© Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and delivered to
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County
April 15 2012.
Whispering Woods is an apartment complex not far from here. In fact, when we were new in town, we looked at an apartment there.
As you may already know there was a stand-off and two deaths there on Thursday.
That there was trouble in Whispering Woods might not be shocking to you, if you’ve lived here longer than I have.
Whispering Woods has a history. The Modesto Bee used the unfortunate title “Neighborhood has a dark history,” which I think borders on racism.
Here’s the thing: at first blush this story has no relationship to Baseball and False Nostalgia, right?
Except it does.
Once, Whispering Woods was known as Prescott Estates. Prescott Estates was built to be a middle-class condo development. And with that goal in mind, the builders of Prescott Estates were engaging in the game of false nostalgia.
While obviously most developers develop properties to make money, while they are developing these developments, they are creating a narrative about this new place they are creating. The are imagining the families that will move in, and what they’ll be like.
As I said, we looked at these apartments when we first arrived. The rooms are nicely sized, there is plenty of green space around each 4 unit building, each unit has a garage spot.
The developers of Prescott Estates were not looking to create a neighborhood where all the “poor, undesirables” would be ghettoized. I’m sure that the sales brochures produced in the 1970’s for the place showed people smiling, laughing and talking with neighbors. Happy children, new cars and back yard barbeques.
But through a series of housing bubbles and bumps, the place was so bad that in 2000 there were 1,225 police calls there a year, that’s about 4 times each day.
Nobody…nobody develops housing hoping that the police will be there 4 times each day.
In about 2002, the name of the place was changed from Prescott Estates to Whispering Woods, in an attempt to wipe clean the slate, to erase the past, to offer a new start.
Now can you see the relationship between this story and false nostalgia?
The story of Prescott Estates/Whispering Woods was from its very beginning, based in part on a fiction.
There is another, important component to this story that took place on Thursday. The Prescott Evangelical Free Church, right across Prescott from Whispering Woods opened its doors to the community. Associate Pastor Russ Cantu was interviewed for the Modesto Bee.
He talked about the church’s relationship with the neighborhood, and how this opening of their doors, and hosting a Red Cross Evacuation center, was a natural outgrowth of their relationship with their neighborhood.
And this got me thinking. Why did this story about the church opening its doors warm my heart so much?
Part of the reason, I think, is that this is how I see the church. This is part of my narrative about church. Church responds to the needs of the people in and around it.
Isn’t church, too, though, victim of a history that isn’t completely based on fact?
I will admit to you that I watch TV shows about ministers. Probably more than most do. Call it occupational hazard if you have to, but I enjoy them. I’m also on guard for shows that aren’t about parish life specifically, but have the occasional clergy person in them.
While I was living in Canada, I became a giant fan of a TV show called Little Mosque on the Prairie. The title is obviously a play on the TV show from the 70’s, Little House on the Prairie. The Little House show was based, somewhat loosely, on the Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author who introduced five-year-old Joe Cherry to what would become his lifelong love of history.
The Little House show had a town pastor by the name of Rev. Robert Alden, portrayed by Dabs Greer. Rev. Alden often offers little bits of loving advice to the growing Laura Ingalls. He is a gentle presence to the town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota. He does however have a past. After the death of this family, Alden became a serious alcoholic until called by the Lord to be a good Christian.
Little Mosque on the Prairie chronicles a modern Imam, Amaar Rashid. Amaar is a Toronto attorney who hears God’s call to become an Imam. His parents are not amused. He takes a job in the fictional town of Mercy Saskatchewan, population 14,000. Among Amaar’s difficulties is that he doesn’t have a beard, so the conservatives don’t trust him, and the mosque is located in the rented hall of the local Anglican Church. Oh, and they’re a group of Muslims living in Saskatchewan, which is roughly the Canadian equivalent of Kansas.
And then there are the BBC clergy persons: the Vicar of Dibly, and the poor, long-suffering Vicar of the church that Hyacinth Bucket attends.
In each of these stories, at some point, the local House of Faith opens its doors to those in need.
The Prescott Evangelical Free Church opened its doors to an urgent need.
Weekly, we make sure our doors are open for various recovery groups every week.
Fiction meets reality. Quite nice, isn’t it?
As you may be able to tell I was quite saddened by the shootings at the Whispering Woods Thursday, and I was very heartened to hear about one way our neighbors in faith responded.
What are your personal ideas about what a church is? About how a faith community responds and engages with your own life?
