Yes, I can be a UU and know that if there’s holding in the endzone it’s a safety

Last night we had a superbowl party.  About a dozen unitarians all crowded around snack food and watching the big game.  I had decided to root for Arizona, being the underdogs, and had a couple of people rooting for Arizona with me.  There were some others rooting for Pittsburg, for their political leanings.  Even those Arizona lost, that was a hell of a game, and a much better game than I was expecting.

I’m a Unitarian.  I like sports (Most notably NFL, College Football and Basketball.)  That doesn’t seem hard to understand, although the person sitting next to me at said party was dumbfounded when I was yelling at the TV about some of the bad calls made by the refs (I’m sorry, but at the end that should have been an incomplete pass, not a fumble by Warner.)  She made the comment that I’m a unitarian – why the hell do I know stuff about sports?  It was in jest (I hope) but the thoughts still there.  (Hence, my Pop-UU from a year or two ago.) And it’s aggravating.

I would rather watch football then go to the symphony.  Does that make me a bad UU?  It just might, but I think it makes me like an overwhelming majority of Americans though.  (That might me one of the few things I’m in the majority of!  heh.)

Time to brag – my church is #1* on facebook

Ok, so Chutney spilled the beans.

A year or two ago (4/13/07), I quietly started up a facebook group for our church – Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta (UUCA.) I started off with inviting folks from our young adult group, since they were the only ones who knew about facebook in the firstplace.  Slowly and steadily, more folks from church found the group, and it had a pretty stable, but small growth rate.

Around midyear last year, our group had a little explosion.  We broke 100.  A large group of folks, parents of youth group members mostly, discovered facebook.  I started looking at other groups, and saw that we were pretty neck and neck with All Souls, DC for facebook group status.  The UUs up in North Carolina banded together to have a statewide group (sneaky), and the rest were national groups.

But due to a stupid error of not pressing the next button, I recently saw we were about 10 down from All Souls Tulsa.  And 1 down from All Souls, DC.  A week later, word spread (ok, with a little nudging and help from the youth group of which I am an advisor of) and sure enough, as of right now we’re the largest congregational facebook group.

Now, I know odds are that might not last, especially when Tulsa and DC read this, or Chutney’s post (I wanted silence!  He wanted smack!) and I fully expect a counterattack.

Ok, now to give some disclaimers.  UUCA has the largest facebook *group*

I know that’s a very technical brag.  Because I also know the Dallas facebook *page* has about a dozen more fans than our members.  (We have both, our facebook *page* is about 125 at this point, but the UUCA group is more easily findable due to the acronym.)

Stil.  Our church is medium-sized.  I don’t know how we stack up against others, but I’m pretty sure Tulsa, DC and Dallas are all a fair bit bigger than us.  So I’m stoked, not just for the hyper competitiveness that came out early this week and the couple of congregations who have sent me a message about getting their church started on facebook, but for a big victory for our little group.

In addition, if any one wants to get any advice about unitarian universalist congregations on facebook, shoot me an email or leave a comment here.  I’ll hep out as best as I can!

Next goal: Beat Dallas for total number of fans/group members (eep), hit 200 (I think this’ll happen by Sunday), somehow surpass that North Carolina statewide group, and then take over the world.

Remember compassion, remember yourself.

We’re going to start this post with imagination – a key in life.  I want you to imagine three people.

Imagine a boy, John, growing up having never felt compassion.  Imagine the hatred he must feel for his fellow man.  The loneliness and solitude he must endure.  The lack of love in his life, both giving and receiving.  The hollowness of just another day as a waste of space.  The isolation, the depression, the cynicism.   John takes a walk down the street and passes an injured kitten.  He noticed the injured kitten, knows exactly how it feels, and walks right on bye.

