I wanna be a dog...or maybe a cat

An Animal Blessing Service
August 28, 2011

I WANNA BE A DOG

Welcome to our Animal Blessing service, all you humans and the animals who brought you here. I want to start off by asking you to help me read a poem that needs some sound effects, okay? This is actually a song, but we're going to use it as a poem. Here’s how it goes. Every time you hear me say “O I wanna be a dog”, I want you to pant like a dog (hhhh) four times and again after the next phrase. You’ll catch on really quickly, I’m sure!

O I wanna be a dog (hhhh), wanna wag my tail (hhhh)
Chase cars and knock over garbage cans,
Bite the lady who brings the mail!

O I wanna be a dog…, wanna drool on the floor ….
Get pats on the head, chase cats, get fed,
Chew your shoes and bark at the door.

O I wanna be a dog… wanna dig big holes….
Wanna sniff French poodles and basset hounds
And pee on telephone poles.

O I wanna be a dog….wanna big wet nose….
Wanna run in the street, get mud on m’feet
And jump up onto your clothes!

I wanna have dog breath, I wanna learn to growl,
Scratch fleas and ticks and run after sticks
I want the moon to make me howl!

O I wanna be a dog….I wanna sleep on the ground….
Bein’ human these days is just a little crazed,
I just wanna be a hound!

How many of you would just as soon be a dog sometimes? Especially when things get a little nutso in your life? Wouldn’t it be nice to be a dog and get treats and do tricks and just give doggie kisses to everyone? Instead of having to pay bills and go to the store and mow the yard and do all those human things? Of course, not all dogs have it that easy, but I’d want to be a nice Golden retriever in a nice family.

Or who would like to be a cat? Cats have a pretty good life----all that cream and petting and bossing the humans around. Cats kind of run my house----they meow me awake in the morning, they meow for me to pet them or give them food, they hog all the extra space on the bed so I can hardly move. They have a pretty good life at my house. Of course, I’m not that crazy about Max’s tendency to bring in dead critters for me to clean up. I know they’re presents from him, but I didn’t ask for them!

Did you ever hear the story about how pets were created? It was recently discovered and here’s how I heard it:
 A newly discovered chapter in the Book of Genesis in the Bible has provided the answer to "Where do pets come from?" It is now part of the ancient story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.

Adam said, "Lord, when I was in the garden, you walked with me everyday. Now I do not see you anymore. I am lonesome here and it is difficult for me to remember how much you love me."

And God said, "No problem! I will create a companion for you that will be with you forever and who will be a reflection of my love for you, so that you will love me even when you cannot see me. Regardless of how selfish or childish or unlovable you may be, this new companion will accept you as you are and will love you as I do, in spite of yourself."

And God created a new animal to be a companion for Adam. And it was a good animal. And God was pleased.


And the new animal was pleased to be with Adam and he wagged his tail. And Adam said, "Lord, I have already named all the animals in the Kingdom and I cannot think of a name for this new animal."

And God said, "No problem! Because I have created this new animal to be a reflection of my love for you, his name will be a reflection of my own name, and you will call him DOG."

And Dog lived with Adam and was a companion to him and loved him. And Adam was comforted. And God was pleased. And Dog was content and wagged his tail.
 After a while, it came to pass that Adam's guardian angel came to the Lord and said, "Lord, Adam has become filled with pride. He struts and preens like a peacock and he believes he is worthy of adoration. Dog has indeed taught him that he is loved, but perhaps a little too well."

And God said, "No problem! I will create for him a companion who will be with him forever and who will see him as he is. The companion will remind him of his limitations, so he will know that he is not always worthy of adoration."

And God created CAT to be a companion to Adam. And Cat would not obey Adam. And when Adam gazed into Cat's eyes, he was reminded that he was not the supreme being.

And Adam learned humility. And God was pleased. And Adam was greatly improved. And Dog was happy. And Cat didn't give a hoot one way or the other.


But you know, it’s not just our pets who make our lives on this earth more worthwhile. There are animals and other living creatures who also help to keep our lives in balance and teach us good lessons about living.

St. Francis of Assisi lived over 800 years ago in Italy and he loved animals too. Stories are told about St. Francis taming a wolf who had been scaring a small village, about his preaching to the birds, and protecting the creatures of the woods and fields. Our blessing today of the animals we care for is to show our understanding and our agreement with St. Francis’s idea that animals are so important in our lives that we must always protect them and take care of them.

We have come to understand that we must not use animals carelessly, that if they work for us, as horses and cows and donkeys and dogs and other working animals do, we have a responsibility to see that they do not work too hard or too long or under bad conditions and that they receive good care, good food, good shelter.

Many of us have come to understand that using animals for food is something that must be done carefully and respectfully. Some of us don’t eat meat any more. Some of us eat only plants and their products for food. Some of us eat meat and fish but look for meat and fish that is humanely produced. And we don’t eat too much of it or eat it just because it’s the trendy thing to do.

Our relationships with animals, whether they are our pets or our source of food or work or the wildlife we see in the fields and forest and oceans, must be in balance. We must not overfish the oceans; we must not overwork our work animals; we must not use up animals or animal habitat unnecessarily.

When our earth and its creatures are in balance, our lives are more in balance too. We are happier when our animals are happy and well-cared-for. We receive so much love from our pets when they are happy and we feel bad when they are sick or injured or afraid.

What does it feel like to be out of balance? When you are dizzy, what does that feel like? Being dizzy is a kind of being out of balance. We can’t walk straight, we feel a little sick, we might even fall down. It’s not very much fun to be dizzy, even if sometimes we do it to be funny.

So we bless our animals today to tell them in our own way that they are important to us, that they help keep our lives in balance, and that we appreciate all that they do for us.

And what is a blessing, you might ask? A blessing is a very strong wish and hope for good things for someone or, in this case, for our animals. When we bless them, we are wishing and hoping that they will have good health, good things to happen to them, good people to take care of them. And we are also promising them that we will help them have good health, good things, good people in their lives.

Our behavior toward our animals tells them even better than words that we care for them. So we are promising them the blessing of our good care. They bless us every time they purr or lick our face or take us for rides or give us eggs or milk or meat. And even when they do something naughty, like my Max does every once in awhile, I still promise to take good care of him, even when I’m a bit mad at him.

How we’re going to do our blessing is this: We’ll do smaller animals first and work our way up through the dogs and larger animals. And we’ll go outside to bless horses and other larger animals. I’m going to ask the owner what the animal’s name is and then I’m going to say, “Bless you _____ and may you live a long and happy and healthy life.” And we’ll give each animal a treat.

At the end of the blessing, we’ll have a time of silence in memory of all the dear animals that have blessed our lives and have given us so much love before they died. During that time of silence, I’ll invite you to call out the names of those animals who have died and whose memory still gives us joy, even though we miss them very much.

Before we sing our final song, I will lead us in a commitment promise to our animals, saying out loud a pledge to treat animals with care and respect, in our homes, in our lands, and in meeting our food needs.

BLESSING CEREMONY
SILENCE (chime, speak names)

COMMITMENT PLEDGE (repeat after me)
I promise to treat the animals in my life with respect and care.
I promise to care for my pets by giving them good food, shelter, and love.
I promise to care for wildlife/ by caring for the forests, fields, and oceans where they live.
I promise to care for working animals by treating them kindly and gently.
I promise to care for food animals/ by respecting the gift they give with their bodies.
I make these promises knowing that my life is connected to theirs.
May it be so.

SONG: All God’s Critters

Max's new digs...

look like a go. I went over to Bill P's place on Double Bluff to check it out and it looks like a workable situation. Max can be outdoors as much as he wants, there will be several people living on the property (small apartment units) who love animals, nobody seems to be a cat molester as far as I can tell, and the grounds he'll patrol are huge, with several outbuildings and a big old barn.

Bill and his pal Ray (?) will let me know when they've fixed up one outbuilding with temporary screens to keep Max inside until he's bonded to the folks feeding him, and then he can go in and out at will. When they've completed the work, I'll take him over and they'll start getting acquainted with him. I told them that if it doesn't seem to be working out, I'll come and get him and keep looking for a spot, but I think it will work out.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed but I know I'm going to miss him terribly.

Decision-making about The Move...

has started and one that has been hanging over my head for awhile is "what am I going to do about Max?" Longtime hangers-on at Ms. Kitty's know that Max the Magnificent, the Massacree-er, is both a beloved fixture at the Saloon and Roadshow AND an attractive nuisance.

When I first started thinking about moving to Astoria, I realized that Max needed to stay on the island, for my wellbeing and his. There are a few organizations on the island who help to place animals who can't accompany their owners to new digs and I started investigating them, figuring I'd make some contacts here and there and by Aug. 1, 2012, I'd surely have found a place for him. Taking him with me was out of the question; paying pet deposits for three cats would be expensive and it's very possible that the only places I'd find to rent would be places where he couldn't go outdoors safely.

A few days ago, I realized that if Max were to have a new home well in advance of my move, it would simplify the move a lot, ease my anxiety about the timeline, make the older cats' lives less anxious, eliminate the need to take him to the kennel every time I want to go out of town, and (I hope) end my need to clean up after the occasional urinary indiscretion (yes, we had another one recently). Let's face it, Max's life here at Cottontail Acres has been marked (pun intended) by messes: disemboweled critters left on the deck and walkways, soaked, odorous bedding, horrible vomitus.

I knew I would miss him, even so, but I decided to look actively for a placement for him right away, so he could be settled in before the rains start. And yesterday morning, in our local version of craigslist, there appeared an ad:

Wanted
One Hardworking Barn Cat
I recently lost a dear barn cat who lived on a beautiful piece of property overlooking Double Bluff ... There is a barn, multiple outbuildings on 5 acres to patrol – a fantasy job for any barn cat, with plenty of opportunity for advancement in the mouse-eating world.
If you have such a barn cat that is seeking new digs, please contact me.
Bill P.

