A Recycling Puzzle

So here I am in the Flathead Valley, surrounded by magnificent scenery that's punctuated by a variety of human made additions, some that harmonize with the scenery and others that just highlight the difference between human fabrications and the work of Nature.

Being human and a participant in the economy we have, I use things and then find I have leftover material to throw away.  The puzzle:  people here in this amazing, almost pristine valley just throw things away..And the things they throw away end up in a landfill. That they have a program to recover gases from the landfill to make electricity is definitely a plus!

Apparently only hippies recycle.  Indeed, the Unitarian Universalist congregation has a system for helping people recycle, and we all know "they" are a bunch of hippies!

Actually, it is starting to change, maybe.  There is a limited recycling program sponsored by Flathead County.  When I go to the transfer station, in addition to the long row of containers waiting to be loaded on trucks and taken to the dump, there are other containers for cardboard (flattened, no milk cartons), paper (no brown paper grocery bags),  plastic (#1 and #2 only),and all kinds of metal cans.  Glass can be recycled by going to a container placed behind the Target store, some distance away. I was not alone when I last went to the recycling facility, and the others looked like ordinary people, not hippies.  That is encouraging.  So is the fact that recycling pickup is available.  It is provided by a private company separate from the regular trash pickup, and apparently people are using it.  

Flathead County landfill gas to energy project

Being aware of our waste and trying to send it back for reuse is surely the first step toward using less in the first place, to living more in harmony with the world around us.  Step by step.  But can there be enough steps, soon enough?

Why Not to Begin with the Water Service

Once again,  I find myself among people whose custom is to begin the church year with the water service, an event I struggle to find meaningful. Once again, I asked them to move the water service away from Opening Day, to make room for something a little different, just as an experiment.  And once again, they are willing to try. I am grateful. I hope they like doing it a little differently.

Mainly, I don't really like starting the year with a ceremony that is (a) backward-looking and (b)individualized, though there's more, of course.

To gather and spend the opportunity of a service looking back over what has happened during summer seems an odd way to energize the congregation for the year's challenge. Yes, those who were away for the summer have stories to tell, and many of them have important spiritual content.  But.here in Montana, the geese are getting ready to fly south, the late harvest of hay is being gathered in, the race between the ripening of tomatoes and the coming of frost is on...  and many things are beginning.  Like school.  And what we call Sunday School. Like all the programs the congregation has planned for the season.  Isn't that exciting? Shouldn't we be talking about that?

And this is a time of gathering, of knowing the congregation as a gathered body.  Why would this be a time to share individual stories for an hour?  If we must look back, how about a moment of congregational history, a golden story of why this institution is important?  It is challenging for me, and I suspect for others, to listen through the water ceremony's litany of summer vacation stories for threads that connect them to the spiritual life of the fellowship.  True, the symbolic pouring of waters into a common bowl can be made a strong symbol of the gathered community, but the words and the gesture of the common bowl do not work well together. "This is water from the South Pacific, where I had a unique and wonderful adventure.  I am glad to have gone, and glad to be back..." The uniqueness of the experience competes with the joining of the waters.

Once upon a time there was a First Water Ceremony.  It happened, according to legend, in Michigan, when a gathering of women convened to change the world.  They brought waters from their home places, from the places that watered their roots.  They mingled the waters together for their time of meeting, blessing the mingling with the energies of their work together.  At the end, they took the mingled waters back with them. This First Water Ceremony joined water from the far flung places where people actually lived, rather than the far flung places where they went on vacation. And it was a temporary thing.  It was appropriate to gather up the water again and send it back blended to the places where it had started, unblended.

I came into ministry from a congregation that started the year with the Water Ceremony.  I thought that was what we did.

Fortunately, I learned in my internship with David A. Johnson (Rhode Island) that there is another way.  He invited the congregation to gather outside the building on Opening Sunday.  There was a procession into the church, bringing objects of symbolic value to be placed appropriately inside.  There were words about the congregation's past, present, and future.  There were familiar hymns.  There was a feeling of "it is good to be together."  Now I try to do this, carrying the message to whatever corner of the Unitarian Universalist village I visit.  And now I have told you, so you can consider it.

Small Church, Small Steps

I'm excited to be starting with another small church, and excited that there is an inclination toward change in the air.  Different people are suggesting different things, including going back to the way it was "before." Still, the interim minister senses an opportunity!

For what?  Probably not the big all-congregation behavioral covenant, detailing all the agreements people make among themselves here, though that is one of the suggestions.  I'm thinking the little, informal, changeable covenants are a more likely possibility.  The kind that are posted on newsprint pads in the meeting rooms by the people at different meetings. We might have done this in the last congregation, but I didn't think of it in time.  That, and saying the congregation's mission statement at the beginning of each meeting. Oh, and lighting a chalice at the beginning of the meeting and having a formal closing.