Are your own ideas and ideals about how the part that this community plays in your life hindering or enriching your own experience here?
++++++++++++++++++++
Just like Prescott Estates has both a fiction and a reality, so has baseball, and what baseball represents.
Baseball is America’s game, right? Many of us grow up playing some version of it, whether poorly or well, in fields and streets of this country.
Baseball, Mom and Apple Pie.
When you say the word baseball, images pop into mind, don’t they. You can almost smell the hot dogs from the stadium vendors.
Like the fiction of Whispering Woods, Baseball’s story is not as simple as it first appears. There are nuances. And if we fail to look beyond the simple picture portrayed for us, we are doing a disservice to all involved.
Baseball, largely in its current form, has been around since… well, it’s hard to say. Here is an image from a book in 1744.
Both Abner Doubleday and Alexander Carthwright have been given credit for the “invention” of modern-day baseball, though the evidence is dubious at best.
Certainly no serious historian, myself included, can see enough evidence to credit either man.
But the story of baseball isn’t always just about facts, is it?
Baseball has a romantic quality to it, doesn’t it? We see images of Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantel and Joe DiMaggio. But the truth is so much deeper than those images.
Yes, Jackie Robinson broke through the color lines in 1946 to play ball for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but it was still 20 years before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s.
While America was trying to convince itself that our world looked like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, the reality of many was vastly different.
The danger of this false nostalgia is people will speak about “The good old days.” Blogger Ed Babinski had this to say:
[Here is] The Assertion of Religious Right: Society today is worse off than it used to be. Things were better in the "good old days."
Counter: Exactly when were the "good old days?" In one episode of the TV series, Dave, his wife tells him, "I just want our kids to grow up in the same world we did." To which Dave replies, "You want our kids to grow up in a world with bomb shelters, polio, and separate drinking fountains?"
There may have been prayer in school back then, but there were also lynch mobs, communist "witch hunts," segregation, open anti-Semitism and Catholic-bashing. There was child abuse and spousal abuse, but it went mostly unreported, unnoticed, unpunished. And it was OK then to bar women and people of color from various professions and to pay them far less than their due in any work situation. Were those the "good old days?"
The danger is when people really begin to believe that the past has some hold on perfection. This leads to all kinds of behaviors and laws which are antithetical to our modern lives.
Just as we know that we are better off today than we were 60 years ago, there are those who feel that the exact opposite is true.
They want to go back to a “simpler time.”
Except a simpler time is a lie.
What they want to go back to is blissful ignorance of the suffering of the world around them.
And we can’t allow that, can we?
As much as anyone, I can understand the desire for a time when my understanding of life and the universe was much less nuanced than it is now.
Do what is right, get rewarded. Do what is wrong, get sent to your room.
But we know that this is not how the world works.
In our efforts to heal the world around us, we too must let go of our older views of reality. Religious Conservatives are not evil. They are not all backward. They are people, like us.
They want what we want: a happy place to live, where they feel safe, where they can hit a good sale at their favorite store, and they can go to bed, secure in the knowledge that all is well.
Our response to the world around us is a different one than theirs. Where their response tends to be akin to circling the wagons for protection, ours tends to be a seeking of a place of inclusion.
Partly our job in this is more difficult than theirs. If are really going to practice what we preach, we have to include them in our worldview, too. Not just tolerate, but include. We have to make a place for them.
We are also called to make a place for the stories of the habitually oppressed.
The latter is more natural to us.
So what can we do about the story of Prescott Estates/Whispering Woods?
We can reach out to our neighbors.
We can make a plan, so that, may the heavens forbid, should a similar tragedy happen where we are the closest house of worship, we know exactly what we are going to do.
We will have a plan for reaching out to our neighbors, a plan for comforting and assisting the people we live near.
Tragedy will strike again. This is part of life.
But if we are prepared, if we know that the idea of the good old days when things like this just didn’t happen is a lie, we can get right to the business of healing our neighbors, our city, our world.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Monday, April 9, 2012
What Improbable Things Do We Believe?
Written for and delivered to
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County
April 8 2012.
Easter is the highest of holidays for our Christian friends. It is a story forever intertwined with Passover, a holiday marked first by the Jewish people. Passover commemorates the end of their time as slaves in Egypt.
For Christians, Easter marks the central miracle of their faith, the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
For Unitarian Unversalists, this time can be marked by discomfort. We don’t know what to do on Easter.
What many have done in the past is talk about how the Christians co-opted other Spring festivals, or how many similarities the story of Jesus has with other “son of God” myths.
