I still feel like me, too. I still think way too much; still giggle and shriek like a teenager when someone really makes me laugh; still cry at television commercials; still talk to my television when I’m mad at the news. I still have three or four books going at the same time, so that I can read according to what mood I’m in. ( I remember how annoyed my mother used to be when finding a turned down book in every room of the house–even the bathroom. The only thing that’s changed is that I can read nearly all my books on my IPad via Kindle. ) I still love gadgets of all kinds. I still love to dance, even though I sometimes can hear my joints popping when I do. I’m still an introvert, though most people don’t believe me. I’m still a romantic; I’m still an optimist.

I don’t want to be one of those women who dreads every passing day out of fear her best days are behind her. I don’t want to be one of those old-lady Luddites who get the vapors in the face of new technology. I don’t want to be a cynic, ever. I don’t want to lose the beat. I don’t want to lose my curiosity, intellectual or otherwise; my goofy sense of humor; my capacity for tears or for appropriate rage. Somebody asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I realized what I want most: I want to feel like myself for all the days of my life.

Three of the UU ministers in our OCCUPYFAITH NYC contingent today

In OccupyFaithNYC, however, we are working toward a more excellent way; both/and is the order of the day for us. With economic justice as our common denominator, we find it natural to rally on behalf of justice for the 99 percent (and transformation of the 1 percent), then to cross over at a colleague’s request to support an action against housing foreclosures. Not everyone can come to every action, but with more and more frequency, more of us know about what’s next on the justice agenda, what move might create synergy, what event requires a larger presence….

Which brings us to MayDay. No one can know what the day will bring; to be certain, I’m thinking through my day in an attempt to avoid buying anything (what I’ll do for coffee is anybody’s guess!) World-class shopper that I am, however, I have come to understand more clearly the idea of retail fasting for this 24 hours. I still recall an early OccupyFaithNYC meeting when a member of OccupyWallStreet joined us to talk about next moves after the group had been evicted from Zuccotti Park. Many of us were lukewarm about the idea of physical reoccupation; wasn’t it more important to free our minds, no matter where those minds were located? But the young man who spoke to us issued a challenge I think of each day that I go about my life in Manhattan. Occupying physical space, he said, was a necessary antidote to the constant corporate occupation that has already taken place in every aspect of our lives.

I have been living with that idea ever since. Every Bank of America branch that bleeds red into my field of vision; every McDonalds that inserts itself into the urban landscape; every Duane Reade drugstore that takes the place of a mom-and-pop deli priced out of the Upper West Side–they all constitute our own insidious occupation by the market. For many of us, this awareness has been worth the price of blocked streets, long meetings and periodic arrests. But awareness is not enough, so this afternoon thousands of us will gather in Union Square. It’s only fitting for OccupyFaithNYC members to meet at the statue of Gandhi by 4 pm, so that we can join with others on the march back to Zucotti Park. It makes sense to return to the start of it all, to go back to the place where so many people slept, and where so many more of us woke up.

Just because people are struggling and scared doesn’t mean they’re also stupid.  They know and understand what is human and real, what the best of America entails: fairness, freedom, access, privacy.  Politicians and corporate interests may be confused, but the people are not.

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.”

Image via Wikipedia

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.

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….

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.

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