To Life!

After a hiatus of a few years, I’m finally getting around to finishing my small group ministry project. With this entry I’ve finally completed the set of small group ministry session plans based on resources from spiritualityandpractice.com. And it’s only fitting that this last session includes a bit of a celebration. So, rather than having group members wait until after the excerpt for the topic is read to hear the question for the day, members should be asked ahead of time “to come prepared to talk about a vivid experience of being fully aroused by life.” They should “also…bring a special goblet, glass, or mug to the gathering.” Why? You’ll have to read the session to find out. I should add that this will be my final entry for Phil’s Little Blog on the Prairie. It’s been a great a fantastic seven years or so at this URL and probably another three years at the previous one (which is no longer accessible…probably some of my best stuff was there, eh?). At any rate, I plan on showing up elsewhere in the interdependent web, and I’m make sure to post an update of where that is when I get there. In the meantime, let’s raise a virtual glass “to life!”

Chalice/Candle Lighting

Opening Words:

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

— Howard Thurman

Check-in/Sharing

Topic:

An Excerpt from To Life! A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking by Harold Kushner

In this primer, Harold Kushner explores Jewish traditions and practices. A key one is to be live life to its fullest, which we call the spiritual practice of zeal.

“To life — these two words represent so much of what Judaism is about. They suggest first that Judaism is about how to live, not just what to believe. They convey an optimistic attitude toward life, investing our energy in living rather than in worrying about dying, asking us to enjoy the pleasures of this life rather than noticing all the things that are wrong with it, emphasizing life in this world rather than pinning our hopes on finding satisfaction in some world to come. As the traditional Jewish toast over a glass of wine, To Life conveys a sense of exuberance, a readiness to enjoy the pleasures of this world. It removes from wine, and from other pleasures, that taint of sin and self-indulgence, and invites us to look at all that God has created and find it good. The sages teach us that ‘in time to come, everyone will have to account for all the good things God created which he refused to enjoy.’

Does any other people celebrate the special moments of life, the births and birthdays and weddings, with as much food, as much laughter and as many tears as Jews do?”

Activity: Plan a “Toast to Life” celebration for your group. Have each person come prepared to talk about a vivid experience of being fully aroused by life. Also have each person bring a special goblet, glass, or mug to the gathering. Gather in a circle, bless your goblets, and fill them with celebratory liquids. After each person shares his or her story, all raise your glasses and toast “to Life!”

Check-out/Likes and Wishes

Closing Words:

You feel your own life — your heart, your mind, your body, your sexuality, the people and things you are connected to — and you spontaneously fill with the exclamation: “God, it feels great to be alive!” That’s delight.

— Ronald Rolheiser in The Holy Longing

To Practice This Thought: Start your day with the affirmation ‘I am vibrantly alive!’ Say it enough times so that it sinks into your consciousness and seeps into your body. Whenever your energy feels depleted during the day, repeat the affirmation. In the last hours of the evening, let your ‘I am vibrantly alive’ extend outward to support others through your prayers.

Group Session Plan based on resources on Zeal from www.spiritualityandpractice.com.

For a PDF version of this small group ministry session, click here: Zeal. For more information on small group ministry, visit the UU Small Group Ministry Network.

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I’m Not Part of an Organized Religion, I’m a Unitarian. Just Kidding.

NOTE: I found this draft of a blog post saved on my iPad’s WordPress app. It’s like over a year old! Maybe I didn’t hit “publish” because it sounds a little snarkier than I like to be. But I seemed to have put a lot of energy into it, and it would be a shame to waste it. So for what it’s worth, here’s a post on why UU congregations aren’t appealing to the “nones” the way we think they should be.

Last Sunday the New York Times published an opinion piece by Eric Weiner entitled, “Americans: Undecided About God.” And judging by the response from some of my Unitarian Universalist friends and colleagues, you would have thought the article was called, “Americans: Ready to Become UUs.” I found this a little bit odd, since my title for the article would have been, “UUs: They’re Just as Screwed as Every Other Denomination in the United States.”

The folks who thought the article was good news generally followed this line of reasoning:

• The fastest growing category of religious affiliation in the U.S. is “None”
• Unitarian Universalism is a non-creedal faith
• Nones should be attracted to a non-creedal faith
• Therefore, Nones should be attracted to Unitarian Universalism

Now if this were true, our congregations should be bursting at the seams. And I’m not talking the measly one precent annual growth we were used to until we started to decline a few years back. I’m talking Jefferson’s “there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die an Unitarian” kind of growth.

