"UUNITED."
"Championship."
These are two words I never expected to see in the same sentance, but now, after a gutsy victory in the playoffs last night - we are on the brink.
We were all relishing the prospect of a rematch against our arch-rivals, "More Cowbell", who beat us 9-8 in a excellent down to the wire match last time we faced them. They scored the go-ahead to beat us with only seconds left on the clock - and we have been waiting for another shot at them ever since.
Cowbell is a fun team to play against: our two teams are evenly matched, and their players are competitive but fun, good people. Still, they finished the regular season in first place, while we dropped to fourth. But we knew we could take 'em.
The game was just as we left off last time - VERY closely fought. The first half was a defensive standoff, with neither team able to crack the opposing defense. We finally scored toward the end of the first half, on a brilliant goal by Jen (assisted, as we are so accustomed to, by Morten). But a one goal lead on a team as good as Cowbell is not enough, and sure enough, they equalized just a few minutes later. After that, the game sped up and so did the scoring. Our passing was patient and crisp, our defense resilient and our offense on target - sooo fun!
But every time we would pull ahead, they would come right back with a goal of their own. It wasn't until the final ten minutes or so that we pulled ahead for good, ultimately winning 5-3. It was a great game. Our win is all the sweeter because not only did we get avenge our earlier loss against Cowbell, but now, having beaten the #1 team - we are advancing to the Championship Match for the first time!! It's all been part of a pretty exciting learning curve for us - last season, we finished dead last in our league (although we all had fun doing it!!), and now - here we are...
We will play for Championship glory (such as it is) on January 8th, so send us plenty of good vibes. We will have a cheering section there (which has steadily grown through the season), so if you have some free time and want to come out to support the team, email me and I can give you time/directions.
Go UUNITED!!
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Monday, December 17, 2007
UUNITED Soccer Team Begins Playoff Run
That's right, UU sports fans, our soccer team is poised for an epic run deep into the Division C Coed Recreational Indoor Soccer record books! Although we are left in 3rd place at the end of the regular season, we can still climb higher by playing well in the playoffs. It will not be an easy task, as we will have to overcome such storied franchises as "Nice Marmot", "Structurally Damaged" and "We Practice at the Pub!"
I can't say for sure whether we will win or lose, sports fans, but I can promise you this - 1) we will play hard, and 2) we will continue our noble tradition of looking really, really good in our spiffy blue uniforms!
Our first playoff game is tomorrow night at 8:40MST - wish us luck.
I can't say for sure whether we will win or lose, sports fans, but I can promise you this - 1) we will play hard, and 2) we will continue our noble tradition of looking really, really good in our spiffy blue uniforms!
Our first playoff game is tomorrow night at 8:40MST - wish us luck.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
UUA Worker Justice Handbook
Howdy, all,
My new Worker Justice Handbook for congregations has just been published by the Unitarian Universalist Association. You can find it by going to the Leaders Library at the main UUA website: http://www.uua.org/leaders/leaderslibrary/index.php, choosing Social Justice as the topic, and then scrolling down the page to the Handbooks. The direct link is: http://www.uua.org/documents/mcemrysaaron/power_union.pdf.
Please share this broadly. This resource certainly does not contain all the answers, but I do hope it can help point congregations in the right direction.
Peace to you, Aaron
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Cautiva
Last night I watched “Cautiva”, a film by Argentinean Director Gaston Biraben. It is a fictionalized re-telling (based on actual events) of the story of a teenage girl who discovers that the adults who have raised her for fifteen years are not actually her parents.
Her real parents, she discovers, were just a couple of young architects who spoke out against the US-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. They were kidnapped and imprisoned in a “clandestine prison” know as “The Cave”, where they were tortured and later killed. Her mother was pregnant at the time, and the military brought her into a hospital one night blindfolded and near death – to give birth. She was born on that incredible day in 1978 when Argentina won the World Cup. All the world’s eyes were fixed on Argentina – but they saw nothing but soccer. The child was then given away to a politically-connected Chief of Police, who raised her as his daughter.
Her real parents were never seen or heard from again.
The girl must then slowly work through her confusion, grief and rage at what she has lost – not only her “real” parents, who have joined the ranks of “The Disappeared” forever, but also the only parents she has ever known - who, for all their sins – raised her and loved her as their own. You can link to a review here:
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=5095
This film would have struck a chord in me under any circumstances, but all of this has hit me in a chain of coincidence, and the cumulative effect is a strong one.
Last week, driving home from work, I was listening to NPR and heard the woman (grown up now) who is obviously the source of Cautiva (I did not know this until I saw the movie) being interviewed. She works for the archives of the disappeared now – trying to help families of the 30,000+ Disappeared find out what became of their loved ones. She also helps other families track down the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of children who were forcibly taken away from their families in the secret prisons and given to military and political families friendly to the regime who wanted babies of their own. Almost all of the torturers and kidnappers were later given blanket amnesty for their crimes – and can never be brought to justice.
But just TWO weeks before that I had seen another film, “Machuca”, by Andres Wood, which also deals with this period of Argentinean history. Machuca is a truly brilliant (and heartbreaking) film about two boys coming of age at the same time as the military dictatorship seized power. I cannot recommend this one highly enough, but it is not for the weak of heart – very hard to watch at times. You can read a review here: http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/movies/19mach.html
So for weeks now I have been coincidentally reflecting on this particular kind of inhumanity: The Disappeared, routine torture, baby-stealing, and clandestine prisons. Of course I cannot help but draw parallels between Argentina’s darkest days and the days our country in enduring today.
Do we not have our own clandestine prisons? How many people have entered US custody never to be heard from again? How many families, how many children will have to live the rest of their lives never knowing what happened to Father, Uncle, Brother?
And then there is torture. Whatever that is.
Definitions of torture slip and slide, grinning in the shadows like a drooling beast. This is nothing new – this is a kind of inhumanity that can only live under cover of darkness and deceit. Many of our politicians will not even tell us what “Torture” is – as that would compromise National security. Instead they just say, over and over again – that the United States does not engage in torture. Never mind that they changed the definition of the word so they could do as they please.
Even when asked directly about specific forms of “enhanced interrogation”, Michael Mukasey, the new head of the Justice Department, refused to say whether or not Waterboarding constitutes torture. This has become a common refrain.
But novelist Stephen King recently came up with an excellent (if horrific) litmus test for torture – would you subject yourself to it? Your family? His point is that we cannot definitively know whether or not Waterboarding constitutes torture because we have not personally experienced it. Only one official in the Justice Department has subjected himself to Waterboarding – and although he had initially been in favor of it, he revered himself, declaring that - based on his personal experience – it was torture. He was later fired for refusing to lie to the press and to Congress about his experience.
So here’s what Stephen King suggested in a recent interview with Time Magazine:
If the Bush administration didn’t think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture.
You can read it in context here: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/ashcroft-takes-waterboarding-bait-to-no-avail/index.html?ex=1353992400&en=332ebc2db936114d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss?
Certainly King’s suggestion sounds horrific – but is it really? The idea of subjecting an “innocent” person to Waterboarding just to determine whether or not it constitutes torture sounds awful. But remember, by all accounts, MANY of the human beings currently held in secret prisons by the United States have not been charged with any crime – are they not also innocent until proven guilty?
It sounds ridiculous to think of Waterboarding a “person”, someone we know or can see ourselves in. But what about faceless people? What about people we have come to see as less than human? As animals or monsters? “Terrorists”, “Jews”, “Blacks”, “Gays” – all of these words have been (and still are) used to strip away the humanity of living breathing human beings so that other living breathing human beings can do horrible things to them.
To torture, to kidnap, to steal children, to carpet bomb – the only way we can do ANY of these things is by refusing to acknowledge the humanity of the people we are destroying. This, to me, is the terrible danger we invite when we confine our national debate to the abstract world of ideas, concepts and data. Without stories, without the voices of real people – including all the voices of The Disappeared – we are doomed to continue to replay our darkest legacies over and over again – Nazi Germany, Argentina, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan and the United States of America.
For more information about the effects of torture, check out the Rocky Mountain Survivors Center. They are the only organization in Colorado devoted to treating victims of torture. Here is a link to their website: http://www.rmscdenver.org/
Her real parents, she discovers, were just a couple of young architects who spoke out against the US-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. They were kidnapped and imprisoned in a “clandestine prison” know as “The Cave”, where they were tortured and later killed. Her mother was pregnant at the time, and the military brought her into a hospital one night blindfolded and near death – to give birth. She was born on that incredible day in 1978 when Argentina won the World Cup. All the world’s eyes were fixed on Argentina – but they saw nothing but soccer. The child was then given away to a politically-connected Chief of Police, who raised her as his daughter.
Her real parents were never seen or heard from again.
The girl must then slowly work through her confusion, grief and rage at what she has lost – not only her “real” parents, who have joined the ranks of “The Disappeared” forever, but also the only parents she has ever known - who, for all their sins – raised her and loved her as their own. You can link to a review here:
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=5095
This film would have struck a chord in me under any circumstances, but all of this has hit me in a chain of coincidence, and the cumulative effect is a strong one.
Last week, driving home from work, I was listening to NPR and heard the woman (grown up now) who is obviously the source of Cautiva (I did not know this until I saw the movie) being interviewed. She works for the archives of the disappeared now – trying to help families of the 30,000+ Disappeared find out what became of their loved ones. She also helps other families track down the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of children who were forcibly taken away from their families in the secret prisons and given to military and political families friendly to the regime who wanted babies of their own. Almost all of the torturers and kidnappers were later given blanket amnesty for their crimes – and can never be brought to justice.
