At the congregation where I was just before I came to you, I was in the choir with a remarkable director of music. Not only did she possess in abundance the skills needed to rehearse projects and develop talent in the congregation, she had a profound understanding of music and art as spiritual practice. I had sung in choirs my whole life, with excellent directors, but had never understood music as a spiritual practice until I worked with Elizabeth. Of all the remarkable experiences I had in working with her over the years, the one that really stays with me is this: when preparing the choir to get up from their seats to go to the risers, she would say: “What would it look like to the congregation if your trip to the front of the room conveyed not anxiety or urgency, but love for one another? As you approach the chancel, try to show your love for each other – let the congregation see what it looks like to care for one another.” Wise woman. She was not asking us to perform love – she was asking us to enact love, to make love visible.

I believe that our UU congregations generally – and yes, UCE specifically – deeply need to learn to become more loving. Likely this is true in every denomination. I don’t know, having only ever served this one denomination my whole life. But for UUs, I think this need manifests itself in a way peculiar to us. We have such good ideas. Our principles are truly wise and magnificent. So much so that we could spend a lifetime contemplating them, thinking them over, considering their nuances. This we must not do – that is to say, we mustn’t get stuck there. For our principles are only as wise as they help us to become more loving with one another, and to bring that love to the world.

In the not quite two years I have spent with this congregation, I have come to love it, and I have seen that you love one another. While admitting, though, that expressions of love are complex and layered – that it’s possible to convey love through a financial contribution, or food preparation, which expressions of love I see in abundance at UCE, for example – I wonder what would happen if suddenly each congregant here took it upon themselves to show the congregation what love looks like – not to perform love, but to enact it. At choir rehearsals, Elizabeth would say as we learned a particularly challenging piece of music: “our goal here is simply to become more loving,” and everything would suddenly shift, become easier and more beautiful.

Last night at the Meadville-Lombard 175^th anniversary, a wise UCEvian asked me what advice I would have for the congregation, and the question brought me up short. I had been sharing some very pragmatic advice with some folks as I broke news of my pending departure to them, but it sounded a clang in my ears in the context of the wisdom we’d just heard from Rev. Jacqui Lewis, our keynote. She, an African-American Presbyterian minister, had sung the praises of our principles, and had said the world is truly desperate for them – so she had asked us 1) to get messy – to get down in the dirt of the need; 2) to risk – being foolish, learning something, being uncomfortable; and 3) to turn up the volume on our love, because that is what the world needs most of all.

I managed to answer the question put to me last night as we were seated there, but the question wasn’t finished with me, followed me home, kept me awake, was waiting for me as I awoke this morning.

My heartfelt answer boils down to this: love one another as I have loved you. Better yet, love one another as Eileen has loved you. 😊 Truly, Rev. Eileen is the named face of love for so many of us – I have heard on many disparate occasions, when congregants talk about what brought them here, what keeps them here, they say “the way Eileen greeted me in love.” Or picture our teachers, who are so often this face of love for our learners of every age. Whoever it is that represents love to you here at UCE, or anywhere, try to picture in your mind’s eye quite specifically what that abundant, extravagant love looks like. Then go and do likewise. All our wonderful lifespan religious education curricula will be enriched by this love, and smart as they are, they are nowhere without it.

I have loved this congregation, loved getting to know you, loved serving you. Please know that I will miss you, and think of you often and warmly – and that I will take your love with me as I go, and leave mine behind for you here. Thank you for who you will always be to me. Blessed be.

 

Maybe you’ll recall from my newsletter post last month that,
following the February presentation of my report monitoring
lifespan learning under policy governance at UCE, our board
president, Jeanne Kerl, asked me to craft three posts from
that report. This is the second in that series. According to
End 2, as presented in our governance document: in our
multigenerational religious community, we foster intellectual
excitement, lifelong learning, truth seeking, and respect for
our traditions of reason and faith. This is what our congregation has said it wants for our congregants of every age. As I said last month, multigenerational community is about more than lifelong learning – i.e., an individual’s serial learning from birth through death. It is also about intergenerational learning, or collaborative learning across generations. I’d like to address my post today to the growth I see in this arena for our congregation – and I especially want to congratulate our adult members for the evolution I see in their thinking and their embrace of a new way of being in our community.

When I first came on board as your Director of Lifespan Religious Education, I learned that I would be staff lead for three organizations: the Children and Youth Program Team, the Learning Associates (who develop and participate in our Tuesday Night Adult RE series), and the Lifespan Learning Council. I also learned that our intergenerational events (Bike the Ridge, Ornament Sunday, Night of the Arts, etc.) were all coordinated by one member of the Children and Youth Program Team, called the intergenerational events liaison (thank you, Jessica Presto!), that the Children and Youth Program were highly engaged and super busy, and that the Lifespan Learning Council didn’t yet have a clearly defined role. Not too far into my first year, I learned from conversations with colleagues at other institutions that the role undertaken by our intergen events coordinator was usually handled by a team – and indeed, Jessica, though highly engaged and organized, was starting to look a little crispy around the edges. One thing I know from long experience: congregations should work hard not to burn out our effective and engaged volunteer leaders.