What good are all these little adjustments?  I'm not sure. But I know they make a difference.  Something starts to shift.  Social hour takes on a busy hum.  People come forward with things they want to start or bring back to life.  Conversations are deeper and sometimes include resolving disagreements. Still, there is no clear cause and effect. Besides, I have just started with these folks, and I don't know what will happen until it unfolds.

So much of my congregational ministry is about little stuff:  getting signup sheets out and getting volunteers slotted into particular days for particular jobs, noticing what bylaws are no longer being followed, encouraging job descriptions for committees, boards, and roles, and more. Sometimes it seems as if I'm all about bureaucracy, when in my own mind it is anything but that.  Little by little, people come to understand what  is expected of them, to see each task as having a beginning, middle, and end.  That creepy feeling that if you sign up for this or that, there will be no end of one thing after another, that creepy feeling begins to fade.  After all, it is not my job to figure out what they want to do in a larger sense, what their role as a congregation in the community will become.  That sort of thing is really their work.  I can help, and the little stuff I suggest is helpful.

And I can love them.

Still, as some relationship or parenting advice book I read long ago pointed out, love is not enough.  Skill is required to turn that love toward congregational thriving. Skill in helping people unlock their love for one another and for the congregation's ministry.  Will I have the skill this time? A book I just read, Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, encouraged me with the little steps in my small congregation.  I cautiously take small steps forward, hoping for the best.

Misappropriating Yoga

I guess I was a couple of years shy of 50 when I had a chance to take a yoga class at church.  I had a vague thought that yoga would be the kind of exercise that could help me into older age without hurting me, and indeed that has turned out to be the case.  I lived in the Northeast at the time, so the Mother Ship of yoga for me was the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health.  I attended a number of workshops there and went faithfully to local classes, gradually settling in to a daily practice that has been a key part of my physical health and spiritual grounding for longer than I care to admit  (Oh, all right, it really has been over 20 years). I have a subscription to the Yoga Journal, which goes through seasons of alternately being helpful and being a vapid women's magazine.  I read books about yoga.  At this point I have that early background in Kirpalu style yoga plus several years of practice guided by teachers in the Iyengar tradition.

None of this has made me svelte as the woman whose photo I grabbed off the web,

but it has made me comfortable in my own body; more aware of the connection of body, mind, and spirit; and happier.

By some lights, I have been misappropriating this tradition. My practice is based on the very Americanized yoga that begins with asanas -- postures -- including meditation and breath control as "extras."  This is backwards from the way Patanjali would have practiced, using asanas as a warmup for pranayama -- breath work -- and meditation.   Never mind that I have learned the Sanskrit names for some postures, have come to love Kirtan chanting, actually do meditate (though I learned it in a different tradition), and have benefited from breathing practices.  It is not the Real Yoga of India.

There are people who do things they call yoga that are even less like the Real Yoga of India than mine.  In Christian church basements, they have to pretend it has nothing to do with some other religion.  In Public schools, they have to pretend that it has nothing to do with spirituality at all.  To me, that's okay.  The vocabulary of the asanas is a spiritual language that uses the body to shape the energies, the mind, and the spirit without words.  It has power that transcends culture, in my opinion.

Furthermore, today's yoga of asanas is an intercultural tradition.  It can be traced to the nineteenth century, as Mark Singleton has shown in his exploration of the origin of postures, Yoga Body, Oxford, 2010. Singleton found that the revival of asana practice was intimately connected with the international physical culture movement of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.  The YMCA, with its emphasis on "muscular Christianity," was a key agent in promoting a Scandinavian system of gymnastics throughout the British Empire, including India.  When the YMCA physical culture men met the indigenous system of asana practice in the Indian subcontinent, they melded the two so as to make their program more attractive to the locals. It worked beyond their wildest expectations.  Body builders and freedom fighters adopted the new asana regimes --including some clearly Scandinavian postures-- as their own.

In the 1930's, European and United States women began to take an interest in yoga for grace, suppleness,and poise.  It was only later that Indian women began to take advantage of their indigenous exercise tradition for the same goals. The traditions of yoga asanas have remained somewhat gendered, with emphasis on strength for men and poise for women, "muscular" Christianity for men and pseudo-Christian mysticism for women.  Gradually, the Hindu roots of the spirituality associated with yoga asana practice have been reasserted.  In U.S. yoga classes, teachers feel called on to begin and end class with Sanskrit chants, if not uniformly to guide the practitioner toward Hindu sources for more learning. Some "real" yogis, both from India and indigenously grown, are even now deepening the spirituality of yoga practice on our continent.

Misappropriation?  I'm thinking it's a little more complicated than that.

Date with Deer

Mike's prize lettuces were being munched.  He actually saw a couple of deer crossing the road, heading toward his garden yesterday as he was driving to work.  Then, it was too late to swing by the feed store to get the deer repellent after he got off.  Would I...?  Well, I started living in the apartment upstairs in his house partly so I could help out, and I could indeed go get the deer repellent.  But for one more  morning the lettuces would be vulnerable.