So I made contact with Bill P and the kind voice on the phone said he thought Max might be a good fit. So I'm going to visit this afternoon and check out the potential new home for my rascally boy. If I feel confident that Bill P is truly kind and that the new digs will work for my Max, I will let him go and explore new territory.

I realize there are risks involved, but there are as many risks if he stays with me. As I went walking yesterday, mulling over the prospect of letting him go, I could see the analogy between letting go of Max and letting go of my dear congregation. Max will miss me (and I him) but he will learn to love another caregiver; his new fields of opportunity will offer plenty of excitement and lots of mice. The congregation will miss me (and I them) but they will learn to love another minister; the possibilities for their outreach and growth will increase with new energy and ideas from a new person. And my life will simplify and ease with each letting-go decision.

Letting go of longtime responsibilities and enjoyments weighs on my mind somewhat. Not to be a minister? Not to be a singer? Not to be a caregiver? Not to be a teacher? a counselor? a provider of information?

And the taking on of possible new roles weighs heavy as well: to be old? to be dependent someday? to be alone? to make new friends? to find new outlets for creativity and enjoyment? to make a new life in a place where I know few people? Risky and exciting, both. Stay tuned!

I know it's healthy to be...

self-critical, but sometimes when I'm reading UU blogs, I get really tired of the seemingly endless litany of what Unitarian Universalist congregations and ministers and establishments and laity and officers and Boston and the hymnal and worship practices and general philosophy/theology are doing wrong.

As if the world weren't hard enough on us already, we pile on even more self-critique. We're pitifully small, we're confused about our message, we ministers need to be more careful about what we say and do and wear, we're elitist, classist, aging, not growing, you name it---we're guilty of it.

And much of this self-critique is true! But sometimes I just want to scream "People, we're human, we're not perfect, deal with it!"

It seems to me that all the self-critique we put out there, particularly in blogs where we are self-editing, is a kind of self-flagellation, where we beat our breasts and publicly apologize for being imperfect. It seems to me that we lack collective self-esteem and feel a need to beat ourselves up for not saving the world faster, more efficiently, more perfectly, and able to convert others to our way of doing things.

When I was working with middle school kids, the hardest one to work with was the kid who was constantly complaining about his/her own imperfections and apologizing for every mistake, as though it were a criminal offense. That kid needed me to help him/her see his/her strengths, take some pride in his/her skills and successes.

The next hardest was the one who complained constantly about others' imperfections, pointing out all the mistakes others made, even though his/her performance was not exactly stellar. That kid needed to focus on his/her own performance, not that of others.

Self-critique is a good thing but it can be more discouraging than encouraging. And it's really boring after awhile. So here I am, being one of those who critiques others rather than my own performance. There's such an aura of sanctimony about self-critique sometimes. I think that's why it bothers me so much.

And yet here I am, being sanctimonious about sanctimony elsewhere. Sorry---I am a worthless worm today. Tomorrow may be better.

So the cat is out of the bag....

figuratively speaking, and I am relieved. I have been carrying around the secret of my impending retirement for many months now. It has constrained me in ways I didn't even know until I wrote the letter, informed the board, and then had the letter mailed to the congregation.

The letter arrived in most mailboxes yesterday and I also posted it here and on Facebook. Interesting to be using social media to get the word out---for instant feedback, there's no equal to FB and blog.

Colleagues responded first, with encouragement and thoughtful advice. They mostly are thrilled for me and I suspect they crave the kind of personal time retirement can bring. Ministry gives a distinctive shape to one's life and it doesn't allow for very much personal time. I thought I detected a note of slight envy, as well as the message to not slip off the map while wallowing in the freedom from ministerial duties.

Response from congregants has been slowly coming in and, by and large, they're excited for me and sad for themselves. My friend A warned me yesterday over our lunch not to be surprised if people experience "abandonment issues" and start acting crazy. We'll see how that turns out. I would hope that this healthy bunch of folks would be able to deal just fine.

I do feel sad about leaving them and I feel sad that this news has come on the heels of a tragic death and another impending death in our midst. But there wasn't a better time and I was having a hard time keeping my mouth shut. Still, when I announced it to the board, one fellow said "so, it comes in threes". Maybe that means we're done with loss for awhile.

I find myself checking off things mentally: this time next year I won't go to a board retreat, or plan an adult RE program, or conduct the animal blessing or the water ceremony or... And I won't need to sort out problems like hurt feelings in a congregant or the request to return by a former member who caused difficulty in the past or submit newsletter items.

It's a mixed bag, of course, because I will miss doing many of these things. And yet I won't wake up in the night, either, wondering what the best response is to the disgruntled congregant or the difficult former member. No more deadlines! No more sermon scrambling! No more UUCWI, in just 10 more months.

And that's tough. UUMA guidelines make it clear that former ministers have a duty to the incoming minister to clear out for awhile, give the new person plenty of room to make his/her own connection to the beloved community. I'll have to figure out what to do about some of my connections with the congregation, like Facebook, but generally I respect the guidelines and will be careful not to interfere with the new configuration of leadership.

It's a good thing that I'm moving 200 miles away, by choice. I won't need to do the awkward dance of fobbing off conversations in the grocery store that wander into UUCWI business that I can't share. My job will be to be caring but not involved, not competing with the colleague who is in the process of bonding with this congregation I love so dearly.

A letter to my congregation

This letter was mailed to my congregation on Saturday, Aug. 13, and should arrive in their mailboxes today:

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Whidbey Island
20103 Highway 525, P.O. Box 1076, Freeland, WA 98249 •
(360) 321-8656
August 9, 2011

My dear Whidbey friends,

We are beginning our ninth year of ministry together and I am looking forward to it with great anticipation. We have a strong leadership team, a growing, vital membership, outstanding adult and children's programming, incredible talent in many areas, and a beautiful facility to share with our community. It will be a wonderful year, I predict, and I am excited about it.

UUCWI has become a strong and growing congregation. That enables me to decide that it is a good time for me to end my ministry with you. I plan to retire from the active UU ministry on June 30, 2012, and will be moving to a new home in Astoria, Oregon, next summer, where I am looking forward to starting a new phase of my life. I have experienced some of the very happiest years of my life here on Whidbey Island and I will miss you all very much when I move away. But the future for you and for me looks bright and promising.

We have accomplished a lot together and you have many more achievements and outreach projects ahead of you. Your service to the Whidbey Island community will grow and prosper and you will find a new minister who will help you fulfill new dreams, new ideals, new ways to serve each other and the larger community.

During the coming months, our board of trustees will work with our Pacific Northwest UU district staff to make decisions about finding a new minister and will keep you the congregation in the loop during this process. Your thoughts and involvement will be crucial to the process of finding just the right person to serve you in the future.

I'm looking forward to this last year together and expect that we will continue our work together this year in exciting ways. Just imagine the possibilities!

Much love,

Kit

The Flaming Chalice

THE FLAMING CHALICE: What it means to Unitarian Universalists
August 14, 2011
Rev. Kit Ketcham

Hey, remember when we’d go to summer camp and sit around a big bonfire at night, make googly eyes at each other across the flames, and sing goofy songs like this? Sing with me if you remember it:

One dark night, when we were all in bed, old Missus O’Leary put a lantern in the shed. The cow kicked it over and winked her eye and said “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight! Fire, fire, fire, fire!”

Whether we experience it in a friendly way---around a campfire or in front of a fireplace in a cozy room----or as a frightening event in our lives, there’s something compelling about fire. We seem drawn to its light, its warmth, its flickering magic, the smoke that rises into the skies. And we also may shrink from its glare, its inferno-like heat, the caustic fumes it can generate and we fear its destructive power even as we kindle a small cooking fire.

We light candles for our own quiet times, or when we desire a sense of the holy. We take care not to let fire get out of control, we keep fire extinguishers handy in our kitchen, by the hearth, and at the campsite. We gaze in horror at times at the destructive nature of fire upon homes, landscapes, property, and we also marvel at its regenerative powers when the ravaged forest begins to bloom again.

A cup, too, a goblet, a container for lifegiving substances, has significance to us. How many mugs with funny sayings on them have you received over your lifetime? We give and receive gifts of containers, from silly mugs to beautiful silver goblets to beer steins and even pasta bowls.

All of these gifts are intended to hold something we value---our morning cup of tea, a celebratory glass of champagne, a cold brew, a hearty meal. We look at the goofy mug and think of its giver----our child who tells us we’re the best mom or dad ever, our sister or brother who can’t resist making one more joke about the difference in our ages.

We raise our champagne goblets high and drink a toast to the bond between newlyweds. We look at the intricate designs on that authentic German beer stein and marvel at the colors and figures on its surface. We pour savory sauce over the pasta in the wide bowl and anticipate its delicious flavors.

Our flaming chalice is a combination of these two things: a bit of fire and a container to hold it. A flame and a safe environment for that flame.

Today we’re going to consider how our flaming chalice came to be important to Unitarian Universalists, the variety of meanings ascribed to it, a bit about its history, and what it means that we light it at the beginning of every worship service and even at board meetings and committee gatherings. And I’m going to ask you for your thoughts a few times.

The flaming chalice was not always our iconic symbol of UUism. It came into being at least twenty years before Unitarians joined forces with Universalists to become the religious movement we are today, and it took 20 more years to become our symbol.

The flaming chalice design was the creative idea of an Austrian artist named Hans Deutsch, in 1941. Deutsch had been living in Paris but ran afoul of Nazi authorities for his critical cartoons of Adolf Hitler. When the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, he fled, with an altered passport, into Portugal where he met the Rev. Charles Joy, who was the director of the Unitarian Service Committee.

