Passover and the Holy Fool Every once in a while, as it does this year, Easter falls during the week of Passover. Significantly more unusual is that Easter also falls this year on April Fool’s Day. Last time that happened was in 1956. It won’t happen again until 2029. [1] Getting into the spirit of the day, the Devon News, a British paper, informs us that Pope Francis has canceled April Fools because it clashes with Easter. To make up for any disappointment, April Fools will be celebrated twice in 2019. [2] Instead of canceling this day of revelry, Methodist minister Jeanne Torrence Finley suggests we take advantage of the…
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Yom Kippur, Repenting, and Atonement
Being Good The other day, I visited with a patient who has spent his life being good. With great force of will, he has been humble of heart and mind, respectful to all he meets, kind, and soft-hearted. Occasionally, he lashed out in anger, but the guilt he immediately felt was so enormous, he would hunch his shoulders and hide himself away. Yet no matter how hard he tried to do things right and thus make people notice and praise him, life knocked him down over and over again. He ended up swept away, sick, homeless, and in despair. Though anger seethed somewhere inside him, he could barely noticed it,…
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Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, and God’s Hands
Riding Roller Coasters Years ago, while preparing to preach about Pentecost, a holiday that at the time I knew nothing about, I discovered that one of my Unitarian Universalist colleagues had once been a Pentecostal minister. Pentecost and Pentecostal must be related, I figured, so I asked him to explain what this holiday was. He didn’t answer directly. Instead, he told me about an amusement park in the town where he grew up. The park was famous for its roller coasters. When he’d been a boy, they had this old wooden one. The train would chug along, inching up the slope, painfully cresting the hill, and then dash down the…
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Memorial Day and Healthy Grieving
Repressed Grief When we don’t address it, grief hangs on. We can we numb ourselves from our pain with force of will or sullen silence, with bursts of anger, or drugs, or busyness, yet the hurt does not go away. Instead, it settles into our joints, scars our muscles, makes our head hurt. Unable to face the enormity of our loss, some of us go to our grave frozen and miserable. Over the years, I’ve sat with many newly sober people who were shocked by the intensity of their ten- or twenty-year-old grief. Suddenly caught with no buffering substance, they felt overwhelmed by emotions they had forgotten how to process,…
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Mother’s Day and the Joy of Turning
The Mess in Our World Today Thinking about Mother’s Day this year, I feel sad. A month ago, I wrote a song for the holiday, reflecting that it was, in some ways, a good thing my mother isn’t alive to see the mess we’ve made of our political and denominational world. In Unitarian Universalist circles, we still struggle to address race issues much as we did in the 1960s when the “black controversy” divided us. Now, voices are again raised in anger over our association’s “white supremacist culture,” while others defend themselves. In the United States, we are more divided than at any time except perhaps during the 1920s. Back then, the…
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Remembering Passover and Dismantling the Golem
Passover, Freedom, and Slavery Passover commemorates the triumph of freedom over slavery. On this holiday, Jews around the world remember their history. They remind one another of who they really are. They recount where they have traveled, and they tell the story of a God who loved and delivered them. In our country today, we need a God to vanquish the evil powers and free us from our own slavery. We are trapped in an addiction that glorifies wealth and aggression. Feeling out of control ourselves, we try to control others. We punish them severely, yet we indulge ourselves. Our political leaders lose their way, like addicts hidden in tenements,…
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Lent, Temptation, and Our White Supremacy Culture
Lent, Temptation, and Life Events Our topic this week is temptation. Originally I thought I would connect this to Lent, writing about Jesus’s forty days in the desert when he was tempted by Satan. During this time, Jesus, rather than giving in, gave up and let go. What might we learn from this? How can into the spirit of Lent enhance our recovery journey? These questions still matter to me, and I will touch on them later. However, two events that occurred this week in Unitarian Universalist circles changed my plans. One is that the president of our denomination resigned; the other is that a ministerial colleague, charged with possessing…
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Tu B’Shvat and Our Connection with Trees
Tu B’Shvat and the New Year for the Trees As a child, I spent a lot of time in trees. I especially liked the pine tree where two branches formed a sitting nook and the crab apple with its wide limbs and puckery fruit, but I wasn’t particular. If I could climb it, I was content. Recently, I learned that the Jewish people honor trees during Tu B’Shvat, the New Year of the Trees. A legal rather than religious holiday, its original purpose was to provide guidelines to farmers for their tithing. Now, it’s a day to get together with friends, eat fruit, plant trees, and promote responsible stewardship of the…
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“Only Love Can Do That” – In Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Praying Without Apology Years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, attended Unitarian churches. King was drawn to liberal religion for “its devotion to the search for truth, its insistence on an open and analytical mind, and its refusal to abandon the best lights of reason.” [1] When they chose a tradition to align themselves with, however, the Kings chose African-American Christianity. In her article, “To Pray without Apology,” Unitarian Universalist minister, Rosemary Bray McNatt describes a meeting she had with Coretta King. At that meeting, McNatt commented that she was a Unitarian Universalist minister. King said that she and Martin had attended Unitarian churches in…
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The Winter Solstice, Light, and Hope
The Winter Solstice Fills Me with Hope The Winter Solstice came and went this year with little notice from me. After working a long day and attending a meeting, I was focused on little except getting ready for bed, so it wasn’t until the next day during my predawn walk that I realized winter had arrived. The grass was tinged white with frost, the roads sparkled in the light from the street lamps, and the frozen trail crunched beneath my feet. Now and then, my dog lifted his nose, smelling coyotes or raccoons I couldn’t see. The squirrels and birds were asleep. Silence hung in the air. Then I climbed…
