Category Archives: The Cultural Life

The Gifts That Don’t Come From a Store Mean a Little Bit More

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This year Advent arrives to a world in turmoil if not revolution.  The Occupy movement  draws increasing attention to the increasing gap between rich and poor.  Over consumption, consumerism, and commercialism are false idols. A holiday season propped up on the pitch to spend more than you can afford because it is material things that bring comfort and joy rings false in more ears by the day.

Campaigns such as The Advent Conspiracy and Christmas is Not Your Birthday (see also Mike Slaughter’s book) bring a creative and urgent call to remember that Christmas is not about consumerism, but the birth of a preacher with a world transforming message of justice, equality, and peace.  That message can’t be bought or sold at a store. And yet, the spirit of that message most definitely can be given and received!
So my question for this week of Advent is “What are some of the greatest gifts you’ve ever received that we’re not bought or sold at a store?” What were you given that someone made, cooked, said, or did that touched your heart so deeply you remember it still? Can tell its story still… can share a story of how it transformed your world or helped you transform the world around you.

Here are some of mine:

The Unopenable Box of Love.

The tag on this box says “I chose this gift just for you but you can never open it. Whenever you are feeling down or lonely, all you have to do is just pick up this box and know I am thinking of you. Just hold the box close to your heart and feel all the love that is inside just for you. I Love You, Tina.”

The K’nex Chalice:

My son made this for me for Christmas out of his K’nex when he was 12. It has hung on office walls, in churches and in prayer spaces in the house.

The Framed Maple Leaf:

This is a mounted and framed maple leaf from Massachusetts. A friend sent it to me a couple of years ago as part of a Facebook meme about making gifts for people. I treasure it.  It is simple, regal, elegant, powerful. It speaks of life and death, dying and rising again, and the natural world. It reminds me I have friends I can’t see who live far away and that love always connects us. It also humbles me and reminds me to follow through on my promises and commitments as I never sent out my gifts for that same Facebook meme.

The “Preacher Man” Drawing:

One year, like many preachers, I offered a sermon topic as a prize for a goods and services auction at church. The winning bidder was a team of people who combined their money and their topics so the sermon was on the three little pigs, God’s problem, Heaven, South Park and a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.  The bottle in the drawing is a bottle of seltzer water!  I played my guitar and (badly) sang the song The Third Little Pig by my friend Andy Webster.  One of the high schoolers (at the time) in the congregation drew this portrait of the occaission. Not only did it warm my heart, but her drawing eliminated my height problem making me appropriate height for my weight. Here’s the sermon:

Feminism and Tutoring:

Maria Mercedes Jaramillo was my college Spanish teacher, but like all good teachers she taught much more than her subject area.  She taught me feminism and from a multicultural perspective.  She taught me about human rights, and was that person for me who encouraged me to learn about and change the world beyond my own front door.  She also provided individual tutoring when I was down to my last chance to pass the theological Spanish exam at Harvard Divinity School.

Dandelion Soup:

The first job I had when I got out of college was as the director of an English as a Second Language after-school tutoring program.  An eigth grade Hmong girl brought me soup as a gift for helping her learn English.  This was the first gift I was ever given by students. It was not the last, but it became increasingly symbolic over the years.

So, again, what are some of the best gifts you’ve received that remind you Christmas (and other good things in life) doesn’t come from a store?

Veterans Day Lessons in Patriotism and Service from Mom and Dad, Chap Tyger, and Paula at Occupy

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Every Veterans Day brings a wonderful admixture of emotions and reminiscences involving my parents. Both of my parents are veterans. My dad is a veteran of the Korean conflict War. My mom’s service was just afterward and stateside in the Women’s Army Corps. Yes, my mom was a WAC, but not in the Philippines. Even at twelve years old, and being a huge KISS and Cheap Trick fan, that line always cracked me up.   Most of my mom’s memorabilia such as uniforms and photographs are now in the Women in Military Service to America Memorial museum at Arlington National Cemetery.

