Starhawk was generous with her time while she was here in Madison a month ago. She granted me two interviews, the first about Palestine and the second — which I will begin to post today now that I’m back from my vacation — about permaculture. For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. From the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, and since the 1990s she’s been most active in promoting permaculture.

Star came to permaculture as a natural outgrowth of her Paganism. After many years in the Goddess movement — where we declared that the Earth was a sacred, living organism that manifests Herself in the cycles of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that occur in all of nature, including our own human culture — Star discovered permaculture. She soon realized it was a practical application of her spiritual path.

Above: The Revs. Rosemary Bray McNatt and Charles Ortman listen to questions posed to them by students during the workshop "Whose Job Is It Anyway? The Ministry of Antiracism, Anti-oppression and Multiculturalism."

The Census Bureau projects that by 2042, whites will no longer constitute a majority of the U.S. population… the fastest growing group will be those who identify as multiracial…. If we fail to respond to this new multicultural reality – if we choose to stand rather than to move – we will not only fail to honor this core principle of liberal theology, we will simply become irrelevant.

This is from the lead article in the current Unitarian Universalist magazine, UU World.

Being good liberals, Unitarian Universalists have been engaged in wrenching self-examination for several years now, at least since the 1992 General Assembly Resolution on Racial and Cultural Diversity.

But the demographics show UUs are as white as they ever were. In a follow up article, well known UU minister Rosemary Bray McNatt writes:

On February 24, Rev. Paul Raushenbush issued a call for articles entitled “Dear Religious (and Sane) America” to inaugurate the launch of the Huffington Post’s new religion section. According to the article,

HuffPost Religion is dedicated to providing a provocative, respectful, and hopefully productive forum for addressing the ways in which religion intersects our personal, communal, national and international life. HuffPost Religion will demonstrate the vibrant diversity of religious traditions, perspectives and experiences that exist alongside and inform one another in America and throughout the world.

Huffington is clearly trying to expand its reach and become one of the big players in religion media, much as it already has in politics, popular culture, and even business. Based on initial responses to the section, it appears to be well on its way.

Growing up I believed that you could get either love OR respect in life, but not both. This was my mother’s understanding of the way the world worked — one she taught me from day one — and maybe it was true for her or even for women of her generation. But over the years, I’ve discovered that without respect, love is a hollow sweetness, and that without love, respect can result in a distance that undoes its best intentions.

These insights came back to me Sunday at First Unitarian Society in Madison as I listened to our associate minister Karen Gustavson offer one of her best sermons ever. It was well-crafted, contained great stories and great intelligence, but I disagreed completely with what she had to say. The sermon was also about a topic that I care about with every cell in my body — about our need to love and care for the Earth. And so I feel compelled to present a different viewpoint.

We in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) are considering changes in the language of our “Principles and Purposes,” the statements that guide our work together as an association of free, but interdependent congregations. Karen was responding on Sunday to the rewording of the seventh principle, a change that would substitute the word reverence for the word respect in the phrase “we covenant to honor and uphold … respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” She made an effective appeal for retaining the original language –respect — because she believes that to revere something implies a certain passivity — true for our fundamentalist brethren, but not for me and other people on the left hand of God — while respect indicates an active response. Obviously, this is not my experience.

What all Unitarian Universalists want in this rewrite of the seventh principle is language that reflects care for the Earth as a religious imperative, not an optional activity.

The idea “to be religious is to be a theist” as Christopher Hitchens stated in his debate with Lorenzo Albacete is a quite ethnocentric claim. It is true that in the West we have often associated a theistic God with religion, but this neglects Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism and numerous religious traditions which have adopted a deistic, pantheistic, panentheistic or other understanding of God. And as I pointed out in my critique of Hitchens last week, Unitarian Universalism contains 19% of people who identify as atheist/agnostic.

