Liberal Theology: Wrap-Up

On this, the final day of our Liberal Theology class, we discussed James Luther Adams extensively.  The challenge he posed to liberal theologians in  1940 is still very much the challenge of today. I am thinking specifically of his plea "for a religious liberalism which, though permitting and encouraging variety and breadth, will acquire a precise character, a cutting edge of its own . . . if it is to be effective in the arena of competing world-views today, [liberalism] must know pretty definitely what its convictions are and expect at least its own adherents to take them seriously."

So what is it that we take seriously or ought to take seriously? This whole week has been helpful for me in refining my personal vision for ministry and my vision for what liberal religion and Unitarian Universalism must take most seriously.  I believe it comes down to this:

We must be a church that ministers not to ideas but to people and the world--people and the world just as they are at this moment. Liberal religionists do not minister in order to save souls but to practice radical acceptance and radical service. We do not minister in order to convince everyone else how wrong-minded they are and how right-minded we are. We do not minister to make idols of the status quo or white, educated middle-class ideals or anything else.  We minister because we love human beings and we love the world.

At least, I believe that's what we ought to do, and to follow the Kantian turn I learned this week, because we ought to do so, we can do so. So may it be!

Walking Along Lake Michigan

One of the greatest things about Chicago is the path that follows the shore of Lake Michigan.  Took a beautiful and bracing walk there today at lunchtime. In the winter, as my friend Tisha pointed out, downtown Chicago looks like something from a snow globe--or maybe the Emerald City.

Liberal Theology Day 3: Emerson & Parker; Dewey & Pinn

Mike reviewed two of the most important themes of the course: authority (what are the sources of religious knowledge or experience) and the changing reputation of human nature (from total depravity in Calvinism to inherently moral in other places). Transcendentalists, as represented by Emerson and Parker in this course, described human nature at its most respected and the source of authority as completely inward.

One of the concepts introduced today that was interesting to me was what Mike called a "strong misreading"--that is, misreading someone else's work, but then running with the new idea that you've developed from your misunderstanding of the other person's view in order to create something entirely new. Such, Mike says, is what the Transcendentalists did with their misreading of Kant. (After having read Kant--and after having read the Transcendentalists--I am grateful for their misreading.)

A prayer for my fellow seminarians and me: May all our misreadings be strong misreadings and may they shed light on the dark parts of our misunderstandings!

Liberal Theology Day 2: Schleiermacher, Channing and Ballou

We started the day with a wrap-up of Kant (rationalist and moralist, denied knowledge of God to make room for faith, believed that what can be known does not exhaust what can be thought, etc.), then plunged into Schleiermacher.

The Methodist in me was pleased to discover that the Wesleyan Quadrilateral is still taught in divinity schools. If the four sources for theological claims are tradition, scripture, experience and reason, we can see that Kant pretty much rejected tradition and put reason first.  Schleiermacher also rejected tradition for the most part, but put experience first. Unlike Kant, Schleiermacher believed that religion could only be described--not explained.

For Schleiermacher, religious experience was an unmediated experience of the infinite, an intuition of the Universe.  He believed that any religious formulation that posited God as a being among beings was a sort of idolatry.

Mike asked how can an object of intuition be pre-conceptual (a la Schleiermacher)? In other words, he has a hard time buying that anything can be intuited without our already having some notion of what it is we are intuiting.

I, on the other hand don't understand how anything that is intuited can be described as other than pre-conceptual. From my perspective, intuition is by its very nature unshaped by language and ideas--although we can use language and ideas to attempt to describe the object of our intuition.

So maybe I'm a mystic after all!

I'll not write about Channing and Ballou here, but the lecture and discussion were both very useful and informative.  And I led the morning devotional today. A beautiful, snowy day in Chicago!

The View from My Window

Liberal Theology: Day 1

We sprinted through an introduction to and overview of liberal theology this morning, and spent the afternoon on Immanuel Kant's philosophy of religion.

Mike Hogue is brilliant and is keeping us on our toes.  A special treat is that the class is being co-taught by Myriam Renaud, who has a very direct teaching style and, as a UU minister has some good ideas about how some of these ideas might find their way into our congregations (or how they're already there).

The description of liberal theology that I like best is that it is the "anti-tradition tradition." One of liberal theology's distinguishing characteristics (the most important one, I think) is that exists in friction with other traditions.  So, what we see in many UU congregations today is a deeply ingrained tradition of being averse to all traditions including our own (!).

