A New Paradigm

Recently I listened to an interview on my favorite public radio show, On Being.  Krista Tippett interviewed Christian Wiman, a poet, essayist, and editor of Poetry Magazine. Wiman grew up in West Texas in a Southern Baptist family. Like many young people, he left the church and religion when he left home, but several years later he returned to religion, to God. I was so engaged by the program, I listened to the unedited ninety-minute interview, then watched his interview with Bill Moyers. What captivated me most was this exchange with Krista Tippett who asks:

[If] you think about yourself in church all those years ago in west Texas, the church you grew up in, which was just given to you like the air you breathed and then when you're in church now, what's going on that's different? How is that experience different?

Mr Wiman: Well, it's utterly different. I think it's a weaker experience now. I mean, I'm just too conscious. I wish I were able to let myself go in ways that those people did in my childhood and still do. When I go to my mother's church now, it's one of those big mega-churches. You know, I don't agree with their theology and I don't like a lot of the ways that they commercialize their services, but it is an incredibly diverse church and the people are intensely involved. They're treating it as if their whole life were at stake. The churches I go to, liberal Protestant churches, it seems pretty casual. I wish there were some credible middle ground. I wish there was some way of harnessing that — the intensity that I felt in my childhood in more sophisticated ways.

You know how I talk about my inner-tent-revivalist? Well this is the tent I’ve been talking about and it’s going up now. Somebody left that barn door open and my inner-revivalist is coming out. Seriously, there is a deep and vast hunger to marry the intensity of a tent revival with a sophisticated understanding of spirit, and we, brothers and sisters, can officiate. But first we must recognize the power of treating church as if our whole life were at stake.

Now it’s easy to dismiss this part; we don’t labor under the threat of eternal damnation. But we live in a state of perpetual disconnection that causes this hunger. Our daily lives are filled with a thousand choices that either connect or disconnect us from the ground of our being—choices that don’t even feel like choices anymore. None of us wants to purchase products made by exploited workers but we figure what’s our choice? So we buy the smart phone or the cheap underwear, or anything else we can find at the big-box store, the discount chain or online, and it tears a little each time we do because even if we rationalize with our minds, the heart center, that core part of our being where knowing, not just thinking, resides, sighs. We know even if we ignore it that there’s no clean way to extract oil or natural gas. Fossil fuels are dirty even if the ads for them are sanitized. Literally everywhere we turn, we feel trapped by what feels like an inevitable, inescapable path paved with the bricks of individualism, competition, and fear. Our political discourse bounces between ridiculous and rancorous; we let the free market—not our core values—decide and then shrug our shoulders with a combination of resignation and powerlessness. We don’t know what to tell or teach our children about yet another fatal shooting in school; and we don’t know what to say to those same children for whom bullying is a fact of life and video war games are staple entertainment.

Daily we spiral deeper into disconnect and the evidence is ubiquitous. Addiction, asthma, autism, depression, PTSD, chronic fatigue, poverty, income disparity—all on the rise. We all experience the disconnect whether or not we name it, see it, or believe it. Our bodies, the heart-center in each of us knows it. Our lives are at stake.

And yet we see an Easter headline like this one from the Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise: “Worshippers Waning: Local ministers say fewer of the faithful attend Easter Services.” And why are people not coming to church the way they did in the past? Because the old paradigm isn’t working.

Last month I read Thomas Bandy’s book, Kicking Habits: Welcome Relief for Addicted Churches. According to Bandy, twentieth-century folks went to church to belong to an institution, to secure status among the right social set, because neighbors and coworkers asked, “What church do you attend?” People joined to belong, and then the church set about to inform them of its structure, both implicit and explicit. Folks got nominated to committees and boards. They were groomed to maintain the church as an institution and train the next generation. Though they began as members, writes Bandy, they ended up as guardians: keepers of the institution. But in this millennium, he contends, people come to church, if they come at all, seeking something else. Not institutional belonging, not doctrine, not hierarchy, not committee meetings. People today seek deeper meaning, a greater sense of relevance and purpose. Bandy is not the only one reporting this. Every commentator or researcher I read says the same thing. People hunger to reconnect with the ground of being. For some that is God, for others, it is just that, the ground of all being, including theirs.

