God was not in the wind
After this week’s devastating tornado in Oklahoma, the Rev. Lynn Ungar addresses God’s role in natural disasters.
How I hate that phrase, act of God. As if God would come down from the clouds to smite a town out of, what, spite? Vengeance? God does not cause weather events, not out of a need to punish infidels and homosexuals, and not because he needed to call his children home to be with him. You will not find God in the great wind, any more than Elijah did.
. . . . God is in all the people who see the suffering that is, and the suffering to come, and who choose compassion and justice and the hope of a better world. (Quest for Meaning, May 21)
The Rev. Dr. David Breeden, who comes from Tornado Alley, writes a poem, “Benediction for the Wind (on the occasion of a killer tornado).”
What better way for
the screaming winds
to set us praying
than the cold logic
of random chance?What better way
to hold sanity and
loved ones close than
to set to praying? (Way of Oneness, May 23)
For Roberta Hecking, the tornado was a reminder of technology’s relative powerlessness in the face of Nature.
Entire towns were flattened in a matter of minutes. Dazed and traumatized faces dominated the nightly news. All our technology couldn’t stop a tornado. Whether we wanted to or not, for a brief moment, the culture bowed to wildness, to Nature in full fury. Did we get the message? Do we understand that the Earth is primary, and we are derivative? (Breath and Water, May 23)
Writing that “life is not safe,” the Rev. Ellen Cooper-Davis encourages us to deal with our fears by building relationships.
Coming to grips with our natural vulnerability, with the stark reality that no matter how hard we try, there is never any guarantee of safety for any of us, can earn us some freedom from fear, and the ability to live life more fully. Turn off the evening news, which makes it sound like every shadow is lurking danger, and send your kids out to play in the lengthening evening. Let go of suspicion and throw a block party so you can meet all of your neighbors. Because when disaster comes, what we will need most is not our illusions of safety, but each other. (Keep the Faith, May 22)
Mandie McGlynn created this graphic, illustrating the W.H. Auden quote, “We must love one another or die.” (UU Media Collaborative Works, May 22)
Walking the winding path
Jordinn, a new seminarian, worries about losing her faith.
Because the truth is, having known it, I don’t want to be without it. I want to feel it. I want to hold it in my hands when it’s been weeks or months or please not years of talking about God instead of connecting with God. (Raising Faith, May 21)
The Rev. Erik Walker Wikstrom remembers a spirited conversation between two people about vocation and the spiritual journey.
Visually I remember the way the campfire highlighted only their eyes as they talked. And if “eyes are the windows of the soul” then there was a true conversation, perhaps even a true communion of sorts, between those two souls. . . .
And one of the things I believe that evening did for me was to awaken a delight in such conversations that has only grown over the intervening years. . . . There are few things that bring me to life more than really engaging deeply and courageously with someone else’s spiritual journey; seeing how it’s been for them and sharing how it’s been for me. . . . And every so often I get to have one during which it seems that everything else fades away but our eyes, and I can almost smell the woodsmoke. (Minister’s Musing, May 20)
The Rev. Andy Burnette’s tattoo symbolizes his journey through Pentecostal and evangelical Christian churches to ministry in Unitarian Universalist congregations.
The image as a whole is the flaming chalice of Unitarian Universalism. I expect to spend the rest of my life as a proud evangelical Unitarian Universalist minister. But I don’t leave anything behind. Every transition I have made is a signpost on my journey, and my tattoo is a symbol of my refusal either to be forced into orthodoxy or to leave behind the lessons of my past. (Just Wondering, May 13)
Making noise for justice
The Rev. Jude Geiger thanks those “making noise” for LGBT justice, even though he feels too numb to join the protesters.
I wanted to want to join the rally. But I couldn’t draw myself out. I wanted to be normal for another day. I wanted not to have to go out and be gay—publicly. I couldn’t stir myself to feel like a rally would do anything. That same night, another gay man was assaulted, not far from my home, on the East side—as if the rally had no meaning. (HuffPost Religion, May 23)
Thomas Earthman hopes that, when Unitarian Universalist congregations participate in Pride parades, they are motivated by a desire for justice, rather than by a desire for additional members.
At what point does our mission to gather after service and carpool to the Parade simply mirror the pilgrimage of the fundamentalist group, where members may not have strong feeling about the LGBT community, but feel compelled to protest the calls for equality as a sign of their faith?
We don’t need publicized missions. We don’t need uniforms. We don’t need national campaigns designed around visibility. We need people, moved by faith, doing good in every part of their lives. If we can inspire that, then we will already have changed the world. (A Material Sojourn, May 16)
Communities of grace
Reponding to the UU blogosphere’s conversation last week about the term, “Beloved Community,” the Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford shares what she has learned from studying of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beloved Community is not held within our church walls. As soon as you begin to think like that, you have moved into the exact opposite of beloved community, because in creating that definition of community, you have necessarily created otherness. There is the community inside our walls, the people who think like us, act like us, look like us. And there are the people who are not part of that community, the “others.” This is not Beloved Community. Royce distinguished between small “communities of grace” that were loyal to the greater cause of the universal Beloved Community and those who were insular, often “predatory,” in their loyalty to their own. (Boots and Blessings, May 22)
June Herold asks, “Are hurt-free, mentally-healthy working professionals turned off in our churches” by an excessive focus on “brokenness”?
I have been surprised that many of my colleagues and friends have walked into UU churches over the last few decades but never returned. Stripping away time management issues, queasiness about religion in general and other typical factors, more often than not, people I have known—highly functioning individuals—say they just don’t fit in. (The New UU, May 23)
The Rev. Tony Lorenzen writes that there is “a Pentecost going on among Unitarian Universalists.”
People are coming alive and beginning to live their lives on fire. Unitarian Universalism is wrestling in a very deep way with what it means to live life every day as if being a Unitarian Universalist can change individual lives and change the world. Unitarian Universalist are finding that their religion is not about going to church but about being the church. (Sunflower Chalice, May 18)
Doug Muder offers “an imperfect introduction to Unitarian Universalism,” a draft of his unfinished book, Unitarian Universalism 101. (Free and Responsible Search, May 21)