Occam's Razor

The religion of the 21st century?

I am back in Northern Virginia after having spent nearly a week in Salt Lake City attending the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I am glad I went. Never have I packed so much learning and fellowship into so short a time a time. I probably cannot afford to attend every year, but I suspect I will be back periodically.

One recurring theme I heard during my five days was that Unitarian Universalism (UUism) might be the religion of the 21^st century. UUism is hardly new. The Unitarian aspects of the faith go back to the Apostic Age of Christianity. Unitarians asserted that there was only one God, rather than God manifested in a Trinity. While I do not think UUism is very likely to be the major growth faith of the 21^st century, its time could finally be right to grow rapidly here in the United States. UUs comprise no more than half a million people, making us a minor religion. However, the United States is becoming more educated and increasingly secular. For those secular Americans who yearn for a sense of community (which is increasingly hard to find in our wired and impersonal world) and yet need to embrace a faith, UUism may be an answer.

For many, you cannot be both rational and have faith. UUs overall are a very left brained lot, but most are still comfortable with the notion of faith, and do not necessarily see a conflict between the two. Reason and science do not answer all questions. Science will probably never fully reveal our universe, simply because there are realms too small or too large for us to plumb.

Emotion is certainly part of being a human. Faith may also be hardwired into us. Faith does not necessarily have to be about accepting whole cloth teachings passed down by a particular religion. As the Rev. Galen Guengerich pointed out at his excellent seminar I attended called “Theology for a Secular Age”, one does not have to move from belief to an understanding of reality based on that belief. Rather it can work the other way around. We can learn a lot about the world through education and experience and then decide what we want to believe. This is the essence of UUism. With no creed to anchor the faith, the faith we find is revealed increasingly to us individually over time as we learn and as science reveals. Faith becomes a journey of the soul, rather than an anchor for a soul.

Some months back, I railed about the failure of Objectivism as manifested in the economic policies of libertarians like Alan Greenspan. Objectivism is an allegedly rational philosophy that glorifies individuality and always puts “me first”. UUs understand that the truth of its opposite: all things are interconnected. It is one of our principles and purposes. As Rev. Guengerich pointed out, we are all utterly dependent on each other. You would not long survive if you could not drink water or eat the food provided by nature. Those who try to glorify utter independence and disconnect themselves from society grow up abnormal. Theodore Kaczynski, the Unibomber who will spend the rest of his life in a Supermax prison, shows how twisted and destructive a human can become trying to deny this reality. Interdependence is our reality and is manifested in our need to be social. To the extent that we try to assert otherwise, we become self-destructive.

Unfortunately, because we are all interdependent, when one of us becomes self-destructive, it affects all of us. This is borne out in among other things global warming. By looking out for our selfish needs first (such as the freedom to drive a car) we implicitly affect all other living things. To a UU, Einstein’s theories of general and specific relativity are not at all surprising. This is not just because they reveal the natural world, but also because it proves that we really are all naturally interconnected in this very real matrix called space-time. We are all glued together whether we choose to be or not. Many of us cannot see the glue that connects us, but it is always there. Perhaps string theory, to the extent that it can be revealed, with add more evidence of this interconnectedness.

In Rev. Guengerich’s view (and mine), faith is a leap of moral imagination, which looks at the world as it is, imagines how it can be and asserts that even though achieving it seems impossible, by the force of our actions we will evolve the world to the way it should be for our mutual interconnectedness to flourish. In doing so we will bring about a world where love truly is at the center of all things. In his view, the purpose of religion is to sustain us in this seemingly impossible quest. This is facilitated by the regular practice of coming together in worship services. During services, we use the established communal forms and forces of words, song, stories and symbols to move us toward that reality. By coming together in worship and working through the church on areas like social outreach, we find not only inspiration but the means to demonstrate the necessary commitment in what would otherwise seem a hopeless fight. In moving forward through an act of what seems like crazy faith, we actually manifest the change needed in the world. By doing things like feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless and fixing the environment, we slowly turn society into the way it should be rather than the messy and discordant way it is now.

President Obama seems to understand this. Faith and hope are necessary not only to realize a better future, but also to sustain the soul in this life. Perhaps President Obama is a Unitarian Universalist in spirit and does not know it yet. Since he is still shopping for a church, he should check us out. Maybe in doing so he will inspire many other Americans shopping for a faith to check out this religion ready for the 21^st century. He can find ready fellowship and kindred souls by venturing up 16^th Street N.W. and attending services at the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church. There he will find plenty of people like him willing to be a positive force for change.

July 1st, 2009 at 07:46pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

Unitarian Universalists invade Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City is one of the great cities to arrive at by air. You descend over the tops of the Rocky Mountains. You feel like your plane may scrape one of the summits, and then gently descend into the Salt Valley. Even in late June you can still see some snow on the mountains. The city unfolds around you as you approach from the south. Out the window I watched the Great Salt Lake glimmering in a setting sun. Unlike the busy hub of Atlanta where I had left, Salt Lake’s airport is rather serene in the evening. It is also unusually close to the center of the city. A few volunteers with the Unitarian Universalist Association greeted me as I descend toward baggage claim. They noticed my Serenity T-shirt and giggled. They should have known I was a UU just from the T-shirt. A shuttle to my hotel awaited. Fifteen minutes later I was at my hotel, the Little America Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City on a warm and dry Tuesday night.

Salt Lake has grown up since 1996. The Salt Palace Convention Center is still there but the mall across the street has been torn down. Condominium skyscrapers are going up in their place. Some of these buildings are so high that they tower over nearby Temple Square, a sort of Vatican City for Mormons. All this construction suggests that mammon may be Utah’s real religion. Yet within a block or two of the convention center there are plentiful vacant storefronts. Utah, like much of the west, is hurting in this economy. Still, the city seems to be shrugging off hard times and building for a boom they have faith will arrive eventually. Its leaders are thinking strategically. There was no light rail system back in 1996, but it has arrived in 2009. I can pick it up at a stop a block from my hotel, but it is better to walk the five blocks or so to the convention center for exercise.