But just TWO weeks before that I had seen another film, “Machuca”, by Andres Wood, which also deals with this period of Argentinean history. Machuca is a truly brilliant (and heartbreaking) film about two boys coming of age at the same time as the military dictatorship seized power. I cannot recommend this one highly enough, but it is not for the weak of heart – very hard to watch at times. You can read a review here: http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/movies/19mach.html
So for weeks now I have been coincidentally reflecting on this particular kind of inhumanity: The Disappeared, routine torture, baby-stealing, and clandestine prisons. Of course I cannot help but draw parallels between Argentina’s darkest days and the days our country in enduring today.
Do we not have our own clandestine prisons? How many people have entered US custody never to be heard from again? How many families, how many children will have to live the rest of their lives never knowing what happened to Father, Uncle, Brother?
And then there is torture. Whatever that is.
Definitions of torture slip and slide, grinning in the shadows like a drooling beast. This is nothing new – this is a kind of inhumanity that can only live under cover of darkness and deceit. Many of our politicians will not even tell us what “Torture” is – as that would compromise National security. Instead they just say, over and over again – that the United States does not engage in torture. Never mind that they changed the definition of the word so they could do as they please.
Even when asked directly about specific forms of “enhanced interrogation”, Michael Mukasey, the new head of the Justice Department, refused to say whether or not Waterboarding constitutes torture. This has become a common refrain.
But novelist Stephen King recently came up with an excellent (if horrific) litmus test for torture – would you subject yourself to it? Your family? His point is that we cannot definitively know whether or not Waterboarding constitutes torture because we have not personally experienced it. Only one official in the Justice Department has subjected himself to Waterboarding – and although he had initially been in favor of it, he revered himself, declaring that - based on his personal experience – it was torture. He was later fired for refusing to lie to the press and to Congress about his experience.
So here’s what Stephen King suggested in a recent interview with Time Magazine:
If the Bush administration didn’t think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture.
You can read it in context here: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/ashcroft-takes-waterboarding-bait-to-no-avail/index.html?ex=1353992400&en=332ebc2db936114d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss?
Certainly King’s suggestion sounds horrific – but is it really? The idea of subjecting an “innocent” person to Waterboarding just to determine whether or not it constitutes torture sounds awful. But remember, by all accounts, MANY of the human beings currently held in secret prisons by the United States have not been charged with any crime – are they not also innocent until proven guilty?
It sounds ridiculous to think of Waterboarding a “person”, someone we know or can see ourselves in. But what about faceless people? What about people we have come to see as less than human? As animals or monsters? “Terrorists”, “Jews”, “Blacks”, “Gays” – all of these words have been (and still are) used to strip away the humanity of living breathing human beings so that other living breathing human beings can do horrible things to them.
To torture, to kidnap, to steal children, to carpet bomb – the only way we can do ANY of these things is by refusing to acknowledge the humanity of the people we are destroying. This, to me, is the terrible danger we invite when we confine our national debate to the abstract world of ideas, concepts and data. Without stories, without the voices of real people – including all the voices of The Disappeared – we are doomed to continue to replay our darkest legacies over and over again – Nazi Germany, Argentina, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan and the United States of America.
For more information about the effects of torture, check out the Rocky Mountain Survivors Center. They are the only organization in Colorado devoted to treating victims of torture. Here is a link to their website: http://www.rmscdenver.org/
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Winter Wonderland
It’s just another Tuesday morning, yet I find myself feeling especially refreshed and ready to seize the day (week, month…). It’s hard to imagine that less than twenty-four hours ago I was hiking with friends in Rocky Mountain National Park, truly one of the great wonders of the world. 
Eliza, Willow (our golden retriever) and I left Denver early Saturday morning. The back of my truck loaded with snowshoeing gear (which we didn't get the use, unfortunately), games and lots and lots of tasty food. We were headed up to the Estes Park YMCA, where we had rented a cabin for a long post-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving.
We began with a good hike through Eldorado Canyon outside of Boulder. Eldo is usually a rock-climbers mecca, but between the ice, snow and breathtakingly cold rocks, we had the canyon more or less to ourselves. Willow snarfled away with her usual abandon and seemed somewhat surprised that none of the squirrels wanted to come down and play with her. The sun was bright and direct on the trail, so our path was melting and clear – but everywhere else remained blanketed with six or seven inches of new snow. Beautiful.
A few hours later we all piled back into the truck and continued up into the mountains. We got to our cabin just before dark, met our friends and headed out on yet another hike – this time a riverside amble in the growing twilight. Just as we were thinking we needed to head back to beat the darkness – a giant spotlight of a full moon rose above the mountains, casting bright silver moon shadows. Our walk home was as slow and leisurely as possible, as none of us were eager to leave the moon light.
Back at the cabin we started cooking – I prepared two giant pots of chile (one veggie, one not) and Eliza whipped up some of her excellent cornbread. Some other friends of ours were staying elsewhere in Estes Park that night and they all came by for dinner, bringing a fresh batch of Pat’s homebrewed beer (a java-stout, which was amazing as always). We had all put in a full day of hiking, so the food went fast.
After dinner we broke out the big box ‘o games (I used to own a game store and have lots and lots of strange and wonderful games) and broke into ever-changing configurations of game-playing and spectating. We were all tuckered out by the late hour of 10pm or so, and that was the end of that.
We were up early the next morning for a big pancake breakfast. After piling on our many layers of warm and waterproof cloths we were ready to hit the trail head. There isn’t much I can say about the hike itself. Rocky Mountain National Park is so breathtakingly beautiful that words inevitably fail me. You’ll just have to take my word for it – it was great!
We hiked up Glacier Gorge, past Alberta Falls, to “The Loch”, a fantastic alpine lake nestled in a vast bowl of towering cliffs and under the watchful eye of Andrews Glacier. The lake was frozen as solid as can be, and before long we were all taking running leaps out onto the ice, slipping and sliding across the frozen water and laughing like children. Even with the icy wind whipping across the lake at us, we couldn’t bring ourselves to stop sliding – “okay, ONE more time….okay, THIS is the very last one…” I can’t speak for anyone else, but I definitely rediscovered the twelve year-old boy inside of me – and I have the bruises to prove it!
By the time we were ready to head back down the mountain, the sun had returned with that particular glow that only seems to happen on perfect late-afternoons. The rocks were warming up (relatively speaking) and we paused more than once to just lay on the rocks and bask.
Hours later we were ready for more chili, more games in front of the crackling fire and then dinner number two – homemade pizza! By the time we finished with the pizza none of us could keep our eyes open anymore and it was bedtime again – at around 9:30 or so.
And so the cycle continued until it was time to come home again last night: back to the world of voicemail, email, laundry, bills and staff meetings. I have to admit, I always feel a certain amount of reluctance (and even dread) when it is time to come back to the world again – but here I am at the office, full of energy and excitement and gratitude. I have so much to be Thankful for (my soccer team even won this week, for a change!!). I feel so alive – just filled with the wonder of things.
Eliza, Willow (our golden retriever) and I left Denver early Saturday morning. The back of my truck loaded with snowshoeing gear (which we didn't get the use, unfortunately), games and lots and lots of tasty food. We were headed up to the Estes Park YMCA, where we had rented a cabin for a long post-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving.
We began with a good hike through Eldorado Canyon outside of Boulder. Eldo is usually a rock-climbers mecca, but between the ice, snow and breathtakingly cold rocks, we had the canyon more or less to ourselves. Willow snarfled away with her usual abandon and seemed somewhat surprised that none of the squirrels wanted to come down and play with her. The sun was bright and direct on the trail, so our path was melting and clear – but everywhere else remained blanketed with six or seven inches of new snow. Beautiful.
A few hours later we all piled back into the truck and continued up into the mountains. We got to our cabin just before dark, met our friends and headed out on yet another hike – this time a riverside amble in the growing twilight. Just as we were thinking we needed to head back to beat the darkness – a giant spotlight of a full moon rose above the mountains, casting bright silver moon shadows. Our walk home was as slow and leisurely as possible, as none of us were eager to leave the moon light.
Back at the cabin we started cooking – I prepared two giant pots of chile (one veggie, one not) and Eliza whipped up some of her excellent cornbread. Some other friends of ours were staying elsewhere in Estes Park that night and they all came by for dinner, bringing a fresh batch of Pat’s homebrewed beer (a java-stout, which was amazing as always). We had all put in a full day of hiking, so the food went fast.
After dinner we broke out the big box ‘o games (I used to own a game store and have lots and lots of strange and wonderful games) and broke into ever-changing configurations of game-playing and spectating. We were all tuckered out by the late hour of 10pm or so, and that was the end of that.
We were up early the next morning for a big pancake breakfast. After piling on our many layers of warm and waterproof cloths we were ready to hit the trail head. There isn’t much I can say about the hike itself. Rocky Mountain National Park is so breathtakingly beautiful that words inevitably fail me. You’ll just have to take my word for it – it was great!
We hiked up Glacier Gorge, past Alberta Falls, to “The Loch”, a fantastic alpine lake nestled in a vast bowl of towering cliffs and under the watchful eye of Andrews Glacier. The lake was frozen as solid as can be, and before long we were all taking running leaps out onto the ice, slipping and sliding across the frozen water and laughing like children. Even with the icy wind whipping across the lake at us, we couldn’t bring ourselves to stop sliding – “okay, ONE more time….okay, THIS is the very last one…” I can’t speak for anyone else, but I definitely rediscovered the twelve year-old boy inside of me – and I have the bruises to prove it!By the time we were ready to head back down the mountain, the sun had returned with that particular glow that only seems to happen on perfect late-afternoons. The rocks were warming up (relatively speaking) and we paused more than once to just lay on the rocks and bask.
Hours later we were ready for more chili, more games in front of the crackling fire and then dinner number two – homemade pizza! By the time we finished with the pizza none of us could keep our eyes open anymore and it was bedtime again – at around 9:30 or so.
