What I also like about church people

Yet Another UU blogged about why he likes church people. Yum. What a great idea!

If you’ve read this blog previously, you know that last spring I came to realize a vocation for ministry, one I am hoping to fullfil in a lay capacity. As such I really threw myself into church this year. I’ve been part of the small group ministry program for several years and this year am the chair of the committee. I began a discernment group with others considering ministry. I’m sitting on the intern committee. In November I brought a Compassionate Listening Workshop to the church. All this to say I’m there a lot. And I find myself falling in love with my church. Which I think is why I think YAUU’s post really struck a chord.

This doesn’t mean people aren’t driving me crazy. There are a few. This doesn’t mean I haven’t found myself in difficult situation. There have been many. I feel like my every weakness button has been pushed.

But I also feel like I have been shown so many people’s hearts this fall. Been shown their hopes and worries, their incredible strengths and gifts. I’m falling in love with my church.

YAUU says he likes church people because:

1. They know the value of face-to-face contact
2. They tend to be more courteous to and interested in others
3. They like books
4. They know that showing up is crucial

Le me reiterate #3. As a book geek I really appreciate this quality in others.

And let me add that I like church people because:

1. They are willing to imagine the world more holistically, to see that there are other ways to make it better than just being good consumers — the message that we, as Americans, get at every turn
2. They believe that it does take a village
3. They are willing to wrestle with the big questions
4. They offer me hugs without me having to ask — my hug quotient has risen exponentially

What do you like about church folks?

 

Abiding

A few months after I realized my vocation for ministry, I decided to go back to the therapist I’d been seeing when I was in depression. Mostly because I knew that I had to change my relationship with conflict (i.e. my extreme discomfort that leads me to do anything possible to avoid it as well as the fact that I seem to freeze, to go dumb, in the face of it).

Anyway, I was talking to my therapist the other day about my struggles with leadership and what has become the quite onerous task of chairing a committee. I don’t remember exactly what got us to this point but at some moment my therapist used a surprisingly religious word: “abiding.” It really struck a chord and has unfolded for me over the last several days.

To “abide” or “abide with” is to wait. Of course the Oxford English Dictionary has about 22 variations on this but they essentially add up to this idea of waiting. There’s a subtext in the word abide though, a subtext of “patience” and maybe too of “trust.” In religious contexts we often hear that God is abiding in or with us, or we are asked what it might mean for us to abide in God. To have a sense of patience that things will unfold and become clear—or clearer anyway—in their own right time.

It’s extremely difficult, especially as a 21st century rational skeptic, to have patience with God. For a culture now used to getting answers to anything we want as fast as our 3G networks will facilitate a Google search, God’s time can be a real challenge.

But apparently it can be just as challenging to abide in and with ourselves. For our core, essential, authentic self to abide—to wait patiently, trustingly—with our Ego, our inhibitions, our insecurities. How can we abide with ourselves as we make mistakes, as we act from our petty or scared places, as we face situations that challenge our greatest weaknesses? When we are able to abide—to wait patiently, trustingly—then we can learn and grow without judging ourselves, without beating ourselves up. By abiding we can love ourselves in all our human frailty.

Pornography for God and plants

Oh how I wish I had seen this exhibit!

My favorite? The titillating-god-by-splitting-particles-in-the-Large-Hadron-Collider bit. I mean, what happens if they actually find (or is it produce?) the Higgs boson particle? Would that be the equivalent of a galaxial orgasm? I have to think that the universe is probably multi-orgasmic, don’t you?

 

Large Hadron Collider Altar

 

 

Rap for the Environment

Very cool:

November UU Salon Topic: What is a Unitarian Universalist?

For other answers to this month’s UU Salon question, see this, this, and this.

 

As I’ve been learning lately, I think you’ll get some pretty different answers to this question depending on whether your talking to a “convert” or someone who’s been born and raised UU.

I discovered the UU church six years ago so I guess I’d be in the convert category, though in may ways it felt like a coming home.

