Thanks

Quote du jour: In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. ~H.L. Mencken

It is the Monday before Thanksgiving and I have yet to pick up the whole foods, locally raised on grass, sunshine, love and new age music, turkey. I have children and stepchildren on their way in a day or two. I have 13 people coming for dinner on Thursday and oral surgery scheduled for Wednesday. I have yet another construction project underway in the house and oh yeah, a job to do. Am I stressed? No. Well, maybe.

But really, if I'm stressed - I'm stressed by abundance, by having a multitude of friends and family in my life, a home to love and rewire, choices about health care and choices about food. I have work that still (after all these years) holds deep and profound meaning for me along with a paycheck. Like most of the capitalist world, I have less today than a year ago, and you know what? I'm still thankful. I usually don't like to write about my personal life, because I'm wary of tipping from self-reference to self- indulgence, but I'm going to aim for relevant. Let me know how I do.

2008 started off with the critical care hospitalization of my youngest child, followed by emergency heart surgery on my partner, followed by my dad's serious illness and continuing decline and that was just the first three months of the year! I gave up keeping track by the end of March. It's been a heartbreaking year in many ways.

But even so, the year has also been one of stunning abundance in so many bullets dodged that I can't quite believe our good fortune. No one died. No one is crippled. The biopsies have been negative. No one has gone without a roof over their heads or their daily bread or the opportunity to earn it. Kids are growing up, falling in and out of love and making plans to transform the world. And one of our friends has agreed to carve the turkey. Isn't it great?

I am telling you my happy story, because, I proud Puritan that I am, often tell the hardship stories. We're New Englanders. We work hard in life. We work hard to parent. We work hard to find meaning. We work hard to stay connected, balanced and sane. And oh so often, we look past the celebration to the costs of it. The weeks of diet and deprivation or the overdrawn bank accounts. We look past the simple and obvious pleasures of our children to worry about their future, the tuition payments, their ability to find a job, their lack of competive edge in the collegiate sweepstakes. And once we get them launched - we worry about having them move back in. With the rocky economy and the geopolitical climate around the world, we worry about our income and we worry about our safety. I won't tell you not to consider these things. It is impossible to ignore them. What I am saying is "tell the happy stories too". "Enjoy the times of celebration." We must celebrate and we must tell the stories because they are something that can transform. They are somthing that casts a light into the shadows. We can give thanks for what we have now - however meagre - and for all the future possibilities that life holds.

I would never romanticize poverty - it's fallacious to believe that poverty is somehow enobling or anything less than a grinding, soul crushing, circumstance. Still, look around and you will witness people with next to nothing finding occasion to laugh. You will find people who make every encounter a celebration of friendship, and every gathering a time to create music. People who spend their lives on others with absolute joy. People who make every meal a feast of the spirit if not of the palate. It isn't one moment that makes a prayer of thanksgiving but many little appreciations, over and over again.

So whether or not we sit down at groaning tables on Thursday, let us give thanks. Whether or not we pray to anthing, let us give thanks. For the meals taken with others or alone, let us give thanks. Thanks too, for the surly teenagers and the demanding toddlers. For the jobs we might lose next month. For the friends who aren't always perfect. For the beloveds who are near and far. For hope in the face of illness. For life in the face of death. For life as it is. For life as it one day might be. Let us give thanks.

Listen Up!

quote du jour and a bonus

"Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, "I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway." ~ Maya Angelou

“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.” ~ Carl Reiner

I include the above quotes in honor of the quick shift to cold winter like weather. I like snow. I just don't like driving in it. Shoveling it. Or wading through it. If I can ski over it or stay inside until spring, then that works.

This weekend we will all be together (except for the very youngest) in an intergenerational worship service for the season of Thanksgiving. Please remember to fill a grocery bag with nonperishable items for the ministry of My Brother's Table in Lynn. We will be collecting contributions during the service.

As most of you know, I roam the RE classrooms on Sunday mornings and get to see a whole variety of ways adults and children engage each other. I learn a lot. It's one of the many things I love about Sunday mornings at church. This past Sunday I was speaking with a teaching team as they were reflecting on feedback they had received from their group of teenagers. What the group found remarkable, was the leaders ability to listen to the group, to not drive them to a conclusion and to hold open plenty of space for conversation between group members but not to put any one individual on the spot.

We have a lot of written materials for every age group in the church and I sometimes fear that they give RE teachers the message that you must cram a lot of didactic information into the minds of our children in an hour for approximately 28 Sundays a year. In case you wondered - not so. The material is for you to use with the group in ways that make the most sense to everyone - adults and kids - who is engaging in it. One of the ways that appear to make sense to kids is to learn, model and practice listening within the RE classroom.

How do we do that?I think about my children as toddlers. When they wanted to tell me something they took my face in the hands and made sure I was paying attention. There are many non-dialogue ways to encourage listening - rhythm, dramatic arts, poetry, music making - which I'll get to in subsequent posts. For now a couple of tips on how you and your group can listen to each other and to listen for the things that matter in our lives.

ATTENTION: Its hard to listen when multiple off topic conversations are going on. Ring a bell, turn off the lights, relight the chalice or blow it out as a group. One of my personal favorites is to have everyone close their eyes and listen to a chime fade into silence. Ask them to raise hands when the sound of the chime disappears. Do this three times and you've provided a meditation break. I have given examples of focusing games before, Zen count or One Duck - use one of these. Don't be afraid to insert them - even if it seems like a non-sequiteur- what ever you happen to be doing if you believe listening has disappeared.