And so the cycle continued until it was time to come home again last night: back to the world of voicemail, email, laundry, bills and staff meetings. I have to admit, I always feel a certain amount of reluctance (and even dread) when it is time to come back to the world again – but here I am at the office, full of energy and excitement and gratitude. I have so much to be Thankful for (my soccer team even won this week, for a change!!). I feel so alive – just filled with the wonder of things.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
There is Power in the (YRUU) Spirit
I recently had the good fortune to join some of your Youth at a weekend-long workshop on spirituality and worship. It was great to be able to spend all that time with them away from all my other responsibilities. I was there for one reason only – to be with them.But if any part of me started the weekend by thinking of it as something I would do for them – I quickly discovered how much they have to teach me, and how much we could do together.
It was a “working Con”, which means just what it sounds like – we spent most of our time working. We talked a lot about spirituality, religion and worship, of course, but we also spent a lot of time doing worship. Our group was divided into smaller groups of six or seven youth who took turns designing and leading all kinds of different worship services.
Every single time I was struck by the sincerity, creativity and affirming quality of their services. Much of what they did was ritual-centered, and the rituals were invariably brave and powerful. We adults, for all of our good qualities, often shy away from the use of ritual. Maybe we are afraid: all good ritual entails risk, opening up deeply and honestly. Or maybe it is too hard for us to call a time-out on our relentless analyzing and just be.
At any rate, working with the Youth that weekend reminded me for the gazillionth time how important it is to create opportunities for people of all ages to share their gifts in our communities. Working with those Youth reminded me how much richer my life and ministry are because they are part of my community.
One ritual we designed took advantage of a lovely pool of water in front of the church we were staying at (Cheyenne, WY). After beginning the service in a darkened room, the worship team led us out into the bright Wyoming sunshine in a slow, serpentine line, accompanied by deep, steady drum-beats. We were very conscious of our breathing and of all the sensations and feelings we were experiencing.
When we got to the pool, we formed two parallel lines about shoulder-width apart. The two rows linked hands above the “aisle”, making a kind of human arch. The people on the end then walked to the pool through the arch. They washed their faces, or sprinkled water or gave a little splash as they invited the healing, loving and nurturing abundance of water into their lives.
It was great.
Later, we turned the gym (yes, a church with a full sized gym!!) into an indoor soccer pitch and had an excellent and nearly endless match featuring ever-shifting players and teams and LOTS of near-hysterical laughter.I didn’t sleep a whole lot at night (the floor agrees with me less than it used to), but I nonetheless returned to Denver and my ministry feeling refreshed and renewed and full of new ideas.
Thanks.
UUs Hike to End Slavery in Mauretania
Last Sunday was a beautiful day. The sky was clear and the air balmy (by our arid Colorado standards!) and warm. In short, the perfect day to go for a hike with my dog - - and seventy-five other UUs and friends!But we weren’t hiking at Mt. Falcon just for fun – although it was fun – very! We were hiking to raise awareness of the ongoing practice of slavery in the nation of Mauretania, where the number of chattel slaves in Mauritania is very high, making up between 15% to 20% of the entire population! Mauritania is one of the few countries in the world where slavery continues as a common social practice. Despite repeated anti-slavery legislation, the laws have never been enforced. Today, slavery continues in Mauritania, much as it has done for centuries.
In addition to raising awareness, we were also hiking to raise money to support a micro-credit lending program that helps formerly enslaved families begin to build independent and sustainable lives in freedom.
And did I mention it was a beautiful day?! Sometimes you really can have it all…
Anyway, we all gathered at the trailhead and I was thrilled to see how many families were there – moms, dads, kids and yes, even dogs – were there to hike for freedom and possibility – putting their family values in action!
We began by forming a large circle, each of us holding onto long ropes that both united us in community and also symbolized our solidarity with people in bondage everywhere. We then set off on our ambling journey.
The hike itself was lots of fun, with laughter and voices of all ages echoing off the rocks. When we got to the half-way point of our hike, we formed a circle again and shared a time of silent reflection. We then raised the rope high above our heads and, yelling “Freedom!” – we threw our symbolic bonds to the ground, accompanied by our hopes and prayers that someday everybody’s shackles will be broken and fall away and that all people would someday feel as free and joyful as we did in that moment on top of Mt. Falcon.
Everyone scattered to walk and play and explore after that. A few minutes later I noticed a group of children had taken up the ropes that used to shackle us and were using them as giant jump-ropes! It was wonderful – and I cannot imagine a more apt and hopeful metaphor. May that day come soon!!! “And a child shall lead them.”
In the end, we raised about $1000, which should help 5-7 families begin their new lives in freedom. May their lives be blessed, peaceful and full of love.
Hopefully this is just the first of a series of such events, so keep your eyes peeled for upcoming opportunities. You will be able to find updates and other interesting material at the Slave Free Mauretania website, which can be found here: http://slave-free-mauritania.org/default.aspx
I also want to take the opportunity to thank Phil McCready for the amazing job he has done with the project. He has been working on this for months, and although many people have contributed to making it a success – it is his vision and determination which have driven us forward. Thank you, Phil!
Fixing What's Broken: Reclaiming the NLRB for American Families
Hello, all, what follows is a speech I gave last week at a worker's rights rally outside the offices of the National Labor Relations Board in downtown Denver. The NLRB is the Federal agency responsible for enforcing all labor laws in this country and for protecting the health and safety of working people. While most NLRB agents I have met are perfectly good people, doing their best to impartially enforce the law, the NLRB Board of Governors are White House political appointees. These political appointees have systemically sought to erode, undermine and reverse the very laws they are called to serve.
This rally was just one of many rallies in cities across America calling for reform of the NLRB and a return to the humane and democratic values we cherish.
Fixing What's Broken: Reclaiming the NLRB for American Families
Fixing What's Broken: Reclaiming the NLRB for American Families
Delivered on a National Day of Action in Protest of Bush’s “September Steamroll.”
November 15, 2007
Debbie was a dietary clerk in a cafeteria. A union organizing campaign had begun and was quickly beginning to make huge progress is almost every department. Debbie was part of the organizing committee and had begun organizing the rest of the workers in the cafeteria.
Her work wasn’t hard. The cafeteria was chronically understaffed, and workers were expected to routinely work through their lunch breaks and even stay after their shifts – but were not allowed to mark it on their timesheets. Workers who did mark their extra hours had their timesheets “corrected” by their abusive manager. Lots of women had complained about his inappropriate touching through the years, so now that the union was in town, the workers were ready to go.
Needless to say, Debbie’s manager was not happy about the way she was stirring her co-workers up. Soon after, Debbie was interviewed about the organizing campaign by a local paper. She was always a bit of a hot head and she did not mince words about how she felt about the anti-union campaign or about the lack of respect management showed to her and her co-workers.
Two days after the story ran, Debbie was fired. A single mom, struggling with cancer, had just lost her job and her health insurance in one blow.
I was confident we would be able to get her job back. It is illegal to fire workers for their union activities and there were lots of other serious problems here as well. She had been disciplined for falsifying her timesheets – which really just meant for actually writing down the truth – that she had not been taking her breaks. To make matters worse, no one ever told her she was being disciplined – they just put the write-ups in her file without telling her. When they got to that magic third write-up, they terminated her.
Debbie was devastated, as you can imagine. I had always been honest with the workers about the fact that they could be punished or fired for supporting the union, but in Debbie’s case, I was confident because the law-breaking was so blatant. I just kept telling her it would be okay. To make matters worse, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy just two days after losing her job. She was terrified.
I went ahead with the process of filing Unfair Labor Practice charges. The process took months, and meanwhile every day was a day of worry and fear for Debbie and her daughter. In the end, after over six months of struggle, the Board ruled in favor of the employer, without giving any explanation that made any sense (legal or moral) to us. Debbie’s life was in ruins. Too sick with cancer to get a new job, Debbie somehow kept going, scrapping from day to day on food stamps and maxed out credit cards.
I was outraged! I was all ready to appeal to the next level when I had an interesting conversation with the NLRB agent who had been supervising our case. He told me how sorry he was, and advised me not to appeal. He said the higher up the NLRB food chain you went, the more political it got. Once you started dealing with the political appointees you had no chance at all, no matter how strong your case was. He also said that many of the regional and local employees had already been pressured or disciplined for ruling in favor of workers too often and had been ordered to stop – or else.
I appealed anyway, and was denied without explanation. That was in 2002, shortly after the rise to power of the Bush Administration, who had stacked the NLRB Board of Governor’s with corporate minions and political hacks. That was when I realized that the National Labor Relations Board had turned almost overnight, into the National Employer Relations Board.
I know it isn’t my fault, but I have always felt I let Debbie down. To this day I can see the look on her face when I had to tell her the bad news. Ever since that day, I have promised myself that I would do anything I could to share Debbie’s story and to fight to reform the NLRB. I am glad to be here with you today my sisters and brothers!
I wish I could tell you that Debbie’s story is an isolated one, but I can’t. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Debbie’s out there right now – waiting for justice that may never come. Since George W. Bush and his cronies began stacking the Board with their friends, they have effectively dismantled, distorted and undermined the only institution in the United States whose job it is to enforce labor laws and to insure justice for workers.
We live in a nation where 1 out of every five union activists will be illegally fired during a union drive, but where employers are seldom punished for breaking the law. We live in a nation where the union election process is even less democratic than in totalitarian states like the Ukraine and Armenia.
As University of Oregon Professor Gordon Lafer writes:
“At every step of the way, from the beginning to an end of a union election, NLRB procedures fail to live up to the standards of US democracy. Apart from the use of secret ballots, there is not a single aspect of the NLRB process that does not violate the norms we hold sacred for political elections. The unequal access to voter lists, the absence of financial controls, monopoly control of both media and campaigning within the workplace, the use of economic power to force participation in political meetings, the tolerance of thinly disguised threats, open-ended delays in implementing the results on an election - all of these things constitute a profound departure from the norms that have governed US democracy since its inception”[1]
We live in a nation where it now takes the NLRB over five and a half years to resolve the cases that it refers to as the “highest priority” cases, and where even workers whose claims are supported by the board may have to wait literally decades to get any back pay at all. We live in a nation where the NLRB, the sole agency responsible for insuring the rights of a couple hundred million American workers, has had its budget slashed so badly that its current staffing levels are roughly the same as they were in the 1950s even though claims have skyrocketed.
