Monthly Archives: May 2020

Unitarian Universalism

Who is the antagonist in the church?

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It’s hard to know and important to know.

Kenneth Haugk’s classic Antagonists in the Church: How to Identify and Deal with Destructive Conflict gives us this guidepost:

What is church antagonism? It is that disruption in a congregation caused by an antagonist…

Antagonists are individuals who, on the basis of nonsubstantive evidence, go out of their way to make insatiable demands, usually attacking the person or performance of others. These attacks are selfish in nature, tearing down rather than building up, and are frequently directed against those in a leadership capacity. (Emphasis Haugk’s in the original, with italics.)

Those are important phrases:

  1. nonsubstantive evidence
  2. go out of their way
  3. insatiable demands
  4. selfish in nature
  5. tearing down rather than building up

When you’ve checked three of those off, you’ve got an unhealthy situation. But what do you do about it?

Haugk explains tactics for dealing with a church antagonist. Many of them look a lot like how sophisticated, socially adept antagonists with power attack their victims. When you start stepping through the process of actually coping with someone using those means, which are at best only relatively kind and gentle, you start looking into the abyss of your own will and ability to impose something unpleasant on another person against their desire. Sometimes it may bring back memories of how and when it was done to you.

If you have to use the tactics of an antagonist against them, how are you different from that antagonist? How do you stay different? Are you the antagonist? Are you perceived as the antagonist? Do you function as an antagonist, whether you want to or not?

Haugk doesn’t throw the word “evil” around casually in his book, but it’s in there. I know the evil that breathes in your ear every time you fight fire with fire. I also know the evil that tells you to see no, hear no, and speak no, so someone can get away with murder.

I don’t have any wisdom (other than Haugk’s), except maybe you should be tough and strong both. I’m working on the strength part.

Personal, Unitarian Universalism, Writing

A Literary or a Scientific Answer to a Human Question?

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The current issue of UU World has a lovely long meditation on mortality and John Keats, “Loss, poetry, and the ballast of faith“, by Kathryn Hamilton Warren. Go on–read it. It’s not long and it’s worth your time. Then I’ll put a small tile on her mosaic.

Kathryn Hamilton Warren isn’t the only one of us who finds answers to deep human questions in art, especially the written word. I find them there, and chances are you do, too. I also find answers in science. So do you, probably, and so does Kathryn Hamilton Warren.

But what of my mother’s spirit, her energy, the person and the presence brought into being by that utterly contingent constellation of atoms? This, of course, is the great question, about which science says this:

There’s another way of answering this question, by going back to John Keats and one of his last works–“This Living Hand“:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

It’s built to be read aloud. The meaning falls into place after a time or two. Most criticism takes this to be Keats expressing fear of mortality, which is true enough, and goes on from there into considerably darker interpretations. Everyone’s a critic, right?

But that’s not how I read it. This poem says:

I am alive now (line one)
I will be dead soon (lines two and three)
You’ll think about me (line four)
You’d do anything to have me back (lines five and six)
It’s okay (line seven)
I’m still here (line eight)

That’s where Keats’ spirit went. It went onto paper and into the people he knew and out into the world generally while he lived. Now that his body is gone, he is still reaching his hand out to us to freely give us what he can:

And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

We don’t have to make our “own heart dry of blood” for Keats, any more than he died for us. Keats lived, and  reaches out to us today.

That’s where I figure my mom’s spirit is, and my dad’s, and someday mine. Holding my hand out, what’s left of me in the world, offering.