Spring-like Tulsa weather

Now that I am back in the spring-like weather of Oklahoma (it will change soon) and I already fit in two long bike rides over the weekend, this perspective on Chicago cold weather made me laugh. Too true!

Chicago temperature conversion chart...

60° F: Arizonans shiver uncontrollably; people in Chicago sunbathe.

50° F: New Yorkers try to turn on the heat; people in Chicago plant gardens.

40° F: Italian & English cars won't start; people in Chicago drive with the windows down.

32° F: Distilled water freezes; Lake Michigan 's water gets thicker.

20° F: Floridians don coats, thermal underwear, gloves and wool hats; people in Chicago throw on a flannel shirt.

15° F: New York landlords finally turn up the heat; people in Chicago have the last cookout before it gets cold.

0° F: All the people in Phoenix die. Chicagoans close the windows.

-10° below zero: Californians fly away to Mexico . The Girl Scouts in Chicago are selling cookies door to door.

-25°: Hollywood disintegrates; people in Chicago get out their winter coats.

-40°: Washington DC runs out of hot air; people in Chicago let the dogs sleep indoors.

-100°: Santa Claus abandons the North Pole. Chicagoans get frustrated because they can't start 'da car.'

-460°: All atomic motion stops (absolute zero on the Kelvin scale); people in Chicago start saying, 'cold 'nuff for ya?'

-500°: Hell freezes over. The Cubs win the World Series!!

Saying Goodbye

I will miss many things about this intense month at Meadville Lombard in Chicago.

New friends
Smart, compassionate teachers/ministers

Lively theological discussions

Rituals
SnowRadiator heat (Much better than forced air)

Obama fervor and inauguration joy

Chicago pizzaand thousands of other things.

Wisdom from Rodgers & Hammerstein

Unexpected insight into a source of racism and bigotry from the 1949 musical "South Pacific."

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!

by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II

Overheard in Seminary (part 3) - Becoming whole

Why look into racism at this point in time? Because we cannot be whole people until we acknowledge the past and its potent grip on today. African Americans have been knocking on the doors of Unitarianism and Universalism from the beginning. But they have been turned away over and over again.

“I just cannot accept the proposition that some people are better or worse than other people because of their race – whatever that may be. I accept my race and the race of everyone simply as a condition of existence, like height, weight, age, sex, or shoe size. Now this doesn’t mean at all that I am blind to the fact that other people may regard race at the most consequential aspect of their being and my being. I have almost a half century of scars, fortunately most of them on my memory and not on my body, to remind me that I live in a racist society. However, I refuse to permit anyone to infect me with the virus of racial pride, because I know it would turn out to be a cancer that would destroy my spirit, my physical self, and the world in which I live.”

-The Hon. Wade H. McCree,

Unitarian. Served on American Unitarian Association board.First African American to serve as USA Assistant Solicitor General

First Sermon & Ouroboros

The crunch of papers, reading and my first sermon took priority over the blog. I have survived, more than survived, got much support, accolades and helpful critiques to very first sermon. In honor of that milestone in my seminary career, here is a photo of the inside of the 1st Unitarian church of Chicago. My sermon was entitled "Radical Hospitality Has No Beginning and No End." It discussed race relations, human relations and hospitality. One image throughout the sermon is Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail as a symbol of re-creation and how hospitality is transforming.

In the Dark

Some post-inaugural thoughts about communication and our country, our families.

Councils
by Marge Piercy

We must sit down
and reason together.
We must sit down,
men standing want to hold forth.
They rain down upon faces lifted.
We must sit down on the floor
on the earth
on stones and mats and blankets.
There must be no front to the speaking
no platforms, no rostrum,
no stage or table.
We will not crane
to see who is speaking.
Perhaps we should sit in the dark.
In the dark we could utter our feelings.
In the dark we could propose
and describe and suggest.
In the dark we could not see who speaks
and only the words
would say what they say.
No one would speak more than twice.
No one would speak less than once.
Thus saying what we feel and what we want,
what we fear for ourselves and each other.