Endangered Lettuces

Deer are pretty shy, I was thinking, so I offered to go sit by the lettuces at the appropriate hour of the gray light of dawn.  He had seen them crossing the road at 6:00, pretty early for me, but not unmanageable...
So I got up, put on warmish clothes, made coffee, got a flashlight just in case, gathered up my folding chair, and headed out in the earliest morning twilight.  "Probably they'll smell you and stay away," he had said.  I tried to think smelly thoughts as I sat in the quiet garden.

It was a wonderfully peaceful time. A rooster crowed in the distance.  The horses in the neighbors' pasture started waking up, making little horsey snuffling noises, birds flew quietly. Gradually the light increased, bringing colors to the streaks of clouds in the Eastern sky. Full light and more cars going by as people got going for the day.  I decided the deer were probably not coming  this morning, and went in for a little, then back out to walk around and take some pictures.  The sun is still not over the mountain, but I believe my date with deer is over.

Coming Dawn

Descansos

One feature I notice in my new surroundings in Montana is the little white crosses they use to mark the places on the highway where people have died.  It's helpful, in a way. One intersection where I turn from a speedy highway onto a country road is marked with three of them.  I take extra, extra care. In the photo they look like ghosts.

Some of the crosses have become little shrines.  They are decorated with flowers and ribbons, clearly kept fresh by people who visit regularly.  I have not had the experience of living in a place where I must drive by the site of a loved one's fatal accident every day.  This seems a very sweet response to the reality of having to revisit a sad loss on a regular basis. This photo is of a shrine to Betty, born 1954, died 2011. It has a bird house overlooking a wetland and a collection of dolls nearby, graduually fading in the weather.

The person who loved Betty comes and mows the place, keeps the bird

house painted, and brings fresh mementos.  There's a rose bush by the
little angel statue.

It reminds me of having read a long time ago in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book, Women Who Run With the Wolves.  She suggested an exercise for women - and these days I would not confine the suggestion to women --in which we make time lines of our own lives, and mark the descansos, the moments of loss and change, with little shrines that reflect our feelings.  Life sends us events that we can't run away from.  Each day we drive by the spot, so to speak.  And trying to pretend it never happened is simply not effective.

There was the divorce.  Or the job loss.  Maybe a falling out with a relative.  A bad situation with someone at work that you handled clumsily.  They don't go away.  They are bits of the stalagmites we are, maybe a little sulfurous, but only a layer here and there in the developing story of who we are.  How are these memorialized in your being?  Do you mark an anniversary?  Do you create art from it?  Is there something you cook that brings it to mind and helps you heal?  If no one has placed a white cross by the side of your road for you to decorate, you can place it yourself, so it need not be white, and need not be a cross.

I invite us all to contemplate these moments of our own lives and to mark them in our own ways.  Let us be who we are, losses and all.  Our stalagmite selves need this affirmation.

The shrine for Angela is in the front yard of a gas station next to a Wendy's just off the corner of LaSalle and Reserve in Kalispell.  In our privatized world, the attendant at the gas station had no idea who she was, even though someone obviously comes and cares for this little monument regularly. May she rest in peace.

God's Ten Commandments

There is some mysterious force here in the Flathead that drives landowners to put up big signs, the size of a full sheet of plywood, signs that all feature the same basic graphic displaying "God's Ten Commandments" in the customary tablet-like form, with a ribbon at the bottom containing some other biblical wisdom.

I think these guys are giving religion a bad name.

Over and over I tell people in my congregations, "The bible is not God's little instruction book."  To get the good out of it, we need to read carefully, consider the context --both cultural and literary-- and reflect deeply in conversation with others not just on the one part at hand but on all the related pieces.  And here are these mini-billboards, sort of like big versions of election yard signs, asserting just the opposite, or so it seems.  Just follow these ten rules, and you'll be okay.

Then there's the tone.  "Thou Shalt Not..."  is hardly an invitation to a joyful life.  Yet I keep telling people that we are invited to live in love and joy and gratitude, and I am not alone among religious leaders in doing this.  The sign-makers convey a very different vision of a religious person's proper orientation to the gift of life.  "Watch your step, or else!"

Do we need to put up signs on our lawns, too, with messages about hope, love, gratitude, and joy?  I'm tempted to start a campaign, though there is so much else to do.  We all drive everywhere here in this valley, past fields of hay and wheat and potatoes, past cattle and horses, and at dawn or dusk maybe some deer or elk, everywhere watched over by a sweeping arc of majestic mountains.  Maybe we can trust people to look beyond the signs and see the handiwork of Nature, sense the astonishing interconnectedness of all that is, and fall into reveries of awe, joy, and thanksgiving.

But will they know that's what our church is about?