In the over 140 comments I received from my post “Christopher Hitchens: The Orthodox Protestant Atheist” both on the Tikkun site and in the version crossposted on Alternet.org there was both surprise and disbelief that atheists could be religious leaders. I described how I am in seminary at Starr King School for the Minstry studying alongside atheists and agnostics who are in training to become religious leaders and ministers. This seemed to be an oxymoron as for some of the respondents all religion is evil and always associated with God. So I thought it would be helpful to include a few statements from atheist students in seminary studying to be religious leaders.

From a fellow atheist seminarian at Starr King:

First, I think there is a difference between being an atheist and being anti-religious. They are orthogonal. There is also a difference between being anti-religious and being opposed to the effects of particular religious traditions. These terms should not be conflated. Since when did not believing in God mean that you are opposed to other people believing in God and or practicing religion regardless of whether they believe? I am an atheist. Just to be clear, by that I mean I don’t believe that there is a god, a higher consciousness, or a spirit. I am also opposed to the effects of certain religious traditions. But I am not by any means anti-religious. I don’t deny the value that religion or religious practice, (whether actual belief in god and the afterlife, or simply liking the pretty candles at mass and multiple opportunities for community) brings to people including myself. Religion has a lot to offer and to deny that is to deny the complexity of the human condition.

I have a friend who says that February is the longest month of the year. Even though this seems nonsensical, I know what she means. It’s still deep winter, but the holidays are over, the Yule lights have been put away — and there’s nothing much to distract from the bare, white winter landscape except for the frigid deep freeze. The cold keeps us inside more than usual, so many of us get cabin fever, that restless, bored, listless, frustrating desire for something you can’t find unless you flee Wisconsin for the southlands.

February is the fallow time of year, with bleak landscapes that can either be beautiful in their stark simplicity or deadly boring because of their lack of color and activity. No iridescent hummingbirds hover at our back window these days as they did in summer, and the chickadees, nuthatches, juncos and downy woodpeckers who keep me entertained when they come to our feeder are black-and-white just like the season. The occasional cardinal is the exception that proves the rule. As a result of this lack of warmth and color, it can be a long and difficult time until spring.

This is the season of Brigid or Imbolc, the traditional pre-Christian Celtic holiday for this time of year (February 1st or 2nd), a holiday which has come down to us as Groundhog’s Day when Sun Prairie Jimmy (or Punxsutawney Phil) sees his shadow in the sunlight (or doesn’t). Winter is half over (by the calendar at least), but it’s usually the coldest time of the year. Nature seems to be resting and preparing for the new life of spring. Covered with a blanket of snow, seeds that fell in the autumn are protected until spring when they begin to grow. All plant life seems to sleep in the death-like grip of winter, but the days are longer now, and the increasing sun promises the renewal of spring. Just like Jimmy, we emerge a little from our hibernation to look for the light.

Newspaper Vendor

My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often. On the front page, taking up about one third of the sheet, there was an article entitled “Trying to open the ‘inner eye.’” It was a piece that described the new Center for Conscious Living, an offshoot of the Church of Religious Science, which the pastor said is “reinventing the idea of church, with ‘stand you up music,’ meditation, singing, chanting and ‘an inclusive message of self-empowerment.’” Above this article, the top story was about our governor’s clean energy plan, in which 25 percent of the Wisconsin’s energy must come from wind, solar, biomass, or other renewable sources by 2025. My friend Jack Kisslinger, whose website is called Planet for Life, tells me that 25% might be a good number, but it has to be 25% of reduced overall energy consumption. So the governor’s goal is at least a step in the right direction. These days we’re at less than 5%!?! But the miracle is that some of Wisconsin’s business leaders are lining up behind the governor, including executives of Johnson Controls, an auto parts and building products manufacturer. All of this combined with the EPA’s stricter standards for smog-causing pollution made me ebullient.