QUESTIONS: Give the conversation a skeleton to fill in around. Ask questions. With younger children, show them an object or picture related to the materials you have. Ask them to give opinions about it. With older kids an open ended question feels less like a quizz. What do you think? Can you imagine. . . ? Has that ever happened to you? Or someone you know? My favorite question (from the above mentioned teaching team) What would you do differently?

SPACE: Most UU's are talkers. Big talkers. Some of our kids are too. The extroverts will jump in and answer and by the time the introverts have organized their thoughts, the rest of the group is on to something else. Have the group jot down notes for a minute or two before opening up verbal dialogue. It gives everyone a chance to sort out their thoughts. With younger kids, have them draw a response. Notice the kids who aren't talking and make sure they have opportunities to speak. Allow for silence if people are pondering. It doesn't have to be awkward to think together.

SAFETY: Make it safe to risk an opinion. That means dialogue not debate. Encourage questions of each other - as in "Why do you believe/think/feel that?" NOT as in "How could you be so dumb?" If your group has a covenant remind them of it. If not, have them come up with ground rules. Usually, but not always, it's the younger kids who need reminders not to interrupt or put down an opinion. Invite participation but don't force it by asking one kid 'what do YOU think?' if they haven't volunteered.

ENERGY: And this last is most important. If the group is restless and high energy, you may need to do something else. Don't give up on your listening plans, just defer them until the group is ready to sit with each other in quieter conversation. Play seven principle charades, or another lively communication game. Do something that doesn't involve conversation, or conversely ask everyone in the room to talk loudly all at once for 5 minutes. Time it and make them talk nonstop for the ENTIRE five minutes. Try it. And then find out what the group thought of THAT.

I am an evil genius.

see you in church

What's in it for 'we'?

Quote du jour: It is doubtless true that religion has been the world's psychiatrist throughout the centuries ~ Karl Menninger

A few weeks ago I was talking to someone about ‘marketing’ church to families who already have so much going on in their lives. Church, youth groups and Sunday School are on a long list of worthy activities demanding time and attention. Although most of us 'think' that church is a good idea, sociologists actually study this stuff. I promised to write about one of the oft invoked studies I have alluded to. The link to the full study report is below. I’ll let you find the cites.

A three staged longitudinal study from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) has been recently published. The authors of the study conclude make affirmative conclusions regarding the role of religion and church attendance in the lives of our young people. There are a number of positive outcomes. Here’s one - This study determined that for early adolescents (aged 12 to 14), parental involvement in worship services even just once a week produced significant results in strengthened relationships with their parents.

But that’s not the only information. As much as the studies and reports describe what church can give our children, church can also protect them on the way to adulthood. I quote sociologist Christian Smith “studies that have included religion measures (especially church attendance and importance of religious faith) have found them to be inversely related to juvenile drug, alcohol and tobacco use, and to delinquency. . . Multiple studies also confirm that religiosity is inversely related to thoughts of suicide, attempted suicide and actual suicide among American teenagers. Religiosity also appears to act as a protective influence against suicide among youth most at risk for it. Furthermore religion is associated with lower levels of depression and hopelessness. . .”

The findings of this study affirm the positive benefits of adolescents living in religiously involved families. They enjoy stronger, more positive relationships with their parents than early adolescents whose families are not so involved. Religiously active families are also more likely to create environments where their youth feel supported and teenagers are more likely to seek help from a parent if some assistance is needed. With alienation and uncertainty awaiting our children in much of their lives, we should find ways to get them into our churches, not only for what we ‘get’ from the experience, but from what we do not.

Hmmmmm. Think about it. When you make those important decisions about time.

See you in church!

Where do we go from here?

Quote du jour: Now, in order to answer the question, "Where do we go from here?" which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. -Martin Luther King Junior

I am having a few hours of sheer unabashed celebration at the end of a very long election season. And then I begin - only begin, mind you - to answer the question "where do we go from here?" Dr. King gave some very good advice, as to how we begin. We begin in honesty. I think that rhetoric often substitutes for true and self aware honesty and I would very much like to see that change over the next months and years. I have hope that a new administration will be able to take the rhetoric of Washington and launch a true assessment of current reality, based in empircal evidence, not projection and fantasy. Where are we now? I think we need to answer that question as a nation, as a people and here in Swampscott, as a church.

As many of you may know, under the new system of church governance, I am now responsible - at the direction of Vann -for the social justice and environmental ministries of this church as well as the educational ones. In this role, I am asking in different ways and over and over again, where are we now? When I came to this church, a thirty year conversation had been taking place about "what shall we do about Lynn?" , essentially a "where do we go from here "conversation. I get the sense that the conversation has been one that puts itself solidly in the future, without assessing the capacity and potential and will of the congregation in the present. The present has become the past, and the future has become the now.

In this now, there are changes in the church. Many of them will not apply to you or to the children we teach. However, many of them will. And those changes won't take hold unless we can say with certainty that we know where we are. Who we are. And what we might be capable of. I am working with you on two significant efforts, one the change in the content and template of the religious education program and the other, what is being called the Lynn Initiative. We want to create a robust and vital Sunday experience for children and the leaders who support the ministry of Religious Education. We want to go back to Lynn in a way that makes sense to us and makes sense to the neighbors that we wish to support. That's great. We should do those things. And we should dream big. But we should know where we are now. Because if we don't place ourselves in the reality of our time, place and culture then there's a very good chance we won't know where to put our foot for the first step on the road to change - enduring change.

It's time. To know where we are. To know who we can become. To know where we can go. Step by step.

See you in church