But, for me, Gary and Tony and Nicholas are more than the subjects of a documentary.  They are my congregants, members of the church I serve, and I can’t help wishing that CNN had talked about that.  It bothers me that the show spent time explaining the Catholic parish that dismissed the reality of their relationship, but couldn’t spare a word about the Unitarian Universalist community that has welcomed Gary and Tony and dedicated their son.

No, I’m not a publicity hound.  But I am an unrepentant liberal religious evangelist, and I think we all need to be.  There are millions of BGLTQ singles and couples and families who care about their spiritual life, but don’t know that liberal religious communities like Fourth Universalist are waiting to welcome them.  There are millions of straight people who want a growing relationship with the Holy, but don’t want any part of a church that treats gay and lesbian people as less than human.

I can’t expect CNN to do my work for me. But it would have been wonderful if they had brought the arc of the story to completion, and included footage of the day our congregation dedicated little Nicholas.  We promised to help guide his feet, to support his parents as they helped him grow; we dedicated him to a life of love and service and promised him tools that would help him on his life’s journey.  That is a promise available to every person who joins a Unitarian Universalist community, and it is radically different from the faith of Gary and Tony’s childhood church.  It would have been great for viewers to know that, somewhere out there, there are churches that stand on the side of love, congregations that mean it when they say what we say at Fourth U every Sunday morning: “Whoever you are, whomever you love, wherever you are on your life’s journey, you are very welcome here.”

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I really was planning to stay out of the Garrison Keillor blogfest; I always knew he disliked UUs, and I only listened to Prairie Home Companion when I was trapped in a car, stranded in that great vacant space between cities where the only radio offerings are evangelical preachers, country music, and an NPR station at the far left of the dial.

But his Silent Night screed, along with his recent onstage parody of Unitarian Universalists at Christmas (he keeps getting our name wrong too!) finally hooked me, hence my sermon from a couple of days ago, which you’ll find below. PHC lovers won’t care. But I am officially tired of the Keillor curmudgeon act; I’m a city girl anyway! Merry Christmas!

Changing Light
A Sermon by
The Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt
The Fourth Universalist Society
in the City of New York
Dec. 20, 2009

It has been a wild week for interfaith understanding. The Unitarian Universalist universe has been filled with chatter this week. On blogs and in chat rooms, liberal religious people have been filled with comments and commentary about Garrison Keillor. In case you missed it, the writer and host of A Prairie Home Companion delivered what many of us believed to be an anti-Unitarian Universalist screed in a recent issue of Salon magazine. Whatever could have set him off? According to our reading today, it seemed to be the changing of the words in Silent Night, as he experienced during a recent visit to a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Whatever it is he heard there apparently offended his Lutheran sensibilities. The Internet has been awash ever since with rumors about the source of his Unitarian or Universalist antipathy. Theories have ranged from an unfortunate encounter with a Universalist minister in a previous life, to the religious affiliation of his second wife, allegedly Unitarian Universalist, and a woman for whom he has lost no love whatsoever. Many people were surprised and distressed by Keillor’s apparent hostility toward both UUs and Jews in his short essay. I was not one of those people; in addition to not being exactly crazy about the rural flavor of his shows, I have always believed that with a few exceptions, Garrison Keillor has never been laughing with us as liberal religious people, but laughing at us. What else could I say about a man who challenges not only the practice of adapting hymn lyrics—something nearly every faith tradition manages to do—but questions with such sarcasm the theology behind it?

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not typically a fan of hymn adaptations myself. Though I was a collapsed Catholic before I joined this religious movement, I love the old Christmas carols, and even now I sing them with all the original words I learned at St. Ambrose. Silent Night is, in fact, my mother’s very favorite Christmas carol. But even I have never been able to generate as much distress as Garrison Keillor seems to think the subject deserves. Something else must be going on, when a public figure with listeners whose number far exceeds our numbers as a religious movement decides to take out after us in such a public way.

