The Flying Chalices: UUs Ride for Seniors in the Moonlight Classic

Last Saturday, August 18th, over forty Unitarian Universalists from First Universalist and First Unitarian rode together through the dark streets of Denver as part of the Moonlight Classic bike ride.

The Moonlight classic is an annual charity bike ride that raises money for Seniors, Inc., a non-profit that helps seniors live more healthy and independent lives. Our team raised almost $1500. We joined over five thousand other riders on a perfect night for a ride.

Our team was a diverse one, with riders as young as eight and as old as eighty-five, with all levels of bike riding experience. We knew we would easily lose one another in the sea of riders, so we all wore bright white armbands that had been decorated by the children of First Universalist with neon fabric paint. The designs were all various creative takes on the “Flying Chalice” name of our team.

But that wasn’t all – many of us made ourselves even more visible by wearing plastic martini-glasses on our helmets with bright glow-stick inside like flames! So we rode through the night together with flaming chalices bobbing over our heads.

I want to thank all the people who helped make this happen, and look forward to an even bigger, better ride next year!!! If you have a Moonlight Classic story you would like to share, please email Aaron McEmrys at aaron@firstuniversalist.org. I am eager to hear about your experience!

UUNITED Soccer Team: Stylish Even in Victory!

UU Sportswire, Denver. A rag-tag team of Unitarian Universalists emerged victorious after their first match of the season, a well-played game against plucky, “Just for Fun.”

The team, UUNITED, has a vibrant roster stacked with women and men from both the First Universalist and First Unitarian churches. Players range widely in age and experience, but all share the same UU-spirit. Their uniforms are navy blue, with a flaming chalice emblazoned on the chest with a soccer ball rising up from the flames. Very stylish indeed!

In the first half it seemed there were blue jerseys everywhere, with crisp passing, sturdy defending and creative offense on display. Most striking, however, was the playful sense of teamwork, a theme that really sums up this new team.

The final score was 2-0, and the team celebrated with fresh orange slices on the sidelines, and enjoyed the sun. As we were getting ready to leave, a young player from one of the other teams came up and asked, “Are you guys Unitarians?” “Yep”, I answered. “That’s awesome,” he replied, with a smile. Evangelism on the soccer pitch; who woulda thunk it!?

What I found most rewarding about the whole thing is the warm and playful spirit of togetherness that has characterized our time together, whether in practice, in "real" games and in all those moments in between: sitting under the shade of the big trees next to the field, sharing our well-deserved orange slices, or tossing a sun-warmed water bottle to someone who needs it.

The air of goodwill and genuine support of one another is pretty rare, in my experience - especially in the all-too-often testosterone and ego-driven world of sports. As one teammate put it to me after our first game, "It's great to be a part of a team that respects everyone else no matter the skill level. Keeping with that, I look forward to making some finely squeezed juice out of them juicy fruits (the name of the next team we play)!"

I also relish the kind of relationships that develop between us as we play. Running around together kicking and chasing bouncing balls over a big green field encourages a very different way of being together, of relating, than most of us experience in our day to day lives. There isn't a lot of opportunity (or spare oxygen) for deep conversation, but that doesn't mean the relationships are not genuine and deep. The laughter, the high fives, and the pats-on-the-backs are a language of their own, spoken without words - but nonetheless sincere and oddly intimate. After all, where else in our lives to we touch relative strangers so freely?

There are ex-teammates of mine in Chicago who I still feel very close to. This seems somewhat inexplicable, since in some cases I knew them for over a year before I even knew what they did for a living or where they lived! An odd kind of intimacy.

The split-second glances between myself and a team-mate who is streaking down the field is hard to describe - but in that frozen flash in time, we both know exactly what I am going to (try) to do with the ball, and what the receiver needs to do to make ready. Then, when the ball spins off my foot to my teammate's foot, it feels like much more than a ball has covered that distance. In a very real way, something of ourselves has passed between us in that instant. There is a kind of attunement there that I suspect requires embodiment - attunement that requires a more integrated kind of mind, body and spirit relationship than we ordinarily experience in our day to day relationships.

This is not to say that team sports is the end-all-be-all or anything, just that playing soccer now, with these people, at this time in my life - reminds me of how much more there is of me, and how much more I am capable of when I remember to be more fully embodied.

When, the fans ask, is the next game? Glad you asked – UUNITED’s next game will be on September 8th at 11:10am, when we will take on the intimidatingly named, “Juicy Fruits.” The game will be played on Grass Field #2 at Dick’s Sporting Good’s Park (where the Colorado Rapids play). So come on out and cheer your new (and did I mention, stylish?) team on!

While we're on the topic of Quanitfying the Unquantifiable...

I have always been a sucker for real-time counters. For example, when I lived in New York City as a young man, my friends and I used to go down to Times Square and just watch the numbers roll on by. Of course now they are rolling by faster than ever, and soon the clock will run out of room altogether.

But after that last post, I find myself full of awe (and anxiety) at the effectiveness of such counters. I like 'em a lot - and so I thought I would add a couple of my recent favorites.

The first one, at National Priorities.com (http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Cost-of-War/Cost-of-War-3.html is a counter I have been watching since the very beginning of the Iraq war. It not only tracks the financial costs of the war, which are mind-blowing - but also puts in in perpective by looking at how that same amount of money could be spent differently.

