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.

A place to call home

We’re home again, finally, and we’re not going anywhere for a while.  It feels good to sleep in our own bed, without significant travel looming over us.

We had a wonderful time in San Francisco.  We ventured into the brave new world (for us) of dim sum at Yank Sing.  We loved Muir Woods, Crissy Field, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Stinson Beach.  We bought all kinds of fun things in Haight-Ashbury.  We decided that we would never again rent a car without hand controls; it’s not a good idea to set out on an adventure with the better driver relegated to the passenger seat.

Of course, for me the best part of our trip was taking the concrete step forward from aspirant status to candidacy.  In their letter granting candidacy, the RSCC wrote, “You have made meaning out of the trauma and losses in your personal and professional life.  You bring the gifts of your religious past to your present religious home, which we anticipate will benefit our denomination.”

I found these two sentences both deeply moving and oddly humbling.

In the RSCC interview, like the one with the MFC, the person being interviewed is asked to provide a “first question.”   As someone transferring from another denomination, and as someone with a winding religious path, I chose the question, “Why the UUA?”

My answers all revolved around the idea of “home.”  My initial experience of UUism as a big enough home, one that allows enough room for growth and change.  The mission I see for the UUA, its responsibility to offer a home for the spiritually homeless (the “unaffiliated“).  A place that helps us be the change we want to see in the world.   A place to practice pluralism.  Fertile ground for the non-theistic mysticism springing to life within me.

Home.  Place.  Ground.

I’m home again, finally, and I don’t plan to go anywhere that takes me from this spacious home.

What Makes Us Come Alive

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”   —Howard Thurman

The romantic in me likes to think that if we all do the work we love, and each of us takes a turn at the work no one loves, then everything will get done in a fair and equitable manner.  The realist in me says that’s easier said than done, and perhaps not even possible.

In the past month, I’ve taken some big steps in the journey of returning to parish ministry, “the work I love.”   My candidacy paperwork is in order, and I will be meeting with the WRSCC in San Francisco in October.  After a long period of vocational despair, it feels good to have an achievable goal in sight.

During my time away from parish ministry, I’ve had some jobs that did not make me “come alive.”  In fact, they stole life from me. When I visited the Center for Ministry career assessment people in Seattle, they said that working at an administrative job was stealing my joy, and that I needed to find some other form of employment.

Since we moved to Girdwood, it’s been my “job” to be the homemaker–I shop for groceries, walk the dog, take care of the laundry, make dinner, clean the condo.  Some of those things I enjoy, and some I don’t.  I like to cook; I don’t like to clean the kitchen.  I like to shop for groceries; I don’t care for lugging them home and putting them away.  I don’t like any of the housecleaning chores, and I’m not particularly good at keeping on top of them.

My life right now gives me time to write, to read (both for fun and for the MFC), to volunteer at the Anchorage UU Fellowship, and to make progress on my return to parish ministry.  I’m very lucky, because vocation is an option.  So many people are trapped in “work,” without hope of ever having the luxury of listening to the inner voice that says, “This is what you were meant to do.”

And the world as we know it depends on them remaining trapped.  It depends on secretaries and waitresses and migrant farm workers and people who stand in an assembly line dismantling chickens.  It depends on contract workers doing time in cubicles.  It depends on people who work on deep-sea oil rigs that just might explode.  It depends on coal miners who might get stuck, forever, underground.

Those of us lucky enough to be free have a deep obligation to those trapped in the deadening mechanisms of our greedy, growth-hungry consumer society.  We have an obligation to get our hands dirty in the hard work of changing the world.

I think we do need to ask what the world needs.  The world needs those of us who are free and (relatively) well-off to use our freedom and our resources in the service of change.  And if we do so, I believe we will discover ourselves coming alive.

What is Socinianism?

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of short posts about questions that arise from teaching myself about the history, theology and polity of Unitarian Universalism.

I’ve run into the word “Socinian” a few times lately.  The first time was in a list of questions the Ministerial Fellowship Committee might ask, so that upped my adrenaline a bit.  The word rang a very distant bell–I could see the word in my mind’s eye on a chart I studied in seminary, could hear the word said by a Church History professor.  Seemed to me that in the context of my previous training, Socinianism was a heresy, but I couldn’t pull up anything more specific than that.

Since I’m not trying to become an expert on the subject, but rather just to get a ballpark idea of what we’re talking about, the following is based on the Wikipedia entry for Socinianism.

Turns out I was right.  Socinianism is a heresy, which makes it right at home among the UUs.  (Yes, I’m being flip.)

Socinianism takes its name from Lelio Sozzini and his nephew, Fausto Sozzini, who lived basically during the time period of the Protestant Reformation.  While reformers such as Luther and Calvin changed a great deal about the Christian faith (they would have said that they returned it to its origins), their “crimes” against the church did not strike the core principles of the Christian faith as deeply as those of “heretics” such as the Sozzinis.

