Category Archives: La Vida Loca

A Pastor’s Christmas as a Civilian

Posted on
2

I resigned from the church I had been serving for the last three years in early November.  There was no scandal, I didn’t molest anyone, I didn’t steal any money, and I wasn’t cheating on my wife with a member of the congregation.  I left a congregation because I have a deep sense of mission grounded in Universalist Christian theology and the congregation did not.   I am getting used to the idea of trying to find employment at Kroger or Tom Thumb and thinking of myself as a church planter and freelance theologian.

Recent events, however, left me unassigned at Christmas.  This has been the first Christmas season in a half-dozen years in which I have not had any responsibilities for making sure a congregation has its celebrations and pastoral care.  I didn’t have to schedule or organize a Christmas pageant. I didn’t have to plan a Christmas Eve service or figure out the scheduling with Christmas Day being on a Sunday.  I didn’t have to organize or attend multiple holiday parties in the congregation nor did I have to make sure volunteers or staff received holiday cards/gifts/bonuses.

I did give a homily at a Christmas service for the local Occupy site in Fort Worth, but for the first time since I have been holding regular worship opportunities there, another local pastor and church helped out with the service and basically organized the entire service, including music and I just had to give the homily.

As Christmas approached I felt out of place and Christmas proceeding without me doing what I do kind of reinforced a lot of the things I’ve been working through: betrayal, failure, isolation, and then…then…I began to check things off my to do list such as finishing up papers to write, publications to edit, classwork to turn in, graduate school and job applications to submit and I began to hibernate a little (you’ll note a span of a couple weeks between posts) and to celebrate Advent.

Then  my mom arrived to spend Christmas with our family.  I was treated to a grace too often left out of a pastor’s life: time to just be with one’s family with no agenda and nothing do but enjoy each other’s company.  And so we did.  We enjoyed the gift of each other.  I cooked some of the traditional Portuguese foods my mom likes and we took her out for regional treats such as bar-b-que and fried pies and a local restaurant that was featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

And yes, we had the bread pudding…

We went for walks and for drives to see holiday light displays.  The best was at the Texas Motor Speedway and included this guy from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:

We watched Christmas movies on TV, DVD and Netflix.  I took her to church (one I’ve been attending, not serving) and to the Dallas area New England Patriots Game Watching Group to watch the  Pats beat up on the Broncos with the regular group of ex-patriot New Englanders.   We shared a lot of hugs and a lot of smiles.

We took video of my mom telling her stories so she’ll be around to tell them in days of Christmas future even when she isn’t here to tell them.  This is what grace looks like.  This is what it feels like to be lucky enough to remember each day is a gift while your living it.

I spent a lot of prayer time in deep reminiscence about Christmas pasts when I was child.  I could reach out and touch the memories playing before my eyes.  Hanging Christmas ornaments on the tree, sitting on a ratty old couch and drinking hot chocolate while watching the Patriots play the Colts in the snow while Christmas carols played on the stereo.  So many Christmases spent driving down to the New Bedford area or to Wethersfield, CT reading a new book just unwrapped that morning.

Christmas Eve we went to Church together, to a liberal Christian church for services.  It was nice. There no arguing over language or hymns or why we were celebrating Christmas. We left the house an hour before the service – together.   We took our sweet time getting home and stayed up late watching movies.  I was the first in the house to awake Christmas morning at 8:30 a.m. – on a Sunday.  We took our sweet time exchanging a few gifts and then I made malasadas.

We ate dinner together at about 2 p.m.  No one left the house the entire day. We didn’t need to travel as family had come to us and we didn’t need to plan the day around church.

Christmas ministered to me this year, during a time I needed it.  It gave me all it had to give – a time with family, a time with love, a time with God.  Christmas is, after all, a celebration of incarnation – that God become human, that not only a baby in Bethlehem, but every baby born is a vehicle of grace, a way to make love known in the world.  Sometimes this love is as close as our moms and dads and spouses and partners and sons and daughters and friends.  Sometimes we just have to stop long enough to be able to see it and feel it and let it catch us – to revel in it, to celebrate it and let ourselves be loved.

