Long, dark night of the soul

I have been feeling a deep sadness lately, a hopelessness bordering on despair. 

I have completed my first semester of seminary, unbelievably arduous even for an accomplished academic, only to be faced with five more just like it and five intensive winter or summer terms in between, beyond which lies an uncertain future to say the least. A detailed conversation with a school official has confirmed my worst fear: that they can and will do nothing to make it any easier for me to fill my denominational requirements here, nor will they waive or allow me to replace any redundant or UU-inappropriate coursework. My church has become a place of work, now--a place of responsibility rather than a place of respite--and for various reasons it seems that my ministers are not able to devote any time to mentoring me right now. My seminary friends have mostly scattered to the winds and taken with them my sole support network. And lest I take this time "off," the professor I have been working for at UT is wanting me to use my "less burdened" time "to play catch-up." And to top it all off, I have been late for practically everything all week, including my kindergartner's first public-school holiday performance. 

It is as though I had traversed a mountain that had proved more difficult to climb than I could possibly imagine, only to see from the peak that there were a dozen more to go, many looking more difficult and remote, and then to land on the other side in a swamp. And to go through all of this only to find that there is no longer anyone designated to hold out a hand to pull me up, certainly nobody to give me directions or to offer any comfort about what lies ahead, and only myself to blame for all of the problems in which I find myself "stuck."

My spiritual director calls it "the dark night of the soul" in reference to a work of the same name by St. John of the Cross. Apparently it is common for seminarians (and others setting out on journeys of spiritual seeking) to go there after the first semester. I forget exactly what he said about it, but it has something to do with the ego needing to get out of the way of the spiritual journey. The old personal spiritual practices that once sustained the student go out the window pretty quickly in the face of an incredible onslaught of new ideas to absorb and process, books to read and papers to write, and weekly (if not daily) challenges to tightly-held facets of their spiritual-theological world view. When the stress finally dissipates at the end of the semester, a deep emptiness remains. The student is left in a place where the easy answers that used to comfort no longer do, where the people who used to serve as guides no longer can, where no sense of controlling or even understanding one's own life path remains intact. 

It is an emptiness that demands to be filled but cannot be if we are to continue the journey. In order to become the people who can give answers and comfort and guidance and perhaps even understanding of where the road is going, we must first let go of our dependence on others to provide these things for us. Even harder, we must admit how many of these things we cannot provide for ourselves, either. Some questions have no comforting answers, some wild places admit no guidance through them, and most of all some paths cannot be known or even understood except in the traveling.

What is to be done about the long, dark nights of the soul? Nothing. They must simply be acknowledged for what they are: periods of waiting for the ego to get out of the way, to admit that it is no longer in control but is now living in service to something greater and more mysterious, for the cloud of self-concern and self-doubt to resolve into a clarity of purpose that may be nothing more than "I have begun this journey, I will follow where it leads." (after all, as the quip goes, when you are going through Hell, for God's sake don't stop going!) And, as the new day dawns, that which is holding the traveler back may suddenly become apparent, and the final leap of faith needed to truly undertake the journey can be made.

Somehow, for me, simply acknowledging that this is going on and that I am not alone has been enough to lift a large part of the weight from my shoulders.  It has also enabled me to see that it is now time to divorce myself from my old career completely, to resign my research post at UT Austin. It has been rightly said that a man cannot serve two masters, and my old master is holding me back in a place of doubt in and incomplete commitment to the new. As for the rest, it is enough to know that I am not alone, that I have traveling companions on an intimidating but well-worn path, that that there are folks looking out for me here and there, and that eventually, on the other side, day will dawn again and I will once again see what i need to do.

Until then, Good Night!

a particular scandal: God is With Us

In brushing up for my theology final tomorrow, I read a series of slams on Unitarian theology in an article titled "The Scandal of Peculiarity" by none other than Cynthia Rigby, the APTS professor who usually teaches this class. The argument seems to go that only a triune God is actively and fully present in our world and is therefore capable of understanding and loving us as we are, of being "God with us" in solidarity (as one who was once human), and of "indwelling" us as challenger, shaper, and transformer of our lives. A unitarian God, she states in negatives, is distant, authoritarian, unloving, and incapable of understanding what it is to be human. 