The Service Committee had been founded in Boston to assist Eastern Europeans, among them Unitarians as well as Jews and homosexuals, people who needed to escape Nazi persecution. From Lisbon, Rev. Joy oversaw a secret network of couriers and agents.

Deutsch was impressed by the work of the Service Committee and wrote to Rev. Joy: “There is something that urges me to tell you…how much I admire your utter self denial (and) readiness to serve, to sacrifice all, your time, your health, your well being, to help, help, help.”

The USC (Service Committee) was an unknown entity in 1941, which was a huge disadvantage in wartime, when establishing trust quickly across barriers of language, nationality, and faith could mean life instead of death. Disguises, signs and countersigns, and midnight runs across guarded borders were how refugees found freedom in those days.

So Rev. Joy asked Hans Deutsch to create a symbol for the USC’s papers, as he said, “to make them look official, to give dignity and importance to them, and at the same time to symbolize the spirit of our work…When a document may keep a man out of jail, give him standing with governments and police, it is important that it look important.”

So Hans Deutsch drew a simple design, and Rev. Joy wrote to his colleagues in Boston that it was “a chalice with a flame, the kind of chalice which the Greeks and Romans put on their altars. The holy oil burning in it is a symbol of helpfulness and sacrifice…” (Sorry it's sideways)

Joy noted that the chalice suggests, to some extent, a cross, and he emphasized that for Christians the cross represents its central theme of sacrificial love.

The flaming chalice design was made into a seal for papers and a badge for agents moving refugees to freedom. In time it became a symbol of Unitarian Universalism all around the world and of the humanitarian call to action by people of faith who were willing to risk all for others in a time of urgent need. Every Sunday UUs all over the world light the chalice as a time-honored ritual---in huge congregations and tiny ones, big historical sanctuaries, rented strip mall spaces, and even home living rooms.

I’m wondering----what does lighting the chalice mean to you all, when we kindle this flame at the beginning of our worship time? Let’s pause for a time of silence while we consider this question. And then we’ll take a few moments to share our thoughts. I know that folks who are newer to UUism may have a different perspective than longer-time UUs. Your perspective is important, too. (chime, silence, chime)

What does our lighting of the chalice say to you? How do you see it?
(Cong. response)

I’ve listened to others reveal what the lighting of the flame means to them, at the beginning of worship or a meeting of some sort. The chalice lighting is often preceded by words of dedication or poetry or the wisdom of some sage, carefully chosen to focus on the event beginning, whether that is a time of worship, of memorializing, of honoring, or doing sacred work.

The lighting of the chalice signifies, to many, the moment at which we move into another realm, into a sacred time, into a time in which we consider matters of worth and value, a time in which we find wisdom and strength in the act of being together in community. It focuses our attention on the work at hand, when we light the chalice before a board or committee meeting, and it reminds us that the work of the religious community is sacred work.

The words of the chalice lighting I turn to most often tell us that the flame stands for our values, values of truth, gratitude, humility, courage, compassion, and generosity. It reminds us that we are together to grow and to learn. And together we repeat the phrase “may love reign among us here, in this hour of community”.

Now let’s think about the possible meanings of combining the vessel of the chalice with the living, breathing flame. Here is a container for nourishment—the chalice--and here is an ever-changing, comforting yet dangerous element—the flame. What spiritual significance might be found in this juxtaposition of these two disparate elements? Let’s think about this idea. (chime, silence, chime) What are your thoughts?

Not long ago, our UU ministers’ email chatline considered the significance of the flaming chalice and how that meaning has developed in our own understandings since the custom began, sometime in the 80’s, introduced by the youth’s and women’s caucuses at a long ago General Assembly, when youth and women were beginning to have a huge effect on the direction of Unitarian Universalism.

You have named some of the very things they named. Here are their thoughts: the chalice is a container for the holy. The chalice signifies open-hearted community where all are welcome. The chalice is a poetic, visual metaphor for community. In dreamwork it indicates a need for spiritual nourishment. The chalice bowl is deep and wide, big enough to contain many paths and ideas, hopes and intentions.

The ministers said that to them, the flame is a conduit to the transcendent. It is ever-changing, alive, untouchable, dangerous; it can tempt and also heal. The flame is a symbol of spiritual transformation; it reminds us of the sacrificial flame of antiquity. It is a light in the darkness. It brings change, creation, rebirth. It is a cauterizing, purifying element.

The flaming chalice, as our iconic symbol of UUism, came into being at a time of great global turmoil. The forces of oppression and tyranny were strong across the earth. Few were able to withstand and survive that assault, but underground, beneath the surface, there was constant clandestine activity by those who resisted, those who dedicated themselves to saving others who were in danger, regardless of the personal cost.

Interestingly, a chalice design similar to our original design by Hans Deutsch mysteriously appears on the cover of a book entitled “The Ideal Gay Man: the Story of Der Kreis” or the story of “The Circle”, the international gay literary journal published from 1932-1967. Except for a slight difference in the curve of the flame, the two drawings might be the same thing. Did Deutsch draw both symbols? I can’t say for sure and am not willing to pay over $100 for this out of print book!

But the significance of a chalice and a flame adorning official-looking documents enabling refugees to leave Nazi Germany and serving as the symbol of a journal which published gay European writers-----that’s interesting. Not only interesting, but compelling.

It makes me ask, what does the flaming chalice stand for? And what might it challenge us to do? Let’s take another moment of silence to think about this symbol and its challenge. (chime, silence, chime)

In the songs Ken sang for us earlier, the flame’s reputation for passion and intensity comes through hot, ardent, eager. Also steamy! Light My Fire and Ring of Fire are classics in the country rock world, making no secret of the heat of passion that drives us mammals to find each other and make new mammals.

Passion drives us in many ways, not just sexually, and it is this passion for action that the flame of the chalice expresses to me. Your thoughts just now also seem to reflect your desire for passion, for fire in your lives as well as the comfort of the sacred space we create with our Beloved Community.

Last week at our annual board retreat, we talked about the new year of church life coming up and how we as your chosen leaders might shape the year. There was a deep desire among us to make particular facets of this community stronger and more infused with passion.

We talked about our children’s and adults’ religious programming and the energy we want to pour into both those areas. And we also learned that many of us want our Social Responsibility work to become a centerpiece of congregational life, for both adults and children, that our neighbors and friends on Whidbey Island be able to live lives that are healthy, safe, and happy, at least in part because of what we can offer them.

We talked about aligning with other congregations and groups on the island to improve housing for those who have no housing, who perhaps live in the woods in tents in the rain or in their vans in isolated parking lots and small parks.

Our interest in this need on the island is borne out by our sponsorship of the WISH agency, the Whidbey Island Share a Home agency whose director, Doris Newkirk, spoke to us last Sunday. (And, by the way, our special offering last Sunday produced $500 as a gift to WISH. Thank you very much for your generosity!)

That night after the retreat, I got a phone call from Doris Newkirk who, serendipitously, was calling a special board meeting of the WISH board to discuss a possible avenue for creating a homeless shelter here on Whidbey. She was thrilled and so was I! Imagine if we could be part of that work, perhaps as part of an interfaith coalition to provide for those families whose economic situation is too fragile for them to have their own homes.

Now there’s a flaming chalice challenge in the tradition of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee! But it’s not the only one. If working with the homeless isn’t your bag, what about working with our children? Kids respond to adults’ passionate interest in the world. And they need your passion to have the best possible religious education we can offer.

I like the symbolism of our congregation, our sanctuary, being a sort of chalice, a community that is safe, healing, and nourishing, welcoming all into its circle. I like the symbolism of our passion to help our community being the flame set inside the chalice, warming us, inspiring us, moving us to action.

I like to think of the lighting of our chalice on Sundays and before our meetings as a visual and heartfelt reminder that we are together in love and commitment, safe within these walls but eager and ready to move out into the community to be of service to those who need us.

And each of us embodies the message of the chalice; each of us can be that safe haven, that healing presence, that source of nourishment to those we meet on life’s path. And each of us can offer the passion nourished within these walls to those beyond these walls. As one of my heroes the late Dag Hammersjold once famously wrote, “Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back.”

Let’s pause once more for a time of silent reflection and prayer.

CLOSING HYMN: “#1028 “The Fire of Commitment”

BENEDICTION: Our worship service, our time of shaping worth together, is ended, but our service to the world begins again as we leave this place. Let us go in peace, remembering that we carry within us the same fire that lights our chalice flame. May we carry our passion and fire into our daily lives, committed to doing whatever we can to serve our neighbors and friends as we live out the symbol of our flaming chalice. Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.

Sometimes our instincts tell us more...

than our minds. Coming home on Thursday instead of today was an act of instinct. I couldn't explain exactly why I felt I had to come home: muscle spasms? yes, sort of. Malcolm's impending death? yes, but he is still hanging in there. tired of camping? okay, but so tired as to miss Cape Lookout? None of it really clicked.

And then, yesterday afternoon, I got a call from the Island County Sheriff's deputy. Could I please come over to the home of a member of the congregation who had just died unexpectedly. The deputy didn't want to leave the daughter home alone without company, waiting for the mortuary to come.

These are the calls that ministers hope never come, but they always do. The member lives very close to me---walking distance even---but I dashed the quarter-mile or so in the car, not wanting to spend an extra moment in transit and not sure what I might need. Two sheriff's cars in the driveway and a shocked-into-numbness daughter, who had found her mother on the bedroom floor.

