Poet Everett Hoagland will be speaking in the service tomorrow morning. Usually our two services are the same, but he’s going to share two different poem cycles, one at 9:30 and one at 11. We have great music that fits his themes of the cosmic journey and homecoming, and I get to enjoy the service from the vantage point of Worship Associate. Our Worship Associates give a 3-5 minute reflection. I was brought up with poetry as one of our family’s religions, with our household gods bearing names like Shakespeare and Frost, and it’s been fun to reflect on how that has affected my religious and ethical life. I’m really looking forward to seeing and hearing this poet in person.
Or want to do something more useful for Spirit Day? Here are five things you can do to make it better for LGBT teenagers and non-teenagers.
Sign the Defense of All Families pledge.
Write a letter to the editor saying that, although suicides of LGBT teens are not making the headlines right now, you haven’t forgotten that there’s an epidemic of deadly bullying underway, and urging everyone to ask their Congressperson to co-sponsor H.R.975, the Anti-Bullying and Harassment Act of 2011.
Write your Congressperson, yourself. (It’s easy. Put your zip code in here. “E-mail me” or “Contact form” will be on your representative’s webpage.)
Come out as a supporter of LGBT equality. Tell one person who’s never heard it from you before how you feel.
Find an LGBT youth support center or Gay Straight Alliance near you and send them a check.
Apologies to those who clicked on my one-word, Dada version of this post. Trying it again.
In the few days leading up to October 9, I had a niggle in the back of my mind telling me the date meant something, but preaching dates being the way they are, I ignored it. They tend to loom, not in a negative way, but in an I-could-rattle-off-the-date-of-every-Sunday-for-the-next-nine-months way, a condition endemic among ministers and, like savantism of all kinds, quirky but mostly harmless. (Yes, I know the date of Easter in 2012, <em>and</em> the next date it doesn’t coincide with Passover. Want to make something of it?)
Usually the “remember this date” pressure lifts after the service (or, rather, is transferred to the next preaching date), but this Sunday, on the way home, October 9 still niggled. Now that I had the mental space to turn my attention to the small child tugging at my brain, I asked it what it wanted to tell me, and finally got it. It was John Lennon’s birthday. Born 1940. Also his son Sean’s, b. 1975.
Whenever I forget something I really need to remember–which is more and more often–I think it’s because my memory is overloaded with trivia like this.
Coming home from church last week, the munchkin sang the song she’d learned that morning, the first day of Sunday school. In one version, her fingers are “things” and she sings, “These little things of mine, I’m gonna let them shine,” which cracks me up. In another version, she seems to understand that she’s talking about a “little light.” They must have gone around the circle and used each person’s name, because that’s the way she sings it:
Is Mama going to turn it off? NO! I’m gonna let it shine
Is Mommy going to turn it off? NO! I’m gonna let it shine
Is [Munchkin] going to turn it off? NO! I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
Also, they made candleholders by decorating plain glass ones with colored tissue paper (on the outside!). She remembered Hanukah and asked if we could light it then along with the menorah, but we said why wait?, and at dinnertime we lit her “chalice.”
It warms a mama’s heart. With a child who’s four, this is what we want from Sunday school: she enjoys herself, she feels cared for and safe, she learns a song that is a game now and will have other meanings as she grows up, and she can make a tangible, beautiful contribution to the religious life of our household.
photo credit: Matthew Bowden, http://www.digitallyrefreshing.com, via Wikimedia Commons
Lessons learned from last year’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass:
Do not try to park anywhere near Golden Gate Park. Either take the bus, or drive to a bus stop far, far away from the park and take the bus from there.
Don’t just bring a picnic–bring all the food and drink you’re going to want.
Don’t try to meet a friend there. It’s hard enough to find the family members you dropped off half an hour earlier. But do expect to run into someone you know.
Bring toilet paper.
Even if one of you says she hates bluegrass, and another says she hates country, and the band you particularly went to see was disappointing, you’re going to love it.
Sixteen years ago I was in my second year of an M.A. in religion, and engaged in the leadup to masters’ exams. Putting the exams together was kind of fun. They could be on any three topics that covered a certain diversity of religion, culture, and era, and mine were Feminist Theology, Dogen’s Shobogenzo, and The Theology of Romantic Poetry.
For the Romantics, my reading list consisted entirely of works of five of the Big Six: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. (The sixth, Byron, didn’t particularly interest me and his work didn’t seem to have many theological implications.) I took note of the lack of female voices–I was studying feminist theology, after all–but didn’t think that there were any that came up to the standard, except maybe Dorothy Wordsworth or Mary Shelley, but neither was noted for her poetry. I hadn’t heard of Hannah More or Joanna Baillie, and somehow thought of Emily Bronte as not quite within the period. Excuses, excuses. If I’d done a little digging, a little looking beyond the canon that had been blessed by men, handed down through generations of male scholars, and endorsed by my male advisor, I’d have expanded my list.
Well, I’m finally remedying the gap by reading Frankenstein. I’m listening to the audiobook version, and it’s making it a little difficult to get out of the car. And wow, here’s something else that might have changed my mind about that reading list (even if it did mean including novels): the subtitle is “or, The Modern Prometheus.” How did I not notice that Mary Shelley and her husband both created masterworks that explicitly expanded upon the myth of Prometheus? Prometheus Unbound was on my exam reading list, you betcha, and it’s the longest poem I’ve ever loved. And Prometheus is such a rich figure for liberal religionists: the human who dared to steal a power the gods had reserved for themselves and give it to humanity, and who, in P. B. Shelley’s reading, is thereby a hero. (I have a feeling that M. Shelley’s point of view is more nuanced. Shh, don’t tell me the end.) Of course, I was a very new UU then, and not yet a minister. Now I’m musing about Prometheus, fire, power, responsibility, and what it means to “play God” if the gods themselves are discredited. And I’m really looking forward to what the novel has to say about all those points.