So as it came time for the Lifespan Learning Council to consider our long-range goals, I asked our members (most of whom are liaisons to other church organizations) whether they would take on the role of heading up our intergenerational events. We had a council retreat where we considered this shift in mission. We tried on some ideas about what it might look like. We brought on some new council members, to represent arts and sciences programming and denominational affairs. We developed ideas for some new programming. Then over the summer, I asked council members to volunteer to take lead on at least one intergenerational event over the course of the new church year, and to assist on another. Though we’re only in our first year and I see opportunities for growth yet, I perceive this transition to have been a great success!

Pi Day was one of our new initiatives last year, and we re-offered it this year. Many thanks to Robb Geiger, our science liaison, for his enthusiasm in helping to dream up what the event might look like, to Jim Strickler for taking lead on the Pi Day Pizza Bar fundraiser for Boston Bound thisyear , and to our able team of volunteers who staffed eight stations for the evening. Robb also took lead on a new event this year, the Worship Arts Jam, which like Pi Day this year, drew a good crowd even in a blizzard. Bodhi Day was a new initative this year – many thanks to Jim Strickler for taking lead in organizing and emceeing this event, to Sue Larson for putting together a team of youth to perform a Jataka Tale about one of the Buddha’s past lives, Great Joy the Ox, and to Sensei Tricia Teeter for leading us in a loving-kindness chant. Heartfelt thanks go to Jean Durkin, our arts liaison, who made it a priority to understudy Johna Van Dyke and Kay Gibbs-Novy on the pageant team, and Johna and Will Van Dyke on the Night of the Arts team, to help ensure ongoing stability for these beloved events – and who also recently co-led our 5^th Sunday Service Day canvas bag craft to benefit Niles Township Food Pantry. Many thanks also go to Rachelle Brooks and daughter Margot Audenard, who volunteered to lead three big events (!) this year: Ornament Sunday, Easter Brunch, and the Church Picnic (not to mention their stellar teamwork for the Serendipity Auction). Thanks also to Forum liaison Dick Whitaker for his leadership and superb storytelling for our Darwin Day Celebration, and to Learning Associates Chair Dan Solomon and wife Lisa Solomon for leading our Learning Seder.

I know that many congregants will likely see this list of events as recreational – and they are! It’s a great big list of fun times! But these are also some of the best opportunities we have as a congregation for multigenerational learning – events that inspire intellectual excitement, lifelong learning, truth-seeking, and respect for our traditions of reason and faith. I even notice that our Forum organizers (thank you, Julia Takarada and Jim Kepler!) have taken some hints from our intergen programming, offering sessions on a Slice of Pi and Passover Renewal, for example. It is vitally important that adults in our congregation take responsibility for sharing and transmitting UU culture, learning, and identity formation among congregants of all ages. This is, I believe, what multigenerational learning looks like, and I am proud to work alongside of these church leaders – as well as our ministers and worship associates in creating all-ages worship – in leading this vitally important programming.

 

 

April 19, 2019

As I’ve found to be the case elsewhere, in speaking with UCEvians
during my time so far here, I’ve learned that familiarity with core congregational documents varies widely. I’m a good example: while it is actually my job to know about policies and protocols, I have been by necessity learning about them over time – where to find them, what exactly they say, and how to implement them. As we engage in our pledge drive this month, I thought it might be appropriate to share here some of what I’ve been coming to understand about our Ends Statements (https://ucevanston.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/endstatements.pdf; for general information about principles of policy governance, under which UCE operates, I recommend this UUA site: https://www.uua.org/leadership/learning-center/governance/policybased/articles/63172.shtml).

Specifically, I’ve thinking deeply about the part of our ends statement laid to the charge of our Lifespan Learning Council:

In our multigenerational community . . . We foster intellectual excitement, lifelong learning, truth seeking, and respect for our traditions of reason and faith.

As staff lead for this council, it falls to me to write an annual monitoring report on our congregation’s compliance with this particular end. As I’ve been urged by Jeanne Kerl, our beloved board president, to write three newsletter contributions drawing on my most recent Ends Monitoring Report for End 2, I think it makes sense to begin with my interpretation of this assigned end – a required component of my annual report. I’ve run this past our coordinator for the Learning Associates who put together our Tuesday Night Adult RE Series, Dan Solomon, and our chair for the Children & Youth Program Team, Sue Larson, and they have both reassured me that this is indeed what we intend to be about in our work together:

When we say we are a multigenerational community, it means we seek to be in relationship and build community across the lifespan. It means we seek connection and belonging in a community where people of every age are in conversation with one another, in respectful, age-appropriate ways, about our diverse life and spiritual journeys. And it means that our congregation offers events and other opportunities specifically designed to foster such multigenerational conversations. Multigenerational community is about more than lifelong learning – i.e., an individual’s serial learning from birth through death. It is also about lifespan learning, or collaborative learning across generations.

