The ministry of reading

One of the gifts of my TV-free childhood was that I spent a lot of time reading. This was less true of my siblings, but for me, I filled with books the spaces my peers filled with television.

Too many children grow up without enough to eat.  I grew up feeling like there wasn’t enough to read.  I read and re-read all the books we owned, and made good use of our public library.

The more I read, the faster I read.  My mother was sure I wasn’t reading every word (and she was right–I think that I somehow take a snapshot of whole paragraphs, whole pages), but every time she quizzed me about the content of a book I was reading, I was able to answer her questions correctly.

As I move into my fifth decade (wow, writing that made me stop in my tracks), there is finally enough to read.  Books, yes.  But also innumerable blogs and other online content.

There was a time when clergy were among a town’s few well-read residents.  A minister often had a personal library, and shared ideas gleaned from that library and other reading with members of his congregation.  The minister was a conduit of learning and information.

Times have changed.  Literacy levels have risen dramatically since then.  Many people have personal libraries, access to public libraries, and to a torrent of online content, much of it free.

These changed times call for a new ministry of reading.  Not one limited to the clergy, but a shared ministry performed by all those called to it.

One of my heroes in this ministry of reading is Doug Muder, who writes The Weekly Sift.  Doug’s blog gathers the news of the week, explores it from a liberal perspective, and provides a bounty of links to the sources that informed his writing.

My own ministry of reading is wider, and less deep.  I’ve subscribed to 269 blogs in Google Reader.  I’ve “liked” a wide variety of pages on Facebook, and they send more information my way.  I have an app called Pulse on my iPod Touch, and I read more there.  I read the New York Times online, though my patterns may shift with the new pay-to-read policy.  I share the most interesting of all this reading on Facebook and Twitter (more the first, less the latter).

We live in a time of information overload.  Some of us have that time and inclination to sift through that information, gathering up the parts that interest us, the pieces that seem valuable, important.  And that is a ministry, a ministry of reading.

 

Finding “Bright Galaxy”

One of our assignments for UU History class was to prepare a class presentation about our home congregation’s history.  I chose to look at the Anchorage UU Fellowship’s history through the lens of its origins in the Fellowship Movement.

I had previously read two UU World articles about TFM earlier.  The story of the Boulder Fellowship’s beginnings still rings in my ears (“You’ll have to do it yourself.”)

As I returned to those articles, I noticed a reference to Bright Galaxy, a book about TFM published in 1960.  Intrigued, I tried to track it down online.  No luck.

Meanwhile, my interest in TFM was growing.  A tiny spark was becoming a flame, and conversations during my first two days at Meadville last week fanned the fire.

Then last Tuesday the Meadville students hosted a pizza party at the historic Meadville-Lombard building that was recently sold to the University of Chicago.

Curious, I took a self-directed tour.  In the library I found a small bookshelf, piled high and overflowing with stacks of books.  Above it a sign said, “Free Books.”  (ML is paring down in preparation for its move.)

Sitting on top, right at eye level, was Bright Galaxy.

In the months leading up to this class, I’d planned to write my final paper on pluralism, trying to answer for myself the question of how this tradition, with its Christian origins, had become the theologically diverse faith it is today.

Finding Bright Galaxy, and continuing conversations with my classmates, changed that plan.  Now I’m writing about the Fellowship Movement–what was hoped for, what went wrong, what we can learn from the experience.

On the plane home from Chicago, Bright Galaxy was my companion.  Somewhere over Alberta I read that Laile Bartlett, the author, considered the Plymouth Brethren to be one of the spiritual forbears of the Fellowship Movement.  I spent the first 20 years of my life among the Plymouth Brethren.

There is a deep satisfaction when life folds over on itself, and the past is suddenly useful.

Shapes With Doors

We are often subtly encouraged to reduce our theologies to a handy label….These labels do tell us something.  Even though our understanding of each of them may differ, they draw minimal descriptive lines within which we see ourselves and with which others in our tradition may partially identify.   –Paul Rasor, Faith without Certainty

I have a love-hate relationship with language.  I love the process of hearing, seeing or feeling a thought within me and then finding the exact words I need to express that thought.  It’s like the satisfying feeling of an image coming into focus through a camera lens.

And yet I hate that, usually when it matters most, words fall short.  I reach for the word and almost have it.  ”It’s …. no, that’s not it.” The camera whirs and clicks, and cannot focus.

I don’t believe in God (at least, not in the usual range of meanings people ascribe to the word “God”).

That would make me an atheist (except that for me the word “atheist” has a flavor I don’t care for).

I could try non-theist (but I don’t like defining myself by what I’m not).

I really do like agnostic (though it does have wishy-washy connotations).