But that’s not happening, is it? The reason is these Nones are, to quote Weiner, “running from organized religion.” And the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations is, for all intents and purposes, an organized religion. Lest there be any doubt about the truth of that statement, let me repeat it, this time in all caps:

THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST ASSOCIATION IS, FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES, AN ORGANIZED RELIGION.

(And just because there’s a joke that goes, “I’m not part of an organized religion, I’m a Unitarian,” doesn’t mean it’s true.) There is absolutely no reason why one of the 25% of the young adults in the United States who identifies as a None should walk through the doors of one of our congregations. Why? Because they’re just not looking for congregation doors to walk through.

So sharing Weiner’s article on Facebook with a comment like “Good news for UUs!” or “Hey, Nones! Have I got a church for you!” misses the point. This isn’t to say that there aren’t any young adult Nones coming to our congregations. But just because there’s a new type of religious person out that doesn’t mean they’re automatically going to be attracted to us. (And even if some of them did find their way to one of our congregations, there’s no guarantee that they’ll find the kind free thinking environment that would keep them coming since 97% of these Nones believe in God, and talking about God isn’t something that comes naturally in a lot of our congregations. By the way, if you want to know what I mean when I say “talking about God,” check out “Theology and the Church After Google.”)

So here’s the metaphor I’ve been working with lately. The content of our religion should, indeed, be attractive to Nones. The problem is how it’s being delivered. A bricks-and-mortar congregation is about as attractive to a None as desktop computer. While the content of either may be worth exploring (“Hey, this church has some pretty cool things to do! Hey, this desktop computer has every episode of Dr. Who on it’s hard drive!”), the odds that a None in search of an alternative to “organized religion” is going to wander into a UU congregation—or any congregation for that matter—is about as likely as a Millennial booting up a desktop computer to check what’s up on Twitter. In either case, said young adult None is more likely whip out a smart phone, or an iPad, or even a laptop, if they’re trying to be ironic.

So trying to increase the capacity of a congregation to serve people in a physical space, be it through expanding the building or hiring more support staff, is kind of like getting a new mouse or adding more memory to a laptop computer. They’re nice upgrades for the people who are already using it, and they might benefit some other folks in the general vicinity. But for people who have moved beyond things like organized religion and desktop computers, those upgrades probably seem pretty superfluous. Rather than seeing congregations as desktop computers confined to a one particular desk, we should start seeing congregations as servers, filling the web with our liberal religious and spiritual progressive content, ready to be accessed by any device, any time, anywhere.

Be Ours a Religion That Gets Things Done

My friend and colleague Sue Sinnamon shared an interesting post from “author, speaker, activist, and public theologian” Brian McLaren called “Q & A: What About Unitarians?” The question (“Why hasn’t the Unitarian Universalist Church or those roughly affiliated seen a sharp rise in either the recent [2012 Pew Forum] survey or any other performed in the last few years?”) is in response to “Thoughts on the Nones,” a video McLaren had posted. In the video, MacLaren notes that the nones “don’t want to be part of a religious community that requires them to hold hostility toward the Other.” The questioner points out that Unitarian Universalism has “a long history in the United States (going back to abolitionism) of acceptance of individuals of many lifestyles, as well as a strong identity tied to charitable and political action.” Yet, the results of the Pew Forum survey “found that the number of Unitarian members was not a statistically viable number among survey respondents.” Whatever happened to the notion that Unitarian Universalism is “A Religion for Our Time“?

MacLaren offers some interesting insights. The one that really caught my eye was this: “the degree to which a religious community deconstructs without reconstructing will put it at a disadvantage. It not only must removed negatives that other communities have: it must have positives that other communities lack.” It seems to me that Unitarian Universalism has, indeed, removed a lot of “negatives that other communities have.” The problem is, perhaps, that we’re a little too self-congratulatory around this point. If the nones are looking for a non-hostile religion, we’re the one! But the nones, like other kinds of spiritual seekers, aren’t just looking for a religion that plays well with others. They could very well be looking for a religion that gets things done, both for themselves and for the world.

Which brings me to Doug Muder’s recent UUWorld article: “The surprising success of lifeboat faith.” The tagline for the article says it all: “Unitarian Universalism cannot thrive if we don’t at least understand the appeal of religions that give people identity and direction.” The Unitarian Universalism that is not thriving is the one that says, “Hey, look! We’ve got a pretty good product here. We embrace theological diversity, and we welcome different beliefs and affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. How cool is that!” Not a whole lot about identity and direction there. People are looking for more. According to Muder,

the appeal of religion lies in identity and orientation: Who am I? Who are my people? Why is my life important, and what am I supposed to be doing with it? The rapid change in the modern era has only increased the importance of those perennial questions and raised the value of answers that feel solid and steady.