She is seriously misunderstanding the unitarian God. Rigby's logic, and that of the people she cites for backup, only works if one sees a unitarian God through a trinitarian lens: in particular, Rigby seems to think that Unitarian Christians choose to keep the "Father/Creator" person of her trinity and lose the other two, maintaining the transcendent aspect of God at the expense of the immanent aspect. No! 

Neither Judaism nor Islam, which both insist on a unitarian Diety, has such an understanding. The Jewish scriptures speak time and again about a Diety who is present and involved in the world we live in, and the Sufi tradition of Islam says we have no further to look for Allah than in the living of our daily lives. 

While we Unitarian Universalists have many names for and conceptions of the Divine, I think it safe to say that we would largely agree on one thing: whatever the Sacred is, it is here among us in the midst of things, dwelling in and among all, present in our very Spirit and in every act of Love, stirring things up for the comfortable yet comforting those in pain. God doesn't have to be triune to be with us or to love us. God simply has to be and the with us is taken care of.

It seems no scandal at all to me, then, that such a God could become incarnate, dwelling fully in a particular human for the good of all. The scandal, for me, is the implication by Christians that Jesus of Nazareth was somehow the only time this ever happened; indeed, I believe that God does this all the time. What if God was one of us, right now? What if God was all of us?

What UU's believe

From time to time, I get asked something along the lines of "So, what do Unitarian Universalists believe?" I always have a hard time answering this question, since as a movement held together by covenants rather than creeds we have no readily accessible statements of "what we all believe." 

It's a bit easier, generally, to explain what we don't believe in: we don't believe in setting apart any one particular set of holy scriptures or in limiting ourselves to any one particular definition of "God," for example, and we heartily disapprove of all five points of Calvinism. But these do not get me any closer to answering the question.

Our district executive, Susan Smith, likes holding up James Luther Adams' "Five Smooth Stones" of liberal religion, but they are somewhat hard to make sense of unless you already have some background in theology to compare them with, so that generally doesn't help me in those conversations, either.

But after writing a couple of term papers and listening to a few podcast sermons, I think I have an answer that might do. I'm sure I will keep revising it, of course, but here's a start:

"We believe in the incredible potential of fully realized human persons, the ability of unbridled spirits to go forth and change the world. We believe that a world full of people who are true to their best selves and actively working to do what they know to be right cannot help but be a better world to live in, because those people will accept nothing less than a world where every person--and every other partner in the web of life--is honored and accepted and cared for and given a voice. We believe that we can talk to each other, work with each other, learn from each other, and love one another without having to share a common statement of faith. We believe that the biggest lie that has ever been told is that one person cannot make a difference. We believe that people who bring their great passions to bear on the world's great needs can heal a broken planet. We believe that if enough of us give of the sparks of the divine that glow within each of us, we can kindle a flame that will set the world on fire."

How's that for some Good News?

A modern UU in King Arthur's Chapel

After almost a full semester here at Austin Seminary, I still find myself going to chapel, and I still find myself trying to figure out what people get out of it. There's an awful lot of scripture reading, an awful lot of praying, a sermon that is more often than not a bible study lesson rather than a lesson in living, and hymns that more often than not lack much energy or ability to motivate - me, at least. So what keeps the Presbyterians doing it this way? Tradition, perhaps. Or maybe it really does move their Spirits in some way that it just doesn't move mine.

I find two things most remarkable about chapel worship here. First, there is a certain choreographed pageantry about it: worship leaders sit in certain places, stand in certain places for certain actions, and never ever interact with the congregation. People who never wear anything more dressy than a t-shirt to class will dress up tremendously for their days as chapel leader (it is my wicked fantasy, should I last that long at Austin Seminary, to give my Senior Sermon in bermuda shorts and a hawaiian shirt). And everything, everything, is done in an emotionally neutral manner, with only an occasional exception of humor or emotion during a sermon. 