By the time the mortuary guy arrived an hour or so later, we had notified family members, church leadership and close friends, and other sisters had arrived to be with their sister and to say goodbye to their mother. All the preliminary legalities had been satisfied----no signs of foul play, a case number with the sheriff, no autopsy needed because of her age. Just shocked and suddenly bereaved adult children and friends...and me, their minister who they turned to immediately.

What an honor, to be in this position. An honor as well as a horrible, heavy duty. One of the joys---and sorrows----of ministry is to be of service in these kinds of moments, to provide the container for grieving, to perform the rituals which allow for healing, to be present at the holy time when life ends, to break the news gently and lovingly to those who are most affected by the death. And to do all this non-anxiously, calmly, without losing self-control---that's where one great sorrow lies, that my love for this person and my grief at losing her must take second place until the needs of her family and our congregation can be properly addressed.

So I grieve to friends outside the congregation, to colleagues on the ministers' chat line. I ask for help from those who can think more clearly than I this morning---and they provide that steady calm, that steady hand, that steady voice that I need to hear, helping me know once again that my presence is my most valued gift at this time. Nothing I can say or do will make it easier, but just being there is enough to help them get through this sad experience.

We will soon send out an email to the congregation advising them of this sudden death and inviting them to come to the church, for we will have a time of silence and candles of honor, to share our grief and be together after the service, in honor and memory of Peggy Bardarson, longtime member and beloved pillar of our community.

Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.

Back early...

from my self-imposed electronic fast. Actually, I cheated a bit, as we have a parishioner who is in his last days of life, and I needed to stay slightly in touch. The iPhone let me get email and phone messages without too much trouble, so I'd check in periodically to see if there was any news.

It was an interesting and revelatory trip. I'd thought I'd spend tons of time reflecting away in my cute little heron-bedecked notebook and I did spend a lot of time writing, but not as much as I'd hoped about "who I am at my core, without the trappings and stereotypes of a vocation".

Along about the second day, after recording my daily happenings, I did manage to write this:

Who am I?:
--female, early elderhood, healthy, few aches and pains, self-sufficient at present.
--pleasant looking, a few scars and warts, well-cared-for, good smile (good teeth), kempt
--smart, curious, many interests but few hobbies, lots of general knowledge but not well-informed enough to argue with anyone who knows more.
--religious AND spiritual, a pray-er, grateful, loving, cheerful, helpful, gracious
--competent: ministry, counseling, teaching, singing, modest, shy about too much fanfare
--musician: read music, love harmony, sing loudly on key, alto

Dislikes (in self as well as in others): whining or being whined at, complainers (self included), arrogance, know-it-alls, illogical or unkind conservatism, bossiness, short-sightedness, unfounded anger, monologuists, nonsense in the service of politics

Likes: openness, clarity, good grammar and spelling, stories, laughing, funny (but kind) people, kindness, thoughtfulness, beauty, friendship, good conversation, eccentricity--to a point.

Is that helpful? I haven't decided. At least these will be the qualities I retain once I shed the robe and stole. Also, I'm not sure the list is finished.

I did do some exploring down the Oregon coast and have pretty well settled on Astoria as my next home, whenever I am ready. It's a lovely little town, right at the confluence of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean.

I spent two nights at Ft. Stevens State Park, which is immense, and my favorite spot was the South Jetty observation tower, from which the Columbia River bar is visible. This crossing is dubbed "the graveyard of the Pacific" because it has drowned so many people and ships. It's such a challenge that large cargo ships are required to have a specially-trained Astoria bar pilot guide them across the bar; you can see the helicopters shuttling pilots back and forth between ship and harbor.

I stood on the tower deck and the words of an old song came to me, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

CROSSING THE BAR

Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

I remembered a little bit of the tune, so I sang as much of the words as I could remember, tears in my eyes, thinking of Malcolm who is dying, Gil and Janis who have died recently, and my mother and father who liked this old hymn. And I sang on pitch. Alto.

An electronic fast...

starts tomorrow, as I take off for a week-long road trip during the last stretch of my vacation. Things here on the island are calm, nobody is actively dying (I assume), and (unlike last year) there is no apparent reason for me to abort this mission.

I'm planning to catch the Keystone ferry at 8:45 tomorrow morning and head for Olympic National Park and the Makah reservation at Neah Bay. Once at Neah Bay, I intend to take the trail that runs from a tribe-maintained parking lot out to the farthest tip of land of Cape Flattery, overlooking Tatoosh Island and the Pacific. It's about 3/4 of a mile and I've never walked it before. It's been on my "bucket list" for a long time and I'd hoped to do it last year but had to cancel at the last minute.

I've been slowly packing for a week, surreptitiously gathering items in the spare bedroom, keeping the door shut so the cats don't worry too much. Yesterday morning when Max wandered in for a nap, I swept him up and hustled him off to the kennel before he knew what was happening. I hate worrying about whether I'll be able to catch him and get him there in plenty of time, so I often take him over a day early.

I'll look for a good camping spot around Neah Bay or Kalaloch for that evening and head for Astoria OR the next morning. I've rented a RoadTrek camping van from my friends MK and Eileen and will be camping out six of the seven nights of the trip, with the final night in Manzanita OR with friends June and Ralph.

People are often aghast at my eagerness to camp by myself. Frankly, I love doing that. It's a special kind of solitude, with a campfire and early morning coffee at a picnic table and a long walk on the shoreline in the dawn. It's a time of peace that can't be attained at home with newspapers and TV and internet and phone. I'm not planning to take my laptop, so I won't be seeking out free wifi cafes on the trip. I'll have my cell phone, just in case, and can check my home voice mail, but those who email me will have to wait.

I won't be strictly doing my WW food routines, but I will be careful enough to maintain what I've lost (19.6 lbs so far). I will indulge with a Tillamook ice cream cone and a breakfast burrito while I'm in that area. If I eat out, it'll be fishy stuff primarily. I don't want to feel food-guilty while I'm detoxing from stress.

Other stops on the road will be Ft. Stevens State Park outside Astoria, for two nights, and at Cape Lookout State Park, outside Tillamook. I'm not going any farther south than Tillamook, as I'll be doing some scouting around for possible retirement locales in the future. Anywhere up and down the North Oregon coast is where I want to be, and these two small cities are lovely places.

I've promised my Aunt Sigrid that I will visit her in Portland before I come home and I'll make every effort to do that, though I discovered that I'll only be in Portland on Sunday, when she's apt to be in church. So I may have to make do with a phone call. I did visit her earlier in the month when I was at the Mensa AG. My sister and I worry about her a little bit, since she lives alone and has had some health issues. Our cousins are attentive but can't do everything and she's our last elder on my mother's side of the family.

I've been thinking about retirement some more and have made some decisions about when and how, but one of the things I want to do some reflecting and journaling about is what my identity will be when I no longer am in a vocation that has been so defining. I've always been in a profession that had "moral weight"----welfare caseworker, missionary, teacher, guidance counselor, minister---and those professions have such an impact on how others relate to me that I'm wondering what it will be like not to have those roles attached to me, especially when I move to an area where no one knows much about me.

An interesting challenge!

Mensa Annual Gathering Redux

As it turned out, several Whidbey Island Mensans went to the AG in Portland. It was fun spending time with Penelope; our trip down was one long meaty conversation. She has a way of asking questions and responding to the answers that inspires me to talk (a lot). I noticed this as I launched into yet another extended answer to one of her questions and dimly realized that I was talking far more than she.

It's funny----you'd think a preacher would have a hard time shutting up when given an opportunity to talk, but I am more comfortable listening to somebody else. I am uneasy talking about myself unless specifically assigned to do so. Like in a sermon, for example. And here I was, rattling on about whatever she asked, words flowing steadily in a more or less coherent stream. Heavens! It was lovely and I didn't feel the least bit self-conscious. She had asked, after all, so I considered it permission to spiel on and on (and on).

She and Richard and I attended a couple of lectures together, most notably one by Richard Lederer entitled "Conan the Grammarian" and were gratified to learn that it is NOT ungrammatical to end a sentence with a preposition (graceful speech trumps awkward construction) NOR is it ungrammatical to split infinitives (again, graceful construction is more important). And he should know. He is a well-known linguistic and language expert, also a Mensan, and writes for the Mensa Bulletin. He's also very funny. We came away feeling quite smug about our own grammar knowledge but also learning a few new things (none of which I can remember at the moment).

This AG was much more about such sessions than about seeing old friends, though I did see a few familiar faces. I attended a session about aging well and making sure one's living quarters were appropriate to one's abilities. Nothing too new there. But my retirement ponderings made it an appropriate session for me.

I also attended a session on dating outside one's demographic. Aka, are "cougars" really drunken older women who feel trapped by their life's circumstances (think Mrs. Robinson) and trying to seduce innocent younger men or are they women who prefer to date men (or, I guess, women) who are more their speed and inclination? The speaker for that lecture was Miss International Cougar, a beautiful woman of about 45 who nearly always dates men who are many years younger and finds them more to her liking than men older than she who can't keep up with her or have expectations that are unattractive.

Another session was the nightly "fishbowl" in which a group of men and women ask gender and sex questions of each other in a setting which allows for confidentiality and honesty. In my group, the women far outnumbered the men, but we did get to hear some pretty straightforward questions and answers: Viagra---what's it like to take it? what can a man do to be the most appealing to a woman? (one answer: the dishes) where is the G spot? what is a total turnoff for a man, sexually? etc. There were some pretty spicy questions and answers, but, as one participant said, "hell, I don't know anybody here----here's what I think".

One thing about a large gathering of Mensans: we tend to let our most outrageous selves hang out at these functions. The Eccentrics were out in full force, with beanies and nerdy slogans on t-shirts stretched tight over large bellies, bellicosity on both ends of the political spectrum, wild outfits, and the like. It was somewhat disturbing to see how many members of the upper 2% IQ scores are hugely obese, to the point of needing electric scooters to navigate. When one mostly uses one's brain instead of one's body, the outcome is inevitable. It was not a pretty sight. And yet, the brains inside those immense bodies are working just fine---except in the area of health.