I do not mind that Keillor asked the question of what it means for us to accept other religious beliefs, and where we might be crossing the line toward appropriation. I mind that, in addition to being snarky, he was intolerant in the same way he is accusing us of being. I mind his inability to accept us, as Unitarian Universalists, with the same exasperated fondness he has for small-town Midwestern life. I mind that, even if he thinks we’re idiots the rest of the year, he could at least show some of the Christmas Spirit he’s accused us of helping to kill.

At the risk of playing into the intellectual stereotype of Unitarian Universalists he’s attacked as part of our problem, does Keillor understand at all that the very holiday of Christmas itself is the alteration and combination of several pagan holidays? Does he know that Jesus was most likely born not in December, but in September? Has he opened a single book that might reveal that the celebration of Christ’s birth was brilliantly aligned with preexisting mid-winter festivals that helped to establish this new sect, Christianity, amid the institutional church’s desire to become mainstream?

Poor thing, he forgets that the coming Christmas holiday is a wild amalgam of pagan holidays, winter solstice, German festivals and Norse legends, and Roman holidays like Saturnalia. He forgets that the baby Jesus and his birth in a humble manger—whether or not it was an actual event—was a symbol of rebirth and new life, like the evergreens that decorate our homes or the many other practices that have become part of our cultures, but whose origins have grown dim. He forgets that nearly all human beings have a need to turn toward the light—for health, for growth, for renewal, and that even as the days have grown shorter and shorter, we approach this winter solstice time with a hope based in reality: from that day forward, the days will only grow longer, the light will only be brighter.

Part of the reason that human beings have festivals of light in nearly every culture is that human beings have always feared and raged against the dying of the light, and have created rituals born in hope but rooted in reassurance that surely, the light will come again, new life will come again, we will be able to begin again. All through history, human beings have banded together, have helped one another to face the changing light that conquers darkness, have learned to move forward into the sun.

Along with those rituals come stories of the seasons, colored by culture and religion and habit, meant to keep alive our hope: the lamp with only one night of oil that burns for eight miraculous nights. The story of a baby, born to an unmarried woman and a carpenter, in a barn surrounded by animals—then visited by the heavenly host. There are other stories we have never heard from people we have never met—all of them conspiring to bring us closer to the light and the life of which we dream and toward which we struggle as imperfect people.

Perhaps Garrison Keillor has troubles we know not of. Perhaps we are taking him too seriously and he meant his essay, and his onstage parody, as a curmudgeonly joke. But these are intolerant days. We know that, and every one of us should be held to account for that intolerance and the ways we promote it, even Garrison Keillor, for the light is changing. The light of faith is shining away from some communities and toward other for the first time in history. The light is changing; for the first time in centuries large numbers of people in the West are reading not just Hebrew Scripture and Christian scripture but Hindu scripture and Islamic scripture. For the first time in centuries, people are attuned to the reality that the light of the holy shines in many places, among many people, and that it is not political correctness but deep reverence for our common stories of the sacred, that inspire more and more of us.

It is possible that Garrison Keillor’s outrage is simply the latest example of predictable backlash in a world that is weary of change. But no matter how tired we are, no matter how much we fear, no matter how much we wish it were not true, the light is changing. These sacred days are meant to remind us that we need not fear the darkness, we need not fear the light, and we need not fear the change. We are meant to ride the rhythms of change, to pursue the light wherever it might take us, to be companions to one another on the journey, and to remind one another, particularly in this season, of the words of an angel visiting Mary: be not afraid. This poor unmarried girl, giving birth to a child not conceived with her fiancé, traveling with little or no money in a land not her own, nonetheless was met with a vision of light and a voice to remind her that, no matter what is coming, no matter what’s ahead, don’t be afraid—God is with you.