Second, there is a fixed attachment to worship as centered around Sacraments. The Sacrament of "Proclaiming the Word" (reading and explaining texts from the Bible) takes up most of the service, with the tedious Sacrament of "The Lord's Supper" (or "Eucharist") taking up an equal space of time when it is celebrated. And they are so serious about this latter ritual that it can only be conducted by an authorized clergyperson at a time and place authorized by a governing body of some sort. Even so, there is an empty plate and empty chalice present on the "Lord's Table" for all worship services, just to show how central this ritual would be if it were being performed.

Which brings me to my second and perhaps even more sacrosanct fantasy: sticking a medium size candle in that chalice and lighting it at the beginning of a worship service sometime. Somehow I don't think I'd last very long after that, though...

"The Lord's Prayer" - my version

If I ever get to lead morning prayer in the Austin Seminary Chapel again, these are the words I think I might use:

Our Heavenly Parent,

blessed be your many names.

We forge your community,

we follow your will,

a Kingdom of Heaven right here

in our daily lives.

Heal today our broken-ness,

that we may help to heal  

the broken-ness that is around us

And fulfill our basic needs,

that we may better serve those

whose needs are not being met

Help us resist our selfishness,

and protect us from harm,

For you are the source of all blessing and power,

now and forever,

Amen

Prayer of Confession

My spiritual direction group this morning worked through an article on the (originally monastic) practice of solitude as a way to achieve spiritual integrity. The article built on the 4th-century Christian "desert fathers" and their conviction that mainstream society was "a shipwreck from which each [person] had to swim for his life." Our at-large society, and perhaps even the sub-communities we join within it, is a "dangerous network of domination and manipulation" that seems to inextricably require that we abandon our religious principles in order to participate. We "children of the light" are coopted to becom "conspirators with darkness." One solution, then, is not to participate: to swim for your life to a place where you can be, with other escapees, continually in touch with the spiritual center of your life. Monks call this practice "solitude."

The clincher for me, though, was the post-monastic idea that solitude of this sort is an attitude, a state of mind, not a physical location. It does not require being removed from the culture, just being apart from it. Imagine that! Imagine if we were to truly cultivate a life where in each moment we tried to act from a deeper place than the culturally-expected focus on the self: imagine acting in each moment from a deeply centered connection to the Spirit of Life and Love, the Ground of Being, the Word of Ultimate Truth...however you concieve of the spiritual reality known in western cultural shorthand as "God".

Imagine with me what that would look like. If our daily life were not dominated by what the article I read calls "main enemies of the spiritual life" (self-exaggerations such as Fear, Anger, and Greed that put our own concern so squarely in our focus-of-vision that we cannot see past it), but instead were punctuated by a continual series of attempts to connect to and act out of the deeper spiritual ground of our being...we would become the spiritual beings we were made to be. We would be like Christ, or the Buddha, or Gandhi, or ML King Jr. Insert your religious radical here.

We would react to each encounter with another not in terms of their expediency to us (I said I wanted chips, not fries!), or their obstacle-ness in our rush to make every meeting and deadline, or their potential to harm us...but rather we would see them each as an imago Dei, an image of God, a person containing the same Divine Spark we contain. Each person would be our teacher, and each person our pupil: the God in Me would seek to connect with the God in the Other. There would be no need to trot out that well-worn First Principle of "Inherent worth and dignity," for that worth would be manifest and obvious to us. If we could truly practice solitude-from-society in every moment of our lives, we would begin to create an alternate society, to form the Beloved Community right here in the midst of the world of selfish darkness.

As I was reading this, I realized that I have failed to live up to my religious principles here in the very beginning of my seminary journey. I have been letting fear and anger and greed dominate when I should be acting out of a true desire to know the pieces of Truth that my fellow Images of God have brought to me here, to offer me for my own deepening in faith. And so, I found myself composing in my head a very classic Christian piece: the following prayer of confession. And now that I've got that out, I feel so much more at peace. For now.