Unitarian Universalists from across the world have arrived in Salt Lake to occupy the city, or at least its downtown. The plentiful Mormons are happy to have our business, and seem a happy bunch in general. I know I am not in Northern Virginia when I cross the street at a crosswalk in the middle of the block and the cars actually stop. In Northern Virginia or DC such a brazen act would likely get you run over. Their economy may be close to being in shambles, but the people of Salt Lake City never forget their manners. Even the tough looking types will offer a pleasantry when you pass them on the street.

The UUs tried to string a five story high banner from the convention center, but it didn’t quite work. “Standing on the side of love” is the theme of this General Assembly. One of the ways we are standing on the side of love is by standing up for marriage equality for same sex partners. In this reddest state in the Union, this could be dangerous. Salt Lake City though is a tiny dot of blue in an otherwise deeply red state. It has two versions of a city paper and a progressive Democratic mayor. Perhaps this is because the city, white as Wonder Bread back in 1996, is now becoming a tad Pumpernickel. African Americans can be seen unloading baggage at Salt Lake City airport, and Hispanics can be found as hotel maids and working at the local Wendys. Perhaps the whites of Salt Lake City no longer wanted these jobs.

A few of us representing the Reston, Virginia contingent of Unitarian Universalists manage to meet up Wednesday night in the exposition hall at the Salt Palace Center. As this is my first General Assembly it is both exciting and comforting. I am very much at home, with or without members of my church, for we speak a common language and share similar values. It has gotten to the point that I can spend five minutes or so with anyone and tell with an eighty percent probability whether they are a UU or not. The normal signs would be a hybrid automobile and a Darwin fish on the rear fender, but in person you can often tell from the way they look – it’s a certain crease around the eyes. There are other clues, like the chalice that many are wearing as jewelry. The flaming chalice is the symbol of Unitarian Universalism.

Still, there is a big difference between attending a service at your local church and being in the presence of four thousand other UUs at an opening plenary session and service. Frankly, I found it a bit overwhelming. The plenary session started out with a banner procession. Each congregation has a banner and they paraded around the enormous room with their banners to the great applause of fellow UUs. While the vast majority of UUs are centered in the United States, we had UUs from Africa, Europe and the Philippines in attendance also. Outgoing UUA president William Sinkford delivered a report to the membership that I found surprisingly stirring. You might think a relatively small faith like ours might not have made much of an impact these last eight years, but you would be wrong. From opposing the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to being at the vanguard of marriage equality, to our outreach to the Muslim community, UUs have made great strides under Rev. Sinkford’s leadership. We also have had two unwitting martyrs. A new association president is to be voted in later this week. The campaigning is hot and heavy on the convention floor. Should we choose a Hispanic man or our first woman as president? Either one, like the African American Bill Sinkford, would demonstrate that our largely white congregation is becoming more inclusive.

It is not often that you attend a worship service with four thousand people. Only the pope gets bigger venues. The service, which followed the plenary session, was both stirring and moving. Hearing our signature hymn, “Spirit of Life” sung in four different language (including Hungarian) was touching, as was the “Passing of Peace” where we offered peace to the people sitting around us, in some cases going more than a few rows back. The service had the theme of atonement. Unitarians were one of the religions selected to help “civilize” Native Americans after they were sent to reservations in the 19th century. In retrospect, this was a great injustice. We made a public apology and had our apology accepted by one of the native tribes. There were few dry eyes in the house.

The exhibition hall showed me the amazing diversity of UUs. There were booths for pretty much every conceivable variation of UU you could imagine, from the humanists, to the Buddhists, to the UUs who think Jesus was divine, to the polyamorists.

Ironically, UUs are still largely silent about the polyamory community. If they are going to stand up for love, why not for those who want to love more than one human being at the same time? Right now we are being largely silent. I imagine this will change in time too. I spoke to the polyamorous UUs and told them I couldn’t figure out how they could juggle more than one loving relationship at a time. They are certainly charting a brave new frontier in love.

Today I attended three seminars, but by far the most interesting was the Theology for a Secular Age course, part of the UU University series. It is being taught by the minister of the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City, the Rev. Galen Guengerich. He may be the best speaker I have ever had the pleasure of listening to, a man of great learning and insight. The seminar resumes tomorrow at eight a.m. so I must be to bed early. I don’t want to miss a word!

Tomorrow will be another day of fellowship and learning.

June 25th, 2009 at 10:28pm Posted by Mark | Life 2009, Sociology, Travel | no comments

Blogging at 35,000 feet

Well, this is cool! I am blogging from 35,000 feet. Granted, the first 10,000 feet are still not Wifi accessible, but perhaps that will change too. For $12.95 I can buy myself about three hours of high speed Internet access, at least on selected Delta flights. Other carriers are probably offering similar services, or will be soon. Moreover, the quality of the service is as good, if not better, than what I get at home via our Cox cable service. The times, they are a changing, and not always for the worse.

I am on my way to Salt Lake City to attend the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Having been a Unitarian Universalist since 1997 or so (and in spirit much longer, I just didn’t go to services) I figured it was about time to attend a General Assembly. This is an annual meeting where UUs from across the country come together and discuss denominational business. It is supposed to be a lot of fun and very interesting. Look for posts on the GA during the week. I will not exactly be alone since other members of our congregation will be in attendance too. When you are surrounded by thousands of UUs, you are never really alone. Of course most will be strangers to each other, but we are all the same in spirit. I am hoping it will feel a bit like coming home to the home you never quite had. I figure that if Muslims are expected to make one pilgrimage to Mecca, perhaps UUs should make at least one trip to a General Assembly too. I hope to learn a lot, but also to clarify for myself just how down the UU rabbit hole that I want to go. Thus far my association has been more tangential than dedicated and has consisted of participating in a covenant group and teaching religious education.