Now imagine Sue, a child growing up surrounded by compassion.  Everywhere the child goes, the child is warmly welcomed, and people bend over backwards for her.  She is the apple of everyone’s eye, and whenever she has a problem, people are constantly there for her so she can be loved and welcomed.  Everyone is compassionate towards her, without it reverting to pity.  She grows up, constantly seeking the compassion she grew up with.  She passes the hurt kitten on the street, but is too caught up in herself to even notice.

These two cases seem like opposite ends of the spectrum, and neither are ideal.

Imagine a little boy, Lee, growing up with compassion when needed, but more importantly being taught to be compassionate when called upon by his community.  He has experienced great compassion from his fellow man, so he can future the compassion by being loving and caring to both friend and stranger.  He passes the same injured kitten on the street immediately stopping, trying to see if the kitten needs help.   He discovered it’s really injured, and starts to ask passersbys for help.

We must not only be compassionate, but we must also teach how to be compassionate.  We also must teach how to accept compassion when we need it, which is something our pride gets in the way of.  We seem to always be wanting to give compassion, but when its offered to us we shy away from it.  If we expect to give it we must be prepared to receive it.  I know others out there have the same trouble I do accepting compassion – I’m always ready to give it and never ready to receive it.

Compassion is only a third of our second principle, but don’t take that as it’s a small amount of our faith – being compassionate is something essential to our faith.

How we accept and how we give compassion leads us to who we really are as people.  Remembering these acts of compassion lead us to remember our history, our life, our true self.  Now, I want you to remember acts of compassion in your life that you received.  Not that you’ve given, but that you’ve received.  Go ahead, think about it for a minute.

Remembering compassion is to remember who you are as a person.  Remember to give compassion, receive compassion, and teach compassion, well, for it is what makes you, you.

Entropy and the Laws of Life

I was thinking about how I’ve recently given my apartment a deep clean, and how I always struggle to keep it clean.  It made me think of entropy.

Yah, I know.  A little odd, but there you go.

Things that are organized have no stability; hence, the universe tends towards disorganization, as it likes stability.  How’s that for entropy made simple?

Sure, this is a nice and easy way to get out of cleaning my own apartment, but I’ve been thinking about this disorganization is stability concept.  How often have we tried to plan out an event only to have something go wrong?  Did we freak out about it, or just let it ride as the Universe righting itself?  Lord knows I’ve freaked out about events going awry – I was determined to have every single aspect of the event organized before the event.  Thinking about it further, I can’t think of any other way than saying I was trying to one-up the Universe.

How often have we tried to plan out a day, only to have it go horribly off track?  That’s certainly happened to me, more often than I can count.  Part of me cringes at the mere thought of an organized day going off track, but the mere derailment of an organized day doesn’t mean the day is lost – sometimes, it ends up better than originally planned, sometimes worse, but either way it’s the Universe kicking that organization to the curb.

Taking this even further, how often have we tried to plan out our lives only to have it go awry?

I’ve got a friend going through this turmoil right now – his life isn’t where he had planned for it to be, and it’s clearly causing him some pain.  I’ve certainly gone through that, as my quarter life crisis posts suggest from over a year ago.  I would say I’m out of that phase now.  I can’t say its anything active on my part, but I think a large part of it is acceptance that, yes, life won’t ever be organized to my desires, but a large part of that is clearly out of my control – gravity will pull the blocks down no matter how high I stack them, and liquids will always fit the shape of its container.

So maybe I shouldn’t really try to plan out the next few years of my life, the next few decades of my life.  Part of me is already anxious over that thought – odd, since I really don’t have any sort of plan, but the mere thought of not having a plan causes anxiety (now that calls for future exploration.)  Besides the inevitable anxiety over the plan, and anger when not meeting the plan, the universe is pretty clear that organization won’t last.

It’s easy to say I’ll just leave “it”, aka my life, up to the Universe, well, easy to type, but it seems extraordinarily difficult to actually believe and accept.  Accepting that your organization will inevitably fall like Newton’s apple means that you’re powerless.  And it’s not appropriate to feel powerless in our society.  It’s easy to fight against the Universe, and make grandiose plans on where you’ll be in ten years.  Easy to fight against, but impossible to win.