Great Spirit of Love and Life, from which every Blessing flows,
I confess that I have not loved your children with my whole being:
Out of fear of losing my own perspective,
I have shut out the perspectives of others;
Out of hurt that others had not considered my feelings,
I have allowed anger to fester in my heart;
Out of an experience of being singled out,
I have seen oppression and exclusion when they were not there;
Out of a desire to be fed the fruits of my own tradition,
I have been un-thankful for the food freely given me by others.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
that I may truly be in communion with your many and varied children here,
that I may truly learn the lessons of the perspective I have been given,
that I may be a vessel for your healing love and grace,
and that I may be of greater service to you and your creations.
Amen

Trinity redux

I saw a flower blooming (on Halloween, folks! the weather here is weird) on the way out this morning. It was a tiny flower, a perfect little triangle, composed of three petals that almost perfectly overlapped. I decided to call it a "trinity flower."

For the first time I understood this whole Trinity idea, in the form of a metaphor presented by Nature herself: one Flower, three Petals. Each petal distinct, but each emanating from the same flower, none of them could be said to be a flower in its own right, and all of them dependent on some central flower-part that is unseen but every bit as real and important. 

Too bad the midterm happened last week...

Open letter to US Congress

Dear US Congresspersons:

Thank you for having the courage to stand up against the President and Wall Street and vote down a package of aid of $700 billion to the extremely wealthy megacorporations who brought this economic crisis crashing down on our heads in the first place. I know the Dow Jones "Industrial" Index fell several percentage points, but I do believe the market will get over it. Seriously. It's in the best interest of the market to do so.

Now that we have kept $700 billion from going down the drain of an unsustainable economy, lets put that money where it belongs: into building citizen confidence (note that I am not using that awful word, "consumer") in our communities and our institutions of government. $700 billion dollars is enough money to invest in citizen "bailouts" averaging almost $2500 per American adult and child. Every family of four could get around $10,000 to help make those mortgage payments, keep food on the table, pay down student loan and credit card debt, and make up for the retirement and college savings they just lost in the stock market crash.

$2500 for a single man or woman might make the difference between defaulting on student loans and just getting by. It might make the difference between affording those health insurance premiums and copays or going without -- as the cost of treatment doubles or triples. It might make the difference between having a bed to sleep in and becoming one of the nation's hopeless homeless. 

So, what do you think? Lift up the people on whose backs our economic house of cards has been built, or prevent a few megacorporations from merging, buying each other out, and otherwise having a bad year? My answer is to help the people.

Taking a longer view, it is time to follow the example of our European neighbors and partially socialize our economy. It is time for us to shift from a notion of each individual and company pursuing their own best interests to a notion of the Greater Good. The individual must exist within a community, and if the needs of the community are not taken care of, the individual is at risk. We must switch from an economy of consumers to an economy of producers: the job of the individual (and especially the corporation) is not to make money for itself, but to provide for the common good...of which it is a part!

Very truly I tell you: by the end of the next decade, we must provide every human being in America with a bed to sleep in, three meals a day, and access to at least basic preventative health care or our country will fall apart at the seams. FDR saw this, and he held the country together with duct tape, self confidence, and federal job programs. We must do this again. We must build sustainable communities, sustainable economies, and sustainable ecology or there will be no community, economy, or ecology for my children and yours to inherit. The future depends on what we do today.

We must do this...why not start today?

Yours sincerely,

James Camp

More thoughts on the Trinity

Believe it or not, Theology class hit on the Trinity again today. And, believe it or not, I have some thoughts on the subject. 

The current best-defense of the idea of the Trinity seems to be that God is inherently relational and therefore must exist as a relationship. (one argument seems to go: if "God is Love," God must have someone to love or God would cease to exist; if God created the universe, there must have been a point when the universe did not exist, and God was alone; in order for God to exist alone, God must consist of multiple persons that can love each other.)

I don't buy it. If God needs to be in relation to someone, why not create someone to be in relationship with. Oh, wait...God did! But, you ask, what about before God created us? UU process theologian Charles Hartshorne posited that God has always existed in relationship to one universe or another; that this universe may have been created out of the ashes of a prior one, and so forth. Not a bad idea, though honestly it smacks of circular reasoning.

But let's just say for the sake of argument that God does need to exist as a relationship. Why three? Haven't theologians ever heard the saying "two's company, three's a crowd"? God could easily exist in relationship with Godself in the guise of a male-female dualism (which, as any person married longer than a few years knows involves many different kinds of love in addition to the obvious erotic-generative love), a parent-child dualism (which models the creator-created relationship to some extent), or even a "dyslexic dualism:" God and his/her Dog (modeling that God is God's own best friend, rubs God's own belly, fetches those subatomic particles that keep getting away during creation, etc). Why do you need a third person? 