Sometimes this has been done in the honest intent of exploration.
More often, though, I have witnessed this as an exercise born out our less than highest ideals.
Passover and Easter are a cultural force. They are part of the Western Cultural Lexicon. Our own culture is steeped in the stories of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Many of us in this sanctuary came to Unitarian Universalism from some other faith tradition. And we left that faith because it didn’t suit us. It didn’t fulfill our needs, we couldn’t reconcile some part of its practice with our heart and mind.
And then, in order to create safety between ourselves and the old faith, we, as a people, we have said things like “I’m a recovering Catholic.” Or we have gut reactions to words that some people find sacred; God, church, altar, obligation and many others.
I am not immune to this.
Hell is the reason I left Christianity.
I could not reconcile the idea that people who had not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior, would suffer eternal punishment.
I had one particularly close friend who I lost over this discussion. His name is Jose, and as we started college, he became a born-again Christian. The more he embraced his new faith, the more “inflexible” I experienced him to be, the deeper I dug my own heels into the ground, resisting his new narrative.
I became smug with the best of them.
As my anger with Jose over his new faith grew, our clashes over religion became more intense. He saw his mission as one that expressed love. He loved me, and he wanted to save me from what he saw as an honestly deplorable future. I wanted to convince him that his new friends were the problem, that they were using this threat and fear tactic to brainwash him.
And in the process, I was losing my friend.
I wasn’t self-aware enough then to notice that a lot of my energy was coming from grief.
After a couple of years of increasing divide between Jose and I, we stopped talking. That was 23 years ago. I think about him now and again, and I wonder if he’s still strong in his faith, if it still brings him comfort.
And back then, who knew that I’d be here today, preaching to a faith community, on Easter Sunday?
With apologies, I’m going to quote my younger self.
How could Jose believe such a ridiculous story? How could this very smart, smarter than me, young man, believe that Jesus died and rose from the dead three days later? I was annoyed, I was angry…
And also I was scared. When I first arrived, I spoke about my concern that I might be wrong, and that being wrong, too obstinate to believe, well what if there were consequences?
And this is where I think much our energy in our own relationship with Christianity comes from.
In our fear, we use the potent power of our minds to make distance.
How else can one explain how a people so committed to diversity, can have such short wicks when it comes to Christianity?
I used the term “Sexton” here once in church, and actually watched a person instinctively recoil.
And that’s the thing, these reactions I see are too quick, too almost instinctual to be rational. There is something almost animal in them.
So, this brought me to the question of “Why?”
I love this question. I’ve been asking it my whole life.
A lot.
So…. Why? Why would these people, these Unitarian Universalists I have known since 1995, why would they so easily tolerate faiths like Buddhism, Paganism with nary a batted eye, but the minute Jesus is mention, get all rankled?
I suspect it has to do with pain.
If our rejection of other faiths was based solely on our rejection of their own improbable beliefs, then what chance do any of them have?
Buddhists believe in reincarnation, right? There is no evidence of reincarnation, is there? And yet, many of us will claim to be Buddhist-inspired.
Pagans believe, often, in a Creatrix and her male consort. This isn’t much different than believing in the story from the Jewish Book of Genesis, is it?
And yet few if any members of this Fellowship would react as strongly to portions of these two stories with the energy and venom with which they react to someone mentioning Jesus in church.
In his book 1981 book Stages of Faith, James W. Fowler developed a theory of six stages that people go through as their faith matures based on the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. The basic theory can be applied, not only to those in traditional faiths, but those who follow alternative spiritualities or secular worldviews as well.
The names are somewhat clunky, and if I read the stages to you, it would sound like me reading a book report from up here, and none of us want that. So I’m going to just give you a VERY brief overview of three of the stages.
Stage 4 is called “Individuative-Reflective.” This is a very difficult stage, when people begin to think outside of the boxes they grew up in. Depending on the environment they come from, the very act of entering this stage can be traumatic and leave deep emotional scars.
Fowler’s 5th stage is called “Conjunctive Faith.” It is rare for people to reach this stage before mid-life. This is the point when people begin to realize the limits of logic and start to accept the paradoxes in life. They begin to see life as a mystery and often return to sacred stories and symbols but this time without being stuck in a theological box.
The 6th stage is called “Universalizing Faith,” and according to Fowler, few people reach this stage. Those who do live their lives to the full in service of others without any real worries or doubts.
I’m not just bringing this information forward because I want to prove to you that I actually went to seminary, and we did more there than contemplate our navels.