My parents were not the type of folks usually portrayed in song and story as United States military veterans.  This does a disservice both to them (and others like them) and to our military.   My dad was a football player, swimmer and boxer who became an painter, art teacher, and tennis player.  My mom was a chearleader and dancer who became a medical secretary and single mom (they divorced when I was ten).  Neither my mom or dad ever downplayed their military service. Neither ever glamorized it.  My dad dropped out of Ohio State University to enlist in the Marines because he didn’t know what to do with his life and says getting shot at by the Chinese was enough to teach him what he did not want to do with the rest of his life should he get to have a rest of his life.  My mom was trained as a dental hygenist in the WACs and relates stories of her service that make M*A*S*H seem all too plausible.  My parents learned lessons about race, poverty and justice in the service that they passed on to my brother and me. I don’t think it’s any accident that my brother and I are both passionate advocates for social and economic justice.  We may not have had a perfect upbringing (who does) but equity, justice, fairness, and peace were always part of what both our parents taught us.  I know that their views on these things were shaped by their service.  So was there commitment to voting and democracy.  My dad returned from Korea to work on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign – in San Francisco, and later worked on the campaigns of Representative Father Robert F. Drinan in Massachusetts.  He worked on the Drinan campaigns because he was teaching at a state college and saw too many of his students being sent to Vietnam and remembers  while being shot at by Chinese thinking the Chinese guys were probably wondering why they were shooting at him too.

Today, as I wake to Veterans Day in 2011, I am struck by how often in my life I have been impacted and influenced by people who exhibit, demonstrate and live out the values taught by my veteran parents: justice, peace, equality, fairness, compassion, humanitarianism and loving your enemies.   Over the last couple of months I have been doing my best to help two people who remind me of these lessons over and over.  They humble me with their courageous service to our country and their patriotism and they remind me over and over the lessons of a lifetime my parents taught me.  They serve in vastly different contexts, but the fact that I can see their service in the same light and mutually connected is, I think, again testimony to what my veteran parents taught me, and ultimately, part of what their service taught them.

Chaplain (Captain) George Tyger is a Unitarian Universalist serving with a unit in Afghanistan.  Chap Tyger is a remarkable, humble, brave servant.  He ministers in a war zone, a place of life and death where easy answers to life’s most difficult questions confront him every day and he offers no easy answers.  This goes against the grain of not only most religious practice, but against the grain of the religious answers offered by other chaplains.  In a place and in a situation that calls for courage just for showing up, Chap Tyger goes an extra step and offers a spiritual and emotional courage. He walks and talks and journeys with men and women who travel a road most of us never have to imagine.  The most difficult days of ministry for peace-bound ministers, days of death and trauma, are his every day working conditions.  In the midst of this, he offers acceptance and grace and presence.  He also shows how it is possible to love one’s enemies even when they are trying to kill you. He has demonstrated to me how to make the difficult journey to seeing the common humanity that binds us together even across the most difficult of chasms.  Chap Tyger promotes what he calls “Cigar Ministry” and collects cigars, candy, toiletries, magazines, and most importantly, cards and letters for the men and women in his care.  He distributes these and hangs out with the troops engaging a ministry of presence that he and they find invaluable.  Chap Tyger also collects supplies to help the children in Afghanistan. Right now he is collecting shoes. The winter raining season is fast upon them there and most of the children there are in need of shoes.  Any children’s shoes of any size in wearable condition will help. (If you or your church would like to send supplies to Cigar Ministry, contact me.)

Paula Smith is one of the founding organizers (there are no leaders but someone had to get the word out first) of Occupy Fort Worth.  She’ll be the first one to tell you no one is in charge at Occupy, but she has been there since day one. She took a vacation week from her job at a local university and spent the first week of the occupation in residence. Since then she is there just about all the time she doesn’t have to be at work. Since she does have to work, she goes home at night to sleep.  She respects the City of Fort Worth, the police, and all the people of her home town.  She is proud of her two sons who are also heavily involved in the movement. She will go anywhere and talk to anyone about Occupy.  She cares for the people who come to the encampment as much as she cares about the issues involved.  Occupy is about basic American values:  fairness, justice, equality, humanitarianism, and loving your enemies.  There is no talk of violence or harming anyone at Occupy Fort Worth, it is about changing hearts.

