“I Had Never Attended a UU General Assembly Before”
by Connie Henry, DRE
Thinking back on it, GA was for me a kaleidoscopic experience. The number of offerings was mind-boggling, each a tiny piece of glass in the kaleidoscope. Slightly turning the GA kaleidoscope, a different design appears: the RE workshops, the environmental workshops, the political workshops, the social justice workshops, the worship services, the musical events, the 5,000(?) UUs in attendance, and glimpses of Portland itself.
Of the dozen or so workshops and lectures I went to, half were RE-related (both children’s and adults’). Two were particularly thought-provoking, with ideas worth considering as we work to improve the religious education experience here at Summit.
The first was given by Rev. Barbara Hamilton-Holway from the UUCB. She’s developed a program called Evensong for Families. A group of 5 or so families plus a leader meet for 8 gatherings, each with an order of service and a kid-friendly theme. Listening is key and the central event is sharing (related to that session’s topic) by both the children and adults. She spoke movingly and with humor about the relationships she saw strengthened within families and between families, of the trust she saw develop in the groups, and of the growth of respect for self and others. Over the course of the 8 gatherings, she said, “People can become the face of love for one another.” We hope as UUs to be caring generous people out in the world, and what a good beginning if we can be the face of love for one another right here.
I went from her workshop directly to the UUA bookstore and bought Evensong for Families, and the next day I went back and bought her previous 2 Evensong books for adults. Stay tuned for these offerings.
The second event, one that I’m still untangling, was a lecture by William Doherty, a renowned marriage and family therapist who’s written numerous books on family matters and belongs to the First U Church of Minneapolis. He opened with a story about having been a UU for just 2 years when his then 7 year old son asked him what happens when people die and if there is a heaven. Doherty replied that some people believe there’s a heaven and others believe you live on in the memories of loved ones. So what do you believe happens when you die, asked his son. Some people believe there’s a heaven and others believe you live on in the memories of loved ones…..No, what do YOU believe, his son persisted. Doherty somewhat reluctantly said he doesn’t believe in heaven, but believes you live on in the memories of loved ones. I’ll believe what you believe for now, his son said, and when I’m older I’ll decide for myself.
The majority of UU adults grew up in other religious traditions or no religious tradition, and Doherty feels that as UUs, we tend to be afraid to impose religious views on our children. He feels we’ve improved from the days when UU Sunday schools taught kids lots about world religions and little about our own tradition, but that we need to go beyond improving curricula. He has 2 lofty but very good goals: first "that children grow up spiritually alive, free, and engaged with the world," and second "that they grow up as citizens in our living religious tradition."
Doherty names 3 obstacles to these goals:
Our me-first consumeristic culture
Widespread time famine – overscheduled kids, over worked parents
Culture of civic disengagement, not citizenship, where we see ourselves as customers and cli ents, even at church, rather than as citizens working for the greater common good
Doherty feels it is essential for the home to be linked to an intentional unembarrassed UU community. Children need to know their parents take this seriously. He stresses that parents’ allegiance shouldn’t be just to their local congregation, but also to the larger UU tradition.
He is part of a group in his congregation that has been developing something called the Family Chalice Project – with home-based practices tied to the church community. They have an evolving ritual called the Sources Supper – something like a Jewish seder – where important parts of the UU story are told that bind us to the past and also connect us to challenges today. Current dilemmas are shared in light of UU forebears, and the question is asked: what do the stories say to us now? Doherty’s group has created a narrative frame: The universe is one, it is good and we are its children, so we are open to all sources of revelation and we push back against forces that block spiritual growth and human flourishing.
What I take from this so far is the importance of our creating meaningful and memorable rituals both for home and church, and of all of us to know (or work at figuring out) why we are UUs and to be willing to speak up and speak out about it with Summit’s children.
I’ve belonged to Summit for a long time and have always felt connected to this community – and while I thought well of the larger UU movement, it was kind of abstract and distant. Going to GA brought it close and made it real, and it’s something I’m very glad to belong to.