The second is one a friend emailed me a couple weeks ago. I didn't think much of it at first, but it has grown on me since, and I find it eerily fascinating. Neither are for the faint-at-heart, but I encourage you to check them out anyway. Iwould also welcome your recommendations for similar counters, which you can post in the "Comments" section of this post!

http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

Leinengen Versus the Ants

For the last few days I have found myself thinking about a story I read long, long ago, when I was a boy. It is called “Leiningen Versus the Ants", written by Carl Stephenson in 1938. I have no idea if this is still commonly assigned in elementary schools any more, but I suspect that for those of us of a certain age, this story might still be stored away on the hard-drives of our grey matter.

The story is about a man, “Leiningen” who owns a plantation in some “wild” part of the Amazon River basin. At any rate, Leiningen, with all the pluck of Colonialists everywhere and at all times (as portrayed in sympathetic literature) refuses to flee with his fellow plantation-owners in the face of a vast swarm of voracious ants, which wash forward like "an elemental--an act of God! Ten miles long, two miles wide--ants, nothing but ants!"

This army of ants, each approximately the size of a man's thumb, marches forward like an unstoppable tide, devouring anything and everything that falls in its path. Leiningen will not be chased off of his property though – not by God or ants ort anything else! He stays to fight.
For those of you who are not haunted by the ghosts of yesterday’s English teachers, the following is a bit of a summary from Wikipedia:

“Unlike his fellow settlers, all of whom have either fled or are preparing to flee, Leiningen is not about to give up years of hard work and planning to "an act of God." He assembles his workers, who are all or mostly Indians, and informs them of the inbound horror. Though the natives are a naturally superstitious and frightened lot, their respect for and trust in Leiningen enables them to remain calm and determined: "The ants were indeed mighty, but not so mighty as the boss." Later in the story, despite suffering setbacks and being given an offer of dismissal with full pay, none of the laborers desert Leiningen.

Much of the rest of the story is taken up with the days-long struggle in which Leiningen attempts to hold off the huge swath of ants. He uses an ingenious system of levees, moats and "decoy" fields to keep the ants at bay. For example, he draws off some of the ants to a valueless fallow field, while keeping a large portion of the others off of the central compound with a system of defensive canals. The ants are initially unable to cross over, but soon manage to build bridges on the bodies of ants who mindlessly sacrifice themselves to the waters. As the bridges of ant corpses begins to reach the near side of the canals, Leiningen opens a series of sluice gates, greatly increasing the flow of water, and washing away the prior ant bridges. He also employs gasoline and other petroleum flammables to great effect; the chemicals not only burn the ants when ignited, but also interfere with their chemically-based tracking and sensory organs.”
In the end, Leiningen floods his entire plantation, simultaneously destroying the ants and reducing his plantation to waterlogged rubble and ruined crops. The ants are defeated, and Leiningen lives on to rebuild. He is indomitable.

To this day, when I think of this story, I can still hear the disembodied voice of some long-forgotten English teacher saying, “And this is a perfect example of the “Man vs. Nature” (or possibly Man vs. God) genre of literature.” Oh the strange things we remember…

It has been a VERY long time since I thought about this story. As a kid, I loved the sense of heroic resistance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It seemed to me to be a very profile of the kind of courage I hoped I would someday be capable of. That’s what I thought when I was nine or ten, anyway.

But this week I have been thinking about this story a lot, and I have been struck by a question that is both intriguing and disturbing. Who are “We” in the story?

For so many years I uncritically assumed that We, “human beings”, “Men”, “Civilized People” – were represented by Leiningen himself, while the Ants represented the frightening forces of Nature, Chaos and all the unknown forces that threaten our sense of control and remind us of how precarious life can be.

This week, however, someone emailed me a link to a fascinating website. It is a collection of artwork by an artist named, Chris Jordan, and can be found here: http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

In this show, Jordan strives (and often succeeds) in trying to capture the seemingly uncountable, unquantifiable and incomprehensible in forms and images that we can make sense of – images that allow us to take in things on a scale that normally makes our minds simply switch off like old fuses in a power surge.

He focuses his attention primarily on consumption. Our consumption. Jordan constructs vast fields of trees used to make the junk-mail catalogues we throw out without reading, gargantuan expanses of the blowing and unrecyclable plastic bags we generate every five seconds, and immense carpets made of the cigarettes smoked by new teenage addicts every day.





I have looked at this website several times now, and have never made it all the way through in one go. Even with Jordan’s effective constructions, my mind starts to falter and sag after just a few images. Not only that, but the scale of consumption is so vast and so clearly destructive, that I my chest inevitably starts to tighten with panic.

Which brings me back to the question I have been pondering this week: “Who is the ‘We’ in Leiningen Versus the Ants?”

Looked at through Chris Jordan’s eyes, we sure look like a tide of mindless, ravening insects – possessed of little more than appetite. But I suspect it is more complex than that.
Are we not also Leiningen? Arrogantly defying Nature, and in doing so, god? Wasn’t Leiningen also driven by appetite? The hunger for control, power, ego and wealth?

In this way, “We” are both the ants and Leiningen fighting the ants. We are the consumer and the consumed. Just as Leiningen destroys his own plantation in order to save it, so our own appetites (so vividly captured by Chris Jordan) drive us to consume and consume and consume until nothing is left except ourselves and one another – which we will then consume as well.

Lest this post sound too dark, there are some positive readings here as well. The fact that we are consumer and consumed; appetite and that which struggles against appetite – this fact also gives us the ability to change direction and to behave mindfully, with intention. We do not have to be mindless, although we often act as if we are.

In the end of the story, Leiningen is left standing in the devastated ruins of his plantation. But the world has not ended, and nothing is beyond hope. With patience and hard work, it may be that Leiningen can rebuild from scratch – and perhaps this time, things can be different. Perhaps Leiningen can be different and so, perhaps - can we.