Happy Hanukwanzmas?

We Unitarian Universalists love holidays.  We love all the festivals of light in December.  We even have a new one of our own, Chalica, celebrating the UU seven principles at the beginning of the month. And people love that, too. At our congregation, we had an (early) Hanukkah celebration, to be followed by two Winter Solstice events and a Christmas Eve service.  We aren't celebrating Kwanzaa this year, but I hear they have enjoyed it in the past.

As an interim minister, I go from congregation to congregation, among other things helping them through the Winter holidays as best I can.  In the last congregation, we tried a Las Posadas holiday pageant, singing the songs in Spanish and getting a little out of our comfort zone.  I confess, it was my doing, and I am not sorry.  In this congregation, I was the instigator of the Christmas Eve service.  Historically humanist, this Fellowship had not gotten around to making a place for its Christians and others for whom that kind of Christmas experience is meaningful.  Turned out that some people who would have wanted it had by-now long standing traditions of getting together with friends and not going to church.  But for new people who haven't established their traditions...can it help?  We'll see..

The trouble is our diversity.  Maybe it's not trouble.  But you know... there are those for whom various December days have special meaning -- St. Nicholas, St. Lucia, the Virgin of Guadalupe -- all depending on the cultural makeup of the community.  With Buddhists in our midst, sometimes we pause to honor Bodhi Day. I have not served a congregation where Diwali was given more than a nod, but for some it's big. And always Hanukkah.  We celebrate the light that would not go out, and the struggle for religious freedom.  We sing and play dreidel and eat latkes. We pray for peace in the Middle East.

There are those who want to make a pagan ceremony at the solstice, and those who want to do something more humanist, celebrating science and truth.  Others just want to have a party.  One congregation did its own mini-Revels every year for which the whole town turned out.  And then it's on to Christmas!  People who are Christian Unitarian Universalists have a variety of theologies, and people who have moved on just slightly from being Christians do, too.  Somehow we weave all this diversity into a fabric of celebration stretches from one end of December to the other.

In the nearly all-white congregations I have been serving lately, Kwanzaa has not seemed like something we need.  Still, the values of Kwanzaa are things I would like to promote among Unitarian Universalists. I'll find a way without having to have white people pretend to be Black and without drafting the already conspicuous few Black people to show us what Black is like (when it's probably not like that).

We close out the season with a New Year's Eve fire communion.  Cast the things that no longer serve you into the fire on little slips of flash paper!  It seems a suitable finale.

With luck and effort, it does hang together and unify most of our theologies, leaving us feeling more whole as a community.  December ends.  The light returns.  There is unity in diversity, and all is well.
Blessed be!

Sometimes It's a Blue Christmas

            It was Elvis who sang a long, long time ago about a blue, blue Christmas, the kind that happens when what you thought was true love is no longer true.  It’s an apt name for the kind of season some of us may be having.  Maybe this is the first Winter Holiday season since a dear one in your family has died, when all the old traditions bring back memories of times when you were all together, sharing the special joys of the season.  Or maybe there has been a separation, estrangement, divorce from someone living—a partner, a child, someone else-- with whom you used to share these times.  Or maybe you are living in a different place, at loose ends when the holiday comes around, missing everyone who used to be around to share the holidays. 

For some people the holidays are always “hellidays,” a time to get together with people who routinely misconduct themselves, but whom you still love. 

Here are my basic suggestions --gathered from a variety of sources--if your holiday season is going to be a challenging one.

1.  Accept is as it is and plan accordingly.  If you are in a time of loss, do give yourself time for sadness.  Reflect on what traditions will bring comfort, and what will bring pain.  If the painful ones are important anyway, allow extra time before and after to deal with your feelings. If you know family members are going to misbehave, make plans not to expose yourself to the misbehavior by limiting time together.  Rehearse responses that will deflect the arguments you don’t want to have.

2.  Make time for spiritual practice and sleep.  If you don’t do meditation or other formal spiritual practice, plan to take a walk or go to the gym regularly.  Especially walk if you can.  Limit television viewing and other media  Plan to get to bed on time, and really try to make the last half hour before bed a relaxing one. Keeping your days and evenings on an even keel will help you manage your feelings and make good choices.

