I am pleased to see that you have created a “bigotry map”. For some time, I’ve wanted a comprehensive list of those against whom you are bigoted. Your map is even better than a list! Well done! I know people in both the groups in Little Rock who you have mapped. Thank you for recognizing their virtues.
However, you have also greatly offended me. My church is not on your Wall of Honor. What do you have against us?|
Please add us to your map immediately. Failing to do so may result in my taking legal action on my own behalf. Here is the information you need to correctly recognize us:
The Unitarian Universalist Church of Little Rock
1818 Reservoir Road
Little Rock, Arkansaw 72205
You can spot us by the rainbow banner out front.
Sincerely yours,
Johnnie B. Zip
P.S. I am unable to embed your map here on my blog. Your help in doing so would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
I wish we Unitarian Universalists were more willing to simply let our hearts break when they ought to break:
(The language gets worse, so turn the sound down now if need be. I expect I’ll turn autoplay off tomorrow, but today it stays.)
I remember the three steps in which the Newtown shooting became terribly real to me. The first was thinking, “Sandy Hook? Isn’t that where Scooter was the caretaker for his step-grandfather?” You Little Rock folks know who Scooter is.
The second step was reading my friend from Fayetteville, Geri, had moved to Sandy Hook–did I remember that she’d moved there? I sure won’t ever forget it–and that her son was right down the hall from the killings.
Then step three was a one-word post on Facebook from Lee Tomboulian–“No”–at the news that the daughter of someone in his circle of New York City jazz musicians was killed, and at that point, it all got very intimately inside my heart and head real.
We intellectualize when, and what, we should feel. How many victims–twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight? Good question. Here’s an answer: Who cares? Isn’t this terrible enough without quibbling over the details? Can’t you just let your heart break?
I’ve tried since then to read everything her parents put on Facebook about Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, to let it sink in and try to imagining what this must be like for them and their son, and to repost it with “Never Forget”.
I missed some, but I’ve tried, and now here is a bit of what her mother had to say for this anniversary:
I remember my six year old’s last words: “There’s something for you under my tree!” This is what she told the bus driver in the last moments before her death. The final words of a first grader. . . .
Sweet Caramel Princess,
Today I feel like I have an apple stuck in my throat. I am having trouble breathing as the memories come in like a flood. Two years ago we were waking up on a day like today to a nightmare that has still not ended. Your daddy went to take out the trash and there were reporters lurking in the bushes. Isaiah was huddled in his bed with a far away, glazed look in his eyes unable to get warm. I was unable to feel my arms or legs. You were not in your bed. The sound of the helicopters above made our small house shake and made conversation impossible.
The lump. The lump in my throat is knowing I can only have you as an angel when I just want you in my lap…
…We would trade everything to have you back. Even for ten seconds. I would give my all to kiss that sweet spot under your neck. . . .
I take comfort in the things we taught you in the short years we had you. Your life was well lived. You knew how to love. You knew how to live. I am so glad we let you make messes. I am so glad we gave you lots of hugs and kisses. You indeed lived a Beautiful Life . . .
Love,
Your Apricot Mami
Ana Grace loved Jesus, people and food. She also loved dancing, music and fun. She loved Canada, CT and Puerto Rico. She loved the sun. She was a real girl who was really murdered on December 14th, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
That it was necessary to say “a real girl who was really murdered” is disturbing. A mutual friend of mine and Geri’s, a nice guy despite being around the bend on conspiracy theories, told her the killings were a hoax. His “evidence” trumped her and her son’s eyewitness.
Skepticism is so valuable, valuable in particular when it is turned on itself. Rigorous self-honesty and constant critical thought can help you know where you embraced logic yet abandoned reason, where your skepticism became the worst form of gullibility.
When UU theologians refer to the “idolatry of reason” (a term I so dislike), this is typically all or part of what they’re talking about.