Richard and I were scheduled to perform at the Sunday night cabaret and we had practiced quite a lot to get ready. We were planning to offer a few of our songs from our former group Trilogy, old Hoagy Carmichael and Irving Berlin stuff from the 20's and 30's. I was pretty dubious about my staying power---we were scheduled for an 11:30 p.m. slot---but, despite a few glitches and a few less-than-happy exchanges with the organizer, it turned out fine and I felt we gave a good show. Unfortunately, we didn't start till midnight and by then most of the audience was gone. But those remaining were enthusiastic and appreciative.

Will I go back to a national Mensa gathering? Probably not. It's expensive to stay in a hotel for four nights and adding air fare and meals to the package ups the cost. Next year's gathering is in Reno, where the FS lives, but I'm going there for his graduation in December and don't particularly want to go back in the hot summertime. I'll stick to local gatherings like our monthly TGIF on the island and an occasional foray into Seattle events.

With an hour to go...

before I pick up my pal Penelope for our trip to the Mensa Annual Gathering in Portland, there's enough time to write a quick post about how excited I am about doing this.

I joined Mensa thirty years ago, when my mom, seeing how stupid I felt after the breakup of my marriage, urged me to try my luck and take an IQ test. In my capacity as a school counselor, I had just given my young nephew Joel an IQ test, which he'd blasted the lid off of, to enable him to join Mensa.

"You could do that too, you know," my mom said. "Don't you remember when you were in 7th grade and Mr. S called us in to talk to us about you? We didn't say much to you about it, but his message was that you were undoubtedly a gifted child and we needed to provide you with the best education we could manage. At that time, you tested in the 140 level. You're probably still there, even if you feel dumb." (Words paraphrased, obviously.)

So I thought about it and eventually enlisted my friend Arline, the school psychologist at the junior high where I worked, to give me the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), figuring that if my brain had deteriorated, as I was afraid it might have, at least she was sworn to confidentiality and nobody would have to know.

But there I was, still, in that range, whether I felt stupid or not. And I sent in my test results, certified by a qualified psychologist, and was duly accepted into Mensa, the high IQ society.

I dithered for months, wondering if I had made a huge mistake. I was afraid to tell people, for fear they'd think I was bragging, for fear of being labeled a brainiac (which I certainly didn't feel like), for fear of being put down as someone who thought overly highly of myself. What good was it to belong to Mensa if I wasn't comfortable telling people?

And then I went to my first meeting of the Denver group, a gathering in a buffet restaurant before a monthly general meeting on some topic. It was like walking into a comfortable, casual home with people who liked me immediately, understood and laughed at my jokes, told their own esoteric funny stories, reveled in punny humor, and weren't the least bit stuck on themselves because of their high intelligence.

Over the years since then, I've honed my leadership skills as an officer in the Denver group (if leading UUs is like herding cats, try Mensans!), spent a few years working with gifted underachieving adolescents in schools, and generally having a blast most (not all) of the time. I got my first writing-for-publication experience writing monthly columns for the Matrix, Denver Mensa's newsletter; I got my first conflict reduction experience as LocSec/President of Denver Mensa for several years; I found some of my fondest friends and lovers in the group (fond, not necessarily normal). And I also got temporarily disillusioned and dropped out for a few years.

Re-entering Mensa when I came back to Oregon in 1999 put me in a whole different Mensa milieu, fun but not as demanding as my earlier leadership experience. And moving up to this area meant I became a member of the Western Washington Mensa group, where friend Richard and I started the Whidbey Island "Thank Goodness It's Friday" second Friday Happy Hour, alternating between Freeland's China City bar and the San Remo Grill in Oak Harbor.

I haven't been to an AG (Annual Gathering) since at least 1991---twenty years. And in scanning the roster of registrants, I'm aware that I will only know a handful of attendees at the gathering. But I believe that there will be the same high spirits, stimulating presentations, and convivial shmooze sessions that have always characterized an AG for me.

So there---I'm out of the closet on this. I am a smart person, even though I don't act like it sometimes. I am not vain about it; my parents and brother and sister are also smart. And then there's Joel! My son became a Mensan when he was old enough to take a junior high IQ test. My ex-husband is also eligible. It's pure luck on my part to be smart and I have a responsibility to be humble about it and use it well.

I have noticed that as I got more and more involved in ministry, my interests changed and shifted and I was less interested in what Mensa was doing. I have spent the past twenty years immersed in ministry, with its search for meaning rather than information. But there's always been a little spark of curiosity in me about science and behavior patterns and human development---not just what they mean in isolation but in relationship to my vocation. And if IQ has had anything to do with ministry, I hope it has been to be intelligent about my relationships, to curb my weirder responses that are an attempt to be funny, and to offer understanding and comfort to others who often offend because they are "too smart for their own good".

In fact, I once thought I might write a book with that title, about what it's like to be a gifted kid grown into a gifted adult, to go from obnoxiously smart to more socially acceptable intelligence. It's been a journey that has had its ups and downs. I still do dumb things occasionally and, even as I smack my forehead in frustration, I still know that I am a wiser person, due in large part to my life experiences.

Mensa is NOT a place where people sit around and stroke their egos. At least I've never seen that happen. Mostly I see people who are blossoming in the accepting atmosphere of a place where they are understood and appreciated for their weird humor, eccentric interests, and creative ideas. If you feel a little off-kilter sometimes in a world that doesn't see things the way you do, consider visiting a Mensa meeting and see what you think. You might find a new home.

At Cross Purposes?

AT CROSS PURPOSES? UUISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Rev. Kit Ketcham, June 26, 2011

A couple of months ago, I was talking with a friend who is one of the organizers of the local PFLAG group (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). She had asked about renting a room here in our building to hold their meetings and I was encouraging her, telling her a little bit about the layout, that sort of thing, and mentioning that Unitarian Universalists have long been in the forefront of civil rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folks.

She seemed excited and interested and was willing to prepay the first few months’ worth of rent right then and there. But then she hesitated, put her wallet back in her purse, and said ruefully, “I’d better check with the rest of the group before I commit us to renting from you. There are a few in the group who won’t walk into a church, even a liberal one, because of the wounds they’ve experienced in other churches.”

I’d had a similar experience at another time with a conservative Jewish friend who was talking with me about where she attends synagogue and why. Her group of Chabad Lubavitch Jews were very uncomfortable meeting in a sanctuary which was called a church. They preferred secular rooms in a hotel to anything which might display a Christian symbol such as a cross.

And in my first congregation, down in Portland, the very fact of meeting in a United Methodist sanctuary, with its several crosses prominently displayed, was enough to encourage a small group of congregants to kick up a fuss and push for a change of venue.

Where does this anger and fear come from? And why does it pop up in our midst? It’s been said that Unitarian Universalists are open to religious symbols from all world religions----except Christianity.

There is, among many Unitarian Universalists, a deep discomfort with Christian ideology and doctrine. Some say it’s because of the supernatural aspects of Christianity---the virgin birth, the physical resurrection and the deity of Jesus, the anthropomorphic definition of God. Others say it’s because of the pain inflicted upon those denounced and excluded because of their race or gender or sexual orientation or culture or religion or other arbitrary characteristic. Some folks have experienced cruelty firsthand that had nothing to do with exclusion and everything to do with control of a child or a woman.

Yet we express respect for other similarly supernatural or exclusionary religions and we select inspirational quotes and stories from traditions which also have their negative histories; Islam, for example, has both cruelty and compassion written into the Koran, yet when our friend Jamal Rahman comes to speak to us of Islam, we pay attention as he unwraps the mysteries of his tradition and explains its contradictions.

What’s going on here? I’ve thought about this a lot and, though I don’t have my own painful past experiences with Christianity, I do think I’ve figured a few things out.

Pain is a powerful deterrent, even keeping us from experiencing delight and love when we’ve had hurtful experiences. Rape or abuse victims often struggle with life’s opportunities and challenges because of the pain inflicted by a rapist or an abuser. Love and pain are often so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish where one ends and the other begins.

We’ve doubtless had our own experiences with love and pain, some of those experiences healthy and normal and others degrading and humiliating. We may have learned our own ways of avoiding pain, healthy and unhealthy as those ways may be.

It can be hard for a man who was the victim of molestation at the hands of an adult male to trust other men, to express affection to a male friend by an embrace or holding a hand. It can be hard for a woman who has been sexually assaulted to work through the pain and fear engendered by that violence. A gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender person can find it very difficult to put him or herself again in a situation which has previously resulted in humiliation. A child treated cruelly remembers that cruelty and tries to avoid it as an adult.

It’s hard to leave behind old, painful experiences, but our own desire for health may cause us to seek a healing solution, rather than try to avoid all contact with anyone or anything that might remind us of the old trauma. We tend to support efforts to help our wounded veterans heal from the effects of Post-Trauma Stress, rather than continuing to experience and re-experience the pain and conditioned responses of psychic and physical battle wounds.

So I would like to suggest that it makes sense for us to take a hard look at whatever pain Christianity has caused us and come to grips with it, rather than avoiding Christian symbolism, criticizing “churchy” hymns and language, and generally scorning Christianity as if it were a noxious religious movement.

Because it’s not. And, it’s our own history we’re scorning. We may have moved on down the evolutionary religious path, but we still started out as Christian, we owe a great deal of our existence to the effort to reclaim the best of Christianity while letting go of the worst and moving on.