3. Moderation.  It’s easy to eat and drink too much at the holidays, and if you are feeling troubled, it’s even easier.  Make plans to find alternatives to overeating and over-drinking and stick to them.  Remember, alcohol is a depressant.  If you are depressed already, it will not help. Oh, yes, and avoid overspending, too.  The stuff you buy will not fill the hole in your life any more than another helping of mince pie will. 

4.  Find new traditions.  If there’s an empty place in your holidays, or a gap created by deciding not to spend time in unpleasant company, look around for new traditions.  A good place to look is to volunteer opportunities.  Can you help at the soup kitchen or the food pantry, or join the crew for a community dinner?  Helping others has two benefits – yes, it really does help others, and then, too, it helps you by turning your attention away from yourself. 

5.  Do take time for mourning whatever loss is involved in your blue holiday.  But also take time for gratitude.  Even the worst of times has some blessing in it.  The sun still rises and fills the sky with beauty.  There is much to think about with gratitude, even now.  Allow your sorrow and pain to be interwoven with gratitude and even joy.   It may not be a happy season, but it can at least be mixed!

What White People Can Do

              We think now about the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and wonder what he would do.  I think now, too, about what white people might do that would be truly helpful.  Here is a reflection I wrote some time ago about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was Martin Luther King’s first entry into leadership of the civil rights movement.           

           

 The year was 1954. Things in Alabama had started to change. The determined action over a very long time of a large number of people who were tired of Jim Crow laid the foundation for what started when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. 

Some of those were white people.  There was Myles Horton, founder and director of the Highlander Folk School.  There was Robert Graetz, the Lutheran minister who, with his wife and two small children, served the small Trinity Lutheran parish, ran its school for Negro children, and lived in its parsonage in the Negro neighborhood.  There was Clifford Durr, a white lawyer and Rhodes Scholar from a prominent Alabama family.  Durr had been influential in the founding of the Highlander Folk School, and he had important connections in government circles in Washington, DC.

            The Highlander Folk School was widely regarded in conservative white circles as suspect, and indeed it was having a radical impact on those who participated, bringing people of different races together for conversation and training.  It became the subject of Congressional hearings during the McCarthy era, and Clifford Durr defended it vigorously, with the result that he lost all his white clients in Montgomery.  He and his family paid a high price for advocating change.  But they did it anyway.

            Myles Horton, at Highlander, lived in isolation deep in rural Tennessee, and even though a community formed around the school, it was risky to be such a small island of tolerance in a vast sea of Southern racism.  People simply disappeared sometimes in those days.  Fires sometimes mysteriously burned people's homes. It could have happened at any time to the Hortons, but they did it anyway.

            Robert Graetz, the idealistic young Lutheran pastor from the North, found that he and his family simply had to live as if they were black, partly because they were so completely unaccepted in white society, and partly because it was their choice to do it that way. When they went to the movies, the Graetzes chose to sit in the Negro balcony.  Since is was illegal for the cashiers to sell white tickets to black people or black tickets to white people, the theater staff just let them in for free.  The Graetzes, too, paid a price for their commitment to racial justice.  All of them did it anyway.

            It remains a mystery that the mass movement in Montgomery was not stamped out, that its leaders were not immediately killed or scared out of town, that the longstanding, usual repression was not quickly brought to bear, as had happened so many times in so many places throughout the South for so long. There was constant danger of death.  Stories are still coming to light of those who gave their lives to the work of opposing racial oppression in the South.  Rosa Parks herself was forced to leave town in order to live without fear for her life when it was all said and done.  Black churches continue to be burned from time to time, just because…. 

There was no reason to believe at the outset that this boycott in Montgomery was going to be any different than the protests that had been made elsewhere.  Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that the black community in Montgomery just went ahead, knowing what the odds were, prepared for the heavy-handed response they knew all too well from long experience. 

The white families whose names are recorded in relation to the Montgomery Bus Boycott did five things we would do well to remember.

            The Graetzes went to live and minister with the black community, fully committed to being with black people as equals.  In the struggle for economic justice, some middle-class people can go live and work among the hardworking poor as equals.

            The Durrs used their money and influence to bring a liberalizing institution into existence, and fought for its survival, fully committed to making resources available for black and white people to get to know each other and learn how to work together.  Some of us can do that.  We can support organizations that work with those who are struggling and cannot get ahead, and fight for the survival of those organizations. 