Bandy distinguishes between declining churches and thriving churches. Congregations, he asserts, must cross-examine themselves. Ask not what is important to many but truly essential to all?

In the newspaper article the minister of our sister congregation in Leominster says, “she tries to make religion and church life relevant for people in the post-modern age.” But even where there’s a parking lot, attendance is down on Easter. Why? Because it’s not enough to pepper our sermons with contemporary cultural references or sing folk songs. We have to act as if our lives are at stake. We have to address the deep disquieting discomforting disconnect that truncates our lives, that induces amnesia so that we forget and worse, deny our inter-being, the interdependency of the web. People come here seeking concrete ways to re-connect, to mend the torn fabric of creation, to engage in tikkun olam, not simply to do for others, but to relearn compassion for ourselves because we can’t give away what we don’t have.

People come to church not just to find relevance but to be relevant, which is to say related. Religion—from the Latin word for refasten. So how do we refasten ourselves? How do we re-member, re-attach that cleaved part that longs to be made whole?

We begin by re-connecting as Unitarian Universalists to a distinct tradition fraught with dissent that arose out of an insistence that we unite the intensity of religious fervor with our capacity for critical and compassionate thought. We recall the early martyrs of our movement who dared to speak against the religious hierarchies and edicts of their day, where their lives were literally at stake—being burned there. We teach our children and they more likely teach us what it means to take a stand—to stand with those who would otherwise go unprotected, unrepresented, whose dignity even the state would flagrantly defile.

In the nineteenth century, many Unitarian congregations split over slavery. Wealthy New England industrialists and mill owners defended it. Nothing is more profitable than slave labor. No doubt some of our churches have endowments built on those welted backs. The abolitionists who spoke up often got run out but they did not go silently because long before a gentle Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh taught two generations of westerners the term “inter-are,” abolitionists knew about the interconnectedness of being. And that knowing propelled them to speak against the willful ignorance of those who cherry-picked the Bible in defense of an economy based on defilement.

A century later, when Jim Crow still wielded the lash, a Unitarian minister in Boston named James Reeb heeded Martin Luther King’s call to join marchers in Selma. Jim Reeb died at thirty-eight leaving behind his wife and four children when white men gusseted by fear beat him for the courage of his convictions, probably because to them, pardon the phrase, he looked like a nigger-lover. He died by the hand of segregationists and for that he is remembered in Unitarian Universalist circles, but it was not his death that embodied his sense of connection; it was his years of ministry working to integrate neighborhoods and churches, and most importantly, the human heart. Jim Reeb did not duck controversy or dodge danger by eschewing the divisive. He understood the fearfulness that grips us and how quickly it transmogrifies into rage.

A decade ago, before any states had passed marriage equality laws, the church where I had interned, a church that had welcomed and affirmed me, that loved the music director and his male partner of near twenty years, fractured around the full impact of what it meant to be a welcoming congregation. The suggestion to fly a large rainbow flag met with resistance. What if people in town think we only welcome gays and not other minorities? What if people reduce us to being “the gay church”? And with equal urgency others in the congregation countered, but we are the only church that welcomes gay and transgender people. Religious institutions have rejected, vilified queer folk for centuries. Consider what it means for people to be welcomed not shunned? We have the power to do that, they pled.

A while back, during social hour, I overheard Dick mention people picketing in front of Planned Parenthood so I made an appointment a couple of weeks ago to meet the outreach coordinator there. The director of the clinic let me in. I had to ring a buzzer so the director could check the live video feed to make sure she didn’t let in someone with a weapon. If I might speak to the women for just a moment, do you remember your first pelvic exam? I was terrified. The thought of it was creepy and invasive. I cannot imagine overlaying that late adolescent self-consciousness and fear with having to be buzzed into a building because someone might burst in and shoot the doctor. It doesn’t matter that no abortions are performed in Fitchburg. To the people who carry signs equating abortion with murder, they are content to willfully ignore the statistics: that nationally, 97% of the health services Planned Parenthood provides are not related to an abortion—or that abortion is still legal. It is not that the protesters are evil or even hateful though it probably feels that way to the young woman terrified because she has missed a period, or the young man afraid he has contracted or spread an STD, who have finally summoned the courage to get tested—as they walk through the gauntlet of stares, signs and disparaging remarks.