Veterans Day is one of many opportunities we have to recognize men and women who have served our country in the military.  It is fitting and appropriate to do so. It is also fitting and appropriate to recognize those who serve in other, but related ways, such as non-violently calling our attention to the values men and women in the armed services are pledged to defend.

Both Chap Tyger and Paula Smith protect and defend the values and ideals of this country and its Constitution and the values my veteran parents taught me.  I salute them both for their service. Both gave their permission to be spotlighted in this post.

Chap and Paula, You are both patriots, each of you a profile in courage. Blessings on you both. And much Love.

The Best Books on Universalism by Unitarian Universalists

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Here are my top three recent works on Universalism by Unitarian Universalists:

The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology, 2009 by Forrest Church

Universalism 101, God is Love: An Introduction for Leaders of Unitarian Universalist Congregations, 2009 by Richard Trudeau

The Gospel of Universalism: Hope, Courage and the Love of God, 1993 by Tom Owen-Towle

Yesterday, I lamented that Unitarian Universalists were conspicuously absent from the discussion of our core theology, Universalism that has been growing over the last decade.  It’s not that Unitarian Universalists no longer say anything about Universalism, it’s that what we say is not said to the larger Universalist, Christian, and religious world.  We play small.  We want to be the religion for our time, yet there has been little effort made it seems to promote these three works as major players in a resurgent movement surrounding our own theology.  Viral YouTube videos accompanied the release of Rob Bell’s Love Wins and the upcoming All is Grace by Brennan Manning.  Where was the major media (mainstream and alternative) promotion of these three works by Unitarian Universalists?  Perhaps the subtitle of Trudeau’s book is telling – “An Introduction for Leaders of Unitarian Universalist Congregations.”  Nothing wrong with that – it’s a good thing to teach our congregational leaders about Universalism. But why stop there? Is it assumed no one else would want to know or no one else would care?  The long list of titles in yesterday’s post disagrees with that approach.  There’s a  growing number of videos on sites such as uutv.magnify.net  and YouTube about Unitarian Universalism.  Perhaps the next book on Universalism by a Unitarian Universalist will get the promotion and energy it deserves.  I hope so.  There’s a growing number of people out there who are taking up our theology. Shouldn’t we be the ones teaching it to them?

Back to School

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My wife reports back to work today.  She is a fourth grade teacher.  She is exceptionally good at what she does.  She reports back to work today as the incumbent teacher of the year in her school district here in Texas.  I can honestly say that this summer she actually took time off.  She went to visit family in Massachusetts and did not take school work with her.  This is rare for her, even over the summer.  This is probably why she’s so good at her job.

I caught a facebook status re-post meme going around this morning and actually re-posted it. I very rarely do that type of thing. This one was about teachers. This one was about my wife.

A teacher somewhere in your neighborhood is preparing lessons to teach your children. In the minute it takes you to read this, teachers all over the world are using their “free time,” and often investing their own money for your child’s literacy, prosperity and future. Re-post if you are a teacher, love a teacher, or appreciate a teacher.

It amazes me that some people still think teachers have it “easy.”  That teachers have a short work day and a lot of vacation time and cushy benefits and big salaries.  Ignorance.  Most teachers who do their jobs well go in early, stay late and have to bring their work home every night and work every week-end. Summer vacation isn’t a vacation it is a planning and professional development period. While it is true that some teachers make decent salaries, the teachers at the beginning of their careers do not make anywhere near the money they should and many good ones burn out long before they should and our society loses many good people from a place they are sorely needed.

Garret Keizer, a writer and contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine has an essay in the current issues of Harper’s called “Getting Schooled: The Re-education of an American Teacher.”  He describes going back to the classroom at the age of 57 after many years away to fill a slot teaching English at the local high school in Vermont.  He describes the school, its students and his workload.  He is in a rather average Vermont school, with a wonderful, supportive staff and great students who are kind to him and hold the doors open for him.  His classes average twenty students, he has three different sections to prep out of five classes taught and has an entire 45 minutes for lunch. To do his job reasonably well, he had to go in early, work late and “had little of what is generally called a life.”  I don’t want to make a martyr out of him, my wife or other teachers in the sense that there aren’t a lot of other people who also exhausted by their work and their lives, but I want to point out that teachers are by no means exempt.  Keizer says:

My point here is that even under ideal circumstances, public school teaching is one of the hardest jobs a person can do. Most sensible people know that. Anyone who claims not to know that is either a scoundrel or a nincompoop; or, to put it another way, a typical expert on everything that’s wrong with American public education and the often damaged children that it serves (pg 34).