Mom’s going home tomorrow and I have no idea what the coming year will bring, but I hope I remember the lessons of this Christmas for a long, long time.

Sometimes I don’t know Jack

Posted on
3

Really, sometimes I don’t know jack, or just feel like I don’t know Jack. When I feel like this,  I re-read something by Jack – Jack Mendelsohn.  This passage is from Jack Mendelsohn’s book Why I am a Unitarian Universalist.  I underlined it in my copy the first time I read it.  I had it read at my installation. About a month and a half ago, a friend emailed it to me to lift my spirits not knowing, or perhaps indeed knowing it was and is my constant meditation on why I do what I do.  I do know Jack, at least a little bit anyway. He was kind enough to have to me to his house one day while I was an intern minister in Massachusetts.  Still, I don’t know Jack, like I don’t know jack.  That’s the point, I guess.  The ministry isn’t about what you know, it’s about showing up, being present, and giving it your best shot in a world that is full of holiness while many people and things try to convince you otherwise.

Who is a Unitarian Universalist minister?

A person who is never completely satisfied or satisfiable, never completely adjusted or adjustable, who walks in two worlds—one of things as they are, the other of things as they ought to be—and loves them both.

A UU minister is a person with a pincushion soul and an elastic heart, who sits with the happy and the sad in a chaotic pattern of laugh, cry, laugh, cry—and who knows deep down that the first time the laughter is false, or the tears are make-believe, his or her days as a real minister are over.

UU ministers have dreams they can never wholly share, partly because they have some doubts about those dreams themselves and partly because they are unable adequately to explain, describe, or define what it is they think they see and understand.

A UU minister continually runs out of time, out of wisdom, out of ability, out of courage, and out of money.  A UU minister is hurtable, with great responsibility and little power, who must learn to accept people where they are and go on from there.  UU ministers who are worth their salt know all this, and are still thankful every day for the privilege of being what they are.

The future of the liberal church is almost totally dependent on two factors: great congregations (whether large or small) and skilled, effective, dedicated ministers.  The strangest feature of their
relationship is that they create one another.

-Jack Mendelsohn

A Random Act of Kindness

Posted on
6

I stopped by a grocery store yesterday to pick up some oranges and some orange candy for a skit I’m doing this Sunday during our Common Ground worship service (wouldn’t you like to know – you’ll have to come by Pathways or wait for the sermon and video).  Anyway, while I was inside the store a random stranger made my day by leaving this note under my windshield wiper in a random act of kindness:

dearyou2

I drive a Honda Civic hybrid.  Ever since I started driving, I’ve had a love for bumper stickers and my partner Tina does not.  A colleague once referred to my last vehicle, also a Honda Civic, as a “billboard on wheels.”  When we moved to Texas about a year ago, I was hesitant to put stickers on the new car, so a friend suggested magnets instead. I bought magnets at a craft store and stuck the bumper stickers to the magnets and put the magnetized stickers on the car.  I was more than a little nervous last fall driving around with my Obama-Biden magnet (an actual magnet from the campaign) in a very, very red Texas county as well as stickers for the human rights campaign ( the = )and other gay rights or equality magnets or stickers, my church at Pathways, and a UU magnet and lately ones that reads “Pro Faith, Pro Family, Pro Choice” that I picked up at our UUA General Assembly last June in Salt Lake City.  I’ve never had any bad reactions or incidents as a result from wearing my opinions on my bumper in Texas, opinions that run counter to the majority here, but I am quite pleasantly surprised that the first reaction I received from them was a positive one. I’m also happy that I’ve chosen to wear these magnets on my car because one of the reasons for doing so is to let people who think like me know they are not alone and as the note proves, I’ve done that in at least one case.

Thanks for letting me know you’re out there, too, whoever you are.

The Dallas Principles

Posted on
2

Like a lot of things these days, I learned about it through email even though it happened in my own backyard.  The Dallas Principles were drafted just over a week ago by activists from around the country here in Texas as a manifesto and call to action for GLBT rights without delay.  It’s time to put up or shut up, America.  Bold, decisive, is everyone equal or not? No religious reasons for inequality in the civic arena, no reasons about waiting until people can get used to the idea, just lay it on the line – it’s time once again for America to decide if it’s going to live up to its rhetoric. Nice.  I like it. I signed on as a supporter.  It was also pretty cool to see former Massachusetts State Senator Jarrett Barrios as one of the authors of this declaration.