            Clifford Durr put his professional expertise as a lawyer and his important connections at the disposal of the cause.  Some of us can do that.

            And the Hortons put their lives on the line to lead a school that advocated peaceful change by empowering people to speak for themselves.  Some of us might do that.

            All three families retained connections to the white world and shared their stories in the white community.  We can do that -- create the bridges of understanding between the people hardest hit by this economy of injustice and the rest.

            So in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let us do these things.  Let us make a commitment to be with all people equals, to use our money and influence to assure the availability of liberalizing institutions, to use our professional expertise to help in the struggle, to participate in programs that advocate peaceful change, and to share our stories.  

Highlander Folk School

The Small Congregation Prepares for Annual Meeting

Annual Meeting is coming.

The idea of preparation is a little new.

The budget must be prepared, but just this week, the Religious Education Committee decided to charge a small fee to help cover the cost of supplies, and never told the Treasurer.  Not really a problem, since it's a wash, but still...

And nobody actually put together a budget item for the 50th anniversary celebration next fall.

But the budget will be presented, probably line by line, and passed.

The nominating committee (known as the Recruitment and Recognition Committee) has managed to find enough people to staff the Board of Trustees, but not to replace themselves.  There may or may not be people who want to nominate for Nominating from the floor.

Most committees have affirmed that they have chairs for the coming year.

There is "always" a pot luck lunch beforehand, although this has not been mentioned so far in the publicity for this event.

The interim minister (that would be me) has instigated a printed booklet of annual reports on the congregation's activities.  The Building and Grounds Committee is alone in declining to participate.  This is a positive development!

The main event is that the part time minister and the part time religious education coordinator-and-administrative-coordinator will be working with this congregation for another year.  This is implicit in the budget and will not be discussed separately, thank goodness!

People are happy about the way things are going.  This is good, because apparently there is no parliamentarian, either official or unofficial. And little knowledge of how to use Robert's or another system to guide discussion to a vote.

Moving to a more formal way of being in the world is happening.  But this congregation is not quite there yet.

That's okay.  In fact, it's fine.

No, this is not the congregation in question....

American Nations and My Religion

It's really true.  My religion is firmly rooted in New England. Unitarian Universalism is an expression of the New England way.  Our central offices are in Boston.  Our people were intimately involved over two centuries in the great project of exporting New England values through educational institutions, publishing, writing, and speaking.  Our people went West in the nineteenth century to participate in that project of cultural evangelism.  To St. Louis, to Minneapolis, to San Francisco, and more.  People with Boston names were their ministers, at least at first.

When I started reading Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures in North America, I was pursuing a thread I had picked up in my political reading.  I had gotten interested in the political evolution of Scots-Irish culture in Appalachia and beyond, since I personally have that heritage.  And since I had been living in the northern marches of the part of our country that once was in Mexico, the political implications of that very different cultural background were also on my mind.  Politics: red, blue, and purple, that was what was thinking about.  Not religion.

But then it struck me: The eleven nations Woodard identifies have very distinctive ways of faith as well as very distinctive ways of politics.  He writes about the private protestants, interested in personal salvation versus the public protestants, interested in doing right in this world for everyone.  We're the apotheosis of public protestants, I thought.  It's a good place to stand -- or was, maybe, in the 20th century-- but kind of limited on a continent with eleven different "Nations." We stand in the very center of Yankeedom, as Woodard calls our nation of greater New England.  Maybe we have reached out into the upper Midwest to the point that it is part of our nation.  And maybe we have strong allies in New Netherlands and the Left Coast, but culturally we are not doing so well in the Deep South, Tidewater, New France, El Norte, Greater Appalachia, the Midlands, the Far West, or the First Nations.

From American Nations, by Colin Woodard

The impact of our impressive reach into education and the printed word has been eroded by changes in media.  Once, it might not have mattered if no one had heard of Unitarian Universalists, for they were reading what we wrote. Now, fewer people read. And reading has a different social meaning.  Instead, people watch things produced in places culturally distant from us.  We need to reach out again to find  places to stand that can reach into all these nations. For our message is not identical with the culture of Yankeedom.