Emotion is sometimes dangerous when it disregards reason, but reason sometimes goes off the rails when it disregards emotion. The gut check of conscience can solve ethical problems our conscious mind evades or ignores or refuses to confront.
Sometimes that refusal to confront reality is based in pain or fear. UU theologian Sharon Welch put me onto the wonderful fiction of Toni Cade Bambara. I can do no better than to quote them:
Minnie Ransom [a character in Bambara’s The Salt-Eaters] sees such an avoidance of pain frequently in her work at the infirmary. She tells of an incident in which a woman came to the infirmary “clawing at her hair, wailing to beat the band, asking for some pills. Wanted a pill because she was in pain, felt bad, wanted to feel good.” The woman was overcome with pain because her mother had died. Minnie was appalled: “Her mama died, she’s supposed to feel bad. . . . Bless her heart, just a babe of the times. Wants to be smiling and feeling good all the time. Smooth sailing as they lower the mama into the ground.”
Which is not that far from Mike Cooley’s vision of the fundamentalist endgame:
So be it if they come to find out feeling good’s
as easy as denying that there’s day or night at all
til what it takes to feel a thing seems so far out of reach
they just claw their skin and grind their teeth and bawl
But I didn’t have these resources–Cooley’s song, Bambara’s novel, Welch’s theology–two years ago. I had to push through a day of grieving people everywhere with what I had at hand. I mean, there was at least one grieving person inside me. It felt like more.
That night, Patterson Hood and the Downtown Rumblers were closing out a tour. As a courtesy to fans who can’t attend, they let a show taper stream his signal on the internet so those of us at home could listen along. It was a lovely, heartfelt performance.
I know the song “A World of Hurt” very well and have been comforted by it on more than one hard occasion. When that intro started, I knew that what had to come that night finally was coming and that I was going to cry like a baby. It was exactly what I needed.
I cried all through writing this, too, through listening to that performance a few times, through writing about it, through thinking back on that dreadful day, through thinking about what the future might bring–
–and right on cue, there’s my daughter, feeling bad, so I must pause and take her temperature–
–and she’s okay–
–and while I remain ultimately optimistic, I’m was pretty sure then and just as sure now the crying isn’t over, by a long shot.
So what do we have, anyway? Three chords and the truth? A majority of people in a society run by a majority of money?
We have a lot, and one thing is the ability of art to bring us through life.
What Patterson Hood did for that crowd in Nashville–and for all of us who were connected to them that night, and for all of us who are connected to that performance right now, here in this age of local loneliness and world-wide connectivity–is sacred work. You don’t have to believe in the supernatural–I don’t–to believe in the sacred. Neither do you have to believe the people who do sacred work are anything more than ordinary human beings. Talented folks, or brave folks, or determined folks, beautiful soulful folks who do The Work.
What we do is who we are.
When anyone works with the raw material of people’s hearts and minds and lives, and transforms crushing grief, perhaps, by filtering it through persistent joy and turns it into something both beautiful and bearable, a bandage worn over a wound like a badge of honor.
And that is sacred work. No matter how it’s done, no matter what the intent, no matter how banal or strange or boring or downright freaky the method. Method just doesn’t matter. What counts is lives lifted up and hours filled with mercy, beauty, and joy.
Life lives its own schedule, not the one I try to impose on it. But I’ll do my best–and there are longer draft posts I’ll be finishing up soon. There’s also a study guide for the next local UU 102 session forthcoming:
In accordance with the December ministry theme of Wonder and Delight, we’ll look at two marvelous modern ways to get the news. One is this story in the Winter 2014 UUWorld,
For those of you in central Arkansas, this is Sunday, December 28th, 10 AM, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Little Rock at 1818 Reservoir Road. It’s part of our long-running Forum series of weekly discussions on varied topics.
The next two sessions are tentatively scheduled for January 25th and February 22nd and will cover (in some order–I’m still thinking about that) these articles and probably some additional blog posts to go with them:
Helping those we love in their times of trouble has occupied my mind these last few days. Here, the Rev. Katie Norris wonders:
Can you be the wind beneath each other’s sheets?