Someone ought to remind our grouchy Lutheran friend what it is the angel said, what message is sent by the changing light shining on the multiracial, multifaith world beyond Lake Woebegon: be not afraid, Garrison. Our covenantal faith won’t hurt you, even if we do ask you to attend to your inner voice. Our embrace of Wiccans or druids or atheists won’t hurt you. You work hard to make us sound aimless and random in our faith, but we aren’t. We just want to be like that innkeeper on the road to Bethlehem, opening the door so that other people get to hear the story, know they aren’t alone, become a little less afraid. We do these things out of our own sense that the light is changing, from a narrow beam to the full and glorious spectrum of human life and human faith. Not all of us are strong, or good looking, or above average, but all of us are welcome. Even you, Garrison Keillor, even you. Blessed Solstice. Amen.

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and then you stopped blogging.  What happened to you???

Yes, I know.  Life happened.  Church happened.  Teenage children happened. Most importantly, hackers happened!

The hacker issue is the worst, and I’m still working on it. So stay tuned; I’ll be back….

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Frank was as hilarious in person as his books, and charmed all of us that weekend. It was perfectly obvious why his students loved him. He was himself, and shame on you if you didn’t appreciate him.  He had nothing to prove to anyone, that seemed plain, and he brought to all his encounters in my presence a sense of delight and wonder that he was there at all. I got to hang out with him again a couple of years later at another writers conference, this time in Sun Valley, Idaho. It’s my husband Bob that has a picture of himself whitewater rafting with Frank, Anne Lamott and her son Sam, and some other people; being a non-swimmer I was having none of that.  My own memories are far more earthy—-hanging out each night after the day’s panels and workshops, listening to Frank and his wife Ellen sing these incredibly bawdy drinking songs, or watching a limerick throw-down among Frank, WS Merwin and Peter Matthiesen. Those evenings rank as some of the funniest spectacles of my adult life. These three men, in particular, managed to create rhymes using the names of body parts I didn’t know could be rhymed.

At a conference when many equally famous writers greeted me with a studied indifference, Frank McCourt was warm, curious, and open.  We had a good time, and promised to keep in touch, but like so many other people who connect only briefly, we drifted away.  I only saw him in passing a few years later, after I had become a minister and learned that he and Ellen lived only a few blocks from the congregation I served.  I was picking up my sons from school, and he was walking along 77th St.  We recognized each other, and spoke for a moment or two, and I introduced him to my boys.  I ran into Ellen just the same way, but we were always on our way somewhere else, or traveling for the holidays, and the fragile connection we once made faded.

Now Frank is gone, too.  I had hoped to see him again in connection to the public high-school-in-formation that we hope will bear his name.  Both Bob and I have been active with others in working toward its creation, so that we might lift up not only a good man and a fine writer, but also the two professions–writing and teaching–to which he devoted most of his life.  Rest well, Frank; I’m convinced you’ll keep God laughing.

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You don’t know me, and until yesterday afternoon, I didn’t know you. I was tired, cranky, discouraged about a host of burdens weighing on my heart. Between meetings at church, I signed onto Facebook to check on family and friends, and found a link to you, from someone who said that watching you would dispel all cynicism. Right, I said cynically, and figured I’d be better off eating lunch. Still, something in the clip I saw—your honest, earnest face, perhaps—made me click on the image in YouTube.

It didn’t take me long to get mad at the way people were talking to you, after you made your way onto the stage of “Britain’s Got Talent,” that condescending tone they used as though talking to a stupid child. These shows already have such a reputation for victimizing vulnerable people with delusions of stardom. I was angry for you, protective of you. What right did people have to make fun of you because you dreamed of singing? Did it really matter how bad you would be? Why should they let you humiliate yourself in front of all the world, just for ratings?

I’m almost ashamed to write this, dear Susan, because I had imagined they had found you in an audition room: unemployed and lonely, plain and off-key. I saw the clip as the camera panned the audience, filled mostly with young, pretty, grimacing women and girls. I half-closed my eyes and prepared to wince as the music rose, as I waited for the errant notes to come.