When we say we foster intellectual excitement, it means we seek to nurture eagerness for understanding. Understanding is about far more than information or content delivery; it involves integration of new knowledge with prior learning, even sometimes re-learning what we have misunderstood or understood incompletely. In order to foster excitement, or eagerness to learn, we seek to help learners retain or rediscover their sense of awe and wonder in the everyday, imminent miracles of the world and universe, as well as their joy in discovery.

When we say we foster lifelong learning, it means we seek to nurture and sustain development of spiritual practices and habits of mind that will support the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom throughout the lifespan.

When we say we foster truth seeking, it means we seek to nurture and sustain community members of every age in habits of both perspective-taking and critical thinking that will help them weigh varying viewpoints and come to complex truths that resonate in mind, body, and spirit.

When we say we foster respect for our traditions of reason and faith, it means we seek to offer members of every age opportunities to encounter bodies of knowledge about our denominational principles and sources, the history of our prophetic thinkers, and the covenants and traditions of our congregational community. It also means we seek to honor logical truth, the truth of our observations, and the truth of our inward experiences and convictions, making room for all of these facets in individual and congregational life.

With regard to how our ends statements are mapped in our bylaws onto our congregational councils and their respective staff leads, let us be thoughtful about how our religious education curricula and practices are holistically understood across the span of our ends statements. Let us take care that our religious education programs are creating joy and wonder through music and the arts; that they are building beloved community through inclusive welcome, compassion, care, generosity, and forgiveness; that they are developing relationships that open us to our congregation, community, and world; and that they support us in acting for peace and justice through study, advocacy, and outreach. Let us foster thoroughgoing collaboration across councils, and among staff leads, in order for excellence in religious education to be fostered in multigenerational community. Let us bring one another into greater understanding that the whole community is necessary to fostering lifespan religious education, and that our truest curriculum resides in everything we do here.

I hope it’s helpful for folks to see my articulated understanding of the work of religious education and what it entails here at UCE. My thought is that this interpretation should function sort of like a congregational philosophy of teaching. In the last paragraph directly above, I am trying to caution us against a pitfall that I have seen too clearly in my former profession as a an academic: turfiness. I think of the issue of turf as being highly relevant not only to our pledge drive, but also to covenantal relationships within our beloved community. It is so important that we learn not to defend our turf, but to share it, and share it, and share it, until it becomes unrecognizable as turf at all, and becomes something more like the shared ground of our being. Religious Education cannot succeed if Worship does not, if Social Justice does not, if Stewardship and Membership do not. I would also venture to say that none of these can succeed without Lifespan Learning. We are all in this together, beloveds. Moreover, our young people are watching us. They are learning all the time about what it means to be a UU in how we treat one another. They are never not learning this from us. Indeed, we are all of us always learning this from one another. Let us take care, dear ones. Let us, most of all – whatever our worries or disagreements – show one another loving kindness. When we forget, let us begin again. This is how we nurture the human spirit for a world made whole. Let it begin with me.

© March 15, 2019

Literal trigger warning. I’m going to be talking about guns here. Please take care before proceeding, or as you proceed, to read this.

As I write, it has been 22 years since Margie and I had our first date on Valentine’s Day, 12 since we had our first public ceremony, and 4 since we were legally wed.

It has also been 1 year since the Parkland shooting, which took the lives of seventeen students and staff members, and 11 years since the NIU shooting, which took the lives of six students, including the shooter.

My partner, who was at work on the NIU campus that day eleven years ago, reminds me that celebrating love on Valentine’s Day is a complicated task when memorializing hard things, such as a terrible, violent trauma. Complicated but important.

As I ponder these events, and face my own anger and fear related to them, I’ve found myself thinking about other shootings. I think about the Tennessee Valley UU Church, where a shooter in 2008 opened fire on a congregation watching a chorus of children – and about longtime member and usher, 60-year-old Greg McKendry, who stepped in front of the bullets to protect others from harm, and church members John Bohstedt, Robert Birdwell, Arthur Bolds, and Terry Uselton, and visitor Jamie Parkey, who intervened to restrain the shooter. These people risked – and in McKendry’s case, gave – their lives in service to their beloved community.

I also find myself thinking about Wendi Winters, a Unitarian Universalist who worked as a reporter at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, MD. Even when she was alive, Wendi was a defender of our faith.  As a newspaper reporter, she stood for the search for truth.  She also stood for democracy – she was such a defender of democracy that she kept her local representatives on speed dial. On that day in June of last year when a shooter showed up at her newspaper’s office, Wendi stood between the shooter and her fellow reporters. She had just recently been to a training at her UU church about what to do in the event of a shooting, so she knew that the first choice is to run, and then to hide, and then, only if absolutely necessary, to fight. She chose to fight. She ran toward the shooter, yelling at him to get out, throwing a trash can and a recycle bin at him. She gave her fellow reporters time to run. She saved their lives. And she stood up for our faith – for the inherent worth and dignity of every person. She gave her own life to save the lives of others around her. There were too many people at Wendi Winters’ memorial service for it to be held at her UU church – they had to hold it at the much larger Annapolis Creative Arts Center. There were nearly 900 people there. They were there to bear witness to Wendi’s courage, and her love.