November 15, 2007
Debbie was a dietary clerk in a cafeteria. A union organizing campaign had begun and was quickly beginning to make huge progress is almost every department. Debbie was part of the organizing committee and had begun organizing the rest of the workers in the cafeteria.
Her work wasn’t hard. The cafeteria was chronically understaffed, and workers were expected to routinely work through their lunch breaks and even stay after their shifts – but were not allowed to mark it on their timesheets. Workers who did mark their extra hours had their timesheets “corrected” by their abusive manager. Lots of women had complained about his inappropriate touching through the years, so now that the union was in town, the workers were ready to go.
Needless to say, Debbie’s manager was not happy about the way she was stirring her co-workers up. Soon after, Debbie was interviewed about the organizing campaign by a local paper. She was always a bit of a hot head and she did not mince words about how she felt about the anti-union campaign or about the lack of respect management showed to her and her co-workers.
Two days after the story ran, Debbie was fired. A single mom, struggling with cancer, had just lost her job and her health insurance in one blow.
I was confident we would be able to get her job back. It is illegal to fire workers for their union activities and there were lots of other serious problems here as well. She had been disciplined for falsifying her timesheets – which really just meant for actually writing down the truth – that she had not been taking her breaks. To make matters worse, no one ever told her she was being disciplined – they just put the write-ups in her file without telling her. When they got to that magic third write-up, they terminated her.
Debbie was devastated, as you can imagine. I had always been honest with the workers about the fact that they could be punished or fired for supporting the union, but in Debbie’s case, I was confident because the law-breaking was so blatant. I just kept telling her it would be okay. To make matters worse, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy just two days after losing her job. She was terrified.
I went ahead with the process of filing Unfair Labor Practice charges. The process took months, and meanwhile every day was a day of worry and fear for Debbie and her daughter. In the end, after over six months of struggle, the Board ruled in favor of the employer, without giving any explanation that made any sense (legal or moral) to us. Debbie’s life was in ruins. Too sick with cancer to get a new job, Debbie somehow kept going, scrapping from day to day on food stamps and maxed out credit cards.
I was outraged! I was all ready to appeal to the next level when I had an interesting conversation with the NLRB agent who had been supervising our case. He told me how sorry he was, and advised me not to appeal. He said the higher up the NLRB food chain you went, the more political it got. Once you started dealing with the political appointees you had no chance at all, no matter how strong your case was. He also said that many of the regional and local employees had already been pressured or disciplined for ruling in favor of workers too often and had been ordered to stop – or else.
I appealed anyway, and was denied without explanation. That was in 2002, shortly after the rise to power of the Bush Administration, who had stacked the NLRB Board of Governor’s with corporate minions and political hacks. That was when I realized that the National Labor Relations Board had turned almost overnight, into the National Employer Relations Board.
I know it isn’t my fault, but I have always felt I let Debbie down. To this day I can see the look on her face when I had to tell her the bad news. Ever since that day, I have promised myself that I would do anything I could to share Debbie’s story and to fight to reform the NLRB. I am glad to be here with you today my sisters and brothers!
I wish I could tell you that Debbie’s story is an isolated one, but I can’t. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Debbie’s out there right now – waiting for justice that may never come. Since George W. Bush and his cronies began stacking the Board with their friends, they have effectively dismantled, distorted and undermined the only institution in the United States whose job it is to enforce labor laws and to insure justice for workers.
We live in a nation where 1 out of every five union activists will be illegally fired during a union drive, but where employers are seldom punished for breaking the law. We live in a nation where the union election process is even less democratic than in totalitarian states like the Ukraine and Armenia.
As University of Oregon Professor Gordon Lafer writes:
“At every step of the way, from the beginning to an end of a union election, NLRB procedures fail to live up to the standards of US democracy. Apart from the use of secret ballots, there is not a single aspect of the NLRB process that does not violate the norms we hold sacred for political elections. The unequal access to voter lists, the absence of financial controls, monopoly control of both media and campaigning within the workplace, the use of economic power to force participation in political meetings, the tolerance of thinly disguised threats, open-ended delays in implementing the results on an election - all of these things constitute a profound departure from the norms that have governed US democracy since its inception”[1]
We live in a nation where it now takes the NLRB over five and a half years to resolve the cases that it refers to as the “highest priority” cases, and where even workers whose claims are supported by the board may have to wait literally decades to get any back pay at all. We live in a nation where the NLRB, the sole agency responsible for insuring the rights of a couple hundred million American workers, has had its budget slashed so badly that its current staffing levels are roughly the same as they were in the 1950s even though claims have skyrocketed.
We cannot blame our local NLRB folks too much for these endless delays when we are living in a nation where a Federal program to promote sport fishing has an annual budget that is significantly larger than that of the entire National Labor Relations Board! We live in a nation where Janet Jackson can be fined $550,000 for her Superbowl wardrobe “malfunction”, but the NLRB is allowed to fine employers exactly nothing for willfully bribing, threatening, assaulting or firing pro-union employees.
But Bush’s Board has been very busy lately. In the month of September alone, the NLRB has issued a whopping sixty-one decisions, the vast majority of which are anti-worker: making it harder than ever to collect back pay, making it easier for employers to discriminate against union organizers and making it much harder to form a union in the first place.
This, my brothers and sisters, is the nation we are living in.
But what is the NLRB supposed to be doing? Enforcing the National Labor Relations Act! That’s it – that’s their only job. Let me tell you what the law actually says:
“It is declared to be the policy of the United States to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and to protect the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.”[2]
That’s it – that’s the law – “to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and to protect the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization for mutual aid or protection!” It is not our national policy just to allow unions – but to actively protect and encourage them! That’s the law!!! Has Bush’s Board even read the law they are supposed to be enforcing?
So why am I, a minister, up here talking to you about workers rights? I’ll tell you why – because in the end, all good laws are rooted in justice and in love. All good laws are designed to help us build a land where all people can live lives of dignity, peace and freedom, where all people can finally claim their inheritance as the beautiful and sacred beings they are – truly children of god.
This law, rooted in the traditional values of fairness, equality, freedom and justice – has been brutally manipulated and undermined by the very people we have entrusted with safeguarding it. This is a monstrous betrayal of our democracy and our trust – and let me tell you my friends, it is not just a legal crime, but a moral crime, and we cannot stand by for even one more day while families like Debbie’s are being tossed into the gutter for simply standing up and speaking the truth!
We cannot stand by while the Bush Board eerily echoes the book of Jeremiah, where it is written that:
26 Scoundrels are found among my people;
But Bush’s Board has been very busy lately. In the month of September alone, the NLRB has issued a whopping sixty-one decisions, the vast majority of which are anti-worker: making it harder than ever to collect back pay, making it easier for employers to discriminate against union organizers and making it much harder to form a union in the first place.
This, my brothers and sisters, is the nation we are living in.
But what is the NLRB supposed to be doing? Enforcing the National Labor Relations Act! That’s it – that’s their only job. Let me tell you what the law actually says:
“It is declared to be the policy of the United States to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and to protect the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.”[2]
That’s it – that’s the law – “to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and to protect the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization for mutual aid or protection!” It is not our national policy just to allow unions – but to actively protect and encourage them! That’s the law!!! Has Bush’s Board even read the law they are supposed to be enforcing?
So why am I, a minister, up here talking to you about workers rights? I’ll tell you why – because in the end, all good laws are rooted in justice and in love. All good laws are designed to help us build a land where all people can live lives of dignity, peace and freedom, where all people can finally claim their inheritance as the beautiful and sacred beings they are – truly children of god.
This law, rooted in the traditional values of fairness, equality, freedom and justice – has been brutally manipulated and undermined by the very people we have entrusted with safeguarding it. This is a monstrous betrayal of our democracy and our trust – and let me tell you my friends, it is not just a legal crime, but a moral crime, and we cannot stand by for even one more day while families like Debbie’s are being tossed into the gutter for simply standing up and speaking the truth!
We cannot stand by while the Bush Board eerily echoes the book of Jeremiah, where it is written that:
26 Scoundrels are found among my people;
Like fowlers they set a trap; they catch human beings.
27Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of treachery;therefore they have become great and rich,
28 they have grown fat and sleek.They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice and they do not defend the rights of the needy.
30An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land."[3]
But we don’t have to stand for this! We do not have to swallow hollow rhetoric about family values without family wages; we don’t have to accept the right to life without the right to a just livelihood or basic health care; we don’t have to cheer for freedom, justice and liberty in Iraq and elsewhere while those very things are being stripped away from us at home!
Sisters and brothers, I want you to hear me now – every single faith tradition puts love and justice at the very center of creation. The teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, the Buddha, and countless others all stand with us today. Let us never forget that Jesus was not an investment banker. He was not a politician or a corporate attorney. Jesus was a carpenter – and I am willing to bet he still carries his union card with pride!
I don’t expect to be able to convert Bush’s Board to my way of thinking. I can’t make them love all human beings as my faith calls me to love them – but I do think they could at least read the law and enforce it in good faith! If they cannot or will not do that – then I say shut it down – and keep it shut down until they are ready to stop being the Bush’s Board and start being everyone’s Labor Board again!