Perhaps we should talk in groups
the size of new families,
not more, never more than twenty.
Perhaps we should start by speaking softly.
The women must learn to dare to speak,
The men must learn to bother to listen.
The women must learn to say I think this is so.
The men must learn to stop dancing solos on the ceiling.
After each speaks, she or he
will say a ritual phrase:
It is not I who speaks but the wind.
Wind blows through me.
Long after me, is the wind.

Time is the Healer

I was introduced to the ideas of Richard Packham and his notion of atheist spirituality today. He explores how that sense of awe and wonder does not have to have a religion attached to it. For a 12-step group he attended he rewrote the Lord's Prayer to fit his understanding of the world.

ATHEIST PRAYER

Our Powers are within, Whatever be their name. What they have done, what still may come, This Earth can yet be as Heaven. Live then this day, and without dread, And forgive your own trespasses As you forgive those who trespass against you. And be not led into temptation, But flee away from evil, For Time is the Healer, With power to restore me, Forever and ever, Amen.

Finding Balance

To counteract all the time spent sitting for class, reading and writing in seminary, going to the gym and making use of the University of Chicago's great Ratner Athletic facilities has saved the day.

Bless us, Bless Obama

Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire (the only openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church) delivered this prayer in Washington for the "We Are One," Barack Obama's kickoff inaugural event Sunday

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.

It is right!

Cowardice asks the question - is it safe?
Expediency asks the question - is it politic?
Vanity asks the question - is it popular?
But conscience asks the question - is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because it is right.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Overheard in Seminary (part 2) - Law of Love

In a weekend class taught by Dr. Sharon Welch, her writings and teachings acknowledge that peace is not simple. She writes, "Those of us who are working for peace are not a righteous vanguard. we can, and will, abuse cooperative power and need our own Trickster stories to remind us of our flaws and excesses. There is not multitude, no group any less likely than others to abuse power. [...] wisdom, ongoing self-critique, and accountability are required of all of us, not just the imperial others, in the exercise of social, cultural, economic and political power." (from Real Peace, Real Security)

The source of this humility is described by Mohandas K. Gandhi.

The law of love will work, just as the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not. Just as a scientist will work wonders out of various applications of the law of nature, even so a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work greater wonders. . .Only our explorations have not gone far enough and so it is not possible for everyone to see all its workings. Such, at any rate, is the hallucination, if it is one, under which I am laboring. The more I work at this law the more I feel the delight in life, the delight in the scheme of the universe. It gives me a peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe.

DisPLACEment

The University of Chicago's David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art's current exhibit is contemporary Chinese art that responds to the world's largest dam building project on the Yangzi River. The works are compelling and eerie responses in video, oil painting, ink painting on long scrolls and an earth work. The Three Rivers Gorge project has displaced over 1,000,000 people and required the relocation and tearing down of hundreds of towns, temples, and other historical sites.

I Contain Multitudes

The week of 40+ hours of class has been exhilarating and intense. I offer part of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" as a nod to the multitudes I now contain thanks to Dr. Mike Hogue and my thoughtful, smart, funny, compassionate fellow students.

The past and present wilt--I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

"Song of Myself" (51st stanza)
By Walt Whitman

What does -15 degrees look like?

Seen around town

For us soil-bound folk

THEOTOKOS
By Brenda Morris

Think of those moments of strange harmony
when light within you kindles and the real
sun, like an answer floods your room and rounds
every common vessel — jug, jar, and basket,
the clay pot with its crimson bloom.
Think how that bloom,
soil-bound and blind, twists toward light, how we
likewise need light to flower, but being free
have to say yes in order to receive,
how yes can never be informed consent
but always something like a pregnancy —
A risky state which nurtures the unknown
and lets it grow, which knits up flesh and bone
then lets them go, to stand erect and free.
Does even God know what the end will be?

Morning Jazz

A field trip with a fellow seminarian to the Third Unitarian Church on the west side of Chicago this morning included fantastic piano arrangements of Herbie Hancock woven throughout the service. Jazz on Sunday morning made my day.


The church has tile portraits by Andrene Kauffman of "prophets, wide people, and seekers of justice." as their flier explains. It was great to be in their company.