It’s written with a light touch and it shines that light on dark places. What does constitute a deal-breaker in a committed relationship? Does “in sickness and in health” come with the footnote “unless you are sick in a hard-to-handle way”?
Let me connect this to another thing I hear people say: “What if you change your mind about that tattoo?” My goodness! The idea that someone would commit to something for their entire life! But you’ve heard that, too, haven’t you?
We all know now that no job is safe and no stockholder owes anyone anything, that times are engineered to be uncertain unless you have a long fat wallet, that our world can be ended in a moment, and having being beaten with those corrupt ideas, we flinch at our commitments.
When the idea of mutual commitment goes away, our peer relations based on such mutual commitment weaken, as does the top-down, noblesse oblige commitment of old-school bosses, and our commitment to good work becomes fear-based.
First, the housekeeping note: I’ve had two family-type issues this last week, one with my family of raising and one with my family of choice. I’ve missed a few days and while I’m not going to try to catch up, I will post a few things besides the daily item.
I’m also breaking a personal guideline with this item: I’d said to myself I wouldn’t repeat authors for a while. This spoke directly to my life as I am living it right now, and so Rev. James Ishmael Ford is here to tell you about friendship as spiritual practice:
So, what does this look like in real life? How are we friends? Is it taking time to sign up for the care crew? Is it noticing someone you know here at church hasn’t been around for a while and giving her a call? Perhaps it’s that monthly commitment to the food pantry or preparing meals for Harrington Hall. These days I write much of sermon in the living room. My auntie, who was sitting next to me watching my furious typing, asked what I was writing about. I said friendship and asked if she had a thought? She said sometimes being a friend is knowing when to say no.
Yoko Ono tells us “Yes”; Ayn Rand tells us “No”; Sonic Youth says “Turn off the past and just say yes”; Nancy Reagan says “Just Say No”; Larry Kramer wrote “Just Say Yes: A play about a farce”; Amy Winehouse said “No No No”; James Joyce wrote “yes I said yes I will Yes.”
This is not the right mood for me to go to choir practice in. As Brother Wayne Kramer says, “Bomb-loving leaders get bomb-loving citizens.” It doesn’t surprise me this happened at this point in history, after that election, not one bit.
I talked later with Mrs. Hurley, 82, lay leader of the small congregation. The anonymous letter was sent to Bill Rhodes, the president of the congregation about two weeks ago. What appeared to be pellet gun holes were found in a church window Sunday, though she’s drawing no conclusions about cause and effect in the case of either the letter or the holes in the window. The church sits by a traffic light and teenagers with a BB gun might have just popped off a few shots, she noted.
It’s her town, and she knows more about their situation than I do. I hope she’s right. And I’m ready to support them.
Here’s the letter:
I am pretty sure that was written by someone a little more literate than it may first appear, but I could be wrong.
My reasons have nothing to do with veterans. I respect people who take risks for what they believe in, period. I may oppose those same people bitterly, but keeping who they are and what their virtues are in mind makes me both a better opponent and a better human.
So what are my reasons? There are two and they are related.
The first is that with the end of Armistice Day, we have no day to celebrate the end of war–any war. That was the original intent of Armistice Day, which I observe with a moment of silence at 11:11 (or as close to it as I can manage) every 11/11.
Neither do we have a day to celebrate peace, nor a day to mourn all the war dead. I don’t find the death of a civilian killed in saturation bombing of a city any less regrettable than the death of the solider who dropped that bomb then was shot from the air.
The second is that this change came during the McCarthy era, at the same time coinage lost E Pluribus Unum (United We Stand) for the sad trade of In God We Trust, and the Pledge of Allegiance gained the divisive phrase “under God” before “indivisible”.