Here are The Dallas Principles:

1.Full civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals must be enacted now.  Delay and excuses are no longer acceptable.

2.We will not leave any part of our community behind.

3.Separate is never equal.

4.Religious beliefs are not a basis upon which to affirm or deny civil rights.

5.The establishment and guardianship of full civil rights is a non-partisan issue.

6.Individual involvement and grassroots action are paramount to success and must be encouraged.

7.Success is measured by the civil rights we all achieve, not by words, access or money raised.

8.Those who seek our support are expected to commit to these principles.

Support the Dallas Principles by signing the pledge here.


I don’t know when I first became such an advocate for GLBT rights. It was probably in divinity school, when I first came to understand the injustices faced by the GLBT community and realized the importance of being an ally.  Until all are equal, none are equal.  All injustices are intertwined.  Where I stand now, where I live now, and how I live now as a person of faith – I am called, invited, compelled to work and live in such a way that a world is created where there is no lesser person.

Born Again Americans

Posted on
1

This is interesting.  Check out Born Again American. It’s not about being a born again Christian American, although there is some slight of hand in the editing that leads you to believe so and I hope it gets corrected.

If you look through the Web Site, the lyrics read “My Bible is the The Bill of Rights,” but the sung version is “The Bible AND the Bill of Rights” which is makes the whole thing much more exclusive of non-Christian Americans, agnostic and atheist Americans, and that is very unfortunate because the other sentiments of the song and the effort are laudable.  It’s all about taking control of America back from the special interests, the privileged, and getting engaged in public life – reminiscent of the Obama campaign and transition team’s efforts to keep the electorate engaged.  Until the line about the The Bible AND the Bill of Rights gets fixed, though, it’s hard to jump enthusiastically on the band wagon, because right in the Bill of Rights, there’s this statement about Congress making no laws about religion.  It’s called Article I:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yet, when you start mentioning the Bible with the Bill of Rights its as if the whole thing – America, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, etc is a Christian endeavor – and IT IS NOT.  So I like the printed lyric you find on Born Again American much better, My bible IS the Bill of Rights.  Sad, they couldn’t have recorded that version.

Note the involvement and presence in the video of Unitarian Universalist minister, and no small critic of the Bible (he’s been a member of the Jesus Seminar) the Rev. Davidson Loehr of First Unitarian Universalist in Austin, TX, author of America, Fascism and God. Now, I’m going to guess, Loehrs was shown the lyric that said the My Bible is the Bill of Rights. (Listen to my interview with Rev. Loehr here – it’s episode #9).

The Born Again American project has also been featured on Bill Moyer’s Journal. There I learned that the project originated with Norman Lear’s Declaration of Independence Road Trip, an effort to refamliarize Americans with our founding documents and recommit them to the ideals contained therein.

Think before you speak

Posted on
1

I taught in a Catholic high school for eight years before becoming a UU minister. One of my biggest pet peeves was hearing students say something was “gay” when they meant they didn’t like something or something was dumb or silly or ridiculous or didn’t make sense. “Oh, that’s so gay.”

I cringed not only because of the injustice of the negagive labeling, but because every time I heard it, I remembered a less enlightened, younger version of myself using the same phrase the same way as a boy growing up.

I just saw a post from a friend on facebook who works with the GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network)  about a series of ads released by GLESN and the Ad Council. They’re the first Pro-GLBTQA ads and are all based on the saying “That’s so gay”.

You can view them all at Think Before You Speak.

Even in a redrawn electoral map, I'm (sort of) disenfranchised – updated

Posted on
4

I’ve moved from Massachusetts to Texas in the last few months and nothing’s changed as far as my vote is concerned.  My home has changed, but this year as in 2004 and 2000, my home state still hasn’t gotten so much as a sniff of Presidential campaign appearance.  That’s because when I lived in Massachusetts, the Bay State’s electoral college’s votes were a lock for the Democratic Party’s candidate and now that I live in Texas, the Lone Star State’s electoral votes are a lock for the Republican Party’s candidate.  When I lived in Massachusetts, I tended to vote Green anyway, in an effort to build not a third party, but a viable SECOND party in what amounts to one-party Democratically run Massachusetts.  The need for such has been brought home by the ethics scandals rocking the democratically controlled state house there this fall.