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Religious Humanism
by Ed Henry
With the encouragement of Kathleen & Mitch, I went to a talk by a man named Wm Murry. Murry is now a retired UU minister and ex-President of Meade-Lombard seminary, but he was initially an ordained Southern Baptist minister. His quest for truth and meaning led him to humanism. The Humanist Manifesto in 1933 introduced a new kind of religion. This religion left the myths and beliefs of traditional religions behind, attempting to provide a foundation for morality and meaning grounded in human reason. There have been subsequent humanist manifestos, and, building on them, Murry is advocating a new humanism, one that offers depth, meaning and purpose without sacrificing intellectual honesty OR the spiritual dimension. He calls his vision Religious Humanism.
RH is a philosophy that exults in being alive in this unimaginably vast and breath-taking universe. It finds joy and satisfaction in contributing to human betterment. It incorporates Religious naturalism, which finds religious meaning in the natural world and rejects the notion of the supernatural. Like other thinkers before him Murry perceived the immense suffering in the world and questioned why, if God was good and all-powerful, such suffering was allowed. But Murry holds that the heart of humanism should not be what we reject, but what we affirm. What he affirms in the way of ethics is not God-given rules but Richard Niebuhr’s ethics of responsibility: being human is to be in relationship with others and to respond to their actions and needs.
Where traditional religion provides an ideological basis with its myths, Murry proposes the ideological basis of religious humanism to be Evolution. Evolution sees humans and their works as products of innumerable cycles of natural selection. Like the first Unitarian humanist, John Dietrich, he believes that what we call spirit or soul is simply the most complex functioning of matter.
Becoming more fully human involves the transformation of the mind and heart from self-centeredness to a sense of one’s self as part of a larger sacred whole. From hedonism, greed and materialism to a life of caring and generosity and a sense of stewardship to the human and natural worlds.
I also went to a Web-site design program. This was a how-to-design your church web-site workshop, recognizing that nowadays a significant number of people check out churches on the web before they first attend. They recommended we have three tabs on the first web-site screen for visitors, members and leaders. They warn that people hate to read, to scroll and to wait. Pictures in warm colors are great, but happy people images attract more than architectural features, and content is king. There are web-sites that give tips on design, They said elected leadership should be setting policy on web design.
Getting away. Sometimes it is useful to take a break from all the workshops. There is a superb classical Chinese garden in Chinatown, with a lotus and lily pond and quintessential structures, and there is a very beautiful and moving Vietnam Veterans Memorial about 20 “ from the convention center.
GA is a musical affair. GA choir practices daily, but it was full by the time we went to sign up on Thursday. At the first Daily singing workshop we were told that the most important music in the Sunday service is congregational singing. We feel better when we sing, and when we sing we change who we are. There was one musical event that wasn’t on the program. Every morning in the convention center two or three people would stand inside near the entrance and pass out up-dates—changes in the scheduled events. On Saturday we were informed that the final event of GA on Sunday night would be a workshop with Ysaye Barnwell. Dr. Barnwell is a member of the legendary civil rights quartet of African-American women, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and a composer of highly polyphonic and polymetric choral music. Summit Singers has performed several of her works, including “We Are” and “Your Children”.
So Sunday night Connie and Marissa and I hurried through supper and made our way to the Doubletree Inn where we were part of a group of possibly two hundred fifty people in a room intended for 200.
Ysaye Barnwell is a small, salty woman with gray, close cropped hair. She immediately moved us into sub-groups: sopranos, altos, tenors and basses. Then she began teaching. There was neither written music or instrumental accompaniment. She would sing a song, then sing the bass part to the basses. They would sing it back to her and she would correct them until they got it right. Then she would sing the tenor line to the tenors and they would learn it and so on. When we all knew our parts we got to put them together under her direction. The first song was called “We Are The Ones That We’ve Been Waiting For.” Singing it together with my 300 new-found friends was so moving I nearly couldn’t sing. We learned and sang probably half a dozen songs that night, and although I’ve forgotten my parts I will not forget the experience of singing in Ysaye Barnwell’s chorus.