This trip is also unique in that it is something I am doing by myself. I travel quite a bit by myself, but so far it has all been business related. My wife, a Buddhist, had no particular interest in attending. Here I am age 52 and this is the first vacation that I have ever done on my own. It is sort of like being single again, at least for a week. There is no family to visit on the other end. There is also no spouse and/or child to drag along. If I get overwhelmed by the intensity of it all, my hotel is a few blocks away. I can distress by computing from my hotel room or hanging out at the pool. I strongly suspect that I will have no problem finding ways to fill my time. The typical problem at these General Assemblies, I have been told, is trying to do too much. There is simply too much going on.

I mentioned to a colleague where I was going and she said “what is Unitarianism?” I am amazed that in 21st century America so many people have not heard about Unitarians or Universalists. There is often at least one UU church in any community of a significant size. There have even been Unitarian presidents of the United States, although at the time they were not known as UUs, but stuck usually said they were deists. Thomas Jefferson was a Unitarian, at least in spirit. If you are curious to learn more about Unitarian Universalism, feel free to check out the association’s web site, or my tag archive on the subject, or just keep reading. To the extent I have time to blog this week, I will be posting my thoughts on the General Assembly.

Unitarian Universalists are basically religious liberals, without a professed creed, with their roots in Christianity but who are for all practical purposes not Christian. Some UUs consider themselves Christian and a UU service definitely has a church-like feeling to it. Most UUs would consider Jesus to be a great teacher, but only a few think he was divine. It is a sort of “none of the above” religion, where no creed is required for membership, where you simply come as you are, hang out in fellowship, try to do good things, and work toward tolerance and social justice. Perhaps a majority of UUs are like me: officially atheist or agnostic. We also have pagans, wiccans, Buddhists, gays, bisexuals, transgendered, the polyamorous and pretty much any type of odd non-denominational faith you can think of. In general UUs are a tolerant bunch.

We are also overwhelmingly Caucasian. If there is one deficiency in my religion, this may be it. I expect the General Assembly to resemble a Republican convention. My wife rightly points out that her Buddhist temple is very multicultural. In some ways I am jealous. I am also hopeful that over time UUs will become more culturally diverse too. Our current president is African American, but that will probably change this week as we elect a new association president. Unfortunately, I am not one of the delegates, since each congregation only gets four votes. I am sure whoever we pick will be someone of a similar vein to Rev. Sinkford.

However, I don’t give myself too much grief about being part of a “white” denomination. The congregation is so white, not because it tries to exclude people of different colors, but because its roots are European, and Europe is predominantly white. It was imported into the United States where it flourished and where mostly white people lived. Just as certain southern Baptist associations are overwhelmingly African American and it is okay, it is okay that UUs are overwhelmingly white. We do have two African Americans in our congregation, so we are not exactly pure white, and a few Hispanics and Asians too. Those of color whom we attract tend to be comfortable among whites. UUs also tend to be intelligent and overeducated. This can be daunting to some.

So I look forward to a week of fellowship, learning and song. While I do not particularly enjoy being away from family, it is not a bad thing to have a week to myself to do things that interest me far away from home. It helps me figure out who I am and where I want to go as a person in this next phase of my life.

The last time I spent any time in Salt Lake City was in 1996. Back then I remarked how Wonder Bread the city was. Perhaps in the thirteen years since it has become more culturally diverse. In any event, given that Utah is overwhelmingly white I suspect that most UUs will feel at home there. Given our religious and political liberalism, we may give the local Mormon population something of a shock. I hope I am there to witness any fireworks.

June 23rd, 2009 at 07:25pm Posted by Mark | Life 2009, Philosophy, Travel | no comments

The real danger of being liberal

I keep hearing from the right wing that liberal ideology is dangerous. Until Sunday, I did not generally associate liberalism with putting your life in danger. Sadly, that is what it has come to. You probably heard about this news story. A man named Jim D. Adkisson, an out of work truck driver, killed two parishioners at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. He also wounded six others. This attack occurred in a packed church with over two hundred congregants. The attack occurred while children were performing a scene for the congregation.

Adkisson survived his attack, but left a four-page letter in his SUV, which he expected to be a suicide note. In it, he said he targeted the church because he “hated the liberal movement” and was “upset with liberals in general, as well as gays.” Moreover, according to the Knoxville News-Sentinel:

[The detective] seized three books from Adkisson’s home, including “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television commentator Bill O’Reilly; “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder,” by radio personality Michael Savage; and “Let Freedom Ring,” by political pundit Sean Hannity.

While the shooting appears random, targeting this particular church was probably not entirely due to its denomination, but likely had to do with some rage toward his ex-wife.

While police said Adkisson did not mention his ex-wife in the note, they said she attended the TVUUC years ago. That’s how he selected TVUUC to unleash his frustrations, police said.

I could be wrong, but I have yet to hear any case of a passionate liberal, inspired by ideological books written by the likes of liberal authors like Al Franken, going around killing right wingers for injustices like not supporting gay rights. I doubt that you ever will. Liberals may be wrong, wrong, wrong as noisy pundits like Rush Limbaugh tell us, but we also tend to be nonviolent.

This particular incident strikes close to home because I am a Unitarian Universalist too. It is certainly fair to cast the denomination as liberal. It was in fact one of the major reasons why I joined. More than ten years ago when I started attending services, I simply was not connecting with any liberals in my community. The church gave me a place to be with my own kind and work with others to promote my values. Thankfully, over the last ten years the area where I live has become much more progressive.

Yet, even in the relatively liberal community of Reston, our church has endured some harassment from those who do not share our values. Some years back we were at the forefront of the gay marriage movement. We put out two prominent banners on our property saying simply, “Civil Marriage is a Civil Right”. You would not think that by themselves they would inspire much vitriol. In fact, both were torn down and defaced by those who did not agree with our opinion. The church leadership was concerned enough that they stationed church elders in the foyer during services with their cell phones ready to dial 911.

Unitarians, like Quakers and other denominations, are often at the leading edge of change. Without us, there might still be slavery in the south and women might not have the right to vote. The minister that married my wife and I put his values on the line back in the 1960s when he marched in Selma, Alabama with the late Dr. Martin Luther King. The two congregants who died Sunday are not the only Unitarian martyrs. Among the dozens is the 18th century Unitarian theologian William Hamilton Drummond.

