First, Make a Fuss / Advent Day 10

Today, Marin’s Dad, John, and I escorted Matteo around downtown San Francisco. We ate breakfast, found a kid’s clothing store, tracked down a photo album, located a Borders book store, drank some coffee, changed a poopy diaper in the aisle of the book store (for lack of a nearby bathroom), searched out and toured the town Aquarium, lucked upon and rode a merry-go-round – all on a very sweet, sunny and warm (high-50's) day.

Later, after we got Matteo below the waves of his nap, I had the assignment (in preparation for meetings at the Center for Ministry) to list my 20 greatest accomplishments in life. Then I was to narrow it down to seven really great achievements. Then to number them one to seven.

Number one was introducing Taize prayer-around-the-cross at Holden Village. It was my favorite vespers, of the obligatory seven nights in the week. It was simple, and elemental, which cut across Lutheran ideological wordiness. We would sit in relative darkness, I’d slowly read something from the gospels, or from Thich Nhat Hanh, or Brother Roger. Then people could come forward, kneel, and light tapers, planting them in the sand. It was something I worked hard at, to make this mixture of silence, and chanting, and kneeling, and lighting candles in the dark work. It gave me another five or eight years of being able to stand being a pastor, discovering and adapting this kind of authentic, mystical, affective worship to lead and participate in. In addition, I suspect it's still going strong at Holden.

There were other accomplishments, like empowering folks at Unilu in Philadelphia to plan and execute worship for themselves, or writing sermons along the line which challenged and nourished searching hearts, there was creating that meal for people with AIDS in Philadelphia in ‘84 which might still be happening, and there was integrating running+yoga+meditation in my own life over the past ten years, there was that time I protested McDonalds encroaching on farmland outside Emmaus with a vigil and a fast and nearly got arrested for it, and there was the baby I’ve been raising and the mother (mine) I’ve been taking care of in Fairbanks for the past 5 years.

But frankly, these aren’t great, exhilarating stories. They’re everyday works of a mixture of selfishness and love, frustration and hope. I wanted to be more heroic, or saintly, or certain, in looking back. Is my time for making a mark over? That’s not what I sense whenever I consider working with Unitarian Universalists. It feels like a new beginning, as if I may yet lend my entire passion and being to a movement and a community which may with my help become a challenge and a blessing for many.

While Jesus himself might have understood "resistance," I didn’t find much place for the concept of resisting the cultural/ political flow among those who "follow" Jesus today. By resisting I mean being committed to a renewal of the earth and the whole human community, starting at home, in Iowa, or Indiana, PA. The sense of hope that drew me into formal religion sprang directly from the heroism of resistance, learned from Bill Coffin at Yale, who protested the Vietnam war and threw himself for the sake of Jesus against the great inexorable. And he got it to move! Coffin in prison was a free man, like the Jesus he preached.

Today we find America in a much more dire context than Vietnam was in 1970. This morning I read this from one of my favorite commentators, Chris Hedges, a war correspondent for 20 years after graduating from Harvard Divinity School:

"When Dante enters the "city of woes" in the "Inferno" he hears the cries of "those whose lives earned neither honor nor (infamy)," those rejected by heaven and hell, those who dedicated their lives solely to the pursuit of happiness. These are all the "good" people, the ones who never made a fuss, who filled their lives with vain and empty pursuits, harmless no doubt, to amuse themselves, who never took a stand for anything, never risked anything, who went along. They never looked too hard at their lives, never felt the need, never wanted to look."