Secular Soul, Religious Refining / Advent Day 15

I awaken from a dream about being at Holden Village, the abandoned copper mine deep in the North Cascades which the Lutherans turned into an adult retreat center. Where some of us lived together a couple years in the mid-nineties. In the dream I was at Holden during a pastors’ convention. I don’t think that I knew anyone there. For some reason I was asked to present slides as an after-dinner program one of the evenings. I sat by myself at dinner, which I realized as the meal progressed, wasn’t very savvy, because I needed to be connecting with people so that they’d want to stay and watch, plus, I couldn’t find out who was introducing me, and so on.

The crowd thinned considerably after the meal, and so the AV guy decided to show the slides up on (and get everyone to sit up on) the stage. We eventually found a way that the setting sun wasn’t so bright that the slides could be seen. More people returned and brought chairs up. I surprised myself by starting the slides with my own introduction, telling my Holden story, how I’d always wanted to be the village pastor there, from my first visit. My sense of things went from scared and alienated to joyful and connected, in the simple sharing of my story. Everything suddenly was right, good, and fun.

It’s a recurring, basic theme for me that is hardwired, I think, from childhood. I remember it from standing around at junior high school dances, from meeting people at church youth group retreats. You feel and behave like a social outcast, and then you are forced somehow to reach out, which connects with other people’s equally felt but more effectively hidden alienation. The end result, at least for me, is exhilaration. It’s a kind of social bipolar disorder. Prep the sermon, feel like it’s a bomb, preach it, people like it, you feel exhausted and happy. Dial the phone number, sweating, and then begin talking, forgetting yourself in a great conversation...

But the image I woke up with was of a fire in my chest cavity. A transforming, a creative fire, which takes experience and events and burns away the dross, concentrating the gold. The idea comes partly from reading Camille Paglia, a progressive lesbian atheist who says that religion is required for good art. She was talking about how Europe has entered a kind of decadence. All Italy cares about, she says, is soccer. No 21st century Fellini, no painters, writers. Just paranoia about Muslims taking over. And she attributes it to a failure of the secular world view which rules in Europe, not that she has any interest in what the Vatican or the Southern Baptist Convention are serving up.

She’s talking more about passion (motivation), trust (faithfulness), stories (cultural narratives), images (icons) and hopes for a transformed future that are believed in and create a stimulating context (safe, exhilarating) for creative expression to take flight. She’d probably see the chaos of America – immigration, gun control, feminism, fundamentalism – as being a rich and spicy soup.

I do remember how she said secularists tend to veer off into talking about the human prospect primarily in economic variables. "People deserve health care. Women deserve equal pay for equal work. Racism deprives kids of a future..."

Strikingly, Paglia doesn’t believe (!!) in global climate change (talk about the failure of secularism – her inability to see the profound mystery of warming which is right before her eyes) or else she’d probably add scientific apocalypticism to her list of the debilitating features of the earnest secular mind. In the Stephen Dunn poem I used a couple weeks ago preaching to the UU’s, the voice in the poem tagged this malady as "cynicism / that other sadness."

When I woke, I had the image of what it means to have faith, it’s this fire inside you. You reliably connect with "God" or "hope" or "what-I-do-is-really-important-to-our-world," a sense which you harbor deep inside your being. The rest of the day, whatever you receive, whatever befalls you, whatever you give, however you behave, comes out of this furnace of love, trust, gratitude, and hope.

This is what I think of as "spirituality," that ability of people to feel right in their lives, and energized to contribute something meaningful in their place and time in life.

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."