I remember trying to wrap my mind around three, yet one, one, yet three while I was in seminary.  We had to memorize long, highly technical Greek words, differentiated from each other by a single vowel.  There were flighty metaphors about the persons of the Trinity dancing with each other.  It was a lot of work, all in the service of defending formulas articulated long ago at Nicaea and Chalcedon.

It seems to me that Lelio and Fausto, let the range of their minds take them beyond the bounds of orthodoxy, unlike their friend Calvin and the other Reformers.  Like their spiritual ancestor, Arius, they realized that everything was much simpler if Jesus were not divine.

If I were to remember one piece of this for talking with the MFC, it would be the distinctive Christology of Socinianism.  In its view, Christ did not exist prior to his birth.  He is not co-eternal with the Father, and not divine, but an object of reverence nonetheless.

Sacred Service, 15-27

The Cambridge Platform of 1648 read, “There ought to be no ordination of a minister at large.  He would be a pastor without a people” (15).

This is interesting to me both in this context (community ministry) and in the context of the theology of ordination.  As a transfer candidate, I’m interested in what it means that the UUs honor my ordination as a Presbyterian minister.  For some UUs, perhaps it means that “something happened” in the laying on of hands, something divine, something magical (in the best sense of that word).    For others, it probably means simply that another religious community (in my case, the Presbys) recognized my gifts, skills and training as a minister, and that those gifts, skills and training transcend differences in theology; in other words, I am who I am, no matter what faith tradition I serve.

The theme, for both community ministry and the theology of ordination, is accountability of ministers to the community (and I supposed of the community to those who minister).  I think it’s Cartman from South Park who says, “I’ll do what I want!”  That instinct is in us–well, it’s in me.  But the constraints of accountability are good for us; they are meant to keep us from going off the deep end, or from going so far in a direction of our choosing that the congregation can no longer see us.

Maintaining the idea of community as parish became problematic in reality, as a theology of conformity was used to empower a politics of exclusion and abuse….the indigenous origins of our liberal religious grounding are found in early models of religious dissent….Perhaps it is from this place, where theology became a moral question rather than a doctrine of judgment, that we derive our impulse for community ministry (16).

It is much, much easier, to tend a flock that, well, flocks together.  A religious community with a theology of conformity is theoretically easier to control.  But in my experience, some of us just have a real problem with conformity.  It makes us claustrophobic.  And so we become dissenters, who either leave on our own, or are excluded by the conformers.  There’s something, too, about communities that are excessively concerned with theological conformity; compassion is often a casualty of that excessive concern.   If compassion survives, it’s often exercised in the service of theology–”if we are kind to them, they will believe like we believe.”

Caleb Rich..arrived at Universalism through a personal struggle in which the threat of Hell did not seem to him a worthy motivation for living a good life (21).

It’s an effective motivation, but not a worthy motivation.  As I moved in progressively more liberal circles, there was more than one time when I shook my head ruefully and said, “People must have been so much easier to motivate when they believed in hell!”  The difference, though, between goodness motivated by fear, and goodness motivated by love, is immeasurable.

In the eighteenth century, Arminian (later Unitarian) and Universalist beginnings cleared small spaces in the densely wooded landscape of orthodoxy to plant seeds of liberal religious thought and practice.  They posed two emergent alternatives to the Calvinist status quo, each offering in its own way a more optimistic view of the human capacity for good.  One was taken up by the more educated and economically well-situated; the other was embraced by people closer to the ordinary exigencies of life.  In both cases, the possibility for being righteous was not precluded by the doctrine of election; in both cases, compassion and the capacity for righteousness took precedence over depravity as the lens through which to view humanity (24).

I love the imagery in this paragraph.  One of the interesting things that is happening for me as I read this book is that I keep comparing the arc of UU history with the trajectory of my own spiritual journey.  There are definite parallels.  I wonder what will happen as I continue.  Am I still clearing small spaces in the dense woods of a fundamentalist childhood?  Even though I live in the broad, open fields of 21st century Unitarian Universalism, are there still invisible, imaginary branches brushing against my face, casting shadows in my path?

Ware…moved from an Arian view of Christ to a Socinian view, whereby Christ was simply a man and had no existence before his birth into the world.  This shift was typical of Ware’s generation of American anti-Trinitarians, adopted a generation earlier in England (26).

This theological shift is so important.  When people look at the life of Jesus, and believe that he was God, there’s a tendency to think, however unconsciously, “Well, of course he could do that.  He was God.”  A further shift,  letting go of a belief in a Magical Other who will save us, helps wake us up to the fact that if we don’t do something, it won’t get done.

In the liberal theologies that broke with orthodox Calvinism and rejected innate depravity, we find a moral imperative alert to human need in the larger human family (27).

So, the liberal theologies told people, “You are not depraved.  You can do good.  Now go and do it.”  And they helped people see Jesus, not as the Magical Other whose example of love they could not possibly live up to, but as a fellow human being whose life they could aspire to emulate.