I think that Unitarian Universalism, as a whole, is stuck in Stage 4, Individuative-Reflective. As an institution, we are not yet “old” enough to deal comfortably with the paradoxes in life. We are not yet ready to let go of our death grip on logic and enjoy the ride.
In some ways, we are like people on a roller coaster. We want to be able to remove our hands from the safety bar, but we can’t quite..yet. We can rationalize that thousands of people have ridden this ride before and few, if any, have died doing so. We might even resent those on the coaster who are able to let go of the bar and lift their hands up and experience the true, deep joy of the ride.
We Unitarian Universalists have our own improbable beliefs.
We believe in things as far fetched as “world peace.” A world were every person will be treated with dignity and have their worth reflected back to them.
We’re comfortable in the knowledge that we, with our efforts, can work toward these goals, even if we think that it won’t take place during our own lifetime.
I have a favorite Chinese proverb on our fridge at home “One generation plants the tree, and the next generation enjoys the shade.”
That, my dear friends, is faith.
It is not the same kind of faith as our friends who are celebrating the central mystery of Christianity today. But I hope that we can see that faith is faith, that it sometimes helps one to endure. That it is ultimately a tool that we can use to get through difficult times, and that can remind us to be mindful and grateful for the joys in our lives.
As we share the beauty of nature this morning in our Flower Communion, see our own faith in humanity expressed here.
Smell the glorious fragrance, in the full knowledge that some are allergic.
See the diversity of color and function, and be glad that we also don’t all look alike
Feel the delicate petals and leaves, and be reminded of the gentle touch of true friends in times of sorrow and celebration.
May we, as a people of faith, remind ourselves and each other, of the beauty of diversity of people, who come in all shapes and sizes, all age ranges, and physical attributes. That our diversity of income, political point of view, gender expression and affectional orientation are a strength to us as a whole.
As the Unitarian heretic and minister Francis David said 400 years ago: We need not all think alike to love alike.
Go forth from this, our sacred space, and spread love.
May it be so.
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County
April 8 2012.
Easter is the highest of holidays for our Christian friends. It is a story forever intertwined with Passover, a holiday marked first by the Jewish people. Passover commemorates the end of their time as slaves in Egypt.
For Christians, Easter marks the central miracle of their faith, the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
For Unitarian Unversalists, this time can be marked by discomfort. We don’t know what to do on Easter.
What many have done in the past is talk about how the Christians co-opted other Spring festivals, or how many similarities the story of Jesus has with other “son of God” myths.
Sometimes this has been done in the honest intent of exploration.
More often, though, I have witnessed this as an exercise born out our less than highest ideals.
Passover and Easter are a cultural force. They are part of the Western Cultural Lexicon. Our own culture is steeped in the stories of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Many of us in this sanctuary came to Unitarian Universalism from some other faith tradition. And we left that faith because it didn’t suit us. It didn’t fulfill our needs, we couldn’t reconcile some part of its practice with our heart and mind.
And then, in order to create safety between ourselves and the old faith, we, as a people, we have said things like “I’m a recovering Catholic.” Or we have gut reactions to words that some people find sacred; God, church, altar, obligation and many others.
I am not immune to this.
Hell is the reason I left Christianity.
I could not reconcile the idea that people who had not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior, would suffer eternal punishment.
I had one particularly close friend who I lost over this discussion. His name is Jose, and as we started college, he became a born-again Christian. The more he embraced his new faith, the more “inflexible” I experienced him to be, the deeper I dug my own heels into the ground, resisting his new narrative.
I became smug with the best of them.
As my anger with Jose over his new faith grew, our clashes over religion became more intense. He saw his mission as one that expressed love. He loved me, and he wanted to save me from what he saw as an honestly deplorable future. I wanted to convince him that his new friends were the problem, that they were using this threat and fear tactic to brainwash him.
And in the process, I was losing my friend.
I wasn’t self-aware enough then to notice that a lot of my energy was coming from grief.
After a couple of years of increasing divide between Jose and I, we stopped talking. That was 23 years ago. I think about him now and again, and I wonder if he’s still strong in his faith, if it still brings him comfort.
And back then, who knew that I’d be here today, preaching to a faith community, on Easter Sunday?
With apologies, I’m going to quote my younger self.
How could Jose believe such a ridiculous story? How could this very smart, smarter than me, young man, believe that Jesus died and rose from the dead three days later? I was annoyed, I was angry…
And also I was scared. When I first arrived, I spoke about my concern that I might be wrong, and that being wrong, too obstinate to believe, well what if there were consequences?
