The good, the hard, the song
Visiting her parents after her father has had two strokes, Kari Kopnick finds solace in song.
The song most present for me today is . . . “All Will Be Well” by the Rev. Meg Barnhouse and while it’s not in any of our hymnals (yet!), it is one of the best songs for keeping on keeping on when things are hard. I have plucked my way through the chorus of this on my guitar, teaching it to groups of children and adults—and they have told me that it helps. It helps. It does.
All will be well, all will be well all manner of things—will be well. (Chalice Spark, August 28)
Lane Campbell writes about the self-destructive habit of comparing herself to others.
I am someone who often measures my own accomplishments next to colleagues. I take a look at what they are doing on their websites and in social media. I listen to colleagues at professional events and wonder why I am not doing more. Why am I not like them?!
It is a way of shaming myself. I look at what others are doing and revisit those feats and accomplishments as a source of why I am not good enough at my job, at my work-life balance, at being a family member—the list could continue. (Loved for Who You Are, September 1)
Jordinn Nelson Long shares the struggles—and joys—of homeschooling her gifted, complicated son.
Babies come shrouded in mystery, and between that and the beauty that blinds and the strengths that draw our gaze away from the weaknesses and the love that’s so big it’s unspeakable and the fear—O, God, the fear—it is hard. It is a difficulty both daily and eternal to see in our child’s face not our dreams but their reality.
But here is truth, and I dare to speak it, not in resignation but in acceptance—an acceptance of what is that kindles a realistic hope for what may come. I speak, I believe, in the truest love I know: Soeren is not a normal kid. Our baby is not what we expected.
And we love him and we are grateful for the gift of him and we are deeply excited at the learning that he is doing. (Raising Faith, September 2)
The Rev. Cynthia Cain understands the rage at the center of the movie Calvary.
As someone who has lived with the knowledge of childhood sexual abuse committed by a family member, as well as a clergywoman who has listened to countless stories of childhood victimization, I am deeply aware of the toll of this transgression upon the victims. I actually understand the rage that could be so all consuming it could make an otherwise peaceful person resort to violence. (Jersey Girl in Kentucky, September 4)
Kenny Wiley has depression, and is young and black; these basic truths of his existence have a lot in common.
That feeling—that people are okay with knowing that you have depression, as long as you don’t talk about it—mirrors some of what blackness has meant in the post-civil rights era.
It’s okay that I have blackness, as long as I don’t talk about it, or “act black” in any way. (A Full Day, September 2)
Lessons learned—or not
Doug Muder wonders whether we will learn from the national trauma of Michael Brown’s death—or forget it with the next news cycle.
In part, that decision is up to all of us. Will we let the things we’ve learned these last few weeks slip away like the trig identities we crammed into our heads for the big math test? Or will we hang on to our new understandings and not settle back into the same old conversations? Will we demand that our news sources and our political representatives recognize these realities? Or not? (The Weekly Sift, September 1)
The Rev. Elizabeth Stevens shares some of the lessons she learned from a visit to Ferguson.
Lesson One: Don’t believe what you see on television. I expected to witness chaos, devastation, and drama. Instead, I saw a community coming together to try to address deep systemic issues and individuals trying to get back to their normal lives. (revehstevens, September 4)
Kim Hampton believes UU responses to events like Michael Brown’s death are haunted by the Black Empowerment Controversy.
[Our] cousins in the UCC have many ministers of color and congregations comprised primarily of people of color. So do the Disciples (yes, they are cousins too). So what has impeded Unitarian Universalism?
. . . Will we see [racial bias] only as something that is happening outside of our congregations and not look at the way that what is happening outside of our congregations is being played out in our congregations too?
(East of Midnight, September 3)
Theological thoughts
Britton Gildersleeve compares Puritan and Quaker beliefs about why bad and good things happen.
Suffice to say: Puritans believed in the inherent evil of human beings; Quakers believed in the inherent good. If you were a Puritan and good things happened to you, God was showing favour. If bad things happened? It was your own fault. . . .
If you get tased by a cop, Puritans would say, it’s YOUR fault. NOT the fault of the racially paranoid clerk at the store, or the racially motivated police. Yours, even if you’re following the law. After all, if you’re black? God must not love you as much. Or something. (Beginner’s Mind, August 29)
The Rev. Meredith Garmon examines three contemporary perspectives on faith, including this one by Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg.
Faith is stepping, jumping, skipping, leaping, somersaulting right into the middle of possibilities for how we might evolve and for what goodness might burst forth. Faith’s opposite, then, is not doubt, but despairing withdrawal. (The Liberal Pulpit, August 29)
Claire Curole encounters opportunities to think about Postmodern theology while on vacation in Maine.
I ought, perhaps, to have used the camera more on vacation. Then I could pass round a picture and say, this here? this is what the post-Modern critique of Modernism looks like. It has weathered cedar shingles and a faded sign and a whimsical piece of folk art in the window, and it is open every day but only until four o’clock. It smells of salt and old fish and road tar. It is around the corner from a vacant boarded-up sardine cannery with a crumbling concrete dock and across the street from an empty lot where a set of granite stairs leads to nothing. Post-Modernism has a soft, cynical chuckle at Modernism’s notions of progress because progress is motion and motion means “away from here” and post-Modernism knows that “here” will still be here when the big houses burn down or sag on their sills until they collapse under their own unmaintained weight.
Post-Modernism paints flowers where they will not grow, because it can. (Sand Hill Diary, August 31)
Quitting the NFL
The Rev. Adam Tierney-Eliot quits the NFL, after a turning point watching a game last season.
I saw a wealthy old billionaire high-fiving his billionaire friends while his employees permanently damaged their heads, spines, legs and backs in pursuit of…something. On the sideline was the caricature of the sort of horrible, screaming, obscene middle-aged suburban dad most of us try not to become at youth sporting events. I asked myself if I wanted to be the sort of person who condones this. The answer, it turned out, was “no.” (Burbania Posts, September 3)