Perhaps incidents like this, as tragic, ugly and thankfully as rare as they are, come with the territory of being a liberal. Jesus was certainly a liberal and you can see what it got him. In general the more liberal you are and the more you express yourself, the more you subject yourself to danger. Yet, while many despise agents of change, without people willing to stand for change it is unlikely that any change would have ever occurred. We progress in part because of liberal denominations like Unitarian Universalism have the moral conviction to stand up peacefully when injustice occurs.

I am convinced that some right wing authors and talk show hosts like Michael Savage are indirectly culpable for these crimes. They pander to our basest prejudices and emotions, which frequently lurk close to the surface. The raw emotions become easier to expose if you are dealing with major life traumas like losing your job, as was true of Adkisson. Some personalities, like Michele Malkin, are clearly fanning the flames of hatred and perhaps help put mentally unstable people like Adkisson over the edge. It is doubtful whether they would be as passionate if their over the edge eloquence did not result in so many listeners and book sales.

In time, Adkisson will be tried. It is quite likely that he will pay for these murders with his life. In this event I already know what the response will be of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church will be. They will be petitioning the governor for his sentence to be commuted to life in prison. The irony is inescapable. In the event the tables were turned, it is unlikely that members of a right wing church would be so compassionate.

It is a shame Adkisson did not sit in the pews and listen for a few services. He might have heard this UU hymn and taken heed:

Come, Come whoever you are;
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving;
Ours is no caravan of despair;
Come yet again come.

July 29th, 2008 at 09:08pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

Imagining My Life in 2015

Yesterday evening was covenant group again. Once a month I meet with the same small group of members of the Unitarian Universalist Church that I attend. Six to eight of us commit to meet once a month, share stories, do readings, eat snacks and digress on a topic of some depth. After an hour of us doing a brain dump of the significant things that happened to us during the last month, we discuss a topic that we had agreed to discuss the last time we met. This time it was where we wanted to be five and ten years in the future.

I hated to admit it, but the topic was a stumper. For most of my life, I had a good idea about where I wanted to be ten years out. Now at age 48 I felt clueless.

We all agreed we did not want to be dead. That was easy. We also agreed we wanted to be in good health. I am the youngest member of my covenant group. As I noshed on strawberries, I wondered if I would break out into a cold sweat when it was my turn to speak. What was I to say? At 58 would I still be working? Would I be retired? Would I start playing golf? Would I start a hobby like building train sets in my basement? Would I find my evil side and take delight at exposing myself to unwilling victims on street corners? Would I write that novel I figured I would write eventually someday? Or would I just kick back and lead a wholly unplanned life, flitting from day to day like a bee flits from flower to flower?

I realized that part of the reason I did not want to think too much about it is that I would be a lot older. I hope that I would retain some semblance of my youthfulness but if it did not work for Robert Redford, it probably will not work for me either. At 48, I feel I look a lot better than most my age. I doubt that will be the case at 58. Generally, we Caucasians do not age well. Therefore, I hope I will graceful about my age. If I attract any young babes, it will be because I won the lottery, not because of my charming personality or youthful demeanor.

Sadly, the chances are good that when I am 58 both my parents will be deceased. My daughter will be 25 and presumably out of the house. (There are no guarantees these days. She seems very comfortable in her room and not anxious to start independent living. I suspect that I will need to bring in marshals to evict her.) If the federal government does not change its retirement policies I could be several years into retirement by the time I am 58.

Part of me expects there to be some calamity between now and then. Perhaps a few suitcase nuclear bombs will go off in Northern Virginia. If I survive that then I expect our assets will be gone with the nuclear fallout and I will be eking a living in drainage pipes and pushing a shopping cart. Perhaps my wife’s various medical problems will become persistent and acute. As a result, perhaps I will end up much like my father and spend my days catering to her. However, the odds are good that age 58 will find us comfortable. I hope that the economy will be good enough and my pension will be secure enough that I will not have to work anymore.

What I do not know yet is whether I would start a second career. In this country being age 58 would mean another decade in the workforce. Fifty-eight is now arguably the middle of middle age. Ideally, any second career would be on my time schedule. Most likely, a full time job would seem too burdensome. Economic necessity might require it. Since I currently teach part time (no more than one three-credit course a semester) and usually enjoy it, I can see myself doing that, probably teaching computer courses full time. Teaching has never been a profession to get into because you want big bucks. With a decent pension, forty thousand dollars a year would seem like a lot of money. On the other hand, since I am clearly a political creature perhaps I would run for public office. (Perhaps not. I cannot see myself spending days dialing for dollars.)

Yet I may still be in my present job. Perhaps I would enjoy it too much to retire. Looking five years ahead, it is likely that I will still be in my current position. For the first time in my life, I feel like I am in a job that is rewarding enough where I might want to keep doing it for ten more years. The pay is excellent. The responsibility is challenging but not overwhelming. I like making actual important strategic decisions. In addition, I am blessed with a terrific team. I am doing about the most interesting professional work that I can imagine. It is all right up my alley.

Nevertheless, I have always been one of these people who continually expect the other shoe to drop. Although there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, I figure that I cannot keep a good job like this going indefinitely. Real life has to crash in eventually and make this latest job unrewarding.

Therefore, I am hoping that things will work out well: with my family, my career and financially. If so then I will have a genuine opportunity at 58: the ability to live life without much worry that I will become insolvent. In other words, I will have a real and extended retirement. Just the idea rather boggles my mind. What would I do with all that time? Having spent my life so far scrambling, what would I do with 20 or so years of decent health and no financial worries feel like?