You have on the other hand, those that say the Universe helps those who help themselves.  Maybe the right method is to have a general direction of where you’d like to go without the specifics that you become too attached too.  But, then again, when running a business, how often do you need to have that specific plan for the long term.  But is there any such thing as long-term success in the corporate world?  Inevitably, all businesses will fail at some point – nothing’s permanent.  So while the short term (short term could even be on the order of decades and centuries mind you) needs a plan for corporate success, no long-term plan can cure that inevitable death (either corporate or human.)

For those with the continual five-year plans, I wonder how happy they are in comparison to those without detailed plans, but floating through the universe without a pile of blocks to be knocked over.  Because isn’t that the goal for all of us?  To find happiness, no matter what our definition of happiness may be?  If my blocks keep getting knocked down by the Universe in its desire for disorder but stability, I won’t be happy as I have to constantly restack them.

But maybe stability isn’t what everyone wants in life.  They want to stack up the bocks to get to their highest potential, and if the universe knocks them down, they find joy in rebuilding.  I’ve come to realize that stability means more to me then great heights.  [Part of this, I’m sure, was the severe instability of my childhood – and the desire to find stability for once.  (“My happy little ruts.”)]  I find comfort, and dare I say happiness, in the stability of my life.  Maybe I need to try to fight the Universe a little less often and try to listen to it more.

Brining UU to my world – YUUP – Young UU Professionals?

After another flurry of emails in my 20s/30s group about the large group of 40s, I’ve been thinking a lot lately on UU and my generation. We are busy – I’m really at the start of my generation, The Millennials, who start with those who graduated high school in 2000 which was my high school class, and continues for around 20 years. This suggests that have more I common with the kids in my youth group than their parents, which I’ve often thought. We’ve grown up on computers (we had a personal computer when I was 5) and the internet (which I had access to in the 4th grade – before the world wide web popped up for mainstream use. I got a computer and internet access through my school, who gave all of us fourth and fifth grades a computer and a modem with access to a chat service and a message board via Prodigy.) We’re accustomed to instant communication, either via the Internet or cell phones (I was among the last of my friends to get one, as a junior in high school in 1998.) We’re busy – we’ve had busy schedules planned out for us since birth. Even with my less than normal childhood, I still had the gambit of little league sports and scouts and once I hit high school I was involved with a dozen after school clubs.)

Now that we’re entering the workforce, we’re encountering a whole set of different kind of problems than what we’ve ever faced before. We’ve gone from having scripted lives to a less than stellar workforce where often our talents aren’t being utilized to our fullest potential…and that’s really the first time that’s happened to us. All our lives we’ve suffered from high expectations, either our own or our families’. And when we don’t live up to those expectations, we see it as a character flaw.

I know, I know. I can hear the eye rolling now. That happens to everyone at that age. Get over it.

We hear that a lot. Get over it. I’ve even heard it at church before. Maybe not those words specifically, but certainly the intent, and the eye rolling, has gotten across before, even in a small group setting which really set me off from the whole small group thing.

But it’s different. At least I think it is, but I’m hardly an objective observer.

I dealt with a lot of these issues a year or two ago, but they really just blindsided my best friend, and she’s having a really hard time coping with it all. Why is that we just can’t seem to be comforted by our faith?

We need to find a way to update Unitarian Universalism, to keep our faith alive and vibrant, not forgetting our past but not letting that past dictate where the future will go. I need a faith where I can practice without having to go on Sunday morning to get my fill. Where I can practice on a flight, going out drinking with friends, or even stuck in traffic. There has to be more ways of connecting with the universe without having to maintain an austere meditation schedule, or taking days off from work to go live in the woods (lord knows I want to, but I can’t take off days like that – I’m not at that point in my career yet.)