Maybe that's what's important for us about reaching out into nations that are actually in different countries. Maybe we need to do that to understand how to establish our faith in places that are culturally not part of Yankeedom.  There are people building congregations from Catalunya to Burundi. from Rural Northeast India to urban Czech Republic.They are very different from us, and yet have some things in common. Some of them -- with Uganda the chilling example of the moment -- are risking their lives for principles we share. There's always the intriguing question -- what things do we need to have in common, and what can we let go?

I'm thinking our practice of asking and answering that question in an international framework can help us find the way into a Unitarian Universalism that speaks broadly in the Far West, El Norte, and New France, maybe even in the Midlands, Greater Appalachia, and the Deep South.  I believe this is something we need to explore. What do you think?

What They Believe, for Now...

What can I say about this wonderful Coming of Age group?

They are all wonderful, year after year, congregation after congregation, and I never get tired of the presentations on Coming of Age Sunday.

Godzilla, this year.  An awesome way to start a reflection on God and heroes and making meaning.

And the two kids who appeared by video because they had to be at a soccer tournament in Coeur d'Alene.
(I hate Sunday soccer tournaments.)

Some believe in God, some are not sure, and some for sure don't.  Interesting riff on the Big Bang and who might have started it. Or not.

All speak well and radiate the glow of youth, filling me with hope for the future of our world, or at least some corner of it.

We only see the tip of the iceberg.  It has been a struggle in this congregation to persuade these youth and their parents that this program is worth it.  But they mostly came on Sundays and were part of it, maybe absorbing more passively than an observer would have liked, but mostly, they were there.  And so much effort from some of the mentors to engage them more fully!

A cold-water plunge in November before the lake froze, taking their instructions from the way of certain Northwest indigenous people.

Afternoon hangouts at the coffee shop, talking about life, the universe, and everything.

And the Sunday service affirmed it had been worth it! Yes, the presentations of their faith statements, of course.  And so many people!  So much food!  So many pictures being taken!  Gifts exchanged!
And so much talk.

Much later, people went home, smiling.

It won't happen next year in this congregation, but looking at the population of the lower grades in Sunday school, they're into a time of doing this every other year.

This is a blessing.

Is a Small Congregation a Black Hole?

The woman sat in my office and tried to explain.  It was just too much, she said.  One leadership commitment always led to two more.  Or worse, when she signed up to do a piece of a project, she often turned out to be organizing the whole thing.  "It's a black hole," she said. "It sucks you in and never lets you out."  She had done it long enough.  She was going to find an alternative to church, something that did not require her to give up her life.  I wished her well, and told her I hoped she would be back in time.

In a small congregation, it's hard to find the people to fill important leadership roles.

It's one real reason to find ways to grow just a little larger. But you can't just  grab the first newcomer and make them committee chair, board member, board officer.  Sometimes you might get lucky, but not often.  I remember the congregation where the secretary of the board had been serving for too long.  A brand new member was selected to replace her.  She lasted three months before bolting.  She left the position and left the congregation, never to darken the doorway again.  The previous secretary returned, and as far as I know is still serving that role, lo these many years later. Complaining proudly that she is the only one who can do the job.  I don't believe this is a good way.

As people get tired, things get sloppy and functions are pared down, a faded feeling of weariness permeates all activities. Potluck suppers feature things people bought at the supermarket on the way over. A certain odor in the building speaks of not quite thorough cleaning. People no longer take time to check in with each other.  Little silos of different functions develop and operate independently.  Efforts to collaborate or even communicate just flutter and die. Children grow up and classes in Religious Education are no longer needed. 

The leaders are just too tired to get to know anyone new.  Sometimes they say "I have enough friends; I don't need to meet people."  Other times, they are just discouraged and can't find positive things to say to newcomers.  

And of course, if that's the way your congregation is operating, growth is unlikely.

Some congregations find a way to suck it up and get through the slump.  Others do not.

I try to encourage leaders in congregations to remember why they are doing what they do, to get to know whatever new people are coming through the doors, and to coach them to get involved without foisting leadership on them too soon.  It's more effort, but signs of positive change begin to emerge very soon, so it doesn't seem like effort for nothing.  What are the resources that can be drawn on for the required added effort?  Each congregation has its own story.  I am convinced that it can most often be a story with a happy ending.