I’ve been really angry at the Obama administration lately, so it was nice to agree with them for the first time in what seems like months. The last straw for me was Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, coming right on the heels of his announcement about expanding the war in Afghanistan. Until then had I tried to see his incrementalism as “realism.” But Rabbi Michael Lerner‘s editorial in the latest Tikkun, “Afghanistan: Obama Capitulates to the War Makers,” says it all. I agree with Rabbi Lerner that Obama’s announcement represented “a decisive endorsement of the strategy of domination.” And then Obama’s Nobel Prize speech tried to justify his decision by saying that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes, that “Evil does exist in the world.” When Obama used that final phrase, I stopped listening to him. Christopher Hedges‘ article in the same Tikkun, “Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand,” describes the shift in my opinion at that point: “President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another.” I stopped believing in Brand Obama.

It’s hard to be optimistic given the world situation these days. But I believe that the three stories that filled me with hope today are related in a way that may not be immediately apparent. Without more spiritual exploration, people in this country will have trouble opening their minds to the changes in store for us. And those changes are going to be very fast, whether for the better or for the worse. As I said in a post several months ago,

In the Talmud in the tractate Brachot (Blessings), the rabbis raise the question of what is meant by the mishnaic statement “ha oseh tefilato keva, ain tefilato tachanunim – the one who makes his prayer fixed, his prayer is not one of supplication.”

One explanation given is that our prayer lacks supplication when it is not done “eem dimdumei chama – with the reddening of the sun.” While on a peshat level the rabbis may be referring to the need for one to be earnest in his or her prayer in order for it to be supplicatory, I think there may be another level to their words.

Did you know that seven states have laws barring atheists from holding political office? I learned this while reading about newly elected Asheville, NC councilman and atheist Cecil Bothwell — both he and the city may face a lawsuit because of his lack of belief in God. Article 6, section 8 of the NC state constitution reads, “The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the Almighty God.” While constitutional experts say the law is not enforceable Bothwell may have to defend himself from civil lawsuits.

Bothwell is a Unitarian Universalist who celebrates Christmas and is not opposed to the council praying before its meetings. He even said he would join in by reading a quote or passage from a meaningful book. Yet the newly elected councilman is still facing criticism:

When Mr. Bothwell was sworn into office on Monday, he used an alternate oath that does not require officials to swear on a Bible or refer to “Almighty God.”

That has riled conservative advocates, who cite a little-noticed quirk in North Carolina’s Constitution that disqualifies officeholders “who shall deny the being of Almighty God.” The provision was included when the document was drafted in 1868 and was not revised when North Carolina amended its Constitution in 1971.

Despite its recent prominence, the religious right is only about thirty years old, while the religious left has a genealogy that stretches back more than two centuries. In every generation people of faith have brought their bodies and spirits to the causes of human freedom, racial and gender equality, economic solidarity, and global peace. Catholics and Calvinists, theological liberals and evangelicals, adherents of indigenous spiritualities and immigrants of every faith have worked to extend the radical vision of the American Revolution to all peoples.

More here, from “The Religious Left: an Old Tradition for a New Day” in the Unitarian Universalist magazine. Saying the Religious Left only stretches back “more than two centuries” is a little thin, when one thinks of Cromwell’s Ironsides who cut off the king’s head, or the Anabaptists of the 16th century, or the medieval Cathars and Hussites and so on. And that’s just the Christians.  The article ends with a survey of the religious left today, seeing four wings of it:

1. grassroots activists like the 185 Catholic Worker houses, and the new monastics, typically nonviolent
2. the social advocacy arms of the mainline denominations (only Christian and UU ones are mentioned, though)
3. those who identify with theologies of liberation and consider the first group too nonviolent, the second group too liberal
4. the “spiritual but not religious” for whom social activism is inherently spiritual.

Tikkun isn’t mentioned and I am not clear where they think we would fall. I’ve been working on our deadline for the next issue all day and will keep cranking all tomorrow and on to Tuesday end of day, and don’t have a brain cell left for making that judgment call, or for saying something analytically wise and interesting. Giving the link to this article is enough.

Though I have to add that we published a kick-ass article on the relevance of the social gospel today, by Gary Dorrien, that goes much deeper than this UU World survey is able to do.

Well, God isn’t personally appearing so far as I know. But we’ll be talking about God as understood by MLK. We will hear insights based on new scholarship, and his theology will very likely surprise you.