What came instead were my tears. I listened to you sing and I found myself remembering everything about my own life, when people thought they knew what was inside my heart because of what they saw outside—my dark skin; my nappy hair; my short, dumpy, ill-dressed body; my naïve and open smile, my wild desire to be something, to say something, to have someone know that I was in this world. You made me remember everything, Susan, and I sat in my office and cried while you sang as though God had sent you Herself.

I have been listening to you all day long; I have played that clip for everyone I know, and you have been in my prayers today, in gratitude that you have never given up the dream of standing in the light. When we who minister try to explain something of the nature of the Holy, its arrival in unexpected places, its wild and crazy blessings, some of what we mean is you, and your extraordinary gift, biding its time until revelation.

So forgive me for being just another person, like so many others, who saw you but never really saw you. Accept my gratitude for reminding me that we all come into life with songs to sing, with stories to tell, with steps to dance and with gifts to give. I give thanks, too, that the song that has made you famous is not yet true, that life has not yet killed the dream you’re dreaming.  Please let me root for you—as millions of others do who have heard you give voice to your dream. I know I’ll be watching—not just for your sake, but for my own, too. Many blessings, Susan Boyle.  Knock ‘em dead, girl!

Faithfully,

Rosemary

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Those of us who love this faith owe Bill an enormous debt of gratitude for making credible a liberal religious voice amid the conservative noise that passes for public debate.  In his strategic commitment to speaking faithfully, Bill changed the game for Unitarian Universalism’s public witness. Today, our faith once again provides respected testimony to our liberal values. Hearing Unitarian Universalists speak truth to power is expected—even assumed.  The first phase of the reclamation of our historic power has been wildly successful, and as a parish minister who has worked to leverage that public voice in her local community, I’m delighted with that success.

It’s time once again for Unitarian Universalists to elect a religious professional to lead our movement into the 21st century. Yet the urgent work that faces our association is very different now than it was when Bill chose to run for the presidency.  As liberal religious people, we are called now, more than ever, to be both articulate in naming the brokenness of this world and effective in the work of healing our world.  That’s why I am supporting The Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman as the next President of our Association.

In his brilliant Ware Lecture from 2008, the African American community activist Van Jones spoke about the next level of insight, awareness and activism that we must embrace as human beings living on this fragile and endangered planet.  And one of his themes—not unique to us as UUs, but so very relevant for us—is that it’s not enough to have a critique; you have to have a plan.  I am supporting Laurel because she has a plan, not a critique of how awful/unprepared/inept we are.mach-zehnder Laurel has a plan that takes Unitarian Universalism to the next level of insight and influence, based on her decades of experience, not only as a parish minister, not only as a brilliant fundraiser, but also as a committed community organizer working with Ernesto Cortes and other members of Dallas Area Interfaith.

Those of us who have been exposed to the community-organizing model know intimately that it’s never about talk, because talk is cheap.  Those of us who know community organizing know that it’s never about what a single person can do, but about what a committed group can do when it works together to hold powerful people accountable.  Most importantly, those of us who know community organizing have seen what can happen when a collaborative leader brings together people who are so different that they shouldn’t even be able to stand next to each other.  We know that amazing things happen when such disparate people unite in a common purpose! I support Laurel because she has lived and ministered in that knowledge for nearly three decades.

Bill Sinkford’s exemplary success in leading Unitarian Universalism has served to raise the bar for liberal religious leadership itself.  We have traveled beyond the point where our movement can empower religious leaders who often talk a good game, but in the end hesitate to change the game.  I am impatient with those leaders in our movement who participate in press conferences and public actions that make liberal religious people feel good, but leave those we oppose feeling angry or dismissive, and leave those unfamiliar with our faith—the movable middle—feeling both unmoved and unchanged. I support Laurel because she knows very well how to argue with people like the late Jerry Falwell, or how to get face time with people like President Bill Clinton, (for the record, she’s done both!) But she also knows, and will institutionalize, ways to build capacity in the tiniest congregation, ways to support the midsize congregations that are betwixt and between, ways to challenge large congregations to step forward for our faith.  Even more important, Laurel knows how to support all our congregations as they work strategically within their own communities, so that our congregations become known as trusted partners in the work of justice, so that real and lasting change occurs.

