Winter Magic

This week has been magical here in the Flathead... after a mild spell with light winds that felt almost springlike, Tuesday was a fairyland of frozen fog, with every tree branch lightly coated in frosty crystals.  As is my wont on Tuesdays, I went up to Big Mountain for a couple of hours in the morning.  Lo and behold!  The slopes were above the overcast that kept the lower elevations under wraps.  I skied in the sun, looking out across the mountains to the peaks of Glacier National Park, some wrapped in clouds, some sparkling in the sun.  I came back to earth with a little pink on my cheeks, ready to deal with laundry and liturgy and church politics. I think I'm liking this life.

Glacier park with clouds...

Yesterday, there was a little snow, a wet and clingy snow, so once again the trees were white until the sun and wind came to clear them.  The roads, driveways, and sidewalks continue to be glazed with ice.  Everyone is practicing their penguin walks, while some wise souls wear extra tread on their boots  (I have some, and somehow never remember to put them on).  And yesterday, there was the news that our local girl --Maggie Voisin --was picked for the Olympics!  I think of all those flocks of little kids who ski all over this mountain and marvel... how this kind of recognition can spring from their energy, enthusiasm, and time on skis.  And many lifetimes of happy enjoyment, recognized or not!

Today --can you tell?-- I'm supposed to be writing a sermon.  Fortunately, the sky is gray, and I am carefully not looking at the summit cams for the ski area.  Tomorrow, if I do my work today, I can ski again.  And maybe get that elusive photo from the summit, the one with lots of sun and not so many clouds, that shows the awesome wildness of that view into Glacier.

Whitefish town and lake

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Token Day or Something Else?

The Sunday of the long weekend marking the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., poses a special problem for Unitarian Universalist congregations.  One of our regular attenders asked me a few days ago whether this was going to be "token Black" Sunday or something else.  If it was the former, he thought he would stay home.  It was something else, but his concern left me wondering.

We are mostly white.  All white, in this congregation, except for one Black man who comes every now and then. And we are big supporters of nonviolence.  We were in the old days big supporters of the Civil Rights Movement.  On a national level, when Dr. King called for people of faith to come to Selma, we responded. That was fifty years ago, but we remember.  Indeed, we have made efforts and experienced both successes and failures since then to become a less white community, because we care.  And some of our congregations are no longer quite so white.  But in the little congregations I have had a chance to serve,  the Anglo whiteness persists.

On Martin Luther King Sunday, and in February, when schools recognize African American history, what do we do?

Yesterday, we heard about the Montana Innocence Project, a statewide program that works to exonerate people who have been wrongly imprisoned.  In Montana, it does not usually have a racial component.  Just prodding the justice system to do its job.

Justice seems to be where it's at.  And being open to the arrival of new people in our midst, regardless of race, religious background, or whatever.  And watching that openness for spots where it's not.  I'm for inviting people of color and African Americans in particular to speak to us, not particularly on Martin Luther King Sunday and not particularly during Black History Month.  Just do it.  In these parts, it's also important to lift up Native peoples' voices and to listen to Asians as well.  I need to remind myself to find readings not just from women (a longtime interest) but from other less well heard groups, to lift up the examples of lives lived with courage and compassion by people of Native, African, and Asian heritage.  The songs of many cultures that made it into our hymnbook in 1985 need to be updated, but that impulse was good.  This needs my work and attention, too.  Openness.  Can it be done?

If we build a welcome, we invite ourselves to a better place.  And maybe others, seeing that, will want to join us.  And maybe some of them will be people who don't look just like we do.

When the Congregation is Family Size

Joining a family is kind of tricky.  They have a lot of ways of doing things that are well established and not explained at all.

The interim minister comes to shake things up and talk things over so things end up being slightly more intentional.  But it's hard...some of the stuff is pretty obscure.

I was in a small group talking with a long-established member about space for religious education classes. She spoke of a time when  space had been opened up in an outbuilding with the idea that a teen class could meet there, but it not been completed. In the context of finding a way to  have an office for the newly established position of administrator -- a spot more suitable than the space at the end of the kitchen -- this was an interesting piece of news.  Somehow no one had thought of that partially finished space.  The middle school group would need the space the administrator could otherwise use.  End of story.  Has another door opened?  To be continued...

I was in a meeting with a diverse selection of leaders.  The subject of fundraising had come up, and people were expressing opinions in a broad way.  "You've probably lost most of them," said a well-placed leader, "but there was a group of people who were really committed to doing something with the building."  First I'd heard of people being disgruntled over the failure of a building project...  I'd heard of something that might be related, but this was news.  In his mind, the minister and  building were competing for the same resources. This was not a principled opposition to professional ministry, which I was well represented in this congregation's conversations, but rather a practical one. His choice of pronouns ("you" have lost them) let me know he was one of them.  Now I can have a conversation with him and find out more, I hope!

I don't think people are holding back or being devious.  I think these two stories are typical of the way a family size congregation works.  There is no need to explain things because everyone already knows.  And it's not easy to identify people who have particular information because everyone has so many roles over the course of years of membership.  And of course, little is written down. That's part of what makes these congregation's fascinating.

New people who aren't ministers can find similar challenges about finding what's going on and what's expected.  It takes just getting in there and asking a lot of questions, something not every newcomer finds comfortable.  

A Time for Vision

The Winter Solstice has just passed, and now, the dark moon that followed it is behind us, too.  As the energies of earth and moon shift from ebb to flow, so do the energies of people and groups.  This time of shift is a time for vision.  I love that there can be times of just being, just not doing anything, after the celebrations of Solstice and Christmas are past. (With the dark moon on New Year's Day, I was not surprised that our plan for a family party collapsed -- our relatives just needed to be home, to hang out, not to get our and do anything, even come over to hang out with us! A little disappointed, yes, but not surprised.)

Then I had two conversations with leaders at the Fellowship I serve, one in person and one on the phone. The two spoke of different concerns in different ways, with different orientations to my work with them, and each spoke of vision.  One was an emerging vision of a congregation as a giving community, the beginning point for creating a giving community in the larger world, a microcosm of a world of cooperation and peace. The other was a long-held vision of things tried and struggles gone wrong, colored with fear that none of it would quite work out.  And yes, the optimism of a new leader and the discouragement of an experienced one, but something more...

The one leader, the hopeful one, spoke of learning from experience and moving forward.  The other leader, whose hope was in tatters, spoke of learning lessons that were finished, leaving little forward motion.  Is it finished, or is there something to build?  Is this as far as we can go in this spread-out community with the low wages and the discouraging distances?  I don't know.  I am committed to the way of the first leader, the one who is engaged with big  possibilities.  I am cautioned by the way of the second leader, for whom the basic survival of the institution is the key goal.

Each has learned and is learning.  What's the difference?  I have personally known experience that tells me things are going nowhere. So, too, I suspect, has the newer leader of this group, for he is not inexperienced in these matters. Something tells him-- and me -- that this case is not one of those.  At this moment, I don't know what that is.  Not just the not having been here to live through the discouragement.  Something else. What?

Okay.  It's a sense of the energy of the group when it gathers on Sunday morning.  I can feel it.  No more than that.  No less. This fellowship is alive. Vibrantly alive.  I'll go with that. And we'll see what happens.