Transfer complete, at long last

Preparing to meet the MFC

A quick self-portrait snapped in our hotel room before we drove to Eliot & Pickett House

Nearly seven years after David Pettee warned me that “the process tends to move slowly,” the transfer of my ministerial credentials from the PC(USA) to the UUA is complete.

For nearly seven years, I have carried the live coal of vocation with me; now I have a place where I can set it down, and let it catch fire.

In the biblical numerology of my childhood, seven was the number of completion, and that feels about right.

I am so grateful for all of you who sustained and supported me during this long process–– helping me remember my true self, suggesting connections in my new religious home, giving me swift kicks whenever self-doubt had me dragging my feet.

If I haven’t thanked you personally, chalk it up to my MFC-addled brain. I remember you with gratitude in odd moments, when I’m away from a phone, when I’m walking the dog, as my head hits the pillow at night. Thank you.

Some of you have asked about my next steps. I’ve been “cleared for search,” which kind of means “hurry up and wait.”  For now, my main tasks are reading the Settlement Handbook, and preparing the packet of information that I will share with congregations. As the Transitions Office begins posting available positions, I’ll start imagining life in those new places. Even if everything moves at lightning speed, the earliest we would leave Alaska would be late summer, 2013. Given the glacial pace of the last seven years, I have no illusions.

So the next steps are still almost completely unknown, and yet I feel a new sense of security, knowing that whatever direction the path takes, I’m walking “in fellowship” with my new community of faith, together with a new community of colleagues.

Why do you write?

My Twitter feed has been sprinkled today with people explaining why they write. After a bit of exploration, I discovered that today is the National Day on Writing.

So here’s my answer: I write because a torrent of thoughts surges through my mind. Words on the screen are shiny bits of debris I pluck from the waters as they rage past.

What about you? Why do you write?

Celebrating Ward’s Day

Liesl started working at Ward’s Aero more than four years ago.  Ward didn’t have dinner at our house until late this past summer, when we instituted “Ward’s Day.”

Ward’s not a planner, and impromptu cooking for guests isn’t a skill I’ve mastered. I need at least a day’s notice before I feel comfortable making dinner for anyone other than Liesl.

We tried to invite Ward for dinner several times, and it just didn’t work out.

But then I had an idea: Ward’s Day.

One day a week––we chose Wednesday––I plan a dinner, and make enough food that Ward can come if he wants to. If he doesn’t, Liesl and I have plenty of leftovers.

He’s been here twice since then, and might come tonight.

We’re having split pea soup with half-grain egg bread, and from-scratch lemon meringue pie for dessert.

It’s win-win-win all around. I get to practice cooking for guests, Ward gets a home-cooked meal he doesn’t have to make for himself, and we all get to spend time together. It’s an important step for Liesl and me, a way for two introverts to stitch together our social network.

What about you?  What practices help you improve the strength of your in-person social connections?

Big things are made of small things

One of the lessons of social media is that big things are made of small things. This is really good news. It’s too easy to feel like we’re powerless to defeat the Goliaths of our time.

This week cancer––or its aftermath––took the life of Steve Jobs, whose creative vision was responsible for the MacBook Pro on which I’m writing this post.

It’s hard enough to know what to say about cancer. Knowing what any one of us can do about it is harder still.

That’s where the good news of “big things are made of small things” comes in.

Yesterday I read a blog post by Seth Godin about his friend and colleague Amit Gupta. Amit founded the photography site Photojojo, and the co-working movement Jelly.

Two weeks ago Amit was diagnosed with acute leukemia.  For several months, Amit will undergo chemo treatments, and then he will need a bone marrow transplant.

But here’s the thing: minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow donor pool. For someone like Amit, of South Asian descent, the chances of finding a donor are one in 20,000.

That’s a big haystack, and there’s no way that I––or any one of us––can do anything about it by myself.

But I can do two small things. The first is this post, which I hope you’ll share. The second is that I signed up to be a bone marrow donor.

If you can, go and do likewise.

Essential Tenets

Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church as authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do, and will you be instructed and led by those confessions as you lead the people of God? –Book of Order, G-14.0405b(3)

When I was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, this was one of the ordination questions to which I responded, “I do.”

Even then, I was enough of a heretic to be relieved that the Presbyterian Church (USA) had never been able to successfully articulate just exactly what those “essential tenets” were.

That’s not to say they didn’t try. Protracted battles were fought–and still rage on. A conservative group called The Fellowship of Presbyterians plans to make a definitive list of the essential tenets.

In my new Unitarian Universalist home, there are similar arguments about defining who we are and what we believe. Sometimes I suspect that, if we held a gathering of everyone who wants to figure out the “essential tenets” of Unitarian Universalism, we’d be surprised by the diversity of what attendees felt was essential.

The Rev. Dr. Jack Rogers, a former moderator of the PC(USA), writes

An essential, or confessional standard, is a core belief that already has the assent of the overwhelming majority of the community.  Essentials are not things that we are fighting over, but things over which we no longer fight.

In other words, essential tenets are those beliefs that are so obvious, that even the most hardened opponents would agree to them.

No matter what religious community we call home, most of us have laundry lists of “essential” beliefs and practices, rituals and traditions. The more anxious we are, the more tightly we cling to our lists of must-haves. Fearful that we might lose what has been of such comfort, we wrap ourselves in mantles of self-righteousness, insisting that ours is the one true way.

What we need is the courage to compare notes. To put our lists on the table, and begin searching for what we share. The core of our identity may be very small. Our central beliefs–the ones over which we no longer fight–may be few.

But that’s not a bad thing. A short list of beliefs is much easier to remember. A lightweight core identity travels well, and stands the test of time.

When we think of centers, and cores, the image we’re describing is a circle. A center, a core––and the circumference of a closed curve.

For Unitarian Universalists, and maybe for other communities, here’s a different image: the daisy. Yes, there are limits to the yellow center. But the daisy’s petals extend from that center in all directions.

So may we be.

(Photo by kkimpel.  Used under Creative Commons license.)