My theory: because those crazy pagans already have the god-goddess dipole set up, and the parent-child dipole smacks of hierarchy unless you add a third person and make it a triangle instead of a line. But, then, why not four? or five? or an infinite number of Divine facets, each of which can "relate" to the others?

And finally: my suggestion for a new, post-feminist, post-modern, post-everything-else Trinity:

• Mother - sophia - wisdom, nurture, love
• Father - logos - reason, teaching, divine order
• Child - lumos - illumination, guidance, the "still, small voice," that-of-God-within

Gets rid of the Divine Patriarchy implied by the Father-Son-Spirit Trinity, gets rid of the modalism of the "economic" Trinity (Creator-Sustainer-Redeemer), and totally eschews sexism in either direction. Mother and Father share generative love that creates life; Mother nurtures, Father teaches - to use classic gender roles - Child exists in solidarity with the created: Immanuel, the God-with-us (and -within-us) that permeates life in the universe and provides us with our leadings/nudgings/callings and other forms of guidance. 

Neat, huh?

On the Trinity

I feel the need to say this: Unitarian does not mean the same thing as "anti-Trinitarian." There, I've said it. 

The Unity of God (and its corollary, the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth) is the idea with which we have been labeled, but it is not at all the idea on which we hang our hats. Putting it another way, "unitarianism" is not the island on which we live, but rather the bridge by which we originally got there. Rather, we live on the Island of Human Goodness (as opposed to Calvin's Island of Human Depravity). And we live there quite happily, Trinity or no.

I can't believe the number of people at Seminary this week who have been tossing Trinity-related jokes, barbs, and generally good-natured ribbings my way -- probably in the wake of Dave Jensen's comment in theology class that "a number of anti-Trinitarian movements have cropped up over the years...hey wait, where's James?" (this happened to be the only Seminary class I have missed this entire semester, and perhaps the one where I most needed to be there to defend myself!) I'm not sure what people thought my response would be, but the general expectation seems to be that sparks would have flown or I would have burst into flames or something.

That said, my Unitarian ancestors-in-the-faith found the Trinity to be:

• unnecessarily complicated (that is, God could be understood perfectly well without the idea),
• doxologically unhelpful (that is, the core teaching of human moral perfectability, that Jesus was able to live a perfect life and therefore so should we, was obfuscated by the teaching that Jesus was both God and human and therefore Not Like Us), and
• unbiblical (that is, they could find no point in the Bible where Jesus claimed to be of one substance with the Father or where God was described as being three persons - rather, the Hebrew Bible goes to great lengths to assert that God is One and worship of substitute persons, idols, emanations, etc is bad - if soli scriptura is really the way to go, then the Trinity is right out).

Modern Unitarian Universalists find the Trinity to be:

• unnecessarily complicated,
• kinda weird, and
• so (exclusively) Christian it hurts.

Other than that, we don't really give it much thought. So we are not really anti-Trinitarians. Sorry to confuse you. You Trinitarians can go about your business, we will not be burning any of you at the stake.  ;-)

The Great Emergence

I had the great and rare pleasure yesterday of getting to listen to Phyllis Tickle -- billed as "founding editor of the Religion Department of Publishers Weekly" among other things -- discuss her new book, The Great Emergence. Phyllis has quite obviously spent a life studying, contemplating, and writing about the social history of the Christian religion...and she has a great deal to say about it.

The thesis of her "conversation" today (everything in the Emergent Church movement seems to be labeled a 'conversation' of some sort or another) was that the "emergent" or "emerging" movement we are starting to see is part of a grand tradition in western religion of periodically breaking down and completely re-forming or re-building our religious basis. To this end, Phyllis makes two possibly-controversial but simultaneously very revealing assertions: first, that the Abrahamic religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- does the Baha'i faith count?) reach a breaking point roughly every 500 years at which the present basis of authority and religious understanding can no longer hold and must be re-formed; second, that we are in the midst of one of these 500-year reformations right now.

