Limited by Trauma She felt guilty. Her father had just died, but instead of feeling sad, she felt happy. Was she a horrible, heartless daughter? Not knowing what to think, she asked to talk to a chaplain. In bits and pieces, her story came out. For the last year and a half, she’d been her father’s caregiver. He’d never been easy to be around. A combat veteran, he had run his home with military discipline. Orderly, rigid, and autocratic, he showed his children a limited kind of love. Mostly he ignored them, but he could be abusive. When drunk, he was cruel to their mother. It was the typical story…
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The Resurrection and Universal Salvation
We Love a Resurrection We talk about resurrection because we can’t bear for crucifixion to be the end of the story. Imagine if the Christian scriptures closed with the image of a broken and beaten Jesus, gasping his last breath in a torment of pain? Who would want to read about that? Even the minimalist gospel of Mark shows us the empty tomb. Of course, Jesus didn’t have a monopoly on suffering. Every day someone in the world dies in agony. Maybe they aren’t hanging on a piece of wood, their hands and feet thrust through with nails, but there are many kinds of torture. Some people suffer for years…
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Ash Wednesday and Opening Our Hearts
Ash Wednesday My mother, who died in 2015, has been turned to ash. The remains of her cremation sit in a box on a shelf in my room. The ashes aren’t her, nor do they symbolize some essence of her nature. Still, I’m in no hurry to spread them across the scattering ground at the cemetery where she bought a place to rest. One day I will do so, when I no longer need her quiet reminder that I am destined to end up as ash myself. Whether we are talking about the dust out of which the Hebrew God formed us or the carbon created in the belly of…
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“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and Valentine’s Day
Baby, It’s Cold Though usually sung around Christmas time, Frank Loesser’s song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” has nothing to do with a holiday. It does mention snow, which we don’t get much of in the Willamette Valley, but February is still winter. So as Valentine’s Day approaches and our minds turn to love, let’s take a look at this jaunty piece that was so popular in its day and has been so criticized now. Originally used by Loesser and his wife to entertain their friends and business associates, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” tells the story of two characters named Wolf and Mouse. It became popular when, Loesser sold the song…
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Prayer, Power, and Love — Martin Luther King, Jr.
History as Story I’ve written before about how our stories create us, how the memories we hold make us who we are. [1] This is true for us as individuals and as a society. Now, as we in the United States prepare to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. on Monday, we explore this topic again, because how we tell the story of this man’s life and ministry affects how we either carry on, or obstruct, the work he did. Perhaps King’s story doesn’t seem complicated enough for multiple interpretations. After all, he led a Civil Rights movement, he believed in beloved community, and he said we shouldn’t…
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Impermanence and the New Year
Change Is Inevitable As the new year approaches, we start to think about who we are and who we want to become. In the tradition of New Year’s Eve, we may make a resolution to consciously change something significant about ourselves. Maybe we want to improve our diet or exercise regularly, or we could focus on being more generous, tolerant, or organized. None of this seems too hard. After all, change is inevitable. They say, for instance, that every seven years, all the cells in our body get replaced. This has led the infamous “they” to make claims about seven year cycles and psychological transformation. We humans manage to interpret…
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Winter Solstice and the Return of the Light
The Longest Night of the Year As I write this, around 5 pm on the Winter Solstice, the sky has been dark for about half an hour. Here in the Pacific Northwest, clouds obscure the stars and the moon.If I lived in the country, I would see blackness cover the land. Even in the most isolated areas, though, houses are blessed with the electricity that keeps my own home bright and my computer humming. No matter how early the sun sets, if I want to, I can work well into the night. I need not gather around a fire, drinking mulled cider, and listening to stories, though I might be…
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Advent, Waiting, and Experiencing Life
Waiting for Advent and Beyond Advent, that month before Christmas comes, is about waiting. Mary and Joseph waited for Jesus to be born. Today, many of us wait for Christmas. Throughout the season and beyond, faithful Christians wait for the Messiah. This is not a bored or frustrated waiting, at least not for those who celebrate the holiday and revel in the coziness and closeness it symbolizes. Yet, this is not everyone’s religious story. Even if we do claim it as our own, the day can be filled with memories of loss or abandonment. Still, we can love the music, love the Christ, love the hearth. Then the waiting of…
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God’s Love and Father Love
What Is God’s Love? At our Mother’s Day service, one of our members asked, “What’s the difference between God’s love and a mother’s love?” Now that it’s Father’s Day, we could ask the same thing about the love of a father. Yet how do we answer that question if we don’t know what God’s love is? The God described in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is a complex one. We’ll call this God “he,” since we’re talking about fathers. This God is full of both mercy and wrath. He forgives the sinner, then goes and wipes out entire cities of sinners, their cultures, and even most of the human race.…
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Flower Communion
Communion and Community We Unitarian Universalists have few rituals of our own. The Flower Communion, created in 1923 in Czechoslovakia by Unitarian minister Norbert Čapek, is one of them. The church he founded was only a few years old, yet already he sensed discomfort among the members. Having left behind Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths, many of them struggled to open their hearts to something new. They didn’t trust one another. Knowing that ritual touches hearts and spirits, Čapek thought some kind of ceremony would help, perhaps something like the Christian communion. For many of his members, though, this practice would bring up old wounds. How could he bring the…