Stories.”

However, I got to it a couple of days later, and I recommend it to everyone. Tip of the keyboard to my friend Abbie, who first brought it to my attention and, like me, reads it at least once a year. Each time a different line strikes me hardest. This time it was the above.

A web search for quotations on waiting, part of my topic for Sunday’s sermon, led me to a philosopher named Anna Callender Brackett who has now grabbed my interest. Brackett was a teacher, educator, traveling lecturer, and translator, and her area of philosophy was one of my passions, philosophy of education. She was also an early feminist, promoting education for girls and women, becoming the first woman appointed principal of a secondary school in the United States, and reinterpreting Hegel to value a life of the mind for women as well as for men (interesting to see that turn-of-the-century St. Louis had a Hegelian school–or am I just revealing my “everything intellectually interesting happens on the coasts” bias?). Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry on her–yet.

According to Women-Philosophers.com, Brackett had a female life partner (Ida Eliot). Not only did they run a girls’ school together, they also adopted two children, the first in 1873. Cool. I’m expecting to discover any moment now that she was a Unitarian too.

I kid, but seriously, how does one discover such a thing? The compilers of the Unitarian Universalist Biographical Dictionary could give me some tips, no doubt. Search the archives of the churches in the places she lived, sure, but I’m looking for something I can do from my desk chair. She gave a lecture on Margaret Fuller and wrote an obituary for Maria Mitchell, but so many prominent women of the 19th century were Unitarians that that’s barely suggestive. Brackett’s own obituary doesn’t mention her religious affiliation, if any; her funeral was held in Linden Park, New Jersey, where we may have had a congregation once, but don’t today. “Was she or wasn’t she?” would be a fun detective project, and along the way I could learn more about her philosophy and see what I think of it, but I will probably just do the latter without fussing about whether she was a sister Unitarian.

At the moment, I’m not even sure how she spelled her middle name; the Times says -der, the Women Philosophers site says -dar but is very typo-ridden. But thanks to Google Books, I’m reading her The Technique of Rest under the rationalization “context for Sunday’s reading.”