Now, here I am in Texas, having switched my voter registration to unenrolled back in January in MA again here in Texas in August to support Barack Obama, for reasons that are as much pastoral as political (my freind Eric points to as good an explanation as I can offer here).  And yet the overwhelming vote here in Texas is probably, although I hope not, going to be for McCain.

dailyKos today points to an informative, although by no means revolutionary post from Nate Silver at 538.com that reminds us that this election, like every other Presidential election is really 50 elections because of the electoral college.  And this year it comes down to this:

This is beginning to look like a five-state election. Those states are Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada. Essentially all relevant electoral scenarios involve some combination of these five states…

The victory conditions for Obama involving these five states proceed something as follows:

  1. Win Pennsylvania and ANY ONE of Colorado, Virginia, Ohio, or Nevada*
  1. Win Ohio and EITHER Colorado OR Virginia.
  1. Win Colorado AND Virginia AND Nevada.

(* Nevada produces a 269-269 tie, which would probably be resolved for Obama in the House of Represenatives.)

Now, suppose you think that Colorado is already in the bag for Obama because of his large edge in early voting there. We can then simplify the victory conditions as follows:

  1. Win Pennsylvania
  1. Win Ohio
  • Win Virginia AND Nevada

    • This graphic from Pollster.com (again a hat tip to dailyKos) puts the race in a linear perspective, sort of an slide rule. Obama needs to grab a light blue state and McCain all the yellow toss up swing states and a bunch of light blue Obama leaning light blue states.

    It’s really time to do away with the electoral college once and for all.  In spite of Obama’s efforts to make this a 50 state campaign, he’s doing it out of electoral strategy and a mandate to govern, not out an electoral philosphy that argues the POUS should be popularly elected by the people.  Popular election of the President requires a constitutional amendment. I stand corrected (see the comments) One way around it is a state law that pledges all the states electoral votes to the popular vote winner. See National Popular Vote for more information on their plan.  I’d still rather have a Constitutional amendment (such as the one that supplied popular direct election of senators), but I’d settle for their plan in the interim.

    UPDATE – In the Nov. 2 edition of the New York Times, Sarah K. Cowan points out that:

    This system (the electoral college), along with the winner-take-all practice used to allocate most states’ electoral votes, creates the potential for an absurd outcome. In the unlikely event that all 213 million eligible voters cast ballots, either John McCain or Barack Obama could win enough states to capture the White House with only 47.8 million strategically located votes. The presidency could be won with just 22 percent of the electorate’s support, only 16 percent of the entire population’s.

    With direct election you get the President the most people want.  I also want Rank choice voting, also called Instant Run Off Voting (let the muppets explain it to you) so I can vote for my actual policy preferences without the fear of putting my least favorite candidate like Bush or McCain in the White House.

    Until then candidate have to have an electoral strategy and I have to have a voting strategy and that’s not what democracy should  look like.

    Back from the Black Hole of Cyber Space

    Posted on
    Reply

    Due to poor communication with customer service reps with not one but two Internet / Web hosting companies and billings issues that I thought were resolved ( I did have receipts, after all).  The domain sunflowerchalice.com EXPIRED (really, I have a receipt saying the registration had been transfered and renewed, so I believed the new hosting company when they told me to ignore renewal emails from the old hosting company).

    After two days of phone calls, emails, speaking with billing reps and customer service with two companies, and having to lay out $70 to get my domain name out of “auction”, I am back.  And to think, I went off of blogspot so I’d have more control of my own site.  Maybe I just need my own server?

    Anyway, I am back.  Just having read Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness, which I must share some thoughts about and having started writing an intro for a second blog, yes a second blog.  I initially started this blog to write about politics/social justice, spirituality and popular culture, but have increasingly become interested in issues related to church growth and vitality, so…I am thinking of starting a second blog just for that topic – the title – Lone Star Chalice.  Perhaps, I will cross post the first few church growth entries… If you read, let me know what you think.