As I read the words of Paul Rasor quoted above, I saw an image in my mind of shapes formed by what he calls “minimal descriptive lines.”  There were circles and squares, ovals, rectangles and hexagons.  And I realized that for me, I always want a door in my shapes.  It’s part of what I like about the word “agnostic.”

Within Unitarian Universalism, as the Rev. Christine Robinson has written, “agnosticism of various stripes is our default theology.”

I really like that about us.  I like that when we draw the shapes of our beliefs, we don’t close the circle or complete the square.  We leave generous openings for doubt, for uncertainty, for admitting that we don’t know everything.

And yesterday’s conversations with Henkimaa helped me to see that leaving doors in our theological labels has a purpose.  It’s not just that it’s more comfortable for me to leave room for doubt.  Doors allow us to invite others into our experience, and they allow us to walk out of our labels into the experiences of others.  Without doors, I am trapped in my circle, you are trapped in your square, and we cannot know each other.

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.

Sacred Service, ix-11

Congregational life is central to Unitarian Universalism, but ministry often calls one to be a “border crosser,” one who moves beyond the center of the congregation in order to reshape the world with our common values (ix).

The idea of being a border crosser appeals to me–and not just from an altruistic desire to change the world for the better.  Sometimes being a parish minister is claustrophobic–or worse, the walls of the church become a too-comfortable haven.  Pushing out and being part of a ministry outside the congregation–and perhaps even completely separate from the congregation–is a good thing.

The human need that inspires ministerial insight and care is relative to time and circumstance, a premise that is fundamental to the range and shape of all ministerial work …. Inspired by deep religious imperatives, [community ministers] reckoned with brokenness as they found it and brought into being creative visions of healing and change (3).

The brokenness that I see in our time and place is a broken habitat.  Without the healing of the earth, what do other human needs matter?  The healing vocation I feel called to is a ministry of healing our connection to the earth, to our food, to community connections.  I don’t particularly feel called to more traditional places of community ministry–hospitals, prisons, etc.–or to work on more traditional issues of injustice.  But maybe this will change.

Liberal religion may free us from the constraints of doctrine and creed, but it does not free us from an imperative to live for the deepest, most worthwhile achievement of being human (5-6).

In some of us who have escaped dogmatic religious experiences, there is a sense of relief, like a kid on the first day of summer vacation.  No more rulers, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks.  But it’s important for us to remember that this “chosen faith” of ours also asks something from us.  It is not the freedom to sit on the couch all summer reading novels and eating bon-bons.  It’s the freedom to make something wonderful of the time we’re given.  And that’s hard work!

James Luther Adams proposes a theology…delineating five major principles as the “Five Smooth Stones of Liberalism.”  The First Stone lays out the premise that revelation is continuous, dependent always on creativity and processes not ultimately of our own making….The Second Stone maintains that relations between persons ought ideally to rest on “mutual, free consent and not coercion.” …The Third Stone affirms the moral obligation to direct one’s efforts toward “the establishment of a just and loving community.”…With the Fourth Stone, Adams argues that the faith of the liberal must express itself in societal forms: in education, in economic and social organizations, and in political organization….With the Fifth Stone, Adams offers the hope-filled view that the resources available to us to create meaningful change should encourage our attitude of ultimate optimism (6-7).

The principle of continuous revelation is the main reason for my reluctance to label myself as an atheist.  Agnostic feels more comfortable, not as a wishy-washy stance, but as a principled openness to the new ideas that tomorrow may bring.  Today, my experience does not lead me to believe in the existence of a deity (or deities!), but you never know.  When your journey has been as far-reaching as mine, experience teaches you that anything can happen.  I also like this sense of moral obligation here, and again, note that it is a chosen obligation, and that, for me, makes all the difference.

Whether one serves as priest, or prophet, or teacher, or healer, the call to community ministry is centered in this belief: that the Beloved Community of justice and love must be made real….Community ministers bring sacred service to civic space, in the great and profound hope that from our ministry in the common places of life will arise the gift of grace, for ourselves and for others; a dynamic of restoration that does not “fix things,” but “opens us up, giving us ears to hear and eyes to see; not by saving us out of this world, but by showing us this real world in which our salvation lies and must be worked out” (11).

One of the profoundly jarring experiences that propelled me away from fundamentalism (and eventually to being UU) was the discovery that my Plymouth Brethren family did not believe in making this world a better place.  They called it “painting the deck chairs on the Titanic.”  Now that I have come to believe that this world is all we have (or at least all that we know we have), I am slightly phobic about returning to such an otherworldly, dissociative state of mind.  In fact, some of what I wrote above about my attraction to being a “border crosser” (rather than being completely submerged in the parish), is most likely related to growing up among people whose insular world was focused almost entirely on the invisible.