And I think about the NIU campus police and others, who rushed toward the danger at Cole Hall eleven years ago, and the scene they encountered when they arrived. And the loving courage it took as NIU responded to the tragedy there – the phone calls and vigils and counseling and memorializing and the massive work of community it took to respond. And about the fact that Mary Kay Mace still memorializes her fallen daughter, Ryanne, by working closely with the Brady Campaign and Everytown and speaking out publicly to prevent gun violence, as some of us from UCE saw her do last year in Springfield on Lobby Day. And I think about the Parkland Students who, in their grief and terror, created the March for Our Lives, and who for Valentine’s Day this year unveiled a ballot initiative to ban the sale of assault weapons. These efforts, too, are courageous love.

As you likely know, since Rev. Julie Taylor’s visit here in July, efforts have been underway to update UCE’s safety protocols. Recently some of our staff and congregants attended a training at another congregation led by Evanston Police, and plans are in the works for training here at UCE as well. In the meantime, I hope we all remember what my son-in-law – who was also on the NIU campus on that day eleven years ago – reminded me of in remembering these events this year: the best time to stop a mass shooting is before it happens. May we elect and support legislators willing to do the crucial work of gun violence prevention. May we support campaigns like Brady and Everytown and Moms Demand Action and Courage to Fight and Americans for Responsible Solutions, March for Our Lives, and the Peace Warriors here in Chicago, who help us understand how to move forward. And may we learn to love one another so courageously that we can stop a bullet before it ever leaves the gun.

 

 

© February 15, 2019

Poet Mary Oliver died yesterday. This leaves a hole in my heart that I picture as leaf-shaped.

I didn’t grow up knowing her writing. At Virginia Commonwealth University, I had a dear faculty colleague who loved her, and would post her poetry at regular intervals – usually as a reflection on her own life or the life of our culture, but always for me it was also a gift to me – it often felt like Oliver, or my friend, were speaking directly to me. Bonnie would post the scrap from an Oliver poem and, because of my respect and love for Bonnie and a desire to see things the way she saw them, I would track down, like a detective, the full verse, and let it minister to me the way it had to her.

. . . like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks.

* * *

. . . we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Slowly.

* * *

. . . the black bells, the leaves; there is this happy tongue.

* * *

. . . a pack as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it on one shoulder.

Though Oliver is greatly beloved among UUs, her poetry never reached me that way; it took this steady love from a friend – of Oliver and of me – for it to sink in.

Because of Bonnie, I got at 43 the poem I needed at 24, about saving the only life I could save – and though it arrived decades too late, it was also right on time. Oliver also asked of herself, and me, a crucial question:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The question, I remember, made me anxious — but I eventually answered with one of the favorite-ever pieces of my own writing:

Lifetime To Do List:

– Love Passionately
– Help Someone Else Make It
– Grow Something
– Help Right an Injustice
– Make Something Beautiful
– Reflect and Center
– Choose Happiness
– Repeat

I was a college professor then – a job and a role I loved for a time, but one whose culture pulled me in a million ways off course from this simple list. The academy will never tell you it’s time to go home, you’ve done enough, and I learned over time that the part of the job I had loved imagining myself doing, I would never be permitted to do, and that the part that I had done and loved doing, I could do elsewhere, with greater ease and honesty. I love the written word and feel the debt I owe to it – but before one can celebrate letters at the university, it seems there are myriad hoops to jump through, only some of which I am fit for, and some of which are not fit for me. And so I gave up on teaching literature to become a catcher in the rye, which I have, in fact, always been.

This new chapter has been one of the great gifts of my life – and Bonnie, and Mary Oliver, and all of you have helped me to be ready to receive it. Whatever may come next for me in this wild and precious life, I am grateful to have landed for a time among you. I feel an answer to my calling, and relish a kind of work that uses all my muscles for such worthy ends.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay
in this world.

May I be enough.

 

 

© January 18, 2019

I grew up attentive to my dreams. This was one of the great gifts from my mother. She helped me learn not only to remember, and contemplate, and seek to understand my dreams, but also to transform them. When I had a nightmare, which was often enough, I would pad into my parents’ room and wake her – always my mom – and she would make room in the bed for me and hold me and ask me all about it, and listen for as long as I needed to talk through it. Then – most amazing thing – she would invite me to rewrite the ending, the scary part that had awakened me. “How could you make this a happier dream?” she’d ask. “What might go differently?” And she would leave it to my creativity and inner wisdom, and I would shape a new ending, and feel so much better. And then she’d send me back to bed.