Next up, some of those female poets who were very famous in their day, I now know, but who got insufficient respect from anthologies and me before.
I proposed a course called “Preaching on the Edge” to Starr King School for the Ministry for next year or later, with this 100-word description:
Great preaching takes risks and emboldens the listeners to do the same. When we go out onto the edge of our experience, our words can be more alive and authentic. When we meet the listeners on the forward edge of their experience, our words have more power to transform them. As we observe and practice different approaches to creating and delivering sermons, we will explore: spiritual practices, ministerial roles, use of the body and voice, interaction with other elements of worship, how to walk the line of appropriate risk, and responding to political, pastoral, and spiritual matters.
Few courses are accepted each year, so I don’t know when I’ll get to teach it, but I keep thinking about the ideas and assignments, and refining the syllabus. It encapsulates so much of where my preaching has been heading in the last few years. In fact, things have shifted so much that when I first proposed a course to SKSM, four years ago, no way would I have offered a course of this description, or any preaching class. I wasn’t taking, or asking, the kinds of risks then that I do now. I’m braver. When I first thought of this course, I conceived of it as “Preaching Without a Net,” but that isn’t quite right. There is a net. Finding yours is part of being a better preacher, or taking any of the brave, scary steps that life might demand.
What do you think, givers of sermons and listeners to sermons? Does your experience of the great ones match the description I’ve given?
photo by Dave Pape, released to the public domain
It’s been mostly hands in drawing class the past couple of sessions. Here are some from two weeks ago.
Hands are so complex and expressive that it’s almost like drawing the human body for the first time. I’m stiff and uncertain. I’m just trying to get my eyes and hands familiar with the forms, and while I am not technique-focused, Michael is right: when you’re making the drawing happen more than letting it happen, you sacrifice a certain responsiveness. More spontaneity may be on the other side of this immersion in a new focus, but it may not. I find it very hard to zero in on details without also losing the power of my own responsive gestures; I can feel myself getting picky and narrow.
I’m also trying to shake up my figure drawing, which has become more stiff recently. I don’t know if I’ll stick to hands today, but I’m going to try to work fast and let instinct come to the fore.
Friday was a good day. I had two meetings with two really interesting members of my congregation, and another with a woman whose congregation has a task force that shares the vision of igniting a UU abolition movement. All three left me buzzing with possibility. In the afternoon, one of my closest friends, whom I’ve known since we were 12 and who lives way too far away, in Washington, D.C., arrived with her husband for an overnight stay, and we talked and walked around an unusually sunny city and ate too many tostadas.
And here’s how it started: early in the morning, I dropped my sweet wife and daughter off at their station and popped a CD in the player, and just as I pulled onto the highway, the drums and David Byrne leapt up with a HEY! and I was driving down 280 with a loud, joyous “And She Was” making the air dance all around. There are moments you just know it’s going to be a great day.
Sermons in Stones 
Preventing child abuse
October 17, 2011 in religious education, social commentary | Leave a comment
A BBC story reports that the US has the worst rate of death from child abuse or neglect of any industrialized nation, with 1,770 kids killed in 2009. (A recent Congressional hearing estimates that the real numbers are even higher.)
So how do these other nations differ from us? By and large, they have lower poverty rates, lower crime and imprisonment rates, universal health care, better family-leave and child-care policies, better pre-school options, and much better networks of help for families with children.
Another thing we learn when we compare ourselves to the countries that are doing much better is that they have markedly lower rates of teen pregnancy. Very young people with unplanned children, unstable relationships, a curtailed education and therefore low earning potential, and lots of contempt from their community* are at an elevated risk of killing their kids. This paper compares measures of US teens’ sexual health (rates of pregnancy, abortion, STDs, HIV) with the teens of Germany, France and the Netherlands–you must click, just to see how much higher our teen pregnancy rate is than these countries’–and concludes that we would do well to adopt their approach of “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” regarding teenage sexuality.
That sounds a lot like the sexuality education program we offer at church, Our Whole Lives. OWL was developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ, but you don’t have to be UU or UCC, or religious in any way, to enroll your kid, and–speaking for my own congregation–we won’t pressure you to join our church or ask you to donate money. It’s part of our ministry to the community. (It’s also not only for teens; there are developmentally-appropriate versions for K-2, 4-6, and adults of various ages, too.)
I know we save lives through this program when we teach young people that it’s okay to be gay, that it’s not okay for your partner to mistreat you or for you to mistreat your partner, and that sex is supposed to be safe (as well as fun, loving, and pleasurable), but I hadn’t thought about the impact on the next generation. I have no doubt that if every teenager in the US received a comparable education, we’d see a huge drop in those child death numbers within ten years.
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*A babysitter of ours, then 17, said that she got lots of dirty looks when she and Munchkin were out alone, such as on their happy trips to the playground. Apparently we had all too many neighbors who (a) had never heard of babysitters, (b) disapproved of teen moms, even one who was taking excellent care of the child, and (c) thought they ought to express that disapproval. Did they imagine that that was somehow helpful?
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