Another thing that’s on my mind is that the main crux of the former young adult planning was centered around conferences and retreats, where someone like me who doesn’t get a lot of time off work can go to, and from what I hear, are slightly more hippie than I’d like. I guess what I want is a UU group for Young Professionals, where we can learn to make sense of the workplace, without having to take a week off to discover ourselves. Maybe I should help start a group – YUUP – Young UU Professionals.

Sorrow. Shock. Disbelief. Anger. Unity.

It’s so easy to want to figure out why, so we can explain it away.  Was he bitter over a failed relationship?  Was he recently fired and in hopeless economic despair and needed to get out his pain by inflicting it on others?  Was he mentally ill?  Was he just reacting to a society gone awry?  If we had an answer, it would give us a way out of the sorrow and fear we feel.  If we can answer that, then we can assure ourselves that it could not happen here, because of x y z.  We need to blame something – it can not just be senseless, random violence.  Because that can happen anywhere, and could happen to any one of us.

And it could.

But I want to choose not to think over that.  I want to banish that thought out of my mind.  Because if I don’t, I would choose to obsess over it, and be afraid every time I step out of my bed.  I would rather live in a bubble than have it popped by a 12-gauge shotgun.

Which today, when the CNN alert came to my blackberry, it did, and the bubble popped.  It took a while for the shock to leave, and now that it has I have to rebuild the bubble.

But is that part of life, knowing that it might end when you least expect it?  Death is rarely on our minds, if we’re lucky.  How can we live life obsessing over the fact that we might just die the next second?

Why is this affecting me so much?  I mean, I’ve never been to TVUU, I didn’t know any of the victims, never met anyone from TVUU in all likelihood.  And gun violence happens every day in Atlanta.  Why would this do it?  It’s part due to such violence in a house of love.  Uniarians are some of the most open, welcoming, loving people I’ve ever encountered, and the stark contrast between that radical love and radical violence is too much to process at once.  Part much be that Unitarians are such a small community nationwide, especially here in the southeast, that when something like this happens to some of us it affects all of us.  Part of it is due to this happening during a youth performance.  I can’t even begin to imagine how I would cope if this happened during my yruu kids’ performance.  Much less imagine how I would help them cope with something that makes so little sense it’s un-process-able.  I read one account that said one of the little girls who was performing was covered in blood.  How could she ever step foot in that sanctuary without reliving the worst experience of her life?

I can’t imagine the terror and sorrow those congregants are feeling right now up 75 in Knoxille.  I can’t imagine the tears being shed in Knoxville tonight, but if anyone from Knoxville is reading this, know that tears are being shed nationwide tonight.

[Note: this was written Sunday Night, 8:30ish]

UU music fest in Houston

So I met up with Diest in Texas, nice guy (although short ☺) and he invited me to come to the Houston UU music fest to hear him play at the UU Fellowship of Houston, which was about 5 miles from where I was ending the day for work-related purposes. Thinking of my earlier life goal of visiting a UU congregation in every sate, I knew I had to go. I cranked through my teacher evaluations for the day and scheduled some time for me to drop on by. Think of it as an extended trip to the airport. I told Diest I would be the tall guy, and most likely the only guy wearing a suit (I was right on both regards.)

The fellowship is a nice place, pretty sanctuary. The festival was held outside, which I understand because it has a beautiful outside yard – something my congregation is sorely lacking…not much green space inside Atlanta. But come on! It was 93 degrees outside. My desire to commune with the seventh principle doesn’t apply when it’s so damn hot outside. But most seemed to really enjoy it, despite the oppressive heat. It must have been the suit I was wearing. Yick.

All in all I’m glad I went and got to meet up with Diest. Pretty cool way to end a workday. Just wish I could have stayed a little longer.

Everyday UU

There’s a vocab source I use at work called Everyday Vocab, 7 words a day to build up your vocab within a calendar year. With words, definitions, exercises, and even quizzes.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had Everyday Unitarian (aside from the blog?) Seven things to do or ponder to make you into a good Unitarian within a calendar year. Ok, I know how creepy and Stepford sounding that is. But creepiness aside, 7 daily little things to do or think about or, heaven forbid memorize, that change each day to deepen our personal faith?