    Evangelicals: The New Universalists

    Posted on
    Reply

    Well, not all of them of course. And certainly not your more fundamentalist types, but people like Spencer Burke and Barry Taylor, authors of A Heretics’s Guide to Eternity which I picked up after it was mentioned on the website and newsletter at Micah’s Porch, you betcha.

    How could I not love this book, being a UU, one who revels in heresy, being that my base theology is deemed heretical by orthodox and mainline Christianity by definition. A definition of which I am proud and they, of course, are not – I refuse to give up the right to choose what I will believe and practice as the spiritual life.

    The love of God is an opt-out proposition, not an opt-in for those who meet the membership rules. Well, no kidding you say, but this is coming from not from your standard liberal theologian from Evangelicals. There is a major shift going on in a theological community generally assumed to be the polar opposite of Unitarian Universalism. How it impacts us is something we should pay attention to because the religious communities it creates may, or may have already become our competition.

    Burke and Taylor quote Nick Cave:

    Everybody got a room
    In God’s Hotel.
    Everybody got a room.
    Well you’ll never see a sign hanging on the door
    Sayin ‘No vacancies anymore’

    Later on they sound, well Ballou-ish, and then get to this:

    …many people’s theology is almost obsessed with our afterlife destination. Christianity is all about getting saved from sin and saved from hell, the punishment for sin. But this is a distortion, or at least a reduction of the Bible’s notion of salvation. The idea of salvation in the Bible encompasses many ideas, including things like bondage and liberation, separation and reconciliation. At it’s most basic, salvation means healing (author’s emphasis in the original – pg 180).”

    Again, this hardly sound revolutionary. Were this coming from a Unitarian Universalist, you might even say, yeah, what’s the big deal?” But this is coming from people fed up with the standard quo within Evangelical Christianity and what they want instead sounds very familiar doesn’t it, UU’s?

    Aren’t these people sounding very ripe for invitation to UU congregations? Keeping in mind of course, that their religious imagination and spirituality is still Christian. But also keeping in mind that they are troubled also by the institution of churches in general. And that’s where the rubber hits the road because we can’t claim our congregations are, across the board, bursting at the seems. On that point we actually share the problems of the “orthodox” Christian communities Burke and Taylor write about.

    “For years,” they write we have assumed organized religion is the only ways humanity can have a relationship with the divine other..but today, many people are beginning to realize that faith can exist outside the realm of organized religion. The only problem is that religious people don’t understand this option – nor do they want to. They feel threatened by the shift to spirituality, and they’re quick to point it’s dangers rather than see its potential. Still, in spite of their best efforts, interest in spirituality is flourishing (53).”

    One is tempted to say, once again, well if people are looking for spirituality instead of religion, come on over to a UU church. But is that really the case? How many of our congregations are still wedded to organ music? To hierarchical governance structures, if not hierarchy? How many are places where things labeled new age are dismissed out of hand?

    Burke and Taylor make an interesting analogy that bears examining for those interested in issues of congregational growth and vitality. They say that the church (any church, not just Evangelical, it could be mainline, Catholic, etc) is like a post office in an email world. Think about it. Before email and the Internet:

    There was a time when the post office was absolute essential. It was a center of society. If you wanted to send a message to someone or pay a bill, you needed a middleman – a letter carrier, to do so. In the same way, the institutional church, has long been the middleman between God and society…The world is a different place today..I am in no way saying the post office is obsolete. We still depend on it for many things, but increasingly its role in our lives is being eclipsed by other means of information delivery…

    The challenge for people of faith who seek to move forward is to acknowledge these shifts in culture and recongize that the institutional church must now find its own way. The things people used to come to the one-hour event on Sunday morning for are not the drawing cards they once were. Today it seems we respond directly to the mystery of the message that religion was created to decipher.

    The institutional church can dismiss this as a byproduct of a consumer culture and insist that we need to get back to basic. That could miss the point that the basics for a whole new generation have changed (133-135).

    Indeed and it could go a long way towards explaining why, even though our Unitarian Universalist theology and world view seems to meet the questing needs of so many spiritual seekers that our congregations still aren’t growing.