The meaning of Veterans Day, and Armistice Day before it, had long been contested. Here’s an example:
On that same Armistice Day in 1919, an American Legion parade in Centralia, Washington, the heart of lumber country and long running labor strife, broke ranks on a pre-arranged signal and attacked the local hall of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
Wobblies in the hall opened fire in self defense as the Legionaries tried to charge up the stairs. Four Legionaries were killed in the attack and several others were wounded inside the hall in a confusing melee before most of the union men were disarmed. Wesley Everest, himself a veteran and in uniform, escaped although wounded and was chased down to the river where he shot two or more of his pursuers before being overwhelmed.
That night a mob of Legionaries, with the complicity of authorities, seized the wounded Everest from his jail cell, dragged him behind an automobile, castrated him, and hung him from a railroad bridge. Several IWW members including those captured in the hall and others tracked down by posses in a massive man hunt were put on trial. Eight Wobblies were convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to long prison terms. No Legionnaires were charged in the initial assault.
That just sticks in my craw. Where is the Grand Army of the Republic when you need them, anyway? Perhaps I digress.
So if you are reading this and you are a veteran, please take no offense at my non-celebration of the holiday. It’s not about you and it’s not about what you did. If you fought bravely for any cause, I respect your personal virtues. But it’s time for a peace holiday.
The prerequisite to peace, of course, is justice. And so:
Let us not break faith with those who have died in defense of human rights, human dignity, human life.
May we recognize the grief that flows in and among us today
and may we keep the faith.
As you may have read, I got bad news about my mom earlier in the week. The short update? This time, it turned out to be a dress rehearsal, a valuable one. Here’s the long version:
The word I got on my mom Thursday was that I should come that day, not the next, so I did. She’s got congestive heart failure and they felt the edema in her right side–a swollen leg and arm–was thus a sign of imminent decline. The next morning, the edema was gone. She is still weak–I mean, ninety-six, right?–but in good spirits, mostly clearheaded, and in hopes of getting better. I don’t think she will but I’m damned if I’m telling her so. They no longer think she’s on the verge any more than she always is.
The best news is I got to do something I’d stalled on. When she was checked into the home, her record ended up indicating that CPR and other invasive procedures could be done on my mom. She’s been to the hospital three or four times since then, and I approve. My mom has a lot of vitality and life left in her–she’s still getting something from hanging around or she wouldn’t be doing it–and I’m happy to get her care that will help. But anything at this point that requires CPR is truly an imminent death sentence. My mom is nearly ninety-seven years old. The success rate for CPR at her age is around seven percent, and success means a chest full of broken bones and even less capacity than one had beforehand. So I changed that and a couple of other things, so they don’t get to keep her meat working after she’s gone. They did this on my authority as her health care proxy. I’d expected difficulty, but no.
My mom believes she’s going to heaven and seeing Jesus and her family when she dies. I figure if anyone does, she will. I have my doubts about heaven, myself, but then, I’ve never died yet and don’t know any of it for a fact. What I do know for a fact is that when she does finally die, I can do my best to see to it her last consciousness is that of loving family surrounding her–Jesus will have to bring his own self, but I figure he’ll make an appearance of some sort–and as pleasant as it can be. It won’t be people busting up her rib cage so she can draw another hour’s breath and then die.
I must briefly brag on my ex-wife-to-be. When I called her, she wanted to know what she could do to help. The next day, she took the daughter out of school right after her tests (four freaking tests before noon and she’s in sixth grade; what is wrong with this country?) and drove up. She’d packed up her work and a week’s clothing and was willing to stay for some time if need be. So the three of us spent time with my mom–my ex hadn’t seen my mom since we separated nearly five years ago–and hung out around town and had an awfully good time together.
Like I say, I doubt there’s a heaven, but I have no doubts about hell. It’s real, it exists here on earth, and while its intensity cannot reliably be measured, its duration is finite. Had it not been for the ex and the daughter, that’s where I’d’ve been these last few days. As it turned out, we had a small family vacation and a lovely weekend.