Almost every Monday night I interview a Tikkun author. Last Monday my guest was the remarkable writer and psychotherapist Kim Chernin, whose article “The Long Path Out of Denial: Zionism, Heartache, and a New Vision of Israel and Palestine” is in the current Tikkun print magazine. Kim’s ability to connect with people who asked questions on the call was remarkable, and they were by no means all agreeing with her.

The previous Monday I talked about Mahatma Gandhi with Michael Nagler, one of the world’s leading experts on nonviolent political activism. That, too, was one of the best Phone Forums we’ve done.

Both can be listened to here. Their print articles are not yet available online, but will be January 1. Meanwhile, buy a copy on newsstands or online here.

Next Monday we welcome The Yes Men to the Phone Forum! We have written about them here and in the current Tikkun, where Michael Lerner reviews their new movie, which is on general release. So go see it this week if you can and then have the chance to talk with the Yes Men next Monday night. Find out where it is showing by going to this page.

The Phone Forum is a free call, no phone charge to you, and is our gift to those who have subscribed to our print magazine or joined the Network of Spiritual Progressives or donated to us: which are the ways we survive here financially. So if you haven’t done any of those please join us on the Phone Forum for one time if you like, but then please subscribe, donate or join to help us out financially before you listen in again.

Tonight it is someone not yet well known, who has a powerful story to tell about Martin Luther King. The rest of this post is from an email I sent out about tonight’s call:

King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We’ve started a new program named “Quest” at First Unitarian Society (FUS). FUS created Quest in order to help members who want it to develop a deeper commitment to their spiritual journey. Some of the introductory writings about the program describe it as “a journey toward wholeness, holiness, and peace.” It’s a very exciting two-year “pilgrimage,” and I’m blessed to be a part of it as a mentor to two women who are participants.

Today one of my partners contacted me. I’d just finished re-reading a chapter from Parker Palmer‘s A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life about “Being Along Together,” a good metaphor for my role in this process. And yesterday I had finally bought two chairs for my meditation room, where I hope to meet with my partners –if that’s what they want. So synchonicities are lining up to indicate the “rightness” of this choice.

For several years now, I’ve been considering spiritual direction as a new option in my life, and being asked to become a Quest mentor helped strengthen this interest. Sometimes referred to as spiritual guidance or spiritual friendship, spiritual direction like mentoring takes place in a one-to-one relationship, in which a person who wants to become more attentive to their spiritual life meets regularly with a “spiritual director,” in order to awaken more fully to the presence of spirit and how it moves through their existence. I’m not using “God language” here, because not all UUs are comfortable with it. But what I realized while re-reading Parker Palmer is just how uncomfortable I am with the term “spiritual direction.”

It’s that time of year again! Leaf blower time! Yuck.

I love the fall. It’s full of color and change. And usually I love my neighborhood. It’s located behind a big hill, so we don’t hear much of the street traffic from the major thoroughfare in our area. And, of course, it’s on the lake, so the vista and the quiet — even when it’s raining, like it is today — are beautiful. But there are certain times when the noise level is literally deafening, namely when people should be raking.

It’s important for those of us who live on the lakes in Madison to deal with the leaves that fall in our yards. Every leaf that goes into the lake produces fodder for the next season’s algae growth — one pound of phosphorus from any source, including leaves, results in 500 pounds of algae. In fact, this time of year you can see yard signs all over town, stating “Love your lakes — Don’t leaf them.” So I guess I should be glad that people are blowing their leaves away from the water. But it would probably be better for them as well as for me and their other neighbors, if they raked rather than using leaf blowers. They’d get some exercise, and I wouldn’t have to walk around with my fingers in my ears.

Yosemite in winter. Credit: Tuan Luong

A pleasure of doing this blog is the people who write in suggesting ideas and then make good on them. Last week someone I don’t know emailed me with the above heading and the suggestion that we should cover it on Tikkun Daily because “Spiritual Progressives can draw sustenance from it.” I asked him if he could write a post explaining why. Here it is, in three parts, with our thanks, from Jan Garrett, who is a (nearly) life-long Unitarian Universalist and a professor of philosophy at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green KY.