In one recurring nightmare, I would fall from a great height to my death – a la Wiley Coyote – and wake up partway down. In the interactions with my mom that followed, I would save myself from falling by flying. This dream-and-revision sequence apparently happened often enough that one night Mom – maybe out of sleep deprivation – asked me: do you think you could change this dream while you’re in it? And, as it turned out, I could. The next time I had this dream, I realized I was dreaming, and I saved myself by flying, and it was amazing. This was how I learned that I could have flying dreams – which are awesome. It was also my first experience with lucid dreaming, which can be trickier. I learned that lucidity was relative, and knowing that I was dreaming while I was dreaming didn’t necessarily lead either to waking or to happier dreams, and that dreaming that I was awake when I wasn’t was disorienting and often upsetting. I liked it better when I had a firmer grasp on waking reality.

As a student of my own dreams through the chapters of my life, I learned to be attentive to theories of dream interpretation and the psychology and physiology of dreaming. This was an interest that dovetailed nicely with my study of literature – both directly, in that the study of symbols in dreams and literature often overlap almost completely, even when an author hasn’t consciously intended this, and indirectly, in that I’ve learned to see the act of writing as a dream, or trance state for the author, even when the author is myself. My mother’s wisdom is very present for me here. I can change the ending. I can help myself to feel better, when that’s what’s needed.

But what if that’s not what’s needed? I think of my dreams as a place where I work through life challenges at a symbolic and mostly unconscious level. Mostly I don’t remember my dreams, or I recall them fleetingly upon waking. If I don’t rehearse the dream memory, it quickly slips away to nothingness. But when a dream awakens me, I am attentive to it in the old way, as I figure it means there’s some part of the challenge that requires my waking, conscious attention.

In grad school, a beloved professor once asked me: “You know that theory of dreaming where everyone in the dream represents some aspect of yourself?” When I acknowledged I’d never heard of it, she said, “Well, I hate that theory.” Which at the time made me laugh and laugh. But I learned to apply this theory to the interpretation of not only dreams, but also literature, especially fiction, in helpful ways — and to other “texts” as well. Some years ago, though, I had a jolt when I realized the theory might also apply to non-fiction writing . . . especially to my own non-fiction writing. Indeed, the understanding slowly dawned on me that the theory might just apply to life itself, to reality as we know it. That maybe, in our encounters in this life with other people and their stories, we might be trying them on, as it were – seeing to what extent their perspectives jibe with our own, determining to what degree they represent us, connect to us.

It’s been some years – I can’t say exactly how many – since I first encountered José y Maria, the political cartoon by Everett Patterson shown above. It startled me today to see that it was published back in 2014, well before the era of the current occupant. I believe it came to me in my Facebook feed. My recollection is that it didn’t come with commentary, pre-digested – that it took awhile for me to really begin to see it. An image rich with visual detail, a sort of dreamscape, the parts of it revealed themselves to me slowly. Minutes passed before I really understood that I was seeing a representation of the holy family. And when the epiphany came, I also felt the warm wash of shame creep over me. Patterson had caught me, somehow; I, who often profess a philosophy of treating anyone we meet as if they might be the Messiah, I was caught unawares. I hadn’t seen them. I had mistaken them. I had failed to see our connection.

Beloveds, as we celebrate this holiday season together and look for the returning light, let us also honor our dreams, and all that the darkness holds for us. Like seeds in the earth, we return to the mysteries of darkness in order to rest, renew, and ready ourselves to spring forth once again. As we do so, may we learn to see in new ways, and especially to see one another and the gifts that each of us brings just in who we are, and in how we are connected. Blessed be.

 

 

© December 21, 2018

Spoils is an interesting term of art. As a plural noun (as opposed to a conjugated verb),
its synonyms resonate – plunder, loot, swag, haul, pickings, booty, reward. The last, reward, is particularly revealing, as it shows a vested relationship hidden by the other terms – a payor and a payee, an employer and employee – as does another synonym: wages. On whose behalf am I seeking spoils? An admiral? A pirate ship captain? A king? Who is my wage-payor? And what’s my cut?

I’ve been mulling on this parcel of terms lately as indicative of the state of things in an important story about my ancestry. In many textbook stories about the Mayflower settlement at Plymouth, it’s related that in early excursions into their new environment, the colonists “found corn.” What is apparently often left out is that they found caches of dried corn buried in the ground. That is, they found stores of the harvested corn of the Wampanoag people who lived there. They found it and took it. They were doubtless hungry, their stores diminished after three months at sea, and they needed to figure out how to survive, short-term and longer-term. Even so, they found what belonged to others, and they took it for themselves. Spoils. Loot. Wages.

Not particularly surprising, really, given the whole state of things for these immigrants. They were coming to a land widely understood by Europeans to be theirs for the taking. England was relatively new to “New World” colonization – France and Portugal and, especially, Spain had been in it for longer. What all of these European cultures had in common before coming to the Americas, though, was an understanding of advancing “civilization” through empire – that is, of the expansion of culture across territory, generally through violence or the threat of it. This was, and remains, part of the Old World paradigm. Take control of what isn’t yours and use it for your own ends. Plant your flag.