Looking at the first assertion as it impacts the Judeo-Christian tradition:

• 1000 BCE: King David, the consolidation of Israel and worship of Yahweh; religious authority from oral tradition and a divine monarchy, temporal authority from divine monarchy
• 500 BCE: Second-Temple Judaism, the "invention" of monotheism; religious authority from a vaguely-defined collection of written scriptures and a priestly class, temporal authority from a priest-sanctioned monarchy
• 0 BCE/CE: The Coming of Christ, beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire, the first universalization of monotheism (ie, our God should be everybody's God); religious authority from Christ and his directly-appointed apostles (and their appointees, the Bishops) - or in Jewish tradition from the Rabbinate, temporal authority from the Emperors
• 500 CE: Catholicism/Orthodoxy, fall of Rome and beginning of teutonic warrior-states; religious authority from the Pope (west) or the Emperor (east), temporal authority from whoever has military strength to own the land
• 1000 CE: The East/West Schism, beginning of feudal monarchies; in the west: religious authority from the Pope, temporal authority sanctioned by the Pope
• 1500 CE: The Reformation, beginning of modern nations; religious authority from the canonized scriptures as interpreted by an educated pastorate (typically sanctioned by the national Church), temporal authority from a sense of national identity - evolution of the idea of 'consent of the governed'
• 2000 CE: The Emergence, globalization-pluralism-multiculturalism; religious authority from spirit-led individuals in community, temporal authority from a sense of global human identity - notion of government as ensurer of social justice, eco-justice, and common welfare of all people

It seems like a reasonable fit to the data, no? It is not, however, the only fit to the data, nor does it account for the fact that other revolutions have happened out-of-sync with this cycle (eg, the American Revolution / American Reformation and the onset of the individual-in-community as source of authority was about 250 years out-of-sync with this cycle)

And the second assertion? That we are in the midst of one of these great upheavals right now? I have to admit that my wife and I have been sensing "the end of the world as we know it" for a few years now: global climate change is driving home the point that we really must all work together to make our culture sustainable or my kids will not inherit a very nice home, global religio-civil conflicts are driving home the similar point that we really must all learn to talk to (and listen to, and work with) each other or we just may all end up killing each other, and the fact that we can't even all agree to talk about these issues because we'd much rather hate each other on religious or political grounds says that we really do need a new religious and cultural basis for our society. 

To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine: what better time than now?

Why UUmergent?

I was introduced to the idea of the Emergent (or Emerging) Christian movement sometime this summer in one of those wonderful synchronicities that flag something for me as important: or, put another way, important things always come in threes. First, I saw a book titled something like "why we aren't emergent (by two guys who ought to be)" in the Seminary bookstore...picking it up, I quickly decided that whatever "emergent" was,  if the authors were against it I was for it! The next day I saw the "emerging church" mentioned in a news article with a quote from some guy named Brian McLaren. Interesting. The next time I was in the Seminary bookstore, I happened on a copy of Peter Rollins' How (not) to speak of God  on clearance. I picked it up, quickly read the first two chapters (amazing for me) and decided I was an Emergent Unitarian. 

Soon thereafter, a series of conversations with new friend and fellow seminarian Mike Clawson convinced me that there is a tremendous synergy between what the Unitarian Universalist movement is trying to do and what the Emergent Church movement is trying to do. We come at it from opposite angles, perhaps -- Mike, from a post-evangelical perspective of working to broaden the scope of conservative Christianity, and myself, from a post-liberal perspective of trying to remind Unitarian Universalists that the Christian message is at the heart of everything we believe and do. But we find common ground, I think, in three principles (correct me if I'm wrong, Mike!):

1. Nurture the Spirit / Heal the Broken. Provide a home for the religiously damaged to rebuild a positive faith in community with others who are on the same journey.
2. Heal the World / Be the Change. Build a just, loving, and sustainable world community one small step at a time.
3. What you believe is less important than how you act out your faith, and how you let your beliefs be in conversation with those of others.

Sound like a good description of Unitarian Universalism? Turns out it isn't a bad description of the New Christianity, either. Imagine that!