At the time I was an atheist/agnostic and suffering from clinical depression and anxiety. It was one of the lowest moments of my life and my spirit it was in desperate need of attention. As an atheist it seemed my only options for spiritual inquiry was the zendo, which I had tried on and off for many years, but for me all that talk of emptiness was kind of the problem. I longed to stop feeling so empty, I longed to be filled up. I have a great respect for many Buddhist teachings and in today’s consumer driven global economy I think all the time about how desire creates suffering. The other day I wrote about how my attachment, even subconsciously, to a particular definition or image of God was creating suffering. But as much as my philosophy and theology may be informed by Buddhism, it was not fulfilling my spiritual needs. What spoke to me, what defined UUism to me when I first came, was that 4^th principle—our individual search for truth and meaning in community. That call to religious freedom encouraged me to set down the anger I carried from my birth tradition and actually begin to engage religion and a life of the spirit from a proactive, instead of reactive, stance.

A lot has changed in the past six years. I am no longer an atheist, for one thing. For another I have begun to let myself be informed by the other 7 principles. But a big part of my identity as a UU is about the spiritual healing I found here. It is a part of the story of most UU converts. I don’t think a of UU born-and-bred would say the same.

If my definition of a UU is in part someone seeking spiritual healing and growth, the other part is around the 7 principles, is around our commitment to tolerance and acceptance and the desire to build a world where all are heard, all are respected, a world of multiplicity and of unity.

Angels on the head of a pin

It is the theory which decides what we can observe.
–Albert Einstein

 

The other day my minister told me that she flew on two wings—faith and trust. Or was it love and trust? Well, one of them was trust anyway.

Just now I’m reading a book on spiritual direction in which the author enumerates on seven qualities of the soul. The last one is “confident truth . . . . trust in liberating, loving  divine Presence.” The other day I was sitting in on a class with a friend of mine who is in seminary. The topic was the Reformation. The professor mentioned a quote by Luther in which he said that for him, faith is trust.

So I seem to be getting a lot of messages about trust right now . . . .

Ever since I felt a sense of call towards ministry last spring, I’ve had an absolute sense that it was right.  That in fact it explained most of my life. Even when I had a crisis of faith in my relationship with God this summer, I never doubted God existed and I never doubted my call to ministry, even when I had no idea how it could work.

So tonight I’m trying to unpack this word—trust. It is synonymous with “faith”? And I’m trying to unpack the connection of those words to “destiny.” If you’ve read any of my recent posts you know that I’ve wrestled with various explanations of God, in particular whether or not God is poking around in our lives. I’m not even comfortable with the phrase being “called” to ministry because it implies an act of will by God, a certain mucking about in my life, a certain sense of predestination. I admit that I find this kind of Scholastic hair-splitting frustrating. One of the great things about being an atheist was that I never troubled myself with vexing questions about trust and predestination vs. free will or how many damn angels fit on the head of a pin. Well, I can still leave that last one to the Scholastics.

I can say I have faith in God’s love because it is an actual and direct experience I’ve had. But beyond that it gets sketchy. When I try praying to God about trusting in the path I’m on, am I implying some sort of predestination? If I say to God that I trust It to lead me in the right direction, trust It to show me the right way for this “call” to unfold, aren’t I saying that I believe there is only one path and God will walk me down it? If that’s the case, what’s the point of effort on my part? Of seeking? Why not just kick back until all is revealed? In fact, what’s the point in doing anything? Do “trust” and “faith” leave room for co-creation, for me to co-create my life with God. Frankly the idea of co-creation sits more comfortably with me. It’s what feels right in my heart. It’s just that my head can’t really figure out the particulars of how it works

Let’s face it. Life feels like free will most of the time, doesn’t it? Not just free-willing but in fact free-wheeling. You know . . . in that really fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, kind-of-out-of-control way. And in a universe like that, prayer makes a lot more sense than in a predestined one.  Which makes this whole blog feel like one hell of a big circular argument.

In that seminary class I mentioned, the professor was talking about the back-and-forth arguments between Luther and the Catholic Church on a variety of key theological points. I’ve always marveled at how sure people can sound about things they can’t possibly know absolutely. How they can pin theologies on scriptures written by mere mortals from a book that constantly contradicts itself? Which just proves that I’d make a lousy theologian because I can’t seem to come down conclusively on one side or another on things like predestination vs. free will, or whether God is an active or absent force in the universe, etc. I am a UU, after all.

Happiness

Krista Tippett recently gathered several religious leaders to talk about “happiness”. Totally awesome! Enjoy ; )

http://vimeo.com/16211701

Unpacking God

The other day I reflected on a recent crisis of faith. On the other side of it now, I can see that it was pretty standard stuff, wrestled with by many before me, by theologians and writers more eloquent than myself.