It doesn’t take much study of the mapping of “civilization” to realize that part of what is meant by “civilization” is the conquering of other people and the expansion of territory. Disheartening, but there it is. Fundamental to my existence here in Illinois in the 21st Century is a cultural mandate to take property and expand territory. Draw lines, hold turf, keep us in and others out. I am reminded that in his Ted Talk — https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_huey — photojournalist Aaron Huey explains that the Lakota word for a person of European ancestry translates to “he who takes the best meat.” Thinking about suburban life in this context very much helps me to understand it. We are inheritors of this terrible, largely unspoken expectation – that we are the rightful possessors of whatever we can get. That other people’s land and labor somehow belong to us, if we can take it.

This month, as we consider together the theme of Memory, as the Sankofa bird asks us to “go back and get it,” as we share our plate with the UU Service Committee, our young people have studied some disparate cultures – Haitian, African-American, Honduran emigrant. The UUSC does its important work in many places throughout the world – but what most of them share is a history of being at the effect of European colonization. No matter what we may say, or even truly aspire to, historically and fundamentally, white folks don’t really believe in a level playing field. If we did, schools in the U.S., for example, would be consistently strong, regardless of location. We may complain bitterly about local property taxes, but we tolerate them, because they help keep our wealth local and largely white, and they preserve educational advantage for our own children. To name one of myriad examples of this cultural mindset. Or consider the legal understanding of corporations as persons. Or the planting of the American flag on the moon. Or the systematic destruction of unions. Or the endless series of voter suppression tactics. Illustrations are truly everywhere, once we are woke enough to look.

Still, it continues to surprise us when those most at the effect of these imperial cultural mandates complain, or resist, or even try to flee. This is how a Black Lives Matter protest or a Honduran caravan traveling through Mexico become news stories. This is how there is conflict around the rights of these people to self-actualize, to plea for asylum or for their right to life. Their truths should be self-evident – but our imperial paradigm blinds us to the righteousness of their causes. Even those of us who feel in our bones the call to justice on their behalf are too often stymied by barriers set in place – some by others long ago, some of our own making and choosing.

As we launch Guest At Your Table this Sunday, and begin to prepare our feasts of Thanksgiving for all that we have, as we enter the season of giving, let us remember – especially those of us of European ancestry, but, truly, all of us – to resist the imperial mandate, to loosen our hold on the wages of empire. Colonization is our common heritage, but it need not be our destiny. Consumption is not itself a good. Keeping this little box on our table can help us to become mindful of our complicity in systems of oppression, yes – and yes, this can be uncomfortable. But if we are mindful of the harms these systems bring to us, as well as to others, it may help us to remember what we have lost and bring us back into the wealth of keeping our wants few, and the abundant love of right relationship. May it be so. May we make it so.

When I was a child, I had a tree friend. She was a great, grand
willow who grew on the west bank of the Des Plaines River in Libertyville, where I grew up. Someone, I’m not sure who, showed me to her – at that time you had to crawl through the hole in a tall chain-link fence that stood around a playground there near the river, near the golf course, then walk through some tall grass, where there might be snakes, to get to the woods near the river. None of this took very long – from the playground, once I was there, it took maybe three minutes to get to her. It took maybe ten or fifteen minutes to walk to the playground from my house, though often I biked, so it was quicker. I went with my friends to see her at first – we’d sit together in the place where her four great limbs, one of them already fallen, came together. We’d sit astride sometimes, and sometimes we would make a brief motion towards climbing one of her limbs, but mostly this seemed like trouble, compared with just sitting in her crook, talking about whatever came to mind. It was good, there in her crook. It was safe. She was a secret we knew about and shared with one another – the way the sunlight sifted through her branches, which drooped low to the ground and formed a canopy around us, hiding us from any who might pass by, though no one did.

Some of these friends moved away in time, and others of us grew apart a bit over the years, but I returned to visit my willow friend again and again. I was steadfast. I needed her, you see. Especially when my family was fighting, which happened a lot – especially when my parents were fighting – I would flee the house as soon as I could ask permission – and maybe sometimes without asking – and leave its toxic energy behind me. I would travel the four blocks – two long, two short – to the park, drop my bike near the fence, and slip out to her. She was steadfast, too, even more than I was. She was always there for me. Always.

Occasionally there was evidence that others had visited her. I remember the shock of finding some sawn wood planks and plywood in a tree nearby, thinking, oh no! Who would I run into now when I came? But I needn’t have worried. Their fort idea was a passing fancy – whereas my love for Willow was strong, enduring, as she was. I brought a boy there once to kiss – we sat on the cement arch over the water pipe that spilled out under her branches. I liked this boy so much that I shared this sacred place with him, and he was worthy of it, though it turned out kissing didn’t really work for us, as he told me quietly there that he thought he liked boys better than girls, somehow not a surprise to me. She was a safe space for such confessions. She held our confidences.