And we have a lot of Christian cousins who are walking only a little bit behind us, letting go of exclusionary doctrines, opening their arms to all folks, working for justice and equity and world community, reinterpreting the Bible through a lens of liberation and acceptance of others.

And we miss out when we overlook the strides many Christian denominations have made, when we fail to encourage their hard work and refuse to forgive them for their errors.

I feel very sad about the great pain caused by such monumentally damaging events as the Crusades, the Holocaust, the dogmas which deny women the right to choose or to protect their bodies from pregnancy, the church laws which prevent women from serving as clergy, the literal interpretations of ancient purity laws which ostracize and condemn sexual minorities.

A great deal of harm has been done by these kinds of practices and policies. Christian church leaders often forget that their founder, the Jesus they claim to revere and follow, did not utter any of these statements of exclusion. In fact, scholarly research is hard pressed to reveal exactly what Jesus did say about anything, since the Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written long after Jesus’ death, years after those with first-hand experience of Jesus’ ministry had died, all based on oral reports handed down from generation to generation and written down by ancient scribes in their own words, not Jesus’.

When I first came to serve this congregation, in 2003, I lived in Seattle for a couple of years and during that time I got connected with an interfaith clergy group called the Religious Coalition for Equality, which was working to support legislation giving all couples the equal right to legal marriage.

It was a exciting thing to do, to sit down with other clergy (Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, Pagan, and UU) and talk about how we could best make this happen.

It was a revelation to me to find many Christian clergy walking with me and others as we marched on the King County Courthouse to give our clergy petition to Ron Sims, King County Executive, asking for marriage licenses to be granted to same-sex couples and supporting the men and women who had attempted to get marriage licenses and were denied.

And scanning the list of signatures on that petition, I found a preponderance of Christian clergy representing all mainline denominations. There were United Methodist, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian, Evangelical Lutheran, Unity, Catholic, Episcopalian, Disciples of Christ, and….Baptist. American Baptist, that is, not Southern or Conservative or any other of the many Baptist brand names.

In fact, when I was first invited to be part of the Religious Coalition for Equality, I was a bit taken aback---but proud and pleased---to find that my former Christian tradition, American Baptist, was strongly represented and, in fact, we held our meetings at the First Baptist Church of Seattle.

It was hard for members of the gay community to walk through those doors in the early days of our work together. It took a great deal of courage to be openly gay and attend a mainline church. But once they’d taken that step, most found a welcoming and supportive environment where they could be themselves without fear of condemnation.

This past winter, a rash of highly publicized suicides by teenagers suspected of being gay or lesbian resulted in a campaign spearheaded by the controversial sex columnist of Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger, Dan Savage.

Prominent and not-so-prominent men and women across the nation, from all walks of life, told the stories on video of their own growing up gay experiences, with the theme of “It gets Better”.

Though the word hasn’t gotten out to every American teenager yet, and there continues to be bullying and humiliation directed toward those presumed to be gay or lesbian, the “It Gets Better” campaign has had a great deal of airplay, with over 22,000 videos produced and distributed on YouTube and other outlets over the past several months. You may have seen some of those videos and thrilled to the stories told by people you may not even have known were gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender.

Some of those videos were made by straight friends who told their own stories of transformation and could testify that, for former bigots as well, things could get better. I could make a video myself, telling the story of moving beyond my own discomfort with the visit of my friend Fern, who came out to me in the 70’s and scared me to death when she wanted to stay overnight.

I think liberal Christianity could use an “It’s Gotten Better” movement! But we Unitarian Universalists have a complicated history when it comes to our relationship with our Christian cousins.

Did it start with the controversy in 325 of the common era, when those who denied the Trinity were condemned as heretics? Or in 544 c.e. when the doctrine of universal salvation was rejected as blasphemy? Those ancient roots established our spiritual ancestors as free thinkers and question askers, not always compliant with orthodoxy.

Our heresies endured, throughout subsequent centuries, across Europe and into North America. Both were persecuted in Europe and both emigrated to the American colonies as Pilgrims, seeking religious freedom.

Here in the newly established United States of America, our founding fathers and mothers proclaimed their separation from traditional Christianity in such areas as women’s rights, the divinity of Jesus, and heaven’s rewards for all.

As President, Thomas Jefferson compiled his own version of the four Gospels, removing passages which he felt were against the life and morals of Jesus, a little book which is available still and known as “The Jefferson Bible”.

William Ellery Channing preached a revolutionary sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity” in which he delineated the differences between orthodox Christianity and that of seekers of a less supernaturally-based faith.

Other preachers such as Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson further explored the limits of traditional doctrines and set forth their thoughts about a free thinking, open minded faith, presenting the findings of science as more valid than ancient purity laws defining human life and opening eyes to God as seen through Nature’s wonders in the literary awakening known as Transcendentalism.

Eventually, the two denominations of Universalism and Unitarianism became stand-alone alternatives to traditional Christianity and in 1961, merged to become who we are today, the Unitarian Universalist Association.

One of our major sources, rational humanism, a reaction to the evangelical fervor and emphasis on supernatural events of traditional Christianity, influenced the continuing development of our faith and its emphasis on rationality and scientific inquiry dominated our faith for many years, until a hunger for spiritual expression began to assert itself and many of us began to take another look at the spiritual practices of more ancient faiths.

Buddhism, Hinduism, paganism, these all had mystical practices that offered something science did not: a pathway into the mysteries of mind and body that could not be explained by rational means.

As this hunger for spiritual experience developed, so did resistance on the part of those whose UUism was largely humanistic. Spirituality seemed to some too much like supernaturalism, irrational rather than rational, and the phenomenon known as “cross cringe” began to emerge, as UUs distanced themselves from a Christianity that no longer worked for them.

The symbol of the Christian cross came to mean subjugation, hypocrisy, and patriarchy in the minds of those who were trying to find a way to combine rational thought and spiritual practice, and many found comfort in Eastern and indigenous spiritual practices rather than the spiritual practices of Christianity.

Unfortunately, this had the effect of distressing the large numbers of Unitarian Universalist Christians who began to feel unwelcome in our midst yet didn’t really fit in traditional, even liberal, Christian congregations.

Something had to happen and the UU Christian Fellowship emerged as a way to recognize and honor the values imparted by our Christian heritage and to support those whose Christianity fit well within our UU community.

I wrote an essay for my blog several years ago about “cross cringe” and one of my readers made this comment:

"IMHO, it would help UUs and Xtians on either side of the "cross-cringe" divide to be reminded that the UU concern for things like justice, equity, compassion, and radical inclusion (sprang)… from the mouth of Jesus, who himself was retelling the message of the Hebrew prophets and who in turn has been retold and preserved through the Christian tradition for 2,000 years…

We UUs of today learned our own cherished principles from our Christian UU predecessors, who learned them from reading Jesus in the Bible. We may have wandered so far away from a formerly Scripture-centered religious orientation that some of us no longer pay much or even any attention to the Bible, but it is still the original source of most of our UU values; we didn't just think them up on our own.

To Christians, the Cross is not a symbol of hypocrisy, patriarchy and subjugation, but of the same principles that we too hold dear, and that our only recently divergent traditions were originally learned from the same source. 

To reject the supernatural cosmology of Christianity or the abusive practices or attitudes of certain Christian subcultures is one thing, but we cannot reject its moral principles and sources without ultimately also rejecting our own, for they are in large measure the same."

I think my reader is saying something we need to think about. When we lump all Christian thought and all Christian behavior and all Christian practice into one objectionable pile, we do ourselves and our neighbors a great disservice. Would that we could come to see the Christian symbol of the cross as a reminder of the compassionate spirit, selfless action, and inclusive practice of the teacher Jesus, whose teachings changed the world, even though they have been much distorted and altered over the centuries. There are still Christians who strive to follow those footsteps, many of them within our own communities.

It is a disservice to our faith when we fail to live out our own principles of acceptance and respect for others’ spiritual paths, especially when our own heritage is what we are rejecting.

We are no longer adolescents who feel the need to disparage and rebel against our parents’ ways. We are loving, compassionate, justice-seeking adults, trying to teach our children to be respectful and caring in a world that often seems to discourage love and compassion.

The Jewish prophet and teacher Jesus of Nazareth is quoted in both the gospels of Matthew and Luke in this way:

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."


So as we work to encourage our b/g/l/t friends and our Jewish neighbors to trust us with their spiritual lives, to reassure them that we UUs have friendship and hospitality to share, as we urge victims of violence to look for peace of mind and heart through therapeutic experience, may we also see that, as Jesus’s ancient words point out, we too may have a vision problem, a problem we need to address before we consider others’ limitations.

Let’s pause for a time of silent reflection and prayer.

BENEDICTION: Our worship service, our time of shaping worth together, is ended, but our service to the world begins again as we leave this place. Let us go in peace, remembering our long history and the ways our Christian ancestors have shaped us. May we honor that heritage, in addition to the several sources which also shape our faith, and may we open our hearts to the understandings and wisdom of all our sources, not just the ones we like the best. Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.

I am one of those NOT going to ...

Charlotte, NC, where the 50th anniversary of Unitarian Universalism is being celebrated at the annual General Assembly.

Despite the blandishments of HOT WEATHER, I would prefer to stay here on my island in Puget Sound where it is raining again and where I have just had to fill up my home fuel tank for over $1000, after a mere six months of daily furnace usage. It is June 23 and the furnace is running again because the outside air is 50 degrees. But I love it in the Pacific Northwest more than any other place on the earth, even if it does get a little rainy at times.

There is a part of me that misses the organized chaos and bonhomie of GA, the wisdom of colleagues who've stayed the course for 50 and 25 years, reconnecting with people I see very seldom and maybe have only met on Facebook.