As teachers head back to the classroom this fall, let’s all try to remember to see their work through their eyes, not ours, and especially not through the eyes of the political spin machine.

(I could not link to the article from Harper’s as it is only available to subscribers and only in pdf  format.)

Can God Get Heather’s Attention?

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When I was at Harvard Divinity School, the standard joke was “Do you know why God couldn’t get tenure at Harvard? Answer – He only wrote one book and most people claim he didn’t even write that one.  It may prove just as difficult for God to get noticed by the editor of the UU World’s Interdependent Web column.

Heather Christensen, the editor of the UU Blog roundup, The Interdependent Web, published a list of tips and pointers this week on her blog nagoonberry about how to get her attention and get your blog noticed in the UU World’s column of what’s happening around the UU Blogosphere.  Here is her list without her comments:

  1. First and foremost, write well. 
  2. Make sure you’re in UUpdates.  
  3. Know how your blog looks in Google Reader.
  4. Think about how a curator reads.  
  5. Write great titles for your posts.  
  6. I’m a big fan of short paragraphs.
  7. Know what you’re trying to say, and say it clearly, at least once.  
  8. Brevity is the soul of wit.  
  9. Know your flaws.  
  10. Don’t fall into the deadline seam.
  11. Your self-promotion should be (almost) invisible, and thus seem rare.
  12. Join the conversation––if you have something to say.  
  13. Vary your tone.  
  14. Introduce yourself.  

I think I’m doing a decent job.  Sunflower Chalice has been spotlighted in the Interdependent Web column in the past and perhaps will be again.  The bigger question for today is can GOD get noticed by the Interdependent Web?  Here is God’s blog, recently noticed and spotlighted by no less a prestigious publication than the New Yorker magazine:

UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.

I don’t know what Heather will think of God’s nascent blog, but the comments are really worth checking out  at http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/08/08/110808sh_shouts_simms.

Some of my favorite comments so far  include:

 

  • The “herb yielding seed” is a hella fresh move. 4:20!
  • The dodo should just have a sign on him that says, “Please kill me.” Ridiculous.
  • Putting boobs on the woman is sexist.
  • Wow. Just wow. I don’t even know where to start. So the man and his buddy the rib-thing have dominion over everything. They’re going to get pretty unbearable really fast. What You need to do is make them think that there were other, bigger, scarier creatures around a long time before them. I suggest dinosaurs. No need to actually create dinosaurs—just create some weird-ass dinosaur bones and skeletons and bury them in random locations. Man will dig them up eventually and think, What the f?
  • and as my son would say, “epic fail, meh.”
I wonder what God’s second post will be?  God couldn’t get tenure at Harvard. I wonder if the Almighty can make the Interdependent Web?  What do you think, Heather?

Translocal Church (or Quitting is not the same as Giving Up)

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Quitting is not the same as giving up. In fact sometimes you need to give up in order to succeed.  Sometimes you need to give up in order to lead.  Sometimes you need to get up and walk out in order to walk on,  make real progress and affect real change.   Have you ever felt that the educational system, the government, society in general, even church is so dysfunctional that it really is time to drop out and start over?  Not a sit on the couch and eventually let someone else support you and the fact that you’ve quit on life – yours as well as the world’s kind of dropping out, but a dropping out that takes the courage to start something of your own from the bottom up and make it on your own in a parallel existence.  A real in the world, but not of it type of life?  Well there’s a name for you and people are already doing it.

According to Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze in their new book, Walk Out, Walk On, you are a “walk out.”  What’s a walk out? According to Wheatley and Frieze Walk Outs learn quickly, take greater risks, and support one another in pioneering work. New Systems are born from their efforts. They find each other and connect, such as on UU Growth Lab, or that cluster of people you meet who are ready to chuck it all and start their own new congregation.
(Are you a Walk Out? – find out here.)