I suspect I will not know the answer unless I experience it. One small nugget of wisdom that I have acquired in 48 years is that life’s journey rarely takes you where you expect. I expect that wherever life takes me in 10 years I will be surprised. Watching my older relatives go through these years, I do expect that much of it will be mundane. I doubt my wife and I will do quite the amount of traveling that we have envisioned. I expect there will still be gardens to weed and trash to take out. The last third of my life may not have many surprises but may feel like being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. In ten years, blogging will no longer be sexy. I hope though that I will continue to make a habit of recording my thoughts, rambling and incoherent as they doubtless sometimes are, for my enjoyment, and perhaps yours too.

July 19th, 2005 at 10:05pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | one comment

Strategies for Coping with Suffering

I participate in a monthly covenant group. We’re a small group of six to ten people (depending on who is available) that get together once a month. We give each other brain dumps on our lives. We also pick a new topic for general discussion. We do all this in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist church that I attend. This month’s topic was how we cope with the nasty stuff that life throws at us.

This is a tough one for us UUs. Most of us do not believe in traditional notions of God. Many of us don’t believe in God at all and are rabid secular humanists. Those with more traditional faiths can project their anxieties to the Almighty through prayer. While some of us practice meditation, no one in my covenant group prays.

Coping happens on many levels. Suffering is usually sharpest when we experience the death of a loved one. But we may also suffer by watching someone we love suffer, and certainly incidents like cancer can cause enormous personal suffering. I feel fortunate to have thus far largely escaped the grief of the death of someone I loved. But I was the exception in my group. The members of my covenant group have all experienced the loss of someone very close to them. One woman related the death of her mother in 1979 from cancer. She broke down and cried. I thought: how extraordinarily attached she must have been to her mother to still feel such acute grief more than 25 years later. But in a way she was fortunate. Not many of us experience such a meaningful relationship with another human being during our lives.

Comparing their experiences with mine I felt very fortunate. I heard stories of a church member who will spend the rest of her life in a nursing home. Yet she still clings to life, in all its mundanity. My suffering is more prosaic: aging parents and coping with a spouse with fairly serious mental and physical health issues.

But who is to say whether one person’s suffering is worse than another’s? The friend in my covenant group lost her mother more than 25 years ago, but at least her mother is now at peace. The loss can still feel acute at times, but she has moved forward in her life. For those of us in a caregiver role, the ups and downs of the suffering of someone we love are a daily trial. What it lacks in extremes perhaps it makes up for in duration. For me it sometimes feels like a marathon that never ends.

How do people get over suffering? We opined that talking with friends and family helps. But I am not so sure about that. I think we all must grieve when we suffer loss. Part of the healing can come from expressing the grief, whether privately or with friends. As much as I love my parents, I don’t believe that unloading to them about my trials of the moment is going to make me feel any better. It seems we emerge when we piece together unique pieces of mental gauze to cover our wounds. It’s almost a quilt that we stitch by ourselves: a little bit of this, a little bit of that. No one size really fits all. We have to make it fit in the unique context of our own personal suffering.

I personally am skeptical that prayer reduces suffering. It may be a step in the healing process to project your anguish on a higher and unseen power, but suffering seems to be universal. Through suffering we learn life’s deepest lessons. We would be shallow and superficial people if we did not suffer. In some respects suffering is good.

I have found some strategies for me that, while no solution, act a lot like a temporary pain relief. For example, when I feel anxious or really stressed I find that exercise helps a lot. A vigorous thirty mile bike ride engages my mind and body. It takes me out of the immediate situation (assuming I can escape in the first place) and gives me a chance to focus on something else. When I get home exhausted and sweaty I feel like I have changed my perspective for a bit.

I have also learned to not put my hand on a hot stove. By this I mean that while I need to be involved in the care of people I love, getting too deeply nested in their problems can adversely affect me. I am not in a position to help them best if I cannot stay above the fray. I am not sure this is actually the best coping strategy, but it seems many times to work for me. The hard part is finding ways to stay concerned but not too empathic. If you truly love someone it can be hard to deliberately emotionally detach yourself from the situation.

Perhaps the best coping strategy for anyone suffering is to engage in life as much as possible. Admittedly this can be a tall order. That woman in a nursing home will find it very challenging to find ways to keep her mind busy and to bring other people into her life. But to some extent we can we can minimize our suffering by accepting that suffering is a part of life, but only a part of life. We need to make the deliberate decision to bring in the outside world even though we grieve. Death finds all of us in time. But life is also about many other things, including joy. We cannot experience these things if we stay mired in grief. Thus it is important to keep engaging, even while we grieve. To let the bad stuff out we must also let some of the good stuff in.

February 16th, 2005 at 09:10am Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | no comments

What Spirituality Means to Me

This was the topic of my covenant group meeting last night. It seemed an odd topic to spend ninety minutes or so discussing in a church basement.

Being Unitarian Universalists we all had different ideas of what spirituality meant. Many UUs are spiritually vacant. This is after all a denomination that attracts the unchurched and the left-brain dominant types. A typical UU congregation might be a quarter to half full of atheists, agnostics or people with no particular belief in God. So asking a UU what is spirituality might be like asking someone blind from birth to describe colors.

Nonetheless many UUs are spiritual in their own way. Upon reflection I realized I probably was a spiritual creature, just not in the traditional sense of the world. For me spirituality has almost nothing to do with religion. But for most Americans I suspect it is impossible to not talk about spirituality without mentioning religion.

When I am spiritual I generally feel a sense of utter peace, an absence of worry and contentment. I am intimately plugged in to a larger reality that I can neither name nor describe but which is still absolutely real. The cares of the physical world seem to leave me. I feel not just at peace, but I often feel a subtle or even overt joy. I often feel a sense of wonder, and sometimes I sense the fantastic. I hesitate to call this God. To me it is simply that which is normally not perceived.

I have occasionally had spiritual feelings in churches. But it hasn’t happened in any service that I have ever attended. Yet I have felt moments of it inside cathedrals. Some years ago when I took a group of religious education students to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception here in Washington DC I felt spiritual. Cathedrals are radically altered spaces designed to skew reality and suggest the supernatural. Their gothic arches, their spires, their stained glass, their darkness, their votive candles, their people whispering their prayers, their polished floors and their intricate statues had the effect of making me feel spiritual. I am sure they are designed that way. There is a certain majesty to a cathedral that is difficult to match elsewhere. It is hard for me to feel the real world when in every direction the effect is surreal, ornate and majestic.