As I said before, we live in a world that perpetually disconnects us. Each day every one of us without wanting to, or meaning to, or even thinking that we are, engage in processes that diminish life. The World Health Organization estimates that somewhere between 30-40,000 children die every day of preventable conditions, namely the lack of clean water and adequate nutrition. Right this minute there are thousands of children languishing in foster homes. And thousands more abducted, sold into sexual slavery, splayed on pornographic websites. You don’t need me to list all the ways we defile the inherent worth and dignity of so many beings. It’s easier to fixate on abortion as the single most egregious form of defilement than to reckon with all the forms in which we are complicit.

And yes, I could tell you the story of my great aunt, or really my father telling me about her, the way she came to him late in her life, when he became president of the local Planned Parenthood, and revealed to him what it had been like in the 1920s for her to climb the stairs of the tenement abortionist when she could not face bringing a third child into an apartment ravaged by an abusive alcoholic. It was not something she could discuss with her rabbi or seek solace for from her congregation.

But if one’s religious community is not a safe place to seek counsel or support or even companionship what does that say about the nature of religious community—a community intended to bind us together?

At the annual meeting I am asking that the congregation consider displaying a banner of support that reads: Love Responsibly. Support Planned Parenthood.

Why opt for something so divisive you might ask? Or seemingly political? For the same reason abolitionists objected to slavery when the biggest church donors profited from it. For the same reason Jim Reeb went down to Selma. For the same reason churches fly rainbow flags or banners supporting marriage equality.

To be relevant to the people of this congregation and community, that is to say related. To claim our connection with the heretical roots of our denomination, the branch that declared errors in the Trinity, and the branch that declared universal salvation, when both assertions sometimes resulted in death. Our denomination has been forged out of the courage to not only withstand the fires of condemnation and misunderstandding, but to champion conscience, reason, compassion and direct experience when no one else will.

We have the opportunity, as the church where I interned had years before, to publicly declare our support for people historically shunned by religious institutions: to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of the people a few blocks from here who seek medical services or work in a health clinic with surveillance cameras because our society hasn’t found a way to counter the deadliness of fear and ignorance yet.

And yes, if we hang a banner some people will say, “that’s the abortion church.”  But you know that just gives us the chance to say, “It’s not as simple as that.” Why not help shape a more thoughtful, compassionate and sophisticated dialogue? Why not re-connect with our own heretical roots? The etymological root of heresy, by the way, is choice.

Amid the overwhelming forces of disconnection, we hunger to reconnect. To restore wholeness cleaved a thousand times a day. Sisters and brothers, our lives are at stake. May we make of them a tent. Amen.

What's Larger Than Us?

Over twenty years ago, I ventured into the halls of AA. I didn’t have a drinking problem so much as a thinking problem. I thought about driving off the road. I didn’t want to die: I just wanted relief from the profound dis-ease I felt inside myself all the time despite outward accomplishment: grad school, college instructorship, friends, a nice apartment. It was during the era when I taught in prison and the woman who invited me to accompany her to an AA meeting said, “It’s no wonder you work in a prison; you live in one.” Ouch! But she was right and I knew it. I couldn’t have told you exactly what was imprisoning me but I felt the constraint so I went with her to a meeting in an upscale Catholic church thinking I was on an anthropological field trip to observe another species: alcoholics. As I said, I didn’t having drinking problem because I did not drink. I avoided alcohol and didn’t care for the effects, but curiously, I found myself identifying heavily with everyone who spoke. Not the details about DUIs, hangovers or hidden bottles: but the feelings I heard described were my own.
Because the hour spent in a meeting provided the only hour of relief from that feeling of dis-ease, I kept going, still thinking myself a visitor but a grateful one nonetheless. For those of you unfamiliar with AA or the other Twelve Step programs, spirituality is a big piece. That first meeting, a big blue felt banner hung on the podium that read “But for the Grace of God.” I recall thinking, well that’s just fine for these people but what are the rest of us to do?