Early in Wheatley and Frieze’s  book Walk Out, Walk On they present a list from the Harvard Business Review on how to “Scale up” what we call growth in church work:

“There are five steps for successful replication. 1. Make sure you have something that can be copied and that is worth copying. 2. Work from a single template. It provides proof of success, performance measurements, a tactical approach, and a reference for when problems arise. 3. Copy the example exactly. 4. Make changes only after you achieve acceptable results. 5. Don’t throw away the template.”

Doesn’t this sound familiar?  Make sure you have something worth copying. Well,dang it, we can stop right there. What are we copying when we do “UU church growth”?  Are we copying a particular congregation? Are we copying Unitarian Universalism in general? Our nonexistent creed? Our principles? A vague and mysterious “healthy congregation”?  All of the above?  Whenever I’ve been at a church growth seminar or workshop it’s usually some combination of the above, that is then presented as if it were #2- a single template that could provide proof of success, performance measurements, and various tactical approaches and just like looking it up in the Alban Institute online search database-a reference for when problems arise.  Ordained and lay leaders are asked to copy this mythical congregational example exactly (and of course feel frustrated and discouraged when they can’t come close to it, and this causes more stress and anxiety requiring more workshops and more consultants).  Few real adaptive changes are ever made because few congregations ever achieve acceptable results and the feel free to break the template or throw it away.  The UU Growth Lab is conversation largely being had by Walk Outs.
Here’s to breaking and throwing away the template because, among other things, it’s no longer seems worth copying and no one seems to be willing to admit it.  In the UUA it seems our biggest, healthiest congregations have more in common structurally and/or in style with non-denominational campus churches than they do with traditional UU congregational churches.  The old model and system of individual stand alone congregations is dying, dysfunctional and economically unsustainable.

Wheatley and Frieze contrast scaling up with scaling across.  Scaling across is being done locally in many types of religious communities today. Emergent communities, missional communities, and new monastic communities, all reach across local boundaries to connect with others doing the same type of work in other locations, but still retain their own specific local focus.
I’m not saying there aren’t best practices and skills and tools that are good to know,but they are not the same for everybody and they can differ, sometimes drastically, given the local situation and culture.   What if our mission in each congregation and as an association was not “to grow,” but to develop individuals and communities spiritually? What if our mission was to serve our individual local communities?  How would each of our translocal churches do that given the economic, personnel, membership, and spiritual realities in each translocal location?  (Remember this is a different question than how can each community be like a bigger successful UU Church?) That would be a new way to be a church community.  It sure would make the annual report to the UUA look different. It may even make it completely unnecessary.

Dinner Party with Spike Lee

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One of the regular podcasts I listen to is The Dinner Party Download (is a fast and funny ‘booster shot’ of news and culture designed to help you dazzle your friends and family at this weekend’s dinner party.).  Last week’s “dinner party guest of honor” was Spike Lee, promoting his new book on the Making of Do the Right Thing.

As we get into Black History Month, looking back into this film with Spike Lee was really interesting with two white dinner party hosts.  One of the gimmicks of The Dinner Party Download is the hosts, Rico Gagliano and Brendan Francis Newnam, ask the guest of honor (the person being interviewed) what’s the questions people shouldn’t ask you if they happened to be seated next to you at a dinner party.  Spike Lee’s response was that one of those questions for white people is “Why did Mookie throw the trash can?”  Black people living in America don’t have to ask that question, Spike Lee said.

Lee also pointed out that film critics and many movie goers back in 1989 got focused on Mookie throwing the trash can and Sal’s business getting burned and looted, yet passed over Radio Raheem’s death.  The dramatic contrast between the concern for the loss of a white business and the lesser or lack of concern for a Black man’s life was and continues to be troubling.  During the Dinner Party Download conversation, the group discusses 1989′s Oscar winner “Driving Miss Daisy” portrayed a Black Man America could handle, but Radio Raheem it was not ready for (is still not ready for) and was/is afraid of.