As marvelous as cathedrals are they are not nearly as spiritual to me as nature in her finest. Once or twice a year I arrive home to see a spectacular sunset displayed in all its finery with my house as the foreground. It awes me that such exquisite beauty can be a result of such complete randomness. In my travels the beauty of Hawaii is so far unsurpassed. But I have felt similar feelings in other places I’ve visited. Some examples: the Canyon de Chelley in Arizona and watching a plethora of stars arranged against an obsidian background from the back of a cruise ship far out in the Atlantic. But I have also felt spiritual at certain moments during a long and sustained bike ride, with the wind whistling in my ears and coursing through my nostrils. I feel almost attached to the nature around me.

The most spiritual moment of my life so far came from witnessing my daughter’s birth. She was delivered Caesarian section in a cold operating room and pulled out feet first from my wife’s steaming womb. I was humbled. I was awed. I was scared. I was joyful. I was crying. And I loved her with an intensity I have never felt before or since and we didn’t even know each other.

But was this spiritual or just a wash of emotions? For me her birth brought home to me the miracle of life and reproduction. I hesitate to say I experienced God, but I can say it was brought home to me what an amazing place our universe it.

I find spirituality in strange places sometimes. I find it in my cat, who sits now contentedly on my lap and purrs. He too is a miracle. Through him I realize that other species see and react to the world in their own unique ways. When I pet him I realize that not only does it feel good, but also that we truly love each other. We have a mutually supportive relationship.

I often feel like we are seeing at most .001% of reality. We have senses but they are extremely limiting. We cannot see infrared or ultraviolet rays but they are real enough. Most of us are only dully aware of the other life around us, or how utterly pervasive life is on all levels. My backyard is in many ways a botanical wonder, not because I have a huge and diverse garden but because it is such a complex system of its own. On one level it is just a lawn. But on another level there a thousands of species, plants, insects and animals living back there, all mutually dependent on each other for survival. Occasionally I may roll in the grass. But what a different perspective the universe must be to a centipede crawling through my lawn. I wonder what the grub experiences pushing its way through my soil. I wonder what it must be like to be the blacktop on my driveway when the rain falls on it. To get through life we generally tune out such thoughts and think them nonsensical or pointless.

To some extent I think even the rocks in my soil are alive. I just see them living on vast cosmic timescales. Over millennium they too move. I wonder what it is to be a rock under the ground, and to feel the moisture of the soil and the rain permeate it or move around it. I wonder just what life is anyhow. I think it exists on so many different levels but it is only the prison of our own existence that makes it hard to see.

I feel this connectedness of all things. I think on some level we all do. I feel a universe that is alive and multidimensional across space and time. When this connectedness permeates me as a presence, when I feel in touch with its harmony and vibration that’s when I feel spiritual.

That’s what spirituality means to me.

November 16th, 2004 at 09:21pm Posted by Mark | Metaphysics | no comments

Covenanted

When you live in cyberspace can you find real community? Does having with a network of friends online amount to the same thing as a network of friends in real life?

For the last few years I have been puzzling over these thoughts. I have been wondering if my family’s social life has become too virtual. I was arguably the first. Back in the mid 1980s my Commodore 64 was hardly warm before I had purchased a 300-baud modem and was discovering electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes). It quickly became my favorite hobby. At first I was online to download software. But gradually I found discussion boards. I found connecting with people online fascinating. Suddenly my community expanded beyond family, established friends and immediate neighbors into a much larger and diverse set of people, many of whom seemed far more interesting than the people I bumped into in real life.

Back then the Internet was virtually unknown and certainly not available to the average person. Its closest equivalent in the mid 1980s was an online service called Compuserve. Unable to afford a service I found instead lists of local electronic BBSes put together by a man named Mike Focke and started dialing. When I got an IBM compatible computer I graduated to the much larger world of IBM compatible BBSes. While chatting on line with other people from the Washington area I started to care about silly things like whether PCBoard software was better than Wildcat software. One nice thing about BBSes though was they were local. Most of us were too cheap to pay long distance charges to chat electronically with people. So after some initial shyness I got a chance to actually meet some of the people I met online. To this day I maintain a core set of friends from those days including Frank Pierce, Angela Smith and Jim Goldbloom.

But those BBS days are gone for good. The Internet arrived in the home. The location of people on the other end of a conversation became irrelevant. This was both good and bad. I missed those BBS get togethers we had every 3 to 6 months, usually with the online gang from The Back of the North Wind BBS. I still hung out online but it wasn’t quite the thrill it had been. The BBS world slowly died out and in 1999 even the venerable The Back of the North Wind BBS shut down after 12 years of nearly continual service.

For my wife the Internet was a way to connect with people of a very narrow interest that she would never have met otherwise. Around 1999 she jumped into the homoerotic fan fiction (Slash) universe big time. She has been happy in that community ever since. She considers her online friends just her friends. While a handful live locally most are distant. And yet we have met many of them. On our recent trip to Canada we visited one of her friends in every city we visited. She’s very tight with her online friends and her world is certainly richer as a result. And while she has shared intimacies with people who in some cases live as far away as Australia we don’t know most of our neighbors. We know some of them because our daughter went to school with their children. We know our next-door neighbor but not the one on the other side. Those neighbors I haven’t met might as well be on the other side of the world. They don’t seem interested in me and I haven’t sought them out either. We are unlikely to interact at anything more than a superficial level.

My daughter’s friends are mostly people she knows from school or through Girl Scouts. They meet in person from time to time but spend much more time interacting in cyberspace. In that sense she is a wholly modern ordinary teenager. Instant messaging is her primary means of communicating with friends. When she gets phone calls it is often from a friend explaining why they can’t get online. And yet even she has her virtual friends out there who will likely always remain anonymous.