[1] Gordon Lafer, Ph.D., “Free and AFir? How Labor Laws Fail US Democratic Standards (Washington, D.C.:American Rights at Work, 2005) p. 27
[2] National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The full text can be found here: http://www.union-organizing.com/nlra.html
[3] The Hebrew Bible, Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 5, verses 26-30
[1] Gordon Lafer, Ph.D., “Free and AFir? How Labor Laws Fail US Democratic Standards (Washington, D.C.:American Rights at Work, 2005) p. 27
[2] National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The full text can be found here: http://www.union-organizing.com/nlra.html
[3] The Hebrew Bible, Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 5, verses 26-30
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
First Universalist RefUUgee Assistance Coalition (FURAC) Hits the ground Running!
As many of you may know, our congregation is working with Ecumenical Refugee Services of Colorado to sponsor a Burmese refugee family that has spent the last few years living in a camp in Thailand.
Our platoon of amazing volunteers got their apartment set up with donated furnishings in the blink of an eye (really, the organizational skills astonish me!!), and now we are gearing up the real challenge – helping this eighty-four year-old grandmother and her three young grand-daughters learn to live healthy and sustainable lives in a place so alien to everything they have known.
I am especially grateful that we were able to help them get out of the camp at all. It turns out that the camp is scheduled to be shut down soon. Our government considers the project “finished” (whatever that means) – despite the recent atrocities that have rocked Burma in recent months, including the arrest, imprisonment, torture and “disappearing” of peacefully demonstrating Buddhist monks. See this New York Times article for more maddening details: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/weekinreview/30mydans.html
Our friends at ERIS tell me that any families that do not manage to leave the country by the time the camp closes will be left destitute and homeless. Needless to say, returning to their homes in Burma is not an option.
Below is an email update I got this morning when I got into the office. I could not be there at the airport when our family arrived (much to my disappointment), but reading this made me smile. I am excited to begin this new friendship.
“The family arrived last night at 1:00 AM and Gaye Beatty, Amy Anthony and Jessica Montgomerie met them and got them to their new apartment.
The girls especially seemed scared / reticent at the airport, understandably. Who knows what they thought about their three-hour, late-night delay in O'Hare? But by the time Amy and I had them settled in the apartment, they had loosened up, were smiling, and the youngest, Paw Ka Rur, was even running around the apartment. It was a wonderful sight.
The case manager, Hussain, will check in to see how they're doing "first thing today" - he may be there now, I don't know- and confirm they are safe and healthy.
They don't appear to speak English, but the girls were so shy, it's truly hard to say. The 13 year old did appear to translate a bit, and was able to spell Colorado and prompted the others to say, ‘my name is...’”
After they have had a chance to decompress, we will begin helping them get to and from their mandatory medical appointments, get through Social Security, Medicaid and other very long lines, make sure the girls get registered for school and so on. We even have an emerging group of teens and younger kids who will be helping the girls learn about “kid-stuff” in the USA. I wish I could be part of that group – sounds like the most fun of all…hopefully they will let me tag along sometimes.
Please email me if you are interested in helping this, or other refugee families, begin their new lives. We have a lot to offer, and a lot to learn. You can also check out Ecumenical Refugee Services here: http://www.ersden.org/
Our platoon of amazing volunteers got their apartment set up with donated furnishings in the blink of an eye (really, the organizational skills astonish me!!), and now we are gearing up the real challenge – helping this eighty-four year-old grandmother and her three young grand-daughters learn to live healthy and sustainable lives in a place so alien to everything they have known.
I am especially grateful that we were able to help them get out of the camp at all. It turns out that the camp is scheduled to be shut down soon. Our government considers the project “finished” (whatever that means) – despite the recent atrocities that have rocked Burma in recent months, including the arrest, imprisonment, torture and “disappearing” of peacefully demonstrating Buddhist monks. See this New York Times article for more maddening details: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/weekinreview/30mydans.html
Our friends at ERIS tell me that any families that do not manage to leave the country by the time the camp closes will be left destitute and homeless. Needless to say, returning to their homes in Burma is not an option.
Below is an email update I got this morning when I got into the office. I could not be there at the airport when our family arrived (much to my disappointment), but reading this made me smile. I am excited to begin this new friendship.
“The family arrived last night at 1:00 AM and Gaye Beatty, Amy Anthony and Jessica Montgomerie met them and got them to their new apartment.The girls especially seemed scared / reticent at the airport, understandably. Who knows what they thought about their three-hour, late-night delay in O'Hare? But by the time Amy and I had them settled in the apartment, they had loosened up, were smiling, and the youngest, Paw Ka Rur, was even running around the apartment. It was a wonderful sight.
The case manager, Hussain, will check in to see how they're doing "first thing today" - he may be there now, I don't know- and confirm they are safe and healthy.
They don't appear to speak English, but the girls were so shy, it's truly hard to say. The 13 year old did appear to translate a bit, and was able to spell Colorado and prompted the others to say, ‘my name is...’”
After they have had a chance to decompress, we will begin helping them get to and from their mandatory medical appointments, get through Social Security, Medicaid and other very long lines, make sure the girls get registered for school and so on. We even have an emerging group of teens and younger kids who will be helping the girls learn about “kid-stuff” in the USA. I wish I could be part of that group – sounds like the most fun of all…hopefully they will let me tag along sometimes.
Please email me if you are interested in helping this, or other refugee families, begin their new lives. We have a lot to offer, and a lot to learn. You can also check out Ecumenical Refugee Services here: http://www.ersden.org/
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
UUNITED Soccer Team Ends Fall Season
That's right, sports-fans - the UU juggernaut that is the UUNITED soccer team has finished it's 2007 Outdoor Season! True, we ended the season with only one win (the first game of the season!), but it was a fine season nonetheless.We played hard and often above ourselves, earning draws with much more experienced teams and losing a number of games in the final bruising seconds as the clock ran out. No matter how you look at it, I think our team definately triumphed in the "Team Spirit" and "Having Fun" departments.
From 4-foot nothing Chanida Thongplengsri's tenacious, take-no-prisoners defense of players literally twice her size to Chiles Friedman's weekly impersonation of the Energizer Bunny to Elliott Davis' on-field "Pirate" persona, every game was challenging, fun and left me counting the days before we would play again.Each week we would end our games by awarding the honorary Captaincy to another of our scrappy and eminently deserving teammates, who would then lead us in our weekly cheer, which was first chanted almost four years ago in Chicago by the first incarnation of UUNITED:
"1-2-3
U-UNITED
YAR!!!"
(the "Yar" pirate bit was added this year by Elliott)
I always get a little depressed at the end of a season. It's like the end of a theatre production or a class or any other project - some people stick around, other people drift off - no matter how you look at it, things will no longer be the same. Always leaves me a little bit blue. In fact, back in my theatre days, I used to do my best to avoid "take-down" after a show because I found it so depressing. I handle endings much better now (perhaps I have matured somewhat), but still...Of course I feel much better looking ahead to the coming weeks. We are switching to a Tuesday night indoor league - which will be lots of fun - and a whole new challenge. For those of you who don't know, indoor soccer is radically different than outdoor soccer. It is really a hybrid of soccer and hockey! We play on an oval turf field about the size of an ice-hockey rink. The walls are made of curved plexiglass and you can play the ball off the walls!! It's really fun, and very fast-paced; non-stop sprinting instead of the more measured endurance required by outdoor soccer.
My lungs will not be happy for the first couple weeks...
Anyway, I just want to close by thanking all my teammates (and our patiently tolerant families and cheerleaders) for one of the most fun seasons I have had yet. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
See you on the pitch!
Aaron
Thursday, October 25, 2007
My Cup Runneth Over
It feels funny not to have written in a while. I find myself inordinately looking forward to those stolen moments when I can add another post. This seems odd to me, since I write constantly, all the usual minister-stuff: prayers, sermons, meditations, wedding services and memorials – and yet I find myself on busy days hoping to find half-an-hour somewhere to work on my blog.
Interesting.
But today I want to begin writing about my recent Ordination into the Unitarian Universalist ministry. Although I was Ordained almost a month ago (Sept. 23, 2007), I have not been able to write about it. It’s just too big. In fact, next to my wedding, the births of my children and getting run over by a car – my ordination was probably the most powerful experience of my life.
And even now, a month later, I still don’t know how to write about it. Words fall so terribly short sometimes.
The feeling of being so supported and affirmed by so many wonderful people, the feeling of the church-walls shaking with song – the feeling of being profoundly connected to all who have come before me and to all who will follow – was simply incredible.
I remember looking out from the pulpit at everyone and seeing their faces, eyes, smiles, standing out in sharp relief. In that moment, I found myself utterly overwhelmed by a feeling of deep gratitude. I remember thinking, “Wow – so this is what Grace feels like…”
And that was all I could do for a time – just stand there, washed in the power and beauty of….everything.
I just stood there speechless (a rare occasion, for those of you who know me!). I think a funny sound of some sort tried to make its way out of my mouth – but that was all I could muster, despite the words clearly printed in front of me.
To some extent I remain speechless. Every part of it was perfect, every prayer, every song, every smile and tear. Perfect. I find myself buoyed just by thinking about it. In answer to my colleague Deborah Holder smilingly asked question, “How’s it feel to have your molecules re-arranged?” I say, “Whoa…..”
So rather than keep trying futilely to express the inexpressible, I will simply post two things that I will carry in my heart, draw upon and strive to live up to for the rest of my life.
The first is the Charge to the Minister and Right Hand of Fellowship, which was given to me by the Rev. David Bumbaugh. The second is the sermon the Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell preached. More than anyone else, it is to these two Ministers that I offer my thanks. Both of them in their different ways have not only inspired me to ministry – but have shown me, through their lives – how to do it.
Charge To The Minister:
By the Rev. David Bumbaugh
In his novel, A Cup of Gold, John Steinbeck tells the story of Henry Morgan. Young Henry grew up in Wales, and finding—as most of us do—the world of his childhood too narrow for his dreams and too confining for his hopes, decided to abandon it for the New World.