It's pretty obvious to me that this kind of attitude is not sustainable--or maybe it would be more accurate to say that this kind of attitude will not help sustain healthy, thriving congregations.  The trick is how to engage constructively with other traditions and with our own history.

Mike asked us to work on developing the ability to understand other people's ideas and beliefs on their own terms.  All the authors that we are reading are dealing with issues and questions that are vital to them, and there is almost certainly something for us to learn from them, whether or not we agree with much of what they say or the ways in which they say it.

My best hope for liberal theology and liberal religion is that we might be able to stop seeing other theologies and traditions as being somehow less highly evolved than our own. In a world in which everything is increasingly interconnected (including ideas and theologies), we would do well to lean into some of these challenging engagements with other traditions, rather than avoiding or dismissing them.

Meadville January 2011 Convo: Day 1

Very good start to the convocation today. Started with musings on theology and music from Mike Hogue, interspersed with beautiful singing led by Dent Davidson. Afterward, we had breakout sessions; I attended one led by Leslie Takahashi-Morris and Jean Pupke on "Ministering Across Cultures." Interesting insights from both of them, especially about using music in ways that can attract or repel a more multicultural crowd than one finds at the typical UU congregation.

We ended with a good vespers service that included lots of hymn singing, readings, a dramatic reading by three of our faculty members and a great sermon from Leslie. She quoted one of my favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches (from his address to the 1967 Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

"A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will 'thingify' them—make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.

"What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, 'America, you must be born again!'

Back in Chicago

I'm delighted to be back in Chicago and very much looking forward to Meadville's January convocation and intensive classes. I'm happy to have arrived a day early to get a bit settled in. I have spacious living quarters this time at a brownstone apartment owned by the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, just one block from where our classes are being held.

I feel like I need to do some decorating to make this rather drab and empty apartment come to life as a cozy home for me for the next couple of weeks:

New Year's Study Break: Thoughts on Vulnerability and Connection

I took a break from studying for most of today to spend some time with my six-year-old daughter and to reflect on several thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for the past couple of days. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about human connection and what it means to us.

When we are not connected with other people, we are not happy and we are not functioning in a healthy way.  I believe that our poor ways of dealing with our own vulnerability prevent us from connecting with our truest selves and with others—and with something bigger than ourselves and others—in deep and meaningful ways.

Rather than allowing ourselves to feel vulnerable, which also allows us to feel joyful, creative and truly free, we find ways of numbing ourselves and ways of trying to attain some kind of invulnerable perfection for ourselves and for our children.

In her recent TED Talk, Brene Brown said, “Our job is not to see our perfect child and try to keep them perfect, to get them accepted in Yale by 7^th grade; our job is to say you’re imperfect and you’re hard-wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging. That’s our job. Show me a generation of kids who are raised like that and I think we’ll see an end to some of the problems we’re seeing today.”

As I spent time with my daughter today, I thought about these words. I do know both of us (and all of us) are imperfect and vulnerable. That’s what human beings are. We can start from that place of imperfection and vulnerability, or we can pretend we’re something else and just wait for the façade to come crashing down one day, as it surely will. It made a big difference to me today to think that my main job as a parent is to deliver that message of worthiness of love and belonging to my child (and to me).. I can do that. I need reminders, but I can do that.

There is something special about children, but it’s not perfection, at least not in an adult sense of the word (without flaw or fault). Rather that something special is the ability to approach the world with creative faculties operating at full bore, unimpeded by expectations or shame or fear of failure. Children hear, they see, they create, they are. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

In 1971, R. Buckminster Fuller met with the Maharashi Mahesh Yogi to talk about human potential and the relationship between human knowing and the design of the universe. Fuller talked about special faculties that children exhibit but “lose very quickly due to the misunderstanding of the life experience by their elders who, in fear, think their children are going to experience pain that they have experienced, and tend to guide their children into ways that disconnect the switchboard of extraordinary connections with extraordinary faculties which we all do have.”

Out of concern about the vulnerability that we fear as adults, we think we’re protecting our children by moving them away from the very thing that we ourselves need to be moving toward—the ability to connect to the broader world directly and without self-generated anxiety and without boxing ourselves in with ever narrower expectations.

I was thinking about these things today as I watched the movie “Akeelah and the Bee” (which, I admit, was a school assignment) with my daughter. The movie featured an extended quote from Marianne Williamson, which, in part, reads as follows: “We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Note from Ella, who lost her first tooth today, to the tooth fairy.

This year I am going to try to allow myself to be vulnerable and in so doing experience real pain and real joy—not the worries about potential pain that my mind generates, which, in fact, precludes real joy.  I am going to strive to be my most authentic self, to shine and to encourage my daughter and others around me to shine as they were meant to. And, with any luck, we will all watch that light grow.