I visited her less frequently as I grew up, but still, I would visit. Even after my parents moved, while I was in college, when I returned home, I would go and see her. Even after I moved away, even after my parents’ passing, even during my years in Virginia, I would make not quite an annual visit to her. It’s been a few years now – it’s time to go again. Over the years she has changed remarkably. I think I was still in high school when I found I could no longer sit in her crook – a dense spring of suckers there prevented it, foretelling what was to come.  Maybe ten years ago I returned to find she had come apart at the crook, her massive limbs now lying along the ground, the suckers springing up everywhere from her body. She is still, fiercely, growing. She is enjoying what I think of as a very graceful decline. I am not at all alarmed by the state of her – only curious to see her next incarnation.

I am unutterably grateful for her existence. She has been truly one of the great gifts of my life – an accident, a bit of grace, this friend. She has thrived there in the dirty waters of the Des Plaines and had a full life, helping to purify the water, offering habitat and comfort to many creatures, myself among them. She has taught me about myself again and again. As our conversation at church has turned to sanctuary this month, my thoughts are often with her. I especially think about how fortunate I have been to know her – how unusual it might be these days for parents to send their kids even four blocks away unsupervised, how not every child is fortunate to live near greenspace by a river, or greenspace anywhere, how kids in our time might not know to befriend trees. How I might have been an unusual kid, even then. I also think about what I owe her, and how I might pay it back by being a friend to her habitat. As some of us have held a conversation about an imaginative playscape for the southeast church garden, I’ve considered the kid I was, and how I’d like to help other young people access the sort of sanctuary I’ve had in nature my whole life, thanks to my tree friend. Even when I am not with her, she is with me, in me, still showing me glimpses of sunlight through her branches. She restores my soul.

 

© October 18, 2018

“Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can!” Maude, Harold and Maude

 

I didn’t really want to go to college. Though I was in moments excited, I was more often anxious and cranky about it. I didn’t feel ready. I remember saying this with clarity to my folks. I had settled on University of Illinois in Champaign because it was where my sister had gone – I had visited her at school and spent some time on campus, so I could imagine myself in that place. But I wasn’t certain about my major in music education – I had a pretty voice, but smallish, and it hadn’t matured yet, and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to teach, let alone conduct a choir. I’d been in choirs all my life, so I knew what that was like – but though I loved being a chorister, I didn’t feel at all excited about directing. Music generally made me happy, and I was good enough at it that it could get me into college, so I went with it – but I sort of knew going in that I was winging it. My parents, though, said they believed in me and that I could do this hard thing, that I belonged at college.

My mom had encouraged me, as a senior in high school, to look at other institutions, and I had a bit. I was mostly drawn to smaller, four-year schools, but didn’t think we could manage the cost. I had watched my closest high school friends graduate the year prior, going to various schools across the country, so it was like I’d had an extra year to contemplate this transition. But my friends were also calling me at odd hours of the night, often drunk and homesick, so it wasn’t like college seemed like this magical place – or at least not magically good.

My old high school beau and I had broken it off when he’d left for college at U of I, and this was devastating to me. Then we patched things up occasionally over the course of his first year, and again over the summer. Since I would be following him to school in the fall, I began to think toward the end of summer that things were starting to look up – like maybe, if I followed closely in my sister’s footsteps and stayed in my boyfriend’s shadow, I could maybe do this college thing. Maybe you can guess what happened next.

The thing is, I wasn’t wrong to be anxious. I could sense that big change was coming. Though I couldn’t quite imagine it, I knew life would be different on the other side – and given that I had just finally gotten things, by the latter part of my high school career, sort of the way I wanted them, I resented that time was moving on and really forcing me, one way or another, to take new steps.

So, yeah, I got to college, and within a couple of weeks, my boyfriend broke up with me. I was a mess. I decided to rush, and while I’m sure many folks have had a very positive experience in Greek life, I can say with clarity now that I was not a good fit for it. I wish someone had sat me down and said, really? This is what you want? I was looking for instant family, and this was what was promised, and I did meet some wonderful people – but mostly, relationships at the sorority house were about an inch deep, especially during pledge year – not at all what I needed. I knew I’d made a misstep, though it took me a couple of years to correct it. I was soon in a deep depression – or rather, deeper, as I came to understand over time that I had actually been depressed for years. I stopped going to classes and, as you might imagine, this didn’t really help matters. My low point came when I spent a week in my dorm room, leaving only to go to the bathroom, contemplating the end of my life. I remember we were selling M&Ms as a fundraiser for my new sorority pledge class, and I had a case of them in my room – so this is what I ate for the week. You know, I liked M&Ms pretty well and all, but a solid week of them is too much for anyone. And then, I ran out of M&Ms.

That was a hard note, but there it was. Once again, change had arrived, like it or not, and fight it though I might, I was going to have to either lay down and die or take new steps. You know, I didn’t want to. But I was hungry. So I went to the dining hall.

It’s funny to me that, looking back now, I don’t remember what I ate, but I do remember sitting down at a table where I sort of vaguely recognized some people from my dorm floor. And I remember there was a girl there who lived across the hall from me who introduced herself as Jenny Nelson. Jenny was offering a running monologue on how messed up her week had been. She was aggravated, and loud, and wicked funny. I remember a laugh sort of tore out of me, all unbidden, in response to something Jenny said, and she looked at me with interest – like, here is someone who gets me. And I knew I had made my first real college friend.

