Raven Speaking, Dante Leading / Advent Day 23

In the candlelit darkness of our drum-beat-heart-beating UU fellowship, Raven arose and told the people sitting in circle yesterday (Sunday) morning the story about how he had met in council with all the animals discussing the encroaching, endless darkness. And how he had succeeded in entering the lodge of the sky, by transforming himself into a spruce needle which the daughter of the chief drinks, and later gives birth to, as Raven Boy! Miracle! Raven Boy opens the three nested, glowing boxes in the corner of the lodge of the sky, transfigures himself back, and flies through the open roofed lodge with the glowing sun in his impervious talons.

The UU service worked. Not the least of all because we drummed for a half hour at the beginning of the service while people arrived late to the circle and chairs had to be found. And still we ended early. Nice to have some meditation time in the circle of the gathered people, in the gentle darkness of the Alaska dawn.

Marin had the observation that the UU’s probably won’t use the same story next year, which is probably true, Jana and I already discussed other wonderful folk stories we could use to illustrate the return of the light.

Maybe that’s where the Unitarians go wrong. Instead of having a yearlong cycle of beloved, recurring stories, we keep ranging out and sampling other people’s stories. Are we failing to attend to the repetition which would make the stories our own?

Last night, after Marin and I had queued up in our DVD player "the Lives of Others," a movie about the Stasi in East Germany, when we heard bumping in the bedrooms below. Matteo, back (after a month sleeping upstairs) downstairs in the guest bedroom to sleep, wasn’t. I went down, annoyed, to take a look, but chilled out as soon as I lay down beside him, arm around him, telling a story about Pooh characters throwing Christopher Robin a birthday party.

Then I launched into the story of Santa Claus, which might be his first exposure to that great American myth. He listened closely. "Where North Pole is?" he asked in his lilting, new-to-language little voice.

Then, sleep not coming anytime soon, I launched into a cultural piece de resistance, the Nativity Story. Mary, Joseph, traveling on a donkey, to a town with no hotel rooms, having a baby like Mama’s going to have a baby, then Angels singing ‘Glory Halleluah," and shepherds ("what’s a shepherd?") watching their sheep to protect them from wolves, and kings riding camels (Teo knows about camels) with gifts of Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh, all duly explained.

He still wasn’t about to sleep, and ended up ejected from the guest bed back into his crib, and the movie went by the wayside. The 45 minute wait had driven Marin to bed before I got done.

But the stories I told, are stories that Matteo is going to hear, each and evey year, for better or worse, until he stops wanting stories or I lose my way in life. And I wish he’d hear the same Raven story at UUFF every year as well, since it’s what cultural identity comes from.

Stories guide us into who we are, they are Virgil to our confused and lost Dante (Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto 1), showing us the opening into the real world of meaning, a mysterious, difficult, darkling passage no one can find on their own.

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."