May it be so.

Christmas After All

Our Christmas revels were tempered by a miserable cold suffered by my six-year-old daughter, although she did perk up enough to enjoy opening presents and watching movies.

My daughter is a being of pure energy. For me, she exists not so much as a child as an unstoppable force in a child's guise. So, seeing her laid low--even with something so clearly insignificant in the grand scheme of things--fills me with fear. I am made painfully aware of my own weakness and the flimsy pretense of invincibility with which I cloak myself and those I love most.

Today, it is not joy that connects me with others I know. Instead, it is this: we have all walked in a great darkness, and we walk in darkness still. Sometimes as we walk, we tell stories or sing songs. Sometimes we hold hands or fall asleep in each other's arms. Sometimes we laugh or cry or simply stare in silence.

As the snow falls in tonight's darkness, I imagine it is falling not just here but in Ohio and Michigan and Illinois, in Kentucky and Tennessee, in New York and Massachusetts.

The snow falls tonight as a benediction, covering with a quieting beauty, the hopes and fears that met to make this day a blessing, a holy day after all.

Illuminating Manuscripts

Let’s say the barbarians have taken over,

And let’s say they’re burning everything,

And the only way to save the books—

All the sacred writings that breathe

Light and meaning into our dusty shells—

The only way to preserve that which

For all these years has preserved us

Is to illuminate it,

                        To construct a place,

A scriptorium where we sit each day

And read and paint with gold and silver,

In hopes that maybe the texts so adorned,

Shiny, exquisite, pleasing, mysterious,

Will be deemed valuable enough to save

By those who left their souls behind

To conquer for the sake of conquest.

Let’s say we awaken suddenly to find

The smoke is already billowing through

Our streets, and darkness is falling:

Find your holy place and take up

Your pen and brush, your gold leaf

And your silver dust, and now at once

Begin and do not cease, begin and

Do not cease, begin and do not cease.

A Lesson Learned from My First Semester in Divinity School

When you are busier than you have ever been in your entire life, you have to make some difficult decisions about how to spend your precious time. What I believe you must not do is completely abandon that which nourishes you, that which fans the flames of your soul, that which has brought you to this special place and this particular moment.

I believe it is especially important to keep the creative energy flowing. If you are a dancer, dance; if you are a painter, paint, if you are a singer, sing. You probably won't get class credit for any of these things (with a few notable exceptions), but you will be happier and healthier than if you were to limit your activities to reading dusty textbooks and producing even dustier papers. If nothing else, I recommend keeping a journal. The energy and the ideas that are generated by journal writing frequently become something upon which you can build.

These past six months have been an amazingly fertile time for me as a writer and musician.  Theoretically, I have much less time for writing than ever before.  And yet, almost every time I've taken the time to write a poem or a song or a journal entry, I've learned something new and significant about myself and about the world, both visible and invisible.

As a seminarian, I do not believe it is my job to cough up digested bits of other people's wisdom. Rather, I believe my task is to take the received wisdom of others into my hands like bricks with which I can construct something entirely new and meaningful and beautiful. May it be so.

Speed Reading the Book of Psalms

My Hebrew Scriptures class has covered a lot of territory--almost the entirety of the Hebrew Bible--in a very short time, which has necessitated reading these amazingly rich and complex texts much, much faster than is desirable.

So, most of the time, I've been in "reading-for-comprehension-rather-than-appreciation" mode.  But, when a particular passage has really struck me right between the eyes, I've tried to slow down and take a good look at it.

Sections of several psalms struck me in just such a way. So much so, that I've actually set one of these passages to music (audio and/or video to follow).

It occurs to me that the parts of the Bible that are most meaningful and important to me are often poems, or are at least poetic.  And I think that's true for most other people, too.  Why is this the case?

The answer, at least for me, is that poetry speaks not just to the mind but to the soul.

As Kim Rosen says in her book "Saved by a Poem":

"Indeed, the very indefinability of the word gives us the need for poetry. Poems can speak these ineffables with a kind of mysterious accuracy. 'Poetry is a commitment of the soul,' Gaston Bachelard writes. 'Forces are manifested in poems that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge.'"

What kind of understanding is deeper than knowledge? And why is it that we spend so much time gleaning facts when we read, rather than experiencing this deeper understanding?

I understand the exigencies of a demanding MDiv program, but I also understand the need of the human soul to breathe its way into the deeper understanding that poetry can provide. And now to learn how to balance the two . . .