I’d like to be able to report that things were easy after that, that life just worked itself out, but this isn’t the case. I had dug myself into a hole that I now had to climb out of. I had to track down professors, make apologies, start again. I had outstanding bills, and check overdrafts, and I had to make it right with my bank and my parents. I had a case of M&Ms to pay for. But things did, slowly, get better. In addition to finding my new friend Jenny, I found a therapist. I got into a show, where I made new friends – still today some of the best friends of my life. I failed a class for the first time ever, but I learned that I could survive a failed class. And I didn’t fail everything. I aced my poetry class and realized that I’d known for some time that I could write as well as sing. I began to contemplate a change of major. And little by little, I learned that I could do hard things, that I didn’t need my ex-boyfriend to define me, that I could have my own adventure, that I belonged at college.

I fought change, but it came all the same. And ultimately, I was changed. I chose change. And I was better for it.

Change can be a chaotic teacher. Sometimes we seek it, to be sure – but often, change finds us. Sometimes it shows up like a neighbor, there ostensibly for a cup of sugar, who we find ourself inviting in, who winds up at our kitchen table, telling us about their life. Maybe we are aggravated at first, pressed for time, unbelieving at the demands of hospitality. But then, if we quiet our minds and listen, maybe we find ourselves engaged, involved, befriended. Unitarian Universalists are often accustomed to seeking change or, more challenging still, to making change – which may, over time, reinforce with us the notion that we are the author of change, in charge of where it’s headed. This is much to the good, of course. All around us we see the need for change – unkindnesses or inequities that cry out for change – and it’s important that we understand ourselves as empowered to seek it or help make it. But I think it helps when we also understand that change happens – that it is its own imperative force in the universe – that it shows up anywhere, everywhere, often unannounced, often making demands all its own. When we are not the author of change, but its reader, its audience, maybe it’s useful to understand that our power lies in how we respond. Will we rise to meet it? Will we let go and laugh? Will we own our mistakes, make amends, make new friends, find new ways of being? These are small decisions, and there’s a humility in them, but they are not less important for that. They can help us to find our resiliency. They can help us to live, and learn, and keep growing.

 

© September 20, 2018

A quiet but heartfelt thanks here to all of you who have reached out to me so generously this week to say you were touched by my sermon last Sunday about rebuilding our denomination’s broken bridge between youth and adult engagement in the community of our faith. It’s been heartening to say the least – perhaps most of all when the message I received from some consisted of just two small words: “I’m in!”

I wanted to share with you that our Young Adult Covenant Group met for the first time this past Monday, and they are off to a very auspicious start. If you are between the ages of 18 and 35 and would like to be part of this group, please drop me an email (msheldenuce@gmail.com) and I’ll connect you. While some of our covenanters have been with us for some time, many are new to our congregation — I can’t wait for you to meet them.

There is a great deal of work already on our plate for the Lifespan Learning Council and for our Children & Youth Program Team, but I cannot help but think this should be within the scope of our mission, both congregationally and denominationally. The problem is, as I’ve said, both large and complex, so perhaps a slow launch is best. But look for me in the coming months to be reaching in to our community to bring people into conversation about how we might do useful work together in bridgebuilding. I have some ideas brewing, and I want to hear yours as well, along with the history of what’s been tried before, and what the sense of need might be here and now. Let’s put our heads together to figure out what it will take to get to ten lilypads.

In the meantime (where we actually live), below are some of the sources referenced in my sermon, along with some resources for bridgers. If you missed my sermon on Sunday and want to know what the fuss is about, it will eventually be posted as a video (though I shudder to think of it) – or if you’d like to read it without all the blubbery mess, just drop me an email (msheldenuce@gmail.com) and I’ll send it along to you. And thank you for thinking about what it will take to actually bridge our UU young people.

Sources:

Kate Tweedie Ersley, Full Circle: Fifteen Ways to Grow Lifelong UUs, UUA, 2004: https://www.uuabookstore.org/Full-Circle-P16733.aspx  I have asked Margaret Shaklee to stock this at the Book H as well.

Emily Parker, “Beyond the Bridge: A Study of Unitarian Universalist Emerging Adults,” Juniata College Department of Religious Studies, Senior Project, 2018: https://sites.google.com/view/pbsp

Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” Pew Forum, 2015: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/

Resources:

Blue Boat Blog for Youth and Young Adult Ministries: https://www.uua.org/blueboat

Campus UUs Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CampusUUs

Church of the Larger Fellowship: A Congregation Without Walls: https://www.questformeaning.org/clfuu/

UUA Hub Map for Young Adult and Campus Ministries: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?ll=26.35232093157663%2C-93.72255200000006&msa=0&z=3&mid=1uDIuwXAUt0ja7sHp4a2SaRoLnuo

Unitarian Universalist Association College and University Campus Ministry resources: https://www.uua.org/college

Unitarian Universalist Association Young Adult Ministry resources: https://www.uua.org/young-adults

 

© August 16, 2018