Rather that being a religion for our time, let’s be the religion that gets things done. A religion that provides “answers that feel solid and steady” to those big questions Muder refers to. He’s got some great ideas about what those answers might look like. And if you haven’t seen the article yet, consider trying to answer them for yourself first. In the meantime, I came across this great quote from the conclusion of the UUA’s Commission on Appraisal’s 2005 report “Engaging Our Theological Diversity” [PDF]:

What would our UU faith be like if our congregations truly became the safe and welcoming place we aspire to create? If we truly did honor and celebrate both our theological diversity and our sources of unity? If we were willing to commit to spiritual discipline as deeply as to spiritual freedom? “Whether we now have the seeds of a liberating faith is not really the question. Deluding ourselves into thinking that admiring the seeds will make them grow is the issue at hand,” writes a contemporary UU prophet (Gordon McKeeman). What marvels might be possible if we took these seeds and planted and tended them? What wondrous blossoms might arise?

McLaren has a similar quote in his post: “Perhaps, as John Cobb says in his recent (excellent) book, Religions in the Making, the best contributions of Unitarians are in their future, and what they can be has not yet been fully manifested.” May it be so, friends. May it be so.

Go UUs!

I haven’t blogged in a looooong time, but I’ve been taken by an idea and I wanted to explore just a little bit further. I tweeted about it a couple of times earlier this week, and got a few responses, which tells me that I may be on the right track (of course some people may think it’s the wrong track, but either way, it’s a track and people are responding to it). So here were the tweets:

So here’s what I’m thinking: When a person of faith identifies first and foremost with their particular religious tradition, it’s like an college graduate identifying himself or herself primarily as an alumnus/a of their alma mater. While that may be an interesting fact (“Oh, you’re a Unitarian. Aren’t you the ones Garrison Keillor is always joking about?”), it really doesn’t tell anyone a whole lot about who you are as a person of faith, just as having an MBA from Harvard Business School doesn’t say a whole lot about how well you run a business (or a country, for that matter).

 

Follow the Grain

Seems like one of the most popular episodes of Ally McBeal was “Theme of Life,” the one where her therapist (played by Tracey Ullman) tells Ally that she needs a theme song. I mean I never really watched the show, yet I knew about that episode. I mention it because the teaching story for this week’s small group ministry session on the spiritual practice of You (based on resources from spiritualityandpractice.com) gives the same advice. In the story, a woman tells the author that her father gave her a theme song when she was born. It’s a lovely idea, one that sounds a little classier coming from a book by a poet and philosopher rather than a television show. No matter where it comes from, the notion of having a theme that you live by makes sense. And if you can set that theme to music, all the better!

Chalice/Candle Lighting

Opening Words:

Follow the grain in your own wood.
— Howard Thurman quoted in To Love and Be Loved by Sam Keen

Check-in/Sharing

Topic:

A Teaching Story from Generous Strangers and Other Moments from My Life by John Skoyles

Poet and philosopher John Skoyles finds examples of the sacred in his everyday experiences — such as this encounter with a woman in a hospital:

At one point, she asked, “Do you have a theme song?”

“A theme song?” I asked.

“A song that followed you or that someone gave to you. Did you give your son a song when he was born?”

I hadn’t, but I told her that the radio was playing in the hospital room when Harry was born, and I recalled that as he was being delivered, Shirley Bassey was singing “Goldfinger” from the James Bond movie.

“When I was born,” she said, “my father said my theme song would be ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ Do you know that one?”

“Yes, that’s a good one.”

“It is,” she said, “but that’s just what I’ve gone and done.”

And I guess she had. I had never met anyone like her.

Questions: What is your theme song? How does it resonate with your soul?

Check-out/Likes and Wishes

Closing Words:

O God, help me to believe the truth about myself no matter how beautiful it is!
— Macrina Wiederkehr quoted in A Grateful Heart edited by M. J. Ryan

To Practice This Thought: Identify one beautiful truth about yourself.

Group Session Plan based on resources on You from www.spiritualityandpractice.com.

For a PDF version of this small group ministry session, click here: You.

For more information on small group ministry, visit the UU Small Group Ministry Network.