I can still be Unitarian and love facebook, starbucks, and birthday princesses

I can still be Unitarian and love facebook, starbucks, and birthday princesses – a minor critique of UU world cover article “Home grown Unitarian Universalism” by William Doherty
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I can be a consumer and still have a soul

I finally had time to read this spring’s UU world Saturday night, on a flight from Dallas back home to Atlanta, another semi-monthly business trip. It was a pretty hectic trip as usual, although most of my thoughts were on the mess of a schedule that was waiting for me at the arrival gate. I finished up Runaway Jury for about the tenth time, and then saw the magazine waiting in my laptop bag. The cover article looked interesting, so after I read through some of the other articles (skimming over the just war article – I’m all sorts of peaced out for a while.) The writer, William Doherty, had good ideas near the end of the article and is right about a fair amount of points (and I appreciate that), but the article starts off with a premise I have issues with, and in fact, I think is telling of one of the biggest challenges Unitarians face: bringing our sometimes elitist faith into the 21st century.

“These three interrelated social pathologies of contemporary middle-class life – consumerism, time famine, and civic disengagements – are a real life curriculum, or anti-life curriculum, for our children. If we don’t find a way to counteract this curriculum, we will end up with feel-good faith formation that looks and sounds fine but lacks power and depth.”

By trying to remove your kids from pop culture and mainstream society, you will set their faith up for failure. The challenge of my generation, the “millenials” who are constantly busy and have been since we were born, is maintaining, no, adapting, our faith to fit our lifestyle. If we are taught that having deep Unitarian faith is only possible when we unplug from society and retreat back into the woods, then aside from feeling Unitarian guilt our faith will gradually disappear. We should be showing and teaching our children how to apply UUism to everyday life, and show them how they can see spirituality in the everyday – If our kids can see how they can find spirituality in Dance Dance Revolution, then our kids will grow up to maintain their faith as adults.

We can’t pretend we live in a world without pop culture and the evil “c” word of consumerism. I don’t think we can even try to set up our own little protective elitist bubble – no child wants to be the boy in the bubble. And even if we could – we shouldn’t.

One of the issues that faces our faith is what happens after someone walks into our church for the first time and bangs up against our elitism. And if you doubt UU elitism, this quote from the front-page article of our quarterly religious publication should quell some doubts – “Our me-first, materialistic, consumer culture.”

When we start our ritual criticism American society and consumerism, people, new and old alike, start to question what we’re all about. What’s the soul of Unitarian Universalsm? Is it rebellion against modern society? Is it anti-consumerism? Is it condemning our neighbor for having too many iPods? Is it peace at all costs? Is it some special interest or another?

Or is it love.

I’d rather be surrounded by the latter

And one final point:

“I’ve been working with parents to blow the whistle on one prominent example of consumer culture invading childhood: out-of-control children’s birthday parties…the frantic culture of busyness among adults and children also threatens the values of our tradition celebrates.”

That’s right, Ava (my niece), your Barbie blow out birthday is hereby banned. It doesn’t fit with my faith. On your upcoming sixth birthday, I think it would be better if we meditated on the meaning of cake. Let our chalice be your cake, and hey, it’s even got a candle!

Sharks and God

A kid in front of me was curious why there were sharks.  He asked god for the answer, and waited to “see if an answer came.”  He closed his eyes in a silent prayer, waited, and said “no answer came.”  He had the most serene look I’ve ever seen on a fifth grader’s face.

“I bet dinosaurs would eat people in heaven.  That’s why they’re probably down there.  I bet they have dinosaurs down there.”

I could tell a shift in my thinking occurred – before, I would tell the kid why he was wrong about the whole dinosaur thing, or that I could tell him why there were sharks and that he didn’t have to pray.  But when he was presumably asking for the answer, I saw a calmness spread across his face.

There’s nothing I could say that could justify taking that inner calmness away.