Lee mentioned that twenty years on, not many people are teaching Driving Miss Daisy and they are teaching Do the Right Thing. I used to teach Do the Right Thing for years when I taught moral theology in a Catholic high schools. I hadn’t watched it in a number of years now, however and seeing as my son is home sick today, and old enough to watch it and interested in making movies (maybe even study with Spike Lee at NYU in a couple of years), I sat down to watch it again.  It still holds up. Its lessons are still hard.    We are too far down the road and have seen too many Sal’s Famous incidents to take The Mayor’s advice to do the right thing lightly or pass over without deeply pondering the wisdom of Martin and Malcolm.   Perhaps in the end we defend ourselves best, avoid violence most by practicing love – as best as we are able.

 

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys a community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.

- Malcolm X

Let me tell you the story of right hand-left hand. It’s a tale of good and evil. Hate: it was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love: these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: static. One hand is always fighting the other hand, and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand–Love–is finished. But hold on, stop the presses; the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes now, that’s right. Ooh, it’s a devastating right and Hate is hurt. He’s down. Left-Hand Hate KO-ed by Love.

- Radio Raheem

Tucson: Fear and Rhetoric to MLK Weekend

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Fearful Tentacles of Injustice: Hyperbole, Mental Illness, Capital Punishment, Guns

Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly were not responsible for the shooting in Tucson on Saturday, January 8, 2010.  Yet the type of inflammatory and at times just plain ignorant rhetoric they practice and this shooting are connected.  Captain Hyperbole and his outlandish utility belt rule our national discourse.  They operate most dangerously on the right, but roam the left also.  The right wing political talk shows and right wing politicians seem to think nothing of linking the president (even simultaneously) with fascism, communism, totalitarianism and figures like Hitler and Stalin.  Yet, I remember not too long ago that folks on the political left spoke in just as outrageous terms of George Bush.  However I don’t remember any rhetoric out of the left suggesting violent overthrow of the government, nor do I remember any of the lefties I know carrying guns to rallies in opposition of candidates or elected officials and/or threatening candidates with targets on their congressional seats.  One example that has been raised lately is a post from the liberal blog Daily Kos calling the liberal blogger’s own Democratic Federal Representative “dead to me” for supporting Nancy Pilosi as Speaker of the House. The fact that this one example keeps surfacing again and again is testament to the fact that violent threats in the political area come far more from the right than left.  Wherever they come from however, they have no place in either our political or civic discourse. There is no way to finding a just society through a discourse so rife with vitriolic hyperbole.

Mental Illness once again becomes something to fear in this country as the portrait of the Tucson shooter emerges.  People saw Jared Loughner exhibit odd behavior, but didn’t want to interfere.  We shy away from each other’s lives.  Then we gasp in horror at the awful outcome of a troubled soul’s pain acting out in the world.  Then, we don’t accept mental illness as a legal defense and we want to execute people for crimes that they committed while obviously not in their right mind.   Many weeks at Pathways I include in the prayer at church a prayer for those dealing illnesses seen and unseen, physical and emotional, visible and invisible. If you live with an unseen, invisible, and/or emotional illness – tell someone.  First and foremost to get help you need and just as important for people who have gotten help, let people around you know that the world is full of people living lives that others need NOT be afraid of and that mental illnesses of all types, day in and day out do NOT end in shootings and violence.

Guns. No one is talking about guns. Members of congress are talking openly about carrying concealed weapons instead of taking an honest look at why America is a gun happy society and how that leads to violence such as the shooting of a member of congress, the assassination of a federal judge and the murder of innocents in a Tucson mall. From where I sit the right to bear arms is not the right to carry concealed semi automatic weapons in a shopping mall or a church or a school and it is unjust that this shooting is not immediately spurring a national discussion about our country’s fascination with firearms. Since I moved to Texas  a couple of years ago, I have lost my previous mentality that all guns are bad all the time.  I still don’t believe we need gun shows and the right to buy assault weapons to uphold the second amendment, however I understand that different attitudes and cultures give rise to other views on guns.  There is a safe, sane middle ground between disarmament and selling semi-automantic hand guns to anyone who asks for one over the counter.