I do not say these things to diminish my experience, but merely to acknowledge its timelessness and universality. Nor do I expect this to be the last time I engage in fisticuffs with the Divine.

Here’s what I’m walking around with on the other side—the architecture. Who knew, I the spatially-challenged, was so damn good at construction? Cuz what it really comes down to is that I built this huge, cavernous cathedral. I decorated it with my icons, my images of God. And then I stuffed God in there, swung shut the elaborately carved front doors, and sealed every crevice so that not a breath of air, not even the breath of God, could get out. And yet, when I sought sanctuary, when I sought God, It was no longer there.

It’s one of those Zen, attachment-creates-desire-creates-suffering things, right? Every time I try to nail God down (no pun intended), It’s going to slip away. Every time I try to define It, It’s meaning is going to elude me. And I’m going to feel abandoned and broken-hearted.

And so on the other side of this crisis of faith, I feel an overwhelming imperative to crack open my notions of God, like giant dinosaur eggs. I gotta let it get real messy. Yolk everywhere. In the Middle Ages, they mixed egg yolks with color pigments to make tempera paint. An act of creation. . . . well now I’m just rambling. . . and mixing metaphors.

The only thing I know for sure is the thing I know from personal experience—not from books or conversations or classes or longings or imaginings. From the Source, as it were. From the personal experience I had with God that started this whole journey.

I always thought the expression “God is Love” was naive, treacley, maudlin even. But what God expressed to me that day in March 2009 is that It loves me, exactly the way I am. That It loves every creature exactly the way it is. That It is sitting right in my heart, like one of those laughing little Buddhas, and that It loves me unconditionally. That It is sitting in the heart of every creature, every tree, every river.

Mark Morrison-Reed spoke at my church this fall. He gave a sermon titled “Dragged Kicking and Screaming into Heaven.” He talked about how often we focus on our Unitarian polity and less our Universalist theology. But this Universalist message is the same thing that I experienced. It is a gospel of radical inclusion—in God’s love. So this is all I know of God. Radical love. A love I don’t really understand and certainly not one I can claim to be walking around with myself.

But as Morrison-Reed pointed out, “Behind it is a simple truth: in being loved we learn to love. Those who are loved will in turn love others. Those who feel another’s love, a manifestation of God’s infinite love, within themselves will in turn feel so good about themselves, so connected to life and so full of compassion, that they will not be able to help but to spread that love for they will overflow with it.” And this has been born out in my experience. The more I open myself to God, the more patient I notice I am. The more often I stop and notice someone’s pain and open myself to it and sit with them there. The more I touch, and let myself be touched.

This is all I know about God. Perhaps it is all I will ever know. I will surely never know more if I keep boxing God in, keep trying to pin It down to one comfortable, definable, understandable thing. Perhaps this is how Unitarian Universalism will save me. By encouraging me ever forward on my search for truth and meaning instead of settling into a narrow little construct, and by reminding me of my experience of radical love in its first and last principles.

Are you listening?

As one commentor has noticed, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Just over two months, in fact.

The truth is that I had a crises of faith this summer and I really just couldn’t write, especially a blog about religion. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to say. My words vanished. Not just in my blog, but in my journal, in my prayers.

This past spring my cat became indeterminately sick. We went to the vet often. Medications were prescribed. Tests were done. Life with her became fraught, at times unbearable. When she again became sick in June I felt it was a moment of decision.

I prayed for guidance. Actually I begged. I didn’t want to put her down just because she’d become so difficult—and expensive—to live with. I didn’t want to do it for me. But I didn’t want to hang on to her if it was her time, if she was miserable. And so I begged for a sign, just some small sign about what was the right thing to do. I never asked that she be saved. Just that I see what was right for her.

I’m sure you can guess what happened . . .

Absolutely nothing.

Eventually I let her go. I still am wracked with guilt because I can’t be sure that I didn’t do it for myself. And for a while I allowed myself to believe that this is why my beautiful relationship with god had turned to ashes.

For months I shut my heart to god, opening only my mouth to spill colorful invectives. Technically, I guess, I still prayed, but it was a steady stream of every cuss word I knew, and a few I made up that surprised even me.

How could I spend almost a year-and-a-half feeling like I was in relationship with god, however confusing and frustrating it might be, have a personal name for it, craft special prayers for it, feel as if I was indeed getting answers to the questions I floated up into the ether, and then, at the moment I most needed guidance and answers, when another creature’s comfort depended on those answers, why had their been nothing but deadly silence?

