Are You Happy Yet?

It's Saint Lucia's day today, and yesterday was the day for the Virgin of Guadalupe.  Today is also the eighth day of Hanukkah.  It's all about celebration and a lot of it is about tradition and remembering the past of before we were born.  Now is the time for photo albums with pictures of ancestors half forgotten, or, indeed pictures of people whose connection to us is lost to memory.  Who are we?  Partly we are the product of all this past, remembered and forgotten, all this culture that has maybe evolved and maybe not so much.

And partly we are the product of our own personal past, of the blessings and challenges of the relationships and situations we grew up with.

These celebrations this season, this is all about the joy of knowing ourselves and our networks of kinship and culture.

But the times cast a pall on the very networks we celebrate, and the very identities we have drawn from them.  I celebrate a culture that is overwhelmingly white, once-upon-a-time Protestant, and full of traditional gender roles.  I have come to suspect that some of my male relatives were gay, though they never said so and can't agree or deny my suspicions now.  I am aware of the shadow of patriarchy within my family, and its dark influence on my own trying-to-be-liberated life,  Unlike the Black Lives Matter folks, I don't look at myself and say, "I love my blackness, and yours."  I love my cultural location, but not my whiteness as a thing in itself.  As the product of a liberal family living through first one, then later another conservative age, I have known the pressure of other people's ridicule of my beliefs.  I have at different times responded to that pressure in different ways.  Oh yes, and it's an old tradition in my family that there are alcoholics among us.

But we have always celebrated.  And sometimes I have been wretched through it.  Other times, I have allowed the celebration to carry me into it.  And at times I have just joined in with good cheer.

My favorite memory of childhood holidays was of a neighborhood caroling party.  We lived in a place where Christmastime was likely to be mildly chilly, not deeply cold, and usually not snowy at all.  Someone mimeographed copies of the words to carols, a date and time and route were announced, and someone signed up to host a pot luck party at the end.  We meandered through the dark, singing at people's houses, though not at places where everyone was outside among the singers. A great blob of us drifted through the dark, our way illuminated by a very few flashlights and lanterns.  I learned all the verses to a lot of traditional carols and sang them with gusto, only later coming to understand that the theologies they expressed were totally alien.

In those years, I felt the struggles the adults were having with the tradition.  We lived in a neighborhood that had Jewish families for whom Christmas was not a Thing.  We wanted to include them, but how?  The non-carol options were not very attractive -- Deck the Halls, Frosty the Snowman, Jingle Bells, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (talk about bad theology!)--and we loved to sing the bad old Christian carols way too much to give them up. So the Jewish families mostly did not come sing.  And when we came to their houses, we sang Jesus-free songs.  Making a new tradition, of making it flexible to include more people is not without cost.  They did it. And they showed me how.  Now I can do it, too.  Not just with the winter holidays, but with other well established habits of thought that hold back the communities where I belong.

And yes I am happy.  Happy to be in the midst of change, laughing all the way.

A Small Congregation's Public Presence

I had an excellent visit with the Board of the Missoula Unitarian Universalist Fellowship before Thanksgiving.  They were wondering how to have more of a public presence as a very small congregation in a town of about 67,000.  I wondered, too.

They are just in the midst of a project to move to a different building,  They were pleased that media seemed to be interested in that, and wondered how to make themselves better known in the process of making this change.

We explored the landscape of public presence, and found some places where the amount of effort and skill they could bring to bear looked likely to yield real results.  We also realized that much of what they want has to do with personal connections with leaders of religious and civic organizations.

Social media looked like the top pick.  They need to adjust some things on their website, they thought, but facebook looked like the target for more energy.  More frequent, shorter, postings, maybe the use of invitations to "events" for special occasions, links to the newsletter and introduction of blog posts for updates on goings-on in the fellowship all seemed like good ideas.  People made commitments to follow up on these.

Participation in special events in town also seemed managable to the group,  They could step out beyond the Pride parade to at least one other parade type event, and maybe set up a table at another occasional opportunity.

They were cautious about taking on too much. I thought that was a really good idea.

The main thing was not to shift so much attention from the core activities of the fellowship that their way of being themselves went out of focus.  They need to maintain the strong worship, strong religious education for children, and strong participation in community service that is making them feel good about themselves.  It's that feeling good about themselves that is making them feel like having a stronger public presence, after all!

I'm excited about the new building.  There are some hurdles as they move through local approvals, and it is still not a completely done deal.  They ave wisely positioned themselves as "maybe" being about to move, and want to be stronger as a congregation whether they do or not. They are advancing confidently in the direction of their dreams... putting foundations under them as Thoreau advised.

Lincoln School building -- Missoula UU's new home?