The punishment for shooting a federal judge, six other people and attempting to assassinate a member of congress will be the death penalty.  This will hopefully stir up debate on the injustice of capital punishment.  Executions, especially in this instance, make all of us, the entire country, assassins and murders.  You don’t kill people to show that killing people is wrong.  The only motive we have for executions is revenge, not justice, and when we act out of revenge, we are not acting out of our best selves.  The shooter is in custody. It is our job now to make sure he harms neither others nor himself.  We need not commit more violence to do that.  We are what we do and we do what we are. There are penalties to pay for wrong actions and heinous crimes.  Death isn’t one of them. We are better than that.

We are now in a time of fear, anxiety and mourning, but let it push us to a time of reflection on these deep issues and let it turn to a time of hope and action. We can not change the world we live in by shrinking from it, but only by engaging it with courage, hope and compassion, like Gabrielle Giffords. Get out in the street. Shake someone’s hand, put your hands to work, there’s a lot to be done. Be not afraid.  Out of darkness there must come out a light.

The Backdrop of MLK Weekend in Tucson: January to April and Beyond

The shooting that critically wounded US Representative Gabrielle Giffords Saturday in Tucson and killed six others comes a week before we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King,Jr. who was assassinated on a Memphis hotel balcony on April 4, 1968, and calls to mind a time in America when the shooting of leaders filled our headlines. A time I was too young to remember personally, but remember well from history.

It’s my prayer that we do not enter such a time in our history again, yet wonder if such a time is already upon us, like it or not.  Our role as Unitarian Universalists in society is to stand and speak boldly as peaceful people of faith. Not just in times of war and on the big issues of the day, but in conversation and on the small issues of the day.  It’s easy to be drawn into the world of hyperbole and inflammatory rhetoric about each and every one of our political and social positions and opinions.  Bold and lofty ideals deserve bold and lofty speech, not hot and incendiary speech.

Let us strive, at the soccer field and in the classroom, in the carpool and at the water cooler, online and in person, to express ourselves and our opinions clearly and eloquently. Let our model be Dr. King, not Glenn Beck or  Bill Maher.  This doesn’t mean we need to discard our ideals and concern for justice. When King spoke he never backed away from very strong, confrontational opinions about what was wrong with America and how to change it, yet he stayed away from language that incited others to violence and always, always chose the path of non-violent, non-cooperation.  To examine his speeches and sermons today, many would be shocked at his strident calls for the government to be change its ways or be removed or changed, yet his calls never included prompts for armed revolution, just the opposite.

This weekend, as we remember Dr. King, his concern for non-violence, poverty and how they were intertwined with racism in America, let us remember that the journey to a more just society begins in our own hearts.  Let the injustices of January and April give birth to a renewed sense of justice we can carry forward all year long and all our lives, remaining true to our principles, expressing them and living them out with strength and integrity, truly respecting the dignity and worth of others,  never backing down in the struggle for peace and justice and equality yet never turning to violence of speech or action.  It’s a tough call to action.  The response has traditionally been: Here I am.

 

100th Anniversary of the Council on Christian Unity
Worship Resources
Prepared by Ron Allen and Linda McKiernan-Allen
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Sunday, January 17, 2010
A child once dreamed the Voice was calling his name. . .’Samuel’;
Fishermen once heard the Voice when a young man bid them follow;
And still the Voice beckons today. . .can you hear?
Here I am. Send me.

Moses protested vehemently as the Voice spoke at the burning bush;
Mary stood amazed as the Voice proclaimed impending birth;
And still the Voice beckons today. . .can you hear?
Here I am. Send me.

Rosa Parks followed the Voice to the front of the bus;
Martin Luther King, Jr. heard the Voice as the bullet shattered;
And still the Voice beckons today. . .can you hear?
Here I am. Send me.

The Voice beckons from humble places. . .
in the tears of hungry children,
in the cries of the frail and frightened elderly,
in the pleas of those whose dreams have been too long deferred;
and still the Voice beckons today. . .can you hear?
Here I am. Send me.

A timid believer pauses to listen to the Voice;
A struggling church hears the Voice and turns;
and still the Voice beckons today. . .can you hear?
Here I am. Send me.