It took a long time for me to see that that wasn’t what had broken my heart. What was actually messing me up was not that god had been silent but that I hadn’t expected it to be. See, here’s the thing. Ever since my mystical experience of god, I had been telling myself, and everyone else, that I didn’t believe god messed about in our lives. Some people got cancer, some didn’t. Some prayers appeared to get answers, some did not. This was just Life. God did not cause what happened to us, did not decide who was worthy and who could suck it.

That’s what I said I believed. But apparently I was lying a blue streak to myself. Apparently that’s exactly what I believed, as witnessed in my abject begging to be told what to do.

So not only had I discovered that I believed something I said I didn’t, but on top of that, I’d gotten a big ol’ slap in the face that this whole gig was just a one way conversation (as if I’m the first to bump up against that annoying little conundrum in the relationship with the divine). And if that was true then what about all the answers I thought I’d been getting for the past year-and-a-half? How could I believe those were real anymore?

This, of course, called into question “the call.” The call to ministry I’d felt last spring. How could I be a minister if all I could do was curse at God? How could I talk to people about their relationship with god when I didn’t have one anymore? How could I be a minister when I felt god had abandoned me right on the heels of calling me? I mean WTF!

And that’s why I stopped writing.

But I didn’t stop talking. Eventually the cussing abated. It seemed that even though I doubted seriously that anything was listening, I still needed to talk.

One day, my spiritual director asked me to describe my call, what I thought my ministry was about. That was easy. I’d known all along it was about listening. I help lead small group ministry at my church. Spiritual direction was instantly an attractive option to me. If I actually went to seminary, I’d never be a parish minister but a chaplain.  She suggested that perhaps, when I listen–listen deeply and compassionately–I’m listening to other people who, like me, want to be heard by god.

When we listen to people, is that god listening? When I listen–deeply and compassionately–to people in my small group, am I god listening to them? When the vet listened to me cry over my cat and asked me if I felt that it was time to let go, was that god listening?

I don’t know the answer to any of this. I don’t have any neat and tidy ending for this blog. But here I am. Writing.

Spirit in the Art of Andrew Goldsworthy

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Rowan Leaves

“Movement, change, light growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.”
–Andrew Goldsworthy

I want to write about Andrew Goldsworthy. I’ve written about art in the form of papers for classes or press releases for an art gallery I used to work for, but I’ve never written about art from my heart. I’m not sure it’s possible. Like things of the spirit, language is slickery and elusive when it comes to feelings about art. In fact, I often feel that most professional writing about art seeks to make it more opaque — have you ever read the stuff art galleries send out about their clients? It’s surely meant to create an “in group”, a group “in the know”. But I don’t think this is what art is about. Art is a vehicle to talk about the very things that words cannot define. But I guess I’ll try.

“The reason why the stone is red is its iron content, which is also why our blood is red.”

I discovered Andy Goldsworthy when I took an Art History class on art created after 1940. That particular session was on land art and the professor showed a few slides of AG and mentioned a documentary on his work, Rivers and Tides. I immediately put it in my Netflix queue. Watching it, I felt the same way I felt the first time I saw a Van Gogh. After being raised primarily on realism, I felt like I was seeing something totally new, like my eyes had been switched out and my brain had been switched out and my heart had been switched out and the world was an entirely different place. This was something totally different than I had previously understood art to be, and something deeply in touch with Spirit.

“As with all my work, whether it’s a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I’m trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.”

Goldsworthy is so deeply in tune with landscape, with nature, with season, with the immediate, with the present moment. My personal experience is that I really can only sense or feel god in the present moment. There are certain activities that can get us there. Meditation or prayer. Being in nature. Physical activity. And art. Art takes you there and, in addition I think, art allows you to, like Spirit, create. Time vanishes. Or maybe it’s more like you don’t experience time as one thing, you are not in one place in time but shifting forwards and back and maybe sideways and up and down as well. Something moves through you and it is you making the art and yet you channelling it from something else as well. I feel like I can actually see this experience in Goldsworthy’s art and I feel myself as spectator also step outside of the normal flow of time.Well enough. I’ll just let Goldsworthy speak for himself.

Stone Circle

“A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.”

Japanese Maple

“Ideas must be put to the test. That’s why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I’ve had what I thought were great ideas that just didn’t work.”