He shares his decision with an old bard named Merlin. Merlin responds to this news by telling Henry that he is like a child who wants the moon and he runs and leaps and grabs, and sometimes he catches a firefly. And Henry looks at old Merlin and asks, “Did you never want the moon?” Merlin says, “Oh yes, I wanted it, I wanted it above all things. I reached for it and then…then I grew up, I became a man and I knew that I could not have the moon and would not want it if I could. I grew up and so I caught no fireflies. I grew up and I became a failure.
But there is this about a failure, Henry," he said: "people know he has failed, and they are kind and sympathetic because they share with him the cloak of mediocrity. But those who have caught fireflies while reaching for the moon are doubly alone; for, as others praise them and set them aside because of their great accomplishments, only they know how great is the distance between the ambition and the achievement, between the dream and the reality.”I
In many ways, this conversation—as I remember it--captures an essential quality of ministry, as I have known it. Ministers are like children who never grow up, who spend their lives reaching for the moon. One of my colleagues once described ministers as “god-driven folk who cannot find god.” We want the moon. We want the light. We want to tease out the eternal meaning that lies all trammeled up in the ordinary and the commonplace. We run and we leap and -- sometimes -- we catch a firefly. And that firefly is the only thing we have to share with our people.
By the nature of our vocation, we are called to share it, to call aloud, "Come! See!" and let others make of it what they will. And sometimes they make very much of it.It is important, however, that we not deceive ourselves or allow others to cloud our understanding. No matter what truth we find, it is never the truth; no matter what gods we encounter, they are not god. And so, Aaron, as you enter upon this curious, demanding, frustrating and sometimes lonely vocation, as you run and leap and reach for the moon I would charge you to share whatever you capture, but always remember two things: First, the firefly you catch is not the moon; and, second the firefly you catch is the moon. In the space opened up by that paradox, ministry becomes possible.
The Right Hand of Fellowship
In this moment, Aaron, not only do you enter formally into your vocation, you also join a long and honored tradition--a tradition that extends back through the centuries--the living tradition of the Unitarian Universalist ministry.
This tradition includes those whose names we write in burning gold--Francis David, Joseph Priestley, John Murray, Hosea Ballou, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Joseph Jordan, Olympia Brown,l August Jane Chapin, Phoebe Hanniford. It includes many more whose names are lost to us, but whose courage and commitment have shaped our faith.
It includes all our colleagues who, in these times struggle to shape a world of justice and mercy, of peace and promise.It is my great pleasure to extend to you the right hand of fellowship and welcome you into the living tradition that is the Unitarian Universalist ministry.
I think I started weeping with joy the moment he extended his hand to me. All I could do in that moment was cling to him and cry. Quite out of character for me – except at births, my wedding and – it turns out – my ordination. Thank you, David.
Here is a link to Marilyn’s sermon, “Unitarian Universalism: the Promise and the Challenge.” Thank you, Marilyn.
http://secure.firstuniversalist.org/openrosters/DocDownload.asp?orgkey=1050&id=29356
I think an audio recording of the service was made, and when I find a copy, I will add it to this post, as well as some more photos and the words of other participants – all of which were simply wonderful.
Now, a month later - I still feel profoundly supported and blessed, and I still find myself shaking my head in wonder and thinking, "That's right - this is what Grace feels like."
Interesting.
But today I want to begin writing about my recent Ordination into the Unitarian Universalist ministry. Although I was Ordained almost a month ago (Sept. 23, 2007), I have not been able to write about it. It’s just too big. In fact, next to my wedding, the births of my children and getting run over by a car – my ordination was probably the most powerful experience of my life.
And even now, a month later, I still don’t know how to write about it. Words fall so terribly short sometimes.
The feeling of being so supported and affirmed by so many wonderful people, the feeling of the church-walls shaking with song – the feeling of being profoundly connected to all who have come before me and to all who will follow – was simply incredible.
I remember looking out from the pulpit at everyone and seeing their faces, eyes, smiles, standing out in sharp relief. In that moment, I found myself utterly overwhelmed by a feeling of deep gratitude. I remember thinking, “Wow – so this is what Grace feels like…”
And that was all I could do for a time – just stand there, washed in the power and beauty of….everything.
I just stood there speechless (a rare occasion, for those of you who know me!). I think a funny sound of some sort tried to make its way out of my mouth – but that was all I could muster, despite the words clearly printed in front of me.
To some extent I remain speechless. Every part of it was perfect, every prayer, every song, every smile and tear. Perfect. I find myself buoyed just by thinking about it. In answer to my colleague Deborah Holder smilingly asked question, “How’s it feel to have your molecules re-arranged?” I say, “Whoa…..”
So rather than keep trying futilely to express the inexpressible, I will simply post two things that I will carry in my heart, draw upon and strive to live up to for the rest of my life.
The first is the Charge to the Minister and Right Hand of Fellowship, which was given to me by the Rev. David Bumbaugh. The second is the sermon the Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell preached. More than anyone else, it is to these two Ministers that I offer my thanks. Both of them in their different ways have not only inspired me to ministry – but have shown me, through their lives – how to do it.
Charge To The Minister:
By the Rev. David Bumbaugh
In his novel, A Cup of Gold, John Steinbeck tells the story of Henry Morgan. Young Henry grew up in Wales, and finding—as most of us do—the world of his childhood too narrow for his dreams and too confining for his hopes, decided to abandon it for the New World.
He shares his decision with an old bard named Merlin. Merlin responds to this news by telling Henry that he is like a child who wants the moon and he runs and leaps and grabs, and sometimes he catches a firefly. And Henry looks at old Merlin and asks, “Did you never want the moon?” Merlin says, “Oh yes, I wanted it, I wanted it above all things. I reached for it and then…then I grew up, I became a man and I knew that I could not have the moon and would not want it if I could. I grew up and so I caught no fireflies. I grew up and I became a failure.
But there is this about a failure, Henry," he said: "people know he has failed, and they are kind and sympathetic because they share with him the cloak of mediocrity. But those who have caught fireflies while reaching for the moon are doubly alone; for, as others praise them and set them aside because of their great accomplishments, only they know how great is the distance between the ambition and the achievement, between the dream and the reality.”I
In many ways, this conversation—as I remember it--captures an essential quality of ministry, as I have known it. Ministers are like children who never grow up, who spend their lives reaching for the moon. One of my colleagues once described ministers as “god-driven folk who cannot find god.” We want the moon. We want the light. We want to tease out the eternal meaning that lies all trammeled up in the ordinary and the commonplace. We run and we leap and -- sometimes -- we catch a firefly. And that firefly is the only thing we have to share with our people.
By the nature of our vocation, we are called to share it, to call aloud, "Come! See!" and let others make of it what they will. And sometimes they make very much of it.It is important, however, that we not deceive ourselves or allow others to cloud our understanding. No matter what truth we find, it is never the truth; no matter what gods we encounter, they are not god. And so, Aaron, as you enter upon this curious, demanding, frustrating and sometimes lonely vocation, as you run and leap and reach for the moon I would charge you to share whatever you capture, but always remember two things: First, the firefly you catch is not the moon; and, second the firefly you catch is the moon. In the space opened up by that paradox, ministry becomes possible.
The Right Hand of Fellowship
In this moment, Aaron, not only do you enter formally into your vocation, you also join a long and honored tradition--a tradition that extends back through the centuries--the living tradition of the Unitarian Universalist ministry.
This tradition includes those whose names we write in burning gold--Francis David, Joseph Priestley, John Murray, Hosea Ballou, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Joseph Jordan, Olympia Brown,l August Jane Chapin, Phoebe Hanniford. It includes many more whose names are lost to us, but whose courage and commitment have shaped our faith.
It includes all our colleagues who, in these times struggle to shape a world of justice and mercy, of peace and promise.It is my great pleasure to extend to you the right hand of fellowship and welcome you into the living tradition that is the Unitarian Universalist ministry.
I think I started weeping with joy the moment he extended his hand to me. All I could do in that moment was cling to him and cry. Quite out of character for me – except at births, my wedding and – it turns out – my ordination. Thank you, David.
Here is a link to Marilyn’s sermon, “Unitarian Universalism: the Promise and the Challenge.” Thank you, Marilyn.
http://secure.firstuniversalist.org/openrosters/DocDownload.asp?orgkey=1050&id=29356
I think an audio recording of the service was made, and when I find a copy, I will add it to this post, as well as some more photos and the words of other participants – all of which were simply wonderful.
Now, a month later - I still feel profoundly supported and blessed, and I still find myself shaking my head in wonder and thinking, "That's right - this is what Grace feels like."
Thursday, October 11, 2007
My favorite writer wins Nobel Prize!
Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Finally.Here is a link to the NY Times story. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/11cnd-nobel.html
Doris Lessing has influenced my development more than any other writer, and more than most people, period. Her always clear, always brave critical eye never seems content with the surface of things, but must always dive, dive, dive into the deep waters where most of us fear to swim. Her commitment to the beauty and potential of conciousness, community and love - always balanced by an equally fierce commitment to freedom and individuality have inspired me since I was a teenager.
She has challenged generations of readers to strive to be "in the world, but not of the world" and to learn to look at ourselves and the world we live in with ever more lenses, sometimes as if through a prism - dizzying and incomprehensible as it may feel to do so. Lessing introduced me to Sufism, and to the many uses of Story.
Perhaps most of all, Doris Lessing has inspired me by personal example. She did not finish high school, but reading and living voraciously - educated herself - as I did. She struggled (and continues to struggle) to live authentically in a world that often seems opposed to authenticity. Lessing has made terribly hard choices in order to live her calling - as I have. Thanks to Doris Lessing, in part, I never felt alone in my own struggles. I have always looked to her as a guide, and knew that if she could walk that path, then I could too. She embodies integrity for me.
I know she would likely purse her lips at the paragraphs above, but that's okay. I trust I have never been slavish or embarrassingly derivative in my appreciation and gratitude.