People in meetings kept mentioning a higher power. Everyone needed one, no matter what it was: Nature, God, the Goddess or G.O.D —good orderly direction or group of drunks. Something beyond the self to turn to, or turn it over to and let go. For me, the phrase conjured some sort of elevated sovereign being which just wasn’t a resonant metaphor so I would sit in meetings held in church basements and peer out a window usually at the street level, thinking there’s a world going on out there that gives no thought to those of us inside this room at ten on a Monday morning or eight on a Wednesday night; but here we are, all searching for something larger. And that’s when it hit me: the idea of a larger power, not a higher one. I realized each morning we wake unto a world already in action. We re-enter consciousness from the sleepy world of our dreams and there it is in all its glory: the universe humming along. As odd as it sounds, it might have been the first time I recognized, or more accurately, felt, for it was more sensation than cognition—that I belong, that we all belong to something larger than ourselves.

When I was a kid I used to terrify myself worrying that I had dreamed up the entire world: that it was just a figment of my imagination and when I woke up I would be all alone in the blackness of space. Finally, I told my best friend who said she had thought the same thing—which somehow instantly reassured me I was not in fact alone, unless of course I had dreamed her up, too. I suspect whether or not we have a childish moment of solipicism where we fear we might have thought up everything from string theory to the entire canon of Mozart, deep down many of us have experienced at least a flash of feeling terribly alone: not solitary in a contented way: but truly unstrung like the moment the obstetrician severs the umbilical cord. Suddenly the world is awash in unfamiliar sounds and smells, lights, temperatures, textures. Gone is the familiar slosh of amniotic fluid, the safe confines of a womb inside a larger being that notices and hopefully cares.

My students often presume humans created religion solely as a way to explain otherwise inexplicable natural phenomena. The new field of neurotheology examines where in our brains the religious impulse comes from and how the brain apprehends religious experience. But it occurs to me on some pre-conscious level, or perhaps simply a pre-natal one, we literally enter the world as we come to know it, with the initial experience of being part of something larger; and once we slip through the birth canal into the delivery room: be it home or hospital or the back of a cab, we sense the sudden shift and seek to recreate the experience of belonging we’ve already had.

When we study religion: eastern, western, animist, monotheist, polytheist, earth-based or otherwise, we encounter story. Great and often overlapping narratives that at the core offer us belonging. Creation stories may attempt to explain how we got here or how life first formed; but more essentially, they contextualize our individual beginning within a meta-origin that continues to hold us. We think of story as a human invention or impulse indicative of how our brain works: how memory, imagination and consciousness coalesce: all of which may be true.  But a bit like my child-self thinking I had dreamed up the world, we believe we have conjured story when in actuality we don’t create story so much as inhabit it.

As one of my students wrote in his research essay on what comprises reality, except for astronauts who have viewed the earth from space, humans don’t typically perceive the ground we live on as spherical. We know cognitively that the planet is round but our senses don’t relay that information; we encounter it as an idea. We experience our lives unfolding on a horizontal plane when in reality gravity affixes us to a point on an arc. In the same way, we appear to fabricate stories from memory and imagination, the gravitational pull of narrative connects us to the greater story of life unfolding.

We speak of our legacy, how we live on in the memory of others through the stories they tell that attest to our influence; but even after the last person who knows us dies, our story still exists. Whether or not it resides in human consciousness, our story remains in the narrative fabric of earth where we have trod and in the molecules of air we exhaled, in the long forgotten cells sloughed off our bodies and the heat that once emanated from us. Our very being belongs to a world that contains us regardless of corporeal form.

Such a perspective is what I call mosaic: enough distance to see the complete picture. Views from the Hubble telescope can depict Earth from multiple angles though not all at once; but even a telescope so powerful cannot capture the entirety of our galaxy, much less all the other solar systems out there. It’s not a readily available perspective so we create stories to stitch us into place, to mark the dot in the swirling galaxy that indicates: we are here. The distinctly tribal narratives of Genesis and Exodus reflect the need to know our place in the scheme of things. To identify with a particular clan or collective recreates a sense of prenatal belonging. Once again we know we are part of something larger.

We rely on stories, biblical or literary, scientific, even musical to instruct and assure us we belong.