And this is where I think much our energy in our own relationship with Christianity comes from.
In our fear, we use the potent power of our minds to make distance.
How else can one explain how a people so committed to diversity, can have such short wicks when it comes to Christianity?
I used the term “Sexton” here once in church, and actually watched a person instinctively recoil.
And that’s the thing, these reactions I see are too quick, too almost instinctual to be rational. There is something almost animal in them.
So, this brought me to the question of “Why?”
I love this question. I’ve been asking it my whole life.
A lot.
So…. Why? Why would these people, these Unitarian Universalists I have known since 1995, why would they so easily tolerate faiths like Buddhism, Paganism with nary a batted eye, but the minute Jesus is mention, get all rankled?
I suspect it has to do with pain.
If our rejection of other faiths was based solely on our rejection of their own improbable beliefs, then what chance do any of them have?
Buddhists believe in reincarnation, right? There is no evidence of reincarnation, is there? And yet, many of us will claim to be Buddhist-inspired.
Pagans believe, often, in a Creatrix and her male consort. This isn’t much different than believing in the story from the Jewish Book of Genesis, is it?
And yet few if any members of this Fellowship would react as strongly to portions of these two stories with the energy and venom with which they react to someone mentioning Jesus in church.
In his book 1981 book Stages of Faith, James W. Fowler developed a theory of six stages that people go through as their faith matures based on the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. The basic theory can be applied, not only to those in traditional faiths, but those who follow alternative spiritualities or secular worldviews as well.
The names are somewhat clunky, and if I read the stages to you, it would sound like me reading a book report from up here, and none of us want that. So I’m going to just give you a VERY brief overview of three of the stages.
Stage 4 is called “Individuative-Reflective.” This is a very difficult stage, when people begin to think outside of the boxes they grew up in. Depending on the environment they come from, the very act of entering this stage can be traumatic and leave deep emotional scars.
Fowler’s 5th stage is called “Conjunctive Faith.” It is rare for people to reach this stage before mid-life. This is the point when people begin to realize the limits of logic and start to accept the paradoxes in life. They begin to see life as a mystery and often return to sacred stories and symbols but this time without being stuck in a theological box.
The 6th stage is called “Universalizing Faith,” and according to Fowler, few people reach this stage. Those who do live their lives to the full in service of others without any real worries or doubts.
I’m not just bringing this information forward because I want to prove to you that I actually went to seminary, and we did more there than contemplate our navels.
I think that Unitarian Universalism, as a whole, is stuck in Stage 4, Individuative-Reflective. As an institution, we are not yet “old” enough to deal comfortably with the paradoxes in life. We are not yet ready to let go of our death grip on logic and enjoy the ride.
In some ways, we are like people on a roller coaster. We want to be able to remove our hands from the safety bar, but we can’t quite..yet. We can rationalize that thousands of people have ridden this ride before and few, if any, have died doing so. We might even resent those on the coaster who are able to let go of the bar and lift their hands up and experience the true, deep joy of the ride.
We Unitarian Universalists have our own improbable beliefs.
We believe in things as far fetched as “world peace.” A world were every person will be treated with dignity and have their worth reflected back to them.
We’re comfortable in the knowledge that we, with our efforts, can work toward these goals, even if we think that it won’t take place during our own lifetime.
I have a favorite Chinese proverb on our fridge at home “One generation plants the tree, and the next generation enjoys the shade.”
That, my dear friends, is faith.
It is not the same kind of faith as our friends who are celebrating the central mystery of Christianity today. But I hope that we can see that faith is faith, that it sometimes helps one to endure. That it is ultimately a tool that we can use to get through difficult times, and that can remind us to be mindful and grateful for the joys in our lives.
As we share the beauty of nature this morning in our Flower Communion, see our own faith in humanity expressed here.
Smell the glorious fragrance, in the full knowledge that some are allergic.
See the diversity of color and function, and be glad that we also don’t all look alike
Feel the delicate petals and leaves, and be reminded of the gentle touch of true friends in times of sorrow and celebration.
May we, as a people of faith, remind ourselves and each other, of the beauty of diversity of people, who come in all shapes and sizes, all age ranges, and physical attributes. That our diversity of income, political point of view, gender expression and affectional orientation are a strength to us as a whole.
As the Unitarian heretic and minister Francis David said 400 years ago: We need not all think alike to love alike.
Go forth from this, our sacred space, and spread love.
May it be so.
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