I will always remember the first time I encountered her. I was about seventeen years old and was marking time browsing the spines of 10-cent used paperbacks at a St. Vincent DePaul's resale shop in rural Wisconsin while my mother was shopping.
That turned out to be a big day in my literary life. My eyes stopped over two titles that day: the first was "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller (which I still reread now and then) and the other was "Briefing for a Descent Into Hell" by Doris Lessing.I thought, "I think the title alone is worth 10 cents!", so I bought it without even taking a look inside. And that was the beginning of a literary relationship that has continued ever since, across the whole of my adult life, and spanning (and intertwining) the worlds of art, politics, sociology, history, spirituality and much more. It has spanned from inner space to outer space and even to some of the places where both of those poles are one.
I won't even try to introduce her work in this blog - there are already volumes upon volumes of those. If you are curious, I think this is the best DL site out there: http://www.dorislessing.org/index.html
I know myself better because of Doris Lessing. I feel more empowered to be myself because of Doris Lessing. My curiosity and search for truth and meaning has been whetted by Doris Lessing. The universe, reality - all-that-is - feels more immediate and open to relationship, scrutiny and interaction because of Doris Lessing.
My life, like so many other lives, has been immeasurably enriched by her life and work, and I cannot think of a better person (just the 11th woman to do so) to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.Congratulations, Doris Lessing - and thank you.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Bread and Roses in Denver
.jpg)
I spent this morning at a big hotel in Denver, face to face with all the reasons I am happy that I don’t have to sit at bargaining tables anymore, but also all the reasons I miss my life in the labor movement.I was part of an interfaith clergy delegation that the housekeepers at the hotel asked to come support them as they demanded more respect, better treatment and safer working conditions from their employer. Our delegation was made up of three Protestant Christian Ministers, a Muslim Imam, and me, a Unitarian Universalist (wearing a clerical collar for the first time!! What a weird feeling that was...).
We got to the bargaining room early and had a good time meeting the housekeepers and listening to their stories. They are amazing women from all over the world: Somalia, Ethiopia, Russia, Turkey and many places in Central and South America. Although several different languages filled the air at any given time, the workers clearly understood one another in all the ways that matter most, and the air of solidarity was palpable.
Then the management bargaining team came in, their expensive suits and manicured hands striking a vivid contrast against the bright red union t-shirts and easy smiles of the housekeepers. Each member of our clergy delegation was introduced to the managers and asked to say a few words about why we were there.
It was wonderful to hear my sisters and brothers in ministry speaking from their own faith traditions in ways that were so compatible with my own. Whatever doctrinal or theological differences we may have, it feels great to know that we are united in our commitment to justice for all people.
It is not at all clear how these negotiations will play out. These housekeepers are expected to do an enormous amount of work in an amazingly short amount of time. Although the industry norm is for housekeepers to clean about 13-16 rooms per day, this hotel requires the workers to clean up to 30 rooms per day!!! This breaks down to the expectation that a single housekeeper should be able to “deep clean” (make pristine) a room in about 20-30 minutes after guests have checked out. If guests are staying there for more than one night, and the housekeepers have to clean around them, the expectation is an absurd 8-15 minutes per room!!!
They have to make their daily quotas before they go home, and if it takes longer than eight hours, they simply have to keep working until they are done – and then their hours are cut for the rest of the week so they will not have to be paid overtime. So folks routinely work through their breaks and lunch hours; only to find that even so, they still have trouble finishing their work on time.
I would love to see the corporate brains who sit around designing these quota systems in some remote cubicle somewhere have to clean rooms for a week – for a day even – under their own systems! They wouldn’t make it to lunch time.
The bottom line is this: these women are honest, hard working people – and they are being worked into the ground so that some shareholders somewhere can earn ever so slightly more at the end of the fiscal year. The work these women are doing is not sustainable, it is not healthy and it is not just. I do not know if my support will make a bit of difference, but I will continue to answer every time they call. I feel honored to know them, and my thoughts, my prayers and my actions will be with them throughout their struggle.
And I guarantee that I am going to tip a heck of a lot better every time I stay in a hotel from now on!!!
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Most Offensive Editorial Ever?
This morning in the Denver Post, blogger David Sirota prompted me to click on this link by declaring that this is the most offensive economics article he has ever read. Ever.
Now that's saying something! It was hard for me to believe that anything could top some of the economic tripe I've read throught the years, with the gentle sound of blood boiling in my ears. I had to check it out.
While I encourage you, dear reader, to go ahead and read this whole column (you might want to take some saftey precautions first, like stowing away any breakables you might feel compelled to throw across the room in a spasm of helpless outrage), let me whet your appetites by sharing a little quotation first. The column is structured around a list of lessons Wall Street pundit Michael Lewis has learned about poor people over the past few months as he watches his personal fortune stumble a bit because of the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry. The following is a real gem of wisdom that never seems to get old:
"4) Our society is really, really hostile to success. At the same time it's shockingly indulgent of poor people.
A Republican president now wants to bail them out! I have a different solution. Debtors' prison is obviously a little too retro, and besides that it would just use more taxpayers' money. But the poor could work off their debts. All over Greenwich I see lawns to be mowed, houses to be painted, sports cars to be tuned up. Some of these poor people must have skills. The ones that don't could be trained to do some of the less skilled labor -- say, working as clowns at rich kids' birthday parties. They could even have an act: put them in clown suits and see how many can be stuffed into a Maybach. It'd be like the circus, only better.
Transporting entire neighborhoods of poor people to upper Manhattan and lower Connecticut might seem impractical. It's not: Mexico does this sort of thing routinely. And in the long run it might be for the good of poor people. If the consequences were more serious, maybe they wouldn't stay poor. "
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a5lhZkEauCu8&refer=columnist_lewis
Cute, huh? While I would like to believe this column in really just a particularly dark bit of satire, I do not think it is, although I would love to stand corrected. While many of Lewis' columns are less...evil...than this one, he does appear to have a healthy disdain for poor people and for people who (in his opinion) foolishly feel empathize with the millions of Americans who are being chucked out of their homes and onto the streets as we speak.
Blaming the poor for their own poverty is one of the oldest lines in the playbook - but blaming the poor for the investment losses of rich people takes a special sort of gall. It is such an audacious claim that it renders me almost speechless. Oh, how my heart swells with compassion for the noble rich, who are dragged down by the poor ungrateful masses!
As I sit here trying to find an appropriate way to express how I feel about this, only one word comes to mind - one of my grandmother's favourites (although I cannot deliver it with anything like the flair she can...) - POPPYCOCK!
That's right - I'm talking to you, Michael Lewis (unless I am wrong and this really is a brilliant satire; in which case, bravo to you)!
But, when all is said and done, I am still not sure that this article rises to the level of "Most Offensive Ever." There are an awful lot of horses in that race!
For example, here is one of my recent favorites - which I also suspected of being a satire. Which it wasn't, as far as I can tell.
This delightful bit of poppycock (how did I ever forget what a wonderful word "poppycock" is?!) is entitled "The Theory of the Leisure Class: An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than the rich?" This one was in Slate. http://slate.com/id/2161309/
The article argues that poor people have more "leisure" time than those unfortunate people who (nobly, industriously, selflessly) make money by the bucketful - a state of affairs writer Steven Landsberg sees as patently unfair. Interestingly, some of his suggested remedies seem eerily similar to those of Michael Lewis. Must be all those years of drinking the cool-aid.
That, and probably never having met a single poor person, or at least not any who weren't washing their cars or mowing their lawns.
This reminds me of a passage from "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens. Maybe these gentlemen should read it.
"For the first time in her life, Louisa had come into one of the dwellings of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life she was face to face with anything like individuality in conexion with them. She knew of their existence by hundreds and by thousands. She knew what results in work a given number of them would produce in a given space of time. She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or beetles. But she knew from her reading infinately more of the ways of topiling insects than of these toiling men and women.
Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a rate of percentage, and yielded such another percentage of crime, and such another percentage of pauperism; something wholesale, of which vast fortunes were made; something that occasionally rose like a sea, and did some harm and waste (chiefly to itself), and fell again; this she knew the Coketown Hands to be. But, she had scarcely thought more of separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into component drops."
Now that's saying something! It was hard for me to believe that anything could top some of the economic tripe I've read throught the years, with the gentle sound of blood boiling in my ears. I had to check it out.
While I encourage you, dear reader, to go ahead and read this whole column (you might want to take some saftey precautions first, like stowing away any breakables you might feel compelled to throw across the room in a spasm of helpless outrage), let me whet your appetites by sharing a little quotation first. The column is structured around a list of lessons Wall Street pundit Michael Lewis has learned about poor people over the past few months as he watches his personal fortune stumble a bit because of the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry. The following is a real gem of wisdom that never seems to get old:
"4) Our society is really, really hostile to success. At the same time it's shockingly indulgent of poor people.
A Republican president now wants to bail them out! I have a different solution. Debtors' prison is obviously a little too retro, and besides that it would just use more taxpayers' money. But the poor could work off their debts. All over Greenwich I see lawns to be mowed, houses to be painted, sports cars to be tuned up. Some of these poor people must have skills. The ones that don't could be trained to do some of the less skilled labor -- say, working as clowns at rich kids' birthday parties. They could even have an act: put them in clown suits and see how many can be stuffed into a Maybach. It'd be like the circus, only better.
Transporting entire neighborhoods of poor people to upper Manhattan and lower Connecticut might seem impractical. It's not: Mexico does this sort of thing routinely. And in the long run it might be for the good of poor people. If the consequences were more serious, maybe they wouldn't stay poor. "
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a5lhZkEauCu8&refer=columnist_lewis
Cute, huh? While I would like to believe this column in really just a particularly dark bit of satire, I do not think it is, although I would love to stand corrected. While many of Lewis' columns are less...evil...than this one, he does appear to have a healthy disdain for poor people and for people who (in his opinion) foolishly feel empathize with the millions of Americans who are being chucked out of their homes and onto the streets as we speak.