I sometimes feel hypocritical and tempted to declare that this sort of online life is unnatural and wrong. Yet it is not without its allures and benefits. For me in the 1980s and 1990s it was a godsend. It gave me a sort of a social life without leaving home. We had something of a social life in those days but it involved around our daughter and her friends. Through her friends we met her friends’ parents and sometimes we found things in common. But they were rarely meaningful relationships. The reality of those times was that they were packed with parenting chores. The computer offered brief escapes into a world populated with adults. There I could talk about things I cared about like politics at my convenience. No one wanted me to read the The Very Hungry Caterpillar at all! And I could do all this without leaving home. It felt good. I felt optimized.

This new way of making and meeting friends and lovers may be the way it will be from now on. Yet something in me still yearns for the traditional sense of community that I have largely spurned. So this year when my local Unitarian Church once again made the appeal for people to join covenant groups I decided it was finally time to try it.

A covenant group is a group of people who agree to meet regularly to talk. I asked our minister to assign me to a random group. I was hoping I might get into a group with people around my own age. But it seems in our church that covenant groups are largely full of people age fifty plus. Perhaps most people my age are too busy with the childrearing chores to attend covenant group meetings.

Yesterday I attended my first meeting. I actually know most of the people in my covenant group. I know them in the sense that I recognize their faces from services. Some of them I know by name because I have talked to them a few times. But I have largely not really talked to any of them. A covenant group provided a structured way for me to get to know them as people.

This particular group has been around for a year or so, but there were a few vacancies. I and another lady filled the vacancies. We met in a room in the basement of the church for about an hour and a half. We introduced ourselves. Since I was new I gave them a short biography, both professional and personal. And I unloaded on my problems of the moment: my ailing mother and my wife’s imminent job loss. And I learned about some of their issues and struggles.

Every meeting has a discussion topic chosen by the group. Yesterday’s topic was how we got to where we are with our religious convictions. Being Unitarian Universalists a lot of us didn’t have religious convictions. I heard more than a couple in my group confess to being spiritually vacant and left-brain dominant. There were more than a few ex-Catholics like me in our circle too. I confessed that while I spent much of my adulthood as an agnostic it didn’t quite fit anymore. In that sense I felt more spiritual than many of the rest of them.

Despite being the youngest in my group it was still an enjoyable experience. We may all be white middle class people but we are a fairly eclectic and interesting bunch. Our group includes a physician, a man working for the State Department, the manager of a childcare center and a number of retired people.

So although I have a busy life I have covenanted to spend one night a month for a year with these people. I am there to get to know them at something beyond a surface level. In the process hopefully they will get to know more than a little something about me. I have heard of covenant groups that blossom into tightly knit friendship circles. Only time will tell if that will happen with our group. But everyone in my group seemed to be nice, decent yet complex people struggling through their lives and their issues. Perhaps in some small way we will find an old fashioned sense of community. Perhaps in time I will grow to find more of my friends in my community and fewer online.

October 12th, 2004 at 09:22pm Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | no comments

Texas: Unitarian Universalism isn’t a Religion

It seems that the state of Texas (or at least its comptroller) think that a religion is not really a religion if it “does not have one system of belief.” Therefore, we Unitarian Universalists are not really a religion, and we should be taxed liked any other entity in Texas.

Oh really? This is news to the hundreds of thousands of us who are UUs in America. I imagine presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, Unitarians of their age, are rolling in their graves.

Here’s what the UUs believe: each person has the right to decide for himself or herself what they believe. We don’t claim to have the answers. We don’t feel people need to be coerced or persuaded. We are one of a very few number of religions that does not require the profession of a creed as a condition of membership. We celebrate all religions and think there is some meaning and value in all of them. But above all we believe in the individual right of conscience. We welcome all. You can believe in God or not. You can believe in multiple gods. You can be agnostic or pantheistic. A lot of UUs are multireligious. For example we have wiccans in our church who practice regularly in a sacred circle they created out in the woods on our church property. They also attend services. We usually celebrate Christmas, and not just because our roots are in Christianity. We also celebrate major Jewish, Hindu and Muslim holidays. We have been known to do Buddhist meditations from time to time too.

I taught a “Neighboring Faiths” religious education program at my church one year. We taught emerging teens about the various faiths in the world. But we did more than just study them. We sought them out. The places of religious worship we visited included a Jewish temple and the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (Catholic) here in Washington. We attended a predominantly African American Pentecostal Church. (It was an amazing experience to witness a service of continuous, almost rapturous song and heartfelt emotion.) And we watched a Mormon church service. We even had frank discussions with their children in religious education after the service. We are not a xenophobic religion. Ours is a religion of free association. We realize that not all people are comfortable with our approach, but it is our approach. It’s what we’ve been doing for as long as we’ve been Unitarians and Universalists.

Each UU church arranges their services as they like. But most Christians would feel at home in a UU church. At our church we sing songs from hymnals. We sometimes even sing about God in our hymns. (Sometimes we may sing about the Goddess.) We have sermons. We light a flaming chalice at the start of each service, symbolizing our belief in independent thought. We even pass around the collection plate.

Newsflash to Texas: there is a lot more to religion than having one system of beliefs. You would think the Texas comptroller would at least bother to look up the definition of the word “religion” in the dictionary before painting with so broad a brush. There are other definitions for religion including “A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.” UUs have no institutionalized system of beliefs. Another definition includes “A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.” We don’t specify beliefs, but we do have values we espouse in our Principles and Purposes. We don’t have a founding father or mother figure but we do have some people of whom we are very proud. In addition to ex presidents we can include Charles Darwin (who articulated the theory of evolution) and Clara Barton (founder of the American Red Cross) among distinguished Unitarian Universalists.

The good news for UUs is that at the moment the courts are on our side. The bad news is that for some bizarre reason (probably because in Texas, as is so often the case, the normal rules of thought don’t seem to apply) the current Texas comptroller is refusing to give up.