I have only been to one GA since I moved to the island in 2003, and that one was in Portland, just down the road. I may never go again, even when I retire and can participate in the ceremony of the Living Tradition as a minister going into retirement. It just isn't appealing to travel across the country, spend bushels of money, and dress well every day in order to maintain my professional image among the laity.

I'd rather stay home with the cats, wear my jeans and sweatshirts, and go to the local jam, cook my own meals, go to bed at a decent hour, and miss out on all the educational and collegial fun. I remember GA's as being absolutely frantic; I always felt I needed to attend multiple educational and governance sessions but I inevitably skipped out on most of them and schmoozed with friends in the exhibit hall. The guilt of spending all that money to hang out around the booths and the buddies rather than boning up on stewardship campaigns and other ministerial topics----that eventually became too much of a burden. So I don't go any more.

Instead, I am going to indulge in an activity next weekend that I haven't enjoyed for 20 years, in fact ever since I began my journey into ministry: the Mensa Annual Gathering which, in a stroke of luck, is in Portland OR! At an AG, I never feel guilty about avoiding all the educational sessions and schmoozing with friends in the hospitality suite or the bookstore or the game room or the nightly fishbowl conversations. In fact, that's what I go for.

Their business meeting takes a couple of hours in the front end of the weekend and nobody is required to go. And everybody likes my jokes, which can be slightly raunchy at times and not appropriate for professional occasions. This time I'm even going to strut my stuff at the after-hours cabaret, since Richard is also a Mensan and also going to the AG. We're gonna do some of our Hoagy Carmichael songs and I'm going to wear a slinky dress and sing "Stardust" into the ears of some so-called geniuses whom I haven't seen for 20 years and just hope they have their hearing-aids turned up.

All this thinking about retirement has me looking with great interest at a future down the road which has fewer professional responsibilities and much more time for kicking up my elderly heels. At the beach. Maybe with a dog. Tidepools in the early morning. Big waves. "Ocian in view. O the joy!"

I was a teenage Pea Bum and...

I'm tired. And beginning to really feel my age. Not to worry you, FS and other family and friends, but I am at an age where retirement is beginning to look pretty attractive. Not that I have quit loving my work---quite the opposite: I love it as much as ever. But I'm at that point in life where I realize that I don't want to work forever.

My first job, at age 12, was babysitting, which I didn't much like. When I turned 13, my dad taught me to drive a stick shift and I went to work for the same pea farmer as all the other Athena girls my age, driving big open-air truckloads of peavines from field to viners, for 85 cents an hour, 12 hour shifts. It was hot, dusty work and we loved it. It seemed logical that the boys driving swathers and loaders made $1 an hour; their job was a little more demanding---they had to fix their tractors when they broke down, while we girls just sat and waited for the field boss to come fix our trucks.

It wasn't always a safe job, either; sidehills were dangerous places to drive alongside a loader and feel the peavines shooting out of the loader chute against the high side of our truck beds. Sometimes the load would stack up unevenly against the high side, making the truck lurch precariously onto two wheels. Hills that were really steep required bulldozers to pull the trucks up the hill vertically instead of risking a tipped-over truck and injured driver.

But it was my job every summer until I turned 16 and got my driver's license. Then I could add wheat truck driver to my resume' and began to earn $1 an hour for 12 hour shifts, on top of the pea harvest pay. Peas came first, in June and very early July, and then wheat ripened in later July and August.

From that early work experience grew a strong desire to be employed in something at all times and I worked pretty much non-stop from then on: strawberry row boss, receptionist, book store salesperson, dorm counselor, snack bar hostess, welfare worker, missionary, teacher, counselor, minister. From age 12 till now is 57 years of Puritan Work Ethic, giving the best I could manage under a variety of conditions, always with responsibility hanging heavy on my mind. No wonder I'm tired!

And the prospect of retirement, of fulfilling a longtime dream to move to the Oregon Coast and live out some of my days, is more and more appealing. I will hate to leave Whidbey Island when I retire, but collegial guidelines will demand that of me, so that the new minister doesn't feel the competition of my presence in the community and so that congregation members don't feel tempted to turn to me instead of the new minister. That's the hardest part of leaving a congregation behind---saying goodbye.

But I'm thinking I will make the decision to retire within the next couple of years, maybe sooner, and help the congregation take the needed steps to prepare for a new minister, figuring out the financing, the search process, the infrastructure necessary to take this large step in the life of the congregation.

When I retire, I want to do it right. I want it to be at a good time in the congregation's life, if possible, and in my life with good health and strong energy in me to enjoy the years of new leisure time. I want to try something new---being a docent at Haystack Rock, working with community theatre, volunteering at something new, walking the beach every day, even in the rain. I want new shorelines, bigger waves, real tide pools, few deadlines. Maybe I'll write something besides sermons and newsletter columns!

At this point, it's just a gleam in my eye. But it will happen when the time is right.

Shall we dance?

EMBRACING THE OTHER
Rev. Kit Ketcham, June 12, 2011

I don’t remember all the pieces of the scenario that day, but it was September and my father and I were standing on a downtown McMinnville, Oregon, street. I think we might have just had lunch before he got back in the car to go home to Athena, after helping me move into my dorm at Linfield College. I think this would have been my sophomore year.

I do remember looking at the nearby movie theater marquee and noticing that some movie musical I was hoping to see was playing. Now, I had not seen many movies up to that point in my life, mostly those shown at church, which were always with a missionary theme, and also the epic movies “The Ten Commandments” and “The Robe”. Instructional movies in school were fine, but not much else was permitted by my strict Baptist environment.

There had been a few clandestine family trips to the drive-in theater in a town 15 miles away from Athena, where nobody would be likely to see the preacher’s family swilling Pepsis and munching popcorn, in defiance of the small-town norm that proclaimed that ministers and their families must be above such worldly pleasures!

My father noticed me gazing at the movie theater and took this opportunity to say something like this: “Betsy, you are now officially an adult. You are 18 years old. You are old enough to make your own decisions about all the things we have asked you not to do while you were living at home. We trust you to make good decisions.”

I was stunned. I had not expected to be given my parents’ permission to step outside of the conventional expectations of our conservative little family.

But I tried to be cool, not betray my amazement by babbling some childish remark which might make him regret what he’d said.

We said our goodbyes and hugged each other, he hopped in the old Dodge station wagon and chugged away, while I stood on the corner wondering if he knew that his words of permission had come a little late.

I had already made the decision to go to the movies and had seen a few during my freshman year. I’d even gone to a dance or two and though I didn’t know my left foot from my right on the dance floor, it was fun to sway back and forth with my equally inept partner, in time to the music.

In fact, I had learned first hand just why the Baptists were against dancing. It was too much fun, too intimate, too encouraging of additional intimacies that might lead to …..what? well, you doubtless have heard the old jokes: Baptists don’t dance because they consider it to be making love standing up. Of course, that’s also related to why they don’t make love standing up----somebody might think they were dancing.

Of course, most of the other youth in our Athena Baptist Youth Fellowship did go to school dances, just not the preacher’s kids. And Linfield was a Baptist college at the time. Apparently not all Baptists had the same rules. And didn’t my dad drive us all to those drive-in movies every summer? Clearly there were variations in the seriousness of these rules!

There was a piece of me that was relieved to hear Dad giving me permission to make my own rules about things that had previously been taboo. There was another piece of me that struggled to get past my guilty fears, particularly about dancing. Dancing was intimate, it was moving in harmony with another person, it was tempting and sexy and scary.

And though I went to several dances during my college years, I was invariably nervous and stiff as a board in my movements. It was as though I really believed dancing was wrong and my body couldn’t relax.

Interestingly, I’ve never completely conquered that sense of discomfort and tension, even though I enjoy dancing, even got good at it during one period in my life when I did a lot of square and contra dancing. I’m uptight and stiff and nervous, at least at first, about stepping on my partner’s toes, particularly in the close-up positions.

I was thinking about dancing as I took my morning walk the other day and I was singing a little ditty as I walked, a song a friend had sent to me via Facebook on the occasion of my birthday: “God danced the day you were born, the angels did the bump to Gabriel’s horn; God danced the day you were born, so grateful for the gift of you.” Isn’t that fun?

But imagine God or the Universe dancing! What would that mean? Infinitely large entities bopping to the music of the spheres? Now there’s some toe-stepping-on behavior that we might want to watch out for! But the truth is that the universe does dance; the planets and galaxies seem to be moving all the time. And we move with them, involuntarily and more or less smoothly.

The ancient poet Rabindranath Tagore expresses it this way:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

When Terra and Eileen and I met to design this service, we talked about Eileen’s idea for the topic: how to be in right relationship with people we love who are radically different from us in their religious or political outlook.

We talked about the ways we had felt uneasy, badgered, silenced, even rejected, because of our differences, the times we had felt that those differences were an invisible but smelly elephant in the living room.

I remembered the times when my dear mother, out of concern for the state of my afterlife, would send me endless tracts about salvation, write letters full of concern, and pray for my soul. I felt almost as if I was hiding inside a protective shell while she beat on it with a stick, to make me change my mind and come over to her side of the Jordan river.

Terra and Eileen had their own memories about occasions like these and as we talked, we began to see that what we were engaged in with our dear ones was a kind of dance, a dance in which both partners were uneasy, unsure of what they were doing, tense and stiff and even antagonistic.

This dance is no fun. It’s scary. We risk losing our relationships over this kind of tense, conflicted dance. We are on edge, self-protective in case our toes are endangered, we don’t know what to say, how to be true to our own dance form without hurting the partner.

And yet, we want to dance. We want to be understood; we want to understand. We want to find the steps that will let us move in harmony with each other, without sacrificing our own integrity or that of the other person.
--------------------------------
“Shall We Dance?” (Eileen)
--------------------------------

Shall we dance? And what dance steps shall we agree to use? What does the music call us to do? Can we relax and be in tune with our partner? Can we let them lead and we follow? Can we lead and encourage them to follow? Can we do this with humor and understanding, especially when both sets of our toes are vulnerable?