Most of all, I support Laurel because I feel in her presence what I feel in Bill Sinkford’s presence: a deep knowledge of The Holy, and a deep commitment to Unitarian Universalism as a liberal religious faith as opposed to some random nonprofit group.  I resonate deeply with those within our movement like Laurel who find depth, strength and focus in a consistent religious practice, and whose spirituality grounds the work they accomplish.  I have confidence that when Laurel leads—even when I disagree with her—she will lead from the core of our Living Tradition, that she will support religious leaders like myself in the work of justice and peace, and that she will call on each and every one of us to reach deeper and do more. Laurel leads with the spirit of a pastor, the focus of a seasoned executive and the insight of the community activist that she’s been for more than 20 years. She has my unqualified support, and I hope you will join me in voting for her at our next General Assembly.

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About 20 minutes later, I saw a tall distinguished man walk through the door and my first thought was: “Oh, this is what Bob will look like when we’re older,” because he looked so much like Bob, and because when you’re 19,  anything older than 30 seems very old indeed.  So I walked up to him and introduced myself, and said that Bob had asked me to look out for him.

He took my hand, and smiled this warm, open smile that made you feel like the sun had come out and was shining all over you.  “I’m Isaac McNatt; I’m so glad to meet you,” he said, and I knew he really was.  I took him to his seat, and sat right next to him. In between acts we chatted, and I talked about wanting to be a writer, and how much fun it was to work on the play, and how talented I thought his son was.

That was the first of our many conversations over many years, as I learned to love “Mac,” as much as everyone else did. I came to care for him first as the antithesis of my own angry and violent father.  He was elegant, and smart, and kind, and he and his wife, Gladys, adored each other.  They talked and laughed and held hands whenever they were together; I had never seen anything like that before.  I kept asking Bob if his parents were really like that—he kept telling me they’d always been that way.  For a lot of Americans, Barack and Michelle Obama were a big surprise, but I’d been looking at their forerunners for decades—Isaac and Gladys McNatt, and their 62-year marriage, was the real deal.

Mac and I were kindred spirits around technology.  We always loved gadgets, and could talk about them endlessly.  Bob and his mom only rolled their eyes at us while we talked about computers and tried to write our own batch files (he was better at it than I was!)  But he was also a keen political thinker, and what he knew of politics came from his long activist history.  I’ll always remember his talking about being in the Seabees during the Second World War; they refused to admit him to Officer Candidate School because he was black.  When the black Seabees were expected to eat after the white enlisted men, Mac helped to lead a protest on the base that led to his expulsion from the Navy, along with 17 of his brothers.  This dishonorable discharge was especially hurtful to Mac’s future; he’d enlisted after taking a leave of absence from St. John’s Law School in NYC.  Without an honorable discharge, he would never have been able to practice law.  So he and several of his brother Seabees decided to fight, and they enlisted the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund: their lawyer was a young man named Thurgood Marshall. The future Supreme Court justice eventually won for them the honorable discharges that would allow Mac admission to the New York and New Jersey bar, and a distinguished career would follow.

In addition to his political and social activism, Mac was a serious churchman, and loved the Unitarian Universalist faith we eventually shared.  I learned half of what I know about doing church from watching him and Gladys in their leadership roles at Community Church of NY, the church in which they were married, and in which I was ordained decades later.

The symptoms of Mac’s Alzheimer’s disease became clear to me while I was living with them in the summer of 1998, working on my ministerial requirement for clinical pastoral education.  He would be fine for long stretches, and then he would forget things or misplace them in a way that was completely unlike him. By then, I had seen enough people at the hospital to figure out what was happening, and his eventual diagnosis sent us all into a long time of grieving, as we began to say good-bye to this man who had been the light of all our lives.