Oh what an odious message it will send if Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn ultimately succeeds. She likely won’t if it ever reaches our U.S. Supreme Court. But if she succeeds it would render our freedom of religion pretty meaningless in this country.

If ignorance is not a sin, it should be.

May 19th, 2004 at 08:11pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | no comments

Unsaved

Merry Christmas to you! Are you saved? If you are saved then praise be to Jesus Christ, Amen! If you aren’t saved and haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Savior ™ — well then it’s time to get on the stick and get saved as soon as you can. Armageddon is almost here.

How do we know this? Why because of all the “Swept Away” books cluttering bookshelves and supermarket aisles, you doofus! The day of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is bound to happen any day now. You, the unsaved, may be under the impression that God and Jesus are all about unconditional love. If so you are wrong. God only lets into the afterlife those who worship him utterly. So if you don’t worship the One and Only True Christian God ™ and don’t find God through his personal emissary Jesus Christ ™, sorry, but you’re damned. That goes for all you Muslims too, and yes, of course you misguided “chosen people”, not to mention you vile Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, pagans, Wiccans and most contemptible of all, you Unitarian Universalists. Yes, on that Final Judgment Day ™ you along with all the other damned get to begin an eternity of torment. So says your just and loving One True Christian God.

But you won’t be going straight to Hell, no! Before you are sent down the chute to Satan’s minions, first you must be shown the error of your ways. We, The Saved ™ will be watching you from the peanut gallery in St. Peter’s Heavenly Coliseum. God will be the matador, you will be the bull and in this game God always wins. In will go the knife of justice into your flawed and perturbed soul. You will realize what a stupid and contemptible piece of filth you were for all that whoring or practicing dangerous secular humanism. You should have been attending Bible study class instead, brother! A tiny tear of sadness may escape from us elect watching you bemoan your fate. You will despair that you had so many chances to come to Jesus Christ ™ but didn’t. We will be sad that you chose eternity in torment. But we will also glad that the likes of you aren’t fouling up the serene peace of the Heaven. It’s an exclusive neighborhood you see, and the covenants are real strict. Out forthwith, you heathens, to your perpetual ghetto! We, the saved, will be so rapturous being in heaven and all, and hanging around God, JC and the Holy Spirit ™ will be such a high that we will soon forget about you. Because we were saved! Saved! Yippee! And there’s nothing that gives us more pleasure than to spend eternity telling the God Trio ™ what great guys they are. The afterlife will be all Bible Study and harp playing all the time and it will never get dull, brother! Alleluia!

Okay, I know I said in this entry that I didn’t really care what your religion is. And really I don’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t find religions that say you either accept my religion or you’ll end up in Hell very contemptible. By inference then perhaps I feel that all the adherents who believe in this to be contemptible too. That’s not true. But if there is a Hell, then perhaps God will reserve some small part of it for these sanctimonious authors raking in millions in royalties for these novels. Elmer Gantry and the Landover Baptist Church would be proud.

As a Unitarian Universalist I am clearly on the damned path. We have a history of engaging in dangerous secular humanism. In fact we have the audacity to call the place we congregate a “Church” even though there is no requirement of anyone to accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior or even be a Christian! If you can imagine, we don’t care what anyone believes or doesn’t believe. Our mission is simply to help each other discover what it is they believe. Along the way we get involved in vile social action projects like feeding and sheltering the homeless, standing up for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised, encouraging democracy and protecting civil rights. We even welcome (Warning: sit down now!) gays, lesbians and the transgender community. And we don’t even try to convert them! Yup, on judgment day we UUs will doubtless be the first ones dispatched into Hell, post haste. Imagine the confusion of people when we, the heathen and unsaved, try to make the world a better place instead of telling others about God and Jesus. What a waste of our time and money!

I am, it appears, unsaved and perhaps irredeemable at this point. Because I’m afraid the missionaries could be lined up at my door stretching to the moon and not one of them will get me to buy into this saved stuff. My mind appears to be shut to them. While I am not sure what I truly believe about spirituality, what I tend to believe changes over time as I learn and experience more of life. This Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior stuff just makes me shake my head. Pity me, those of you among The Saved ™. I actually believe the Universalist notion. It states that if Jesus really did come down to earth to save us from our sins, he did so for everyone, for all time, with no strings attached. Because, you see, this to me is the highest expression of love. I can’t imagine any entity claiming to come from God, the source of unconditional love saying in effect “I’ve saved you all, but first you have to sign and adhere to this contract.”

So while I am skeptical about the afterlife in general I don’t give it too much concern because I figure I’m already saved. If I have a philosophy of life, I like the one expressed by J.R.R. Tolkien though his character Gandalf in “The Lord of the Rings”: “All you have to do is decide what to do with the time given to you.” For that I will let my heart and my conscience be my guide.

For those of you convinced that the only way to salvation is through Jesus, peace to you. But know this: I know in my heart that if God exists, he is not a jealous god, or a god that sets preconditions. Many Christians see Jesus the way fat people see diet doctors. Whether it’s Atkins or Pritikin, when you diet the goal is weight loss, not the means. If the afterlife or spiritual growth is the goal then the messenger doesn’t matter. If reading your Bible and attending services is your way to spirituality I think that’s great. Jesus is your means of getting there. But try to open your heart and your head to the notion that there are many ways to God. The ways of the Buddhist or the Muslim way may be just as valid as your way. Don’t confuse the medium (Jesus, the Bible) with the result (becoming a more spiritual person). Every human is unique. If there is a God it is clear that God designed us this way — we need only examine our own DNA for proof. I believe there is no one size fits all suit to spirituality. There are infinite suits to try on, and infinite paths. We are all spiritual creatures on our own unique spiritual journeys. Jesus hinted as much, by suggesting praying in your closet might work out better than in a house of worship. Try it for a year or so and let me know how it goes. And try this one for size: we the Unsaved deserve the dignity and respect for making our own choices on this matter, not your pity because we don’t share your particular brand of spirituality. You can start by not buying any more of those contemptible “Swept Away” books.

December 27th, 2003 at 11:23am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | 6 comments