How many of us have friends, neighbors, and relatives who are very different from us in their outlook? And how do we maintain good relationships with them considering those deep divisions? The differences might be religious or political or philosophical; we might have agreed NOT to discuss certain topics for the sake of family or neighborhood harmony.

But any time important parts of our whole selves have to be hidden from those we care about, there is pain. And we can see from the tenor of our national political conversations, that NOT discussing our differences in calm and reasonable terms is NOT helping our country be its best self.

When my mother persisted in her efforts to get me to return to my childhood faith, I didn’t handle it very well. I wrote long impassioned, defensive to the point of insulting letters to her, sent her tracts back to her or tossed them in the trash. I was angry that she couldn’t see my point of view.

Finally, my sister wisely reminded her of my legendary stubbornness and suggested she quit banging her head against my wall. And she did, to her credit, though I know she kept praying for me! And her ongoing, unconditional love for me eventually opened my eyes to a way of being in better relationship with her.

Only a few years later, my mother suffered several small strokes and was unable to put many words together coherently. But one of the few sentences she could utter was one she used a lot: “I love you so much.”

It wasn’t “I love you but I’m afraid you’re going to hell” or “I love you and you ought to do what I tell you”. It was just “I love you,” a sentence that set aside the squabble about whose religion was right in favor of the clear truth of our love for each other. The squabble became meaningless in the face of the universal truth of mutual Love.

And luckily, I had learned a little more compassion by then, having gone through my own set of transformative experiences and coming out on the other side with a better understanding of relationships and their importance in my own life.

Through those experiences, I had learned to look for the common ground between me and those I disagreed with. I had learned to look at what had brought them to where they were in life. I had learned that my impassioned disagreements weren’t going to change anyone’s mind. I had learned that NOT discussing hard things wasn’t going to help; there would always be a big smelly elephant in the room.

I’m still not great at it, so when Eileen suggested this topic for today’s service, I knew it would be a good one for me to think about.

Terra loaned me a little book entitled “Gracious Space” by Patricia Hughes, described as a practical guide for working better together. It’s aimed at workplace discourse and seeks to address the issue of our coarsening national civil discourse by improving it in the workplace.

Hughes notes that nationally and individually, we have become hardened in our arguments with each other, polarized to the extent of disabling government efforts to meet our citizens’ needs. We are distrustful, conflictual, and we tend to form our opinions based on sound bytes, not reasonable conversations.

She quotes an adapted Arabian proverb, poetically expressed by Dinah Craik:

“Oh, the joy---
The inexpressible comfort
Of feeling safe with a person,
Having neither to measure words
Nor weigh thoughts,
Pouring them all out just as they are,
Chaff and grain together,
Certain that a loving hand will sift through,
Keep what is worth keeping,
And with a breath of kindness---
Blow the rest away.”

It’s universal, isn’t it? The Arab sage who first expressed this deep need for safety and comfort with another person was speaking for, I’d guess, all of humankind.

How much of human misery could be prevented or healed by the gift of safety and comfort in the presence of other people? Not just one other person, but a universe of safe, trustworthy, compassionate people.

I think we human beings want less defensive, safer, reasonable conversations with each other. I believe we want to be able to learn from each other. I believe we are curious about others and yet too afraid of hurting or being hurt to dare to ask for information.

“What if I ask my brother to tell me more about why he is so politically conservative? Won’t he just tease me again about being a liberal? Won’t he just ridicule me or try to get me to agree with him? Won’t we just go away mad?”

“What if I ask my sister to tell me more about her objection to abortion? Won’t she assume I’m trying to change her mind and get her to agree with me? Won’t this endanger our relationship if we can’t agree on the issue?”

Patricia Hughes, in her little book, speaks of two dimensions to creating Gracious Space. She points out that in order to experience the first dimension, that of Spirit, we have to create a gracious spirit within ourselves.

That inner life of graciousness is something we carry within ourselves; it is trusting and eager to learn, it is open, vulnerable, and compassionate. Gandhi once said, memorably, that we must be the change we want to see in the world.

To cultivate this spirit of inner grace, we need to examine our approach to life in this world. Do our days feel tough or joyful? Are we patient and curious about new ideas? Are we constantly rushing or do we relish a slower pace? How do we show compassion for those in need?

In this way, we can discover our innate strengths and see where we might try to improve. For most of us, it takes time and conscious effort to develop an inner spirit of graciousness and openness.

The second dimension of Gracious Space is Setting, the care we take to provide a place that is welcoming and comfortable for those we seek to understand.
In our own lives, as we play host to those who are so different from us, a little intention can go a long way. Hospitality is the foundation of a gracious setting, an intentionally comfortable and accepting space.

Remember when we were renting space elsewhere and the cross was a prominent fixture in the room? Though many of us didn’t mind it a bit, many others of us didn’t feel quite comfortable with that symbol of a different faith so prominent in the room.

It’s one reason we use the word “congregation” in our name, rather than “church”, preferring the more inclusive term. A setting in which all feel comfortable and accepted is a gracious setting. Are there ways we can create a gracious setting in which our gracious spirits can welcome others who are different, religiously, spiritually, politically, philosophically?

And once we’re there, with our gracious inner spirit and our gracious outer setting, what then? How do we initiate the dance?

“Shall we dance?” What common ground do we have? Can we start there? How can we learn more about our neighbor, our friend, our relative, without badgering, without insisting on there being one right answer, without patronizing or anger or defensiveness? Can we find compassion and understanding by just listening to another’s stories? Can we find a way to support the other’s efforts to live a life of integrity and good will? Can we respond to the other’s efforts to change our minds with gentle firmness but without rejecting them?

I wish I’d had the wisdom and compassion to say to my mother long ago, “Please, mom, these conversations are hurting our relationship. I feel badgered. Can we shape them differently so that we both feel understood?”

My sister and I have found common ground in talking about the efforts of each of our congregations to help the poor and needy in our communities. We may diverge sharply on our theology, but we are in step when it comes to reaching out to the poor and homeless of our communities.

Interestingly, I was talking recently to a realtor who lives just up the road from me, and she told me that the South Whidbey Community Church, a nondenominational evangelical congregation which is fairly new on the south end, has just bought the piece of property across the highway from us here at UUCWI.

And it makes me wonder: when we are neighbors with this very different congregation, can we reach out to them with love and care, despite our religious differences? If they are receptive, can we have a conversation that is gracious in spirit and in setting? If they are uneasy or rejecting, can we respond with compassion and openheartedness? Is there any common ground that we can share?
In other words, can we, shall we dance?

BENEDICTION: Our worship service, our time of shaping worth together, is ended, but our service to the world begins again as we leave this place. Let us go in peace, remembering those in our lives who are different from us in outlook and understanding. May we look for ways to create an inner spirit of grace and an outer spirit of welcome, that we might grow in understanding and compassion for all humankind, regardless of our differences. And may we find great joy in embracing the other. Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.

It only works if you work it.

Those words I spoke to myself as I drove away from my Oak Harbor physician's office two months ago. I had driven the 30 miles or so to my appointment with her, rehearsing the words I wanted to say, the reasons I wanted to give: "I don't want to take statins to reduce cholesterol; I don't want to take bone density drugs; I can't lose weight; I'm not willing to double my exercise routine."

I knew it would be a hard sell, though she's not an ogre and my numbers aren't really terrible. They're pretty normal for someone of my age bracket, my health history and my heritage. She'd persuaded me to try a statin and a bone density drug a couple of years ago and my experience was not particularly good. I had side effects I wasn't willing to live with and I quit taking them eventually. But the cholesterol had jumped up again and I was going to have to deal with that in some way.

Sitting next to her as she unveiled the latest lipid panel scores, I heard myself, right out of the blue, when she asked "how's your diet and exercise plan working out for you?", ---I heard myself say "well, I guess I could go back to Weight Watchers." And saw her smile and say "yes, WW is a good food program." And nothing more. Clever doctor.

I groaned inwardly. I have tried Weight Watchers often enough that I definitely know how it works. Only once have I lost enough weight that I could become a life member and it was 30 plus years and pounds ago. Every time I'd sign up, I'd think "God, these meetings are boring; I know better than these housewives and old fat ladies; I'll just weigh in and do it on my own."

And after a couple of weeks, I'd flake off and toss the materials once again, putting the desire to be slender back on the shelf with the cute dresses and dancing shoes, as well as the confidence I used to feel when talking to an interesting and available gentleman.

In the car on that drive home, I remembered the day when Annaliza Rachelbeth called me up and said to me "we're going to lunch today and we're going to talk about why you keep getting mixed up with all these alcoholic losers". And we did and I found AlAnon, which changed my life radically-----because I worked it. I got a sponsor, I worked the steps, I did what I needed to do to get my life back on track, away from the alcoholic losers and toward a spiritual journey that has brought me here to this place and time.

"It only works if you work it" I told myself on that drive home. I could scorn the meetings, play around with the program, cheat constantly, and stay right where I am physically, with elevated cholesterol and a bad attitude toward exercise. Or I could work it, really take it seriously, develop food and exercise habits that would last me the rest of my life, and improve my health permanently---and maybe regain that confidence I once felt with men. AlAnon did that for me spiritually, but only because I worked it.

I've been working it now for two months. Thirteen pounds gone. Exercising five or more days a week. Smiling a lot. Taking old baggy jeans to the thrift store. Buying new pants in smaller sizes. Bragging. Eating great food. Enjoying the meetings and the new friends. It's working! But only because I'm working it.