I

Like many others in this country, last week I spent my evenings watching “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” directed by Ken Burns and co-produced by Dayton Duncan, on my local public television network. The series contains five nearly 2-hour episodes, with inspirational scenery, powerful wildlife footage, and an engrossing, often inspiring, human story spanning more than a 150 years, replete with heroes and villains, mystics, poets, journalists and scientists with hearts, and statesmen who occasionally do the right thing.

John Muir

Full episodes have been available online since their original showing but they will be removed after October 9. Perhaps shorter clips from the series will still be available. The series will apparently also be run on PBS stations beginning at a rate of one episode per week. In the following notes, based mainly on the first and sixth episode in the series, which I viewed a second time online, I hope to interest Tikkun Daily readers in the spiritual experience of immersing yourself in the entire series.

Sunday we’re celebrating “Coming Out Day” at First Unitarian in Madison, and I’ve been asked to tell my coming out story. Compared to many, mine is pretty painless. It’s a story of ignorance, invisibility, and ultimately of the ability to pass. You see, I’m a bisexual woman in a committed heterosexual relationship.

I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York. It was definitely in the “provinces.” So perhaps it’s not so surprising that although I’d heard of homosexuality, I had no idea until I reached college that female homosexuals existed. I’m not sure I encountered the word “lesbian” until I was in my twenties.

In 1965 as a freshman at Smith, I started to hear rumors that the woman who lived across the dorm hall from me was “different.” Nobody stated directly how she was unlike the rest of us. But according to the whispers, she was recruiting other girls as well. By the time I returned from my junior year abroad, she seemed to have succeeded in enlisting at least one other girl, and it became apparent to me that they were lovers. None of this seemed to affect me very much. In those days, I was pretty sure that I was heterosexual.

It’s unclear to me if I ever would have discovered my sexual attraction for women if it hadn’t been for the women’s movement. Lots of the women I hung out with in the late 1960s and 1970s were out lesbians. They were strong, wonderful women. Eventually I had to acknowledge that I was attracted to more than one of them on more than a platonic level.

Teaching the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum (and blogging about it) lit a fire under me. The title of the course refers to a story told in the book of Jeremiah. This week I finally recorded the song I wrote about this tale on YouTube. Now others can learn the tune and sing it in their “Cakes” classes.

If you don’t know the story, here’s a synopsis: Jeremiah rants and rails against the Queen of Heaven, telling the people that worshipping Her is a betrayal of YHWH. (This actually proves to be historically incorrect, since YHWH had a consort for most of the years until the Babylonian exile — even in the temple in Jerusalem. But Jeremiah doesn’t know his archaeology, since he’s living during these turbulent times.) He threatens the people that if they revere any God or Goddess other than YHWH, God will punish them. Here’s how Jeremiah expresses God’s anger at the people:

As I told you a few weeks back, the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum empowers women in remarkable ways. During last night’s class I discovered that it sometimes empowers in different ways at the same time.

Our reading for the evening was a compelling story — the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham (Genesis 22). As told in the Bible, this tale contains no mention of Isaac’s mother Sarah. Instead YHVH tells Abraham to demonstrate his loyalty by making a ritual offering of his one-and-only child. So Abraham dutifully takes fire-making tools, a load of wood, a knife, and his son Isaac to a nearby mountaintop to be slain. Of course, at the last minute an angel stays Abraham’s hand and provides a ram instead. What our class focussed on was the conspicuous lack of information about Sarah in this story.

Sarah is not easily overlooked. More girls have been named for Sarah than for any other woman in the Bible. There are good reasons for this. Sarah was a Chaldean princess and, because royalty and ritual leadership were inextricably tied together in those days, a priestess as well. She’s the only woman whose age is given in the Bible. She was the matriarch of the Jewish people. And Abraham owed his flocks, herds, and status to her.