Mac died quietly last Monday at a hospice in North Carolina. Knowing it was time didn’t make it any easier to let him go, and we are heartbroken.  But I so glad he lived, so grateful to see his face in the faces of my husband and sons, and to hear so many stories of his dedication to his country, to his liberal religious faith, and to his people.  He was a treasure, and I loved him.  Take care, Mac.

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IT WAS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!

Yes, better than graduating from high school or college or seminary.  Better than getting married, or having my children, or getting ordained.  (For the record, my husband and children rolled their eyes as I was writing this; they know how I am….)  This is so much bigger than my tiny little life.  This is about my country, and my children and my children’s future.  After all these years, I have a president!

It was a totally wonderful experience.  People were all so happy, and so psyched.  In Washington today, it was all about Obama.  In the restaurant we went to for lunch (at 3 p.m.!) the staff was chanting his name with all of us who were eating.  One man on the street we passed was chanting:  “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at last; we ain’t got to kiss nobody’s ass!”  All of us were howling with laughter and relief.

I’ll have more intelligent things to say about this tomorrow, perhaps, once I calm down.  I am too happy for intelligent speech, especially when I think of George Bush, safely ensconced in Texas where he can no longer do significant harm.  And when I look at the clips of my new president, reminding us that the time has come “to put aside childish things.”  I knew things were different when, at the end of the ceremony, as the National Anthem was played, I stopped with everyone else to place my hand over my heart and sing every word—in spite of who wrote it—because I really meant it.  Finally, finally, finally:  it’s my country too.

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I wish I had more of the objective, cynical quality that journalists and bloggers are supposed to have, but I just can’t. Moments like this remind me of why I left the business of journalism and went into ministry, which is really the business of advocacy and hope.  I get to live the way that I feel, and not attempt to affect the attitude of jaded, all-knowing weariness that made me so weary of many folks in my former career.

I am off to dress and eat breakfast, and get my kids to do the same, though they are agitating to go;  if I can blog from the Mall, I will.  Mostly, though, I am going to see something that still boggles my mind.  Bush is going to Texas, and Obama, a black man, is going to the White House.  Glory Hallelujah!

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10.  Riding in the snowy night through Western Pennsylvania, no longer scary to me because I KNOW it’s Obama country now, listening to my new favorite Brazilian singer, Mariana Aydar, and hearing the soft snoring of  “the guys” as I drive.

9.  Having my brother call at about 1 p.m. on Wednesday, asking for an ETA (estimated time of arrival) in Chicago, because everyone else is already there.

8.  Not being able to drive up 51st St. for the first time in 20 years, because the Secret Service has cordoned off 51st St. from Woodlawn to Drexel in order to PROTECT MY PRESIDENT AND HIS FAMILY.  Hallelujah! Go Chi-Town!

7.  Arriving to the sounds of my boisterous family, the smells of sweet potato pie and baked spaghetti and greens that I can eat RIGHT NOW, not Thursday.

6.  Sleeping late and waking up to the laughter in the kitchen as my mother and sister and nieces wrestle with the turkey. (I’m not a cook; I’m The Clean-Up Woman, with only a few apologies to the song of the same name!)

5.  Soaking in my mother’s amazingly deep claw’s foot, cast-iron bathtub for a whole hour before the rest of the family descends on us. (God, I miss long, hot baths!)

4.  Answering the yearly rash of questions from my sons about who all those people are who keep showing up and how they are related to us, and greeting all my long-lost cousins and their husbands and wives and children and realizing that, even though I don’t come home more than twice a year, they know PRECISELY who I am.

3.   Watching and smelling all the last-minute preparations that my sister makes because my mom’s hands no longer have the strength to hold the pots or fix the food, even though she still has opinions.

2.  Getting to do the prayer as my sister and my brothers and their children and my children and my husband and everyone else hovers over a table so filled with food we can’t eat it all on the first go-round. (But we all know Brays and McNatts and Broadnaxes never stop eating!)

1.  Being well, being happy, being alive, being together with the people who don’t care at all about how much or little I make, or what church I serve, or what people think of me.  Being with the folks for whom I am always and forever, “Ro.”   Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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