Blaming the poor for their own poverty is one of the oldest lines in the playbook - but blaming the poor for the investment losses of rich people takes a special sort of gall. It is such an audacious claim that it renders me almost speechless. Oh, how my heart swells with compassion for the noble rich, who are dragged down by the poor ungrateful masses!
As I sit here trying to find an appropriate way to express how I feel about this, only one word comes to mind - one of my grandmother's favourites (although I cannot deliver it with anything like the flair she can...) - POPPYCOCK!
That's right - I'm talking to you, Michael Lewis (unless I am wrong and this really is a brilliant satire; in which case, bravo to you)!
But, when all is said and done, I am still not sure that this article rises to the level of "Most Offensive Ever." There are an awful lot of horses in that race!
For example, here is one of my recent favorites - which I also suspected of being a satire. Which it wasn't, as far as I can tell.
This delightful bit of poppycock (how did I ever forget what a wonderful word "poppycock" is?!) is entitled "The Theory of the Leisure Class: An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than the rich?" This one was in Slate. http://slate.com/id/2161309/
The article argues that poor people have more "leisure" time than those unfortunate people who (nobly, industriously, selflessly) make money by the bucketful - a state of affairs writer Steven Landsberg sees as patently unfair. Interestingly, some of his suggested remedies seem eerily similar to those of Michael Lewis. Must be all those years of drinking the cool-aid.
That, and probably never having met a single poor person, or at least not any who weren't washing their cars or mowing their lawns.
This reminds me of a passage from "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens. Maybe these gentlemen should read it.
"For the first time in her life, Louisa had come into one of the dwellings of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life she was face to face with anything like individuality in conexion with them. She knew of their existence by hundreds and by thousands. She knew what results in work a given number of them would produce in a given space of time. She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or beetles. But she knew from her reading infinately more of the ways of topiling insects than of these toiling men and women.
Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a rate of percentage, and yielded such another percentage of crime, and such another percentage of pauperism; something wholesale, of which vast fortunes were made; something that occasionally rose like a sea, and did some harm and waste (chiefly to itself), and fell again; this she knew the Coketown Hands to be. But, she had scarcely thought more of separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into component drops."
Thursday, August 30, 2007
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!
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!
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
GOOAALL - Part II: Iraq Wins!
Iraq has won the Asian Cup for the first time, beating Saudi Arabia 1-0!
You can read more of this, and other coverage at:
http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/the-celebration-in-baghdad/#more-137
Ali Adeeb of the Times Baghdad Bureau writes:
Iraqis in different neighborhoods in Baghdad took to the streets cheering and shouting, “Play play Iraq!” and “Stay victorious Baghdad!” after the Iraqi team won the Asian cup today.
In Sadr city people of all ages poured into the streets, walking and driving cars despite the vehicle ban, waving Iraqi flags and singing in joy. People were seen in the streets distributing sweets and soft drinks to the celebrating crowds.
Abu Baqir, one of the celebrating men, said: “Congratulations to everybody. This is the greatest sign of Iraqi unity. Congratulations to all Iraqis. You can see the national feeling, it has always been there, and we hope this winning will be the beginning of the end of sectarianism. This team includes Shiite, Sunnis and Kurds, it is a team of all Iraqis.”
He added: “I swear if it was secure enough we would celebrate for three consecutive days”.You can read more of this, and other coverage at:
http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/the-celebration-in-baghdad/#more-137
Friday, July 27, 2007
"GOOAALL!!!": Soccer in Life and Metaphor
So I'm starting a new soccer team. This is the first time in a long time that I have gone two consecutive seasons without being on a team. There are lots of other things I do for fun and to keep fit, but soccer is something special.Being the super-dork that I am, I not only like to play soccer - but to watch it, to read about it, and to think much too deeply about it as a metaphor for all sorts of things. Soccer as poetry!
Before I get into what I really want to write about this morning, let me highlight a couple exceptional examples of the kind of soccer writing that I find so compelling. It is writing that makes soccer overflow the pitch, explaining, celebrating and mourning everything from nationalisim to globalization to the mysteries of life itself.
See, I'm not the only super-dork soccer fan! We are (apparently) legion, and some of us even write books - which other super-dorks (like me) pay for and read with all too much fervor!
1. My favorite: "How Soccer Explains the World: an unlikely theory of globalization" by Franklin Foer. Foer wanders the world looking at the ways in which soccer shapes and is shaped by culture, politics and the new economic realities of globalization. The book is funny, infectious, smart and ultimately hopeful. A fascinating read for football fans and non-fans alike. The section on the role of football hooligans in the Rwandan genocide is particularly chilling and important.
2. "Soccer Against the Enemy: How the World's Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power" by Simon Kuper. In 1992, Kuper set out to travel the world, looking for case studies to support the thesis in this book's subtitle. He found a former East German who'd been hounded by the Stasi for his love of a West German team, a Slovakian president who made a nationalist statement with troops and truncheons in a soccer stadium, a Ukrainian club that exported nuclear missile parts, and much more.
3. And on a lighter note... "Soccer in Sun and Shadow" by Eduardo Galleano. Uruguayan poet and writer Eduardo Galleano writes about soccer as game, as metaphor as cultural phenomenon, as muse and as lover (sometimes spurned). His writing is lyrical, evocative and beautiful. A lovely book that will make you want to love soccer the way Galleano does.
But now to my main point. Having soccer on the brain lately, I have been following the trials and tribulations of the Iraqi national soccer team wiuth considerable interest. They have just made it to the finals of the Asian Cup, and international tournement where they have played the role of underdog better than any movie script could have dictated.
The New York Times has been covering the team, and has published two very good articles this week. They can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/world/middleeast/21soccer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
and here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/world/middleeast/26iraq.html
In the first article, "For Iraq, Common Ground Can Be Found on Soccer Field", we read about how the Iraq remains "soccer crazy, and despite mortars, bombings and shootings that are sometimes aimed at amateur teams in Baghdad and Ramadi in western Iraq, it remains the national game. While the young play, older men and children gather to watch and women who are walking by steal glances from under their long, black veils."
The Iraqi soccer team, unlike any remaining Iraqi institution is non-sectarian. Players and coaches are Sunni, Shiite and Kurd, and the fact that they play and succeed as a team is powerfully inspiring as the rest of Iraq continues to spiral into a sectarian bloodbath.
"For Iraqis the success of the soccer team — a 22-member squad with Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds — evokes the old days, a time before sectarianism began to tear the country apart. It offers a moment of national pride and fosters the hope that the country, like the team, can look beyond its differences.
“The Iraqi team is the only thing that is uniting us now,” said Haiydar Adnan, 29, a Shiite. “When the Iraqi team wins a game, the people in Karkh, who are Sunnis, get happy, the people in Rusafa, who are Shiites, get happy.”
“I hope that the Iraqi politicians would look at these simple football players who managed to unite the Iraqi people and learn from them,” Mr. Adnan said.
Not only does the team bring together ethnic and sectarian groups (under a Brazilian coach), it is also free of the abuse that sports teams suffered under a son of President Saddam Hussein, Uday, who was the head of the soccer federation. That is another encouragement to Iraqis that they can win out of skill, and not out of fear."
So I was feeling all good and sunshiney for a day or two there, which is tough when it comes to Iraq. But hey, I thought, any silver lining is still a silver lining, right?
But I (not to mention the Iraqi people) was quickly brought back down to earth. I guess I saw it coming, but the next headline, "Soccer Victory Lifts Iraqis: Bombs Kill 50" was as heartbreaking as ever.
"As the Iraqi national soccer team eked out a 4-3 shootout victory over South Korea on Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis poured into the streets in a paroxysm of good feeling and unity not seen in years.
It was more rapture than celebration, a singular release of the sort of emotion that has fueled so much rage and fear and paranoia. But this evening, at least at first, it seemed diverted into nonstop car-horn bliss; spontaneous parades clogged streets from Erbil to Karbala, from Basra to Mosul, from Ramadi to Baghdad.
Then, just as suddenly, the moment passed in places, and the fractured Iraq re-emerged. As throngs of people danced and shouted in Baghdad, insurgents took quick advantage of the unguarded revelry. Two suicide car bombs ripped through cheering crowds in Mansour, on the western side of Baghdad, and in Ghadir, on the city’s eastern side. Together they killed at least 50 people and wounded 135 more, according to an Interior Ministry official."
Tellingly, not even the suicide attacks have been able to entirely dampen the spirits of Iraqi soccer fans who finally have something to cheer about, something to be hopeful about - even if it is only the largely symbolic victories of a team playing a soccer match thousands of miles away. The celebration goes on, as life and love always does - terror or no terror.
Which brings me to my new idea. This new team of ours needs to have two different jerseys, one white and one colored. I found a website (the Assyrian Market http://assyrianmarket.com/iraq-soccer-team-jersey.html) where we can order Iraqi jerseys. I can't speak for the whole team obviously, which hasn't even come together yet, but I have decided to wear a white Iraqi soccer jersey for all of our "white" games, in solidarity with the people of Iraq, who still laugh and play and cheer even as the war drags on and on.
I also encourage churches and other community groups to participate in the Passback Program. Passback collects gently used soccer equipment and redistributes it to people and places where it is needed - including Iraq. We did this last year at the First Unitarian Church of Denver and quickly collected enough equipment to outfit almost ten full teams, more than 100 players worth! If you are interested, please contact Courtney at cef@ussoccerfoundation.org or (202) 872-6659. The Passback website is: http://www.passback.org/
By the way, if you'd rather play soccer than read about it, and you happen to live somewhere near Denver, email me. We may just have a roster spot for you...
in peace, Aaron
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)