That’s the power of AA and other Twelve-Step programs: creating a safe space for individual stories others identify with so that no one feels unique or more importantly isolated, unreachable, alone. As much as an insistence on having a higher or larger power may appear dictatorial, it isn’t. It’s just wise. The isolation of addiction is not unique. It is an intense and potentially deadly form, but as prosaic that the isolation of anyone else. Most if not all of us know the feeling of floating like a dust mote disconnected. The concept of a larger power is but a metaphor for the source of our being; be it a long-dead star, an accumulation of atoms, or the breath of the universe mysteriously and miraculously coalesced into human form.

Dust motes don’t exist in a vacuum. Well, they may end up in one, but dust though it seems disconnected gives evidence of what exists and has existed. Dust may be the original storyteller.

Macro- and microscopic worlds include us even when we don’t consciously perceive our inclusion. Many years ago on the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland I noticed

the untamed grasses tickling

the clear belly of sky…

the ground plump with stories,

mist unfurling secrets

to the intricate workings

of villages blossoming

in the scrub brush

a world chattering around our ankles.

On woods walks with my dog, Zuki I often get lost in my thoughts but then she sniffs and upends a tuft of fur and I realize the woods teem with stories of life and death. The voles and mice, fox and deer, coyotes and porcupines, owls and woodpeckers, the hawks and wild turkeys inhabit an intricate expansive world far greater than my ability to imagine—and with each step that jostles a twig or rustles leaves, Zuki and I enter the narrative, leaving our scents and our dust, our spent oxygen, and she, her scat for other creatures to decipher just as intently as she reads theirs.

What’s larger than us? Everything. The trees more plentiful; the underground fungi more prolific; oceans, mountains, sky, galaxies. And stories. Something as vast as the Himalayas or as complex as the mathematical underpinnings of a multiverse lacks the intimacy we long to return to, the containment of belonging we seek, so we go in search of that and find it in AA drunkalogues and tall tales, in ballads and frescoes, poems and plays, quilts and recipes handed down for generations. We find it in archetypes and myths and pictographs etched into cave walls.

We craft stories to express ourselves: to exhale what we ingest; to make tangible what we imagine; to enrich the ongoing conversation; to demonstrate how our particular experience nuances the cosmic narrative. We engage with the stories of others to find the ways we fit and where we don’t because even when we feel we don’t fit in to this particular story or that particular crowd, we define ourselves within the meta-narrative.

When I was so sure I did not belong with the ones who talked about a higher power and kept saying “But for the grace of God,” I unwittingly returned to the story by Dr. Seuss where some of the sneetches had stars on their bellies while others did not. I spent my childhood and adolescence on the margins, and occasionally I wore that feeling of outsiderhood as a badge; but by early adulthood I remember wanting to be just another bozo on the bus. In my late twenties I spent several months sitting in AA meetings thinking I didn’t belong and wishing I did—because I felt better there, recognized and inside, no longer out. I’d been writing stories since childhood to understand the incomprehensible; and then years later, when and where I least expected, rooms full of strangers named and demystified the incomprehensible by telling their stories and nodding when I shared mine.

Thursday it snowed where I live so Zuki and I went trotting into the woods where the lattice of snow-laden branches sculpted a womb of trees and suddenly I knew why I have always sought to live at the forest’s edge.  As much as I love the beach and the expanse of ocean stretching toward the horizon, it is in the woods that I feel held. It is there I experience most vividly the sensation of belonging: where I meet what is larger and climb inside.

All of art, music, invention and discovery are larger than us. Grief and joy are larger. Hope and the indomitability of spirit are larger. The drive to survive, the replication of cells, the path of light traveling from red giants to our retinas here on earth, God, the ground of our being, the breath of the universe, mysteries and the ineffable: all larger than we are —and inseparable.  It is not just with our brains but with our sensory organs we can once again know how it feels to inhabit belonging. The more we notice, the more we listen to the stories that surround us in scrub-brush and anthills, in church basements and sanctuaries, in fallen logs and deer scat, supernovas and bacteria, the easier it is to feel again the pulsing umbilical cord that fastens us to the world wherever and whoever we are.