Before we started to create modern-day midrashim — reinterpreting and commenting on this Biblical tale — we looked at several theories that questioned how this story was told in the Bible. Dancer and liturgist Fanchon Shur deduces from her absence that Sarah was the “hand of God” that stopped the sacrifice. Carol Ochs in Behind the Sex of God concludes that

the sacrifice of Isaac marked the death of the matriarchal tradition personified by Sarah. The meaning of Abraham’s test becomes clear when viewed in the light of the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy. The first allegiance in matrirarchy is to one’s offspring…In patriarchy, the first obligation is to an abstract moral principle…obedience to God.

Imagine that government services were designed and delivered by people who really care. Wouldn’t that have been so attractive we would have had universal healthcare by now?

But what does it mean to really care for the people who receive government services?

My friend Chase knows what it means for her in her office. She is a member of the covenant group my wife and I joined at our Unitarian Universalist Church. The group meets twice a month to talk about our lives. I didn’t expect much when Chase said she would tell us about her spiritual practice as a government employee, but I was blown away. Chase is a quiet woman, who doesn’t say much. But this is what she said that evening she talked about her work. She gave me permission to publish it here.

What has stayed with me from that evening wasn’t so much that I could imagine doing the same practices as Chase myself: it was the quiet glow about her as she told us what a difference it had made to her, her fellow workers and her clients for her to pray on behalf of each client coming to the office. It made me want to find what the equivalent kind of spiritual practice might be that would work for me: some day when the hectic rush dies down, I’ll try and think about that again. Chase said:

My Work as Spiritual Practice:

When I first decided to make my job a spiritual practice I realized that the energy in my cubicle was chaotic and anxious. I wanted to change the energy and the only way I knew to do that was to create sacred space, which I did in two ways. I put up symbols of my beliefs, prayer flags, pictures of Buddha, a Zen garden, and hindu gods and godesses, and muslim prayers beads. And I conscientiously began to pray, chant and meditate at my desk periodically throughout the day. One of my prayers is by Shantideva:

Shantideva

May I be a guard for those who need protection
A guide for those on the path
A boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood
May I be a lamp in the darkness
A resting place for the weary
A healing medicine for all who are sick
A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles
And for the boundless multitudes of living beings
May I bring sustenance and awakening
Enduring like the earth and sky
Until all beings are freed from sorrow
And all are awakened.

Carlton Pearson

As a Unitarian Universalist (UU) who loves to go to Christian services in the black gospel tradition–for their emotional depth and warmth, even though I am pretty allergic to Christian theology–it was a delight to read this article about the largest UU congregation in the country teaming up with a black (universalist Christian) congregation.

First, who would believe that the largest UU congregation–in a religion that is so identified in people’s minds with its New England origins–would be in Tulsa, Oklahoma? Maybe they need it more and know they do, while New England itself is going increasingly post-religion altogether.

Second, just contemplate the courage of the Rev. Carlton Pearson. This man was a rising star in the evangelical world, charismatic, successful on the ground (he built the Tulsa church he founded to 0ver 6,000 members) and on TV, making a lot of money and garnering adulation. Then, watching the Rwandan genocide on TV, his life was changed.

His assumption was that the victims were bound for hell, persecuted yet unsaved. Feeling angry at God, and guilty that he himself wasn’t doing anything about it, he recalls, he fell into a sort of reproachful prayer: “God, I don’t know how you can sit on your throne there in heaven and let those poor people drop to the ground hungry, heartbroken, and lost, and just randomly suck them into hell.”

He heard God answer, “We’re not sucking those dear people into hell. Can’t you see they’re already there – in the hell you have created for them and continue to create for yourselves and others all over the planet? We redeemed and reconciled all of humanity at Calvary.”

Pearson had the courage to preach the gospel of God’s universal love for everyone. He was expelled from his church and lost his congregation, his TV spot, his income. Well, not his entire congregation. About 200 stayed with him, attending services he held in a sympathetic church. Now, thanks to the openmindedness of the young UU minister in Tulsa, Pearson and the 200 have joined the Universalists whom he used to despise.