Let our voices be a safe haven
When news stories spark conversations about domestic violence, Karen Johnston urges us to “let our voices be a safe haven.”
Let us remember who is in the room.
Let us be mindful of who is in the room when we speak, when we consider how and when to ask our questions. Let us be thoughtful when we speculate.
Let us be guided by facts and real-life testimony of survivors of violence and their allies that in most any public circumstance, in any gathering of people, there are survivors of domestic violence among us. They are us and we are them. (irrevspeckay, September 11)
Thirteen years ago
The Rev. James Ford comments that it’s hard to believe it’s been thirteen years since the September 11 attacks.
Today, these thirteen years later, at home we’ve come to be divided even more than we were before, something I’d not thought possible if asked in about it on 9/10.
And in the relentless play of causality even a president who came into office in significant part on the promise to extricate us from the morass looks to be forced into a fight with a truly horrific child birthed out of the whole dirty mess.
Blood poured upon blood. (Monkey Mind, September 11)
The Rev. Lynn Ungar acknowledges that we have responded to the 9/11 attacks by choosing security over freedom.
When the World Trade Center towers came down. . . . everything changed, because we had to come face to face with the reality that loss on such a grand scale really could camp out on our very doorstep.
And then we had to figure out how to respond. Would we build back our personal defenses through going on attack, following the illusion that we could simply exterminate everyone who was a possible threat? . . . . Why yes, we would.
Because anything is better than simply dwelling in the knowledge that we are not safe, that the horrors which befall any one of us could befall all of us, that loss lurks around every corner. (Quest for Meaning, September 11)
The just-world fallacy
The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Landrum examines the just-world fallacy in the context of leaked celebrity photos and the death of Michael Brown.
What happened to Jennifer Lawrence was a crime. Her privacy was invaded, her digital material stolen, her pictures shared without her consent. What happened to Michael Brown was horribly wrong, and no unarmed person deserves to be shot by the police. We’re pushing back against the bully culture and the rape culture, too, that tell us that the victims deserved what they got.
[Your] disease, your misfortune, crime perpetuated against you—these are not what you deserve. The Just-World perspective is a fallacy. You have inherent worth and dignity, you are worthy of love, you deserve a good and happy life. (Loved for Who You Are, September 8)
Effort, engagement, and success
The Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford wonders, “When did ‘pet project’ become an insult in UU churches?”
What if, rather than trying to get 40 participants for one program, we instead equipped and empowered 40 members to go out and each one follow their own passion? Maybe we gave them meeting space or maybe even a little seed money. Maybe all we did was cheer them on, and offer them the shared wisdom of all the other church members who were changing the world in their own particular calls. (The Lively Tradition, September 11)
The Rev. Dan Harper responds to a blog post about moving beyond the simple congregational metric of average worship attendance.
Odom’s blog post ends with him wishing that he “could go back to the good old days and track a couple of different numbers.” I don’t share his nostalgia—I’m fascinated by the ongoing evolution of congregations, and I love the opportunities for creativity we now have.
How about you? What metrics would you use to figure out how your congregation is doing? (Yet Another Unitarian Universalist, September 9)
The Rev. Dawn Cooley, drawing on her experience with roller derby, asks, “What are our stinky pads,” the evidence of our hard work?
On the one hand, I see evidence of our liberal religious effort all over the place. . . . Of course, just providing space is not enough—a roller derby team can provide practice times, but if no one shows up, no effort is put in. So then I wonder: Are people attending these events, workshops and opportunities provided by various liberal religious entities? Are they showing up and putting in effort? If so, then I think that this is one way that we can see evidence of “faithful sweat stains.”
But this does not seem sufficient—we need an outward component as well. (The Lively Tradition, September 10)
Finding peace
The Rev. Tamara Lebak struggles to be calm when she gets a flat—driving on the highway, with her young daughter in the back seat.
It is nearly impossible to hide an emotion when in cognitive or emotional overload. You will inevitably leak. It seeps out in our voice or in a nearly imperceptible micro-expression that warns others of our emotional world even if they don’t know exactly what they saw. On the one hand I want Beckett to be able to identify and articulate what she is feeling when she is feeling it and I would like to model that. I don’t want her to hide her feelings. On the other hand I do not need her upset when I am trying to dodge oncoming cars. I had a job to do. (Under the Collar in Oklahoma, September 9)
Using—and protecting—the web
The Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern encourages us to help protect net neutrality.
I have loved living in this age, seeing the internet grow from nonexistent, to a seldom-used novelty, to the central part of our lives it is now. It’s how I do research, meet new people, share my daughter’s childhood with faraway family and friends; it’s my ongoing university, workshop, and studio; it’s how I met my wife. I hate to picture looking back on this as the long-gone heyday of the internet. I don’t want to tell my daughter, as she works with a much different network of channeled and ranked information, “Let me tell you about 2014, when the internet was still neutral.” (Sermons in Stones, September 10)
Katy Schmidt Carpman uses “the interdependent web” to facilitate a long-distance, surprise donut delivery.
The blessings of a single donut have rippled through the week. Favors and laughter and networking and sugary sweetness—it’s all good. (Remembering Attention, September 10)