Worship

I return to the question: What are we here for? Or (for those who object to prepositions at the the end): For what are we here? That is, for what do we come to a worship service?

Well, we come in order to worship. OK. And what does that mean?

Coming to worship is different from coming to watch a performance. Ruth Lewis (the Music Minister at the UU Fellowship of Gainesville) and I are not performers. The worship associate for the day, the soloist singer, the rest of the choir: none of us are performers. We are co-liturgists. And "liturgy," as you'll remember, means "the work of the people." It is your work. It is, as my colleague Rev. Abhi Janamanchi put it when he was our guest preacher here in Gainesville last October: the work of “uniting together in mind, body, and spirit with a larger reality that is known and unknown by many names.”

We can’t make it happen, sometimes it doesn’t happen, and if it does happen, it’s a kind of accident. Worship is for the work of trying to be a little more accident-prone. It is, as Abhi also said, for

“witnessing to the creativity which can evolve from the inevitable tension between the individual voice and the group which gives it resonance and depth. And we gather to witness to the presence of the depth of being which expands, renews, and reinvigorates us to encounter levels of reality not [noticed] in our day-to-day lives.”

You’re not here to take in a show. You didn’t pay your money for your ticket to a show that you expect to be able to watch in undisturbed peace. If that is your expectation then allow me to upset that expectation.

Worship is a communal act. It’s the people around you, not the people up here on the chancel, that matter most. That’s why I call it a chancel, not a stage. The people around you cannot be a distraction FROM the worship, because the people around you ARE the worship. They might distract you from my sermon, they might distract you from the choir's anthem, they might distract you from writing your check for the offertory, but they cannot distract you from the worship because the people around you in this space made sacred by our intention that it be so -- they ARE the worship.

Worship, after all, means "worth-scrippen": worth ascribing. It means ascribing worth – taking this time from our week to remember what is really and truly of worth in this life – to ascribe and inscribe it in our hearts and memories to fortify us for the week ahead. And if the people around you aren’t of worth, then all I can say is that’s one mighty big gator you’re wrestling. If the people around you, children, young adult, middle-aged, or senescent, are not of worth, then all I can say is, "So sorry about your bad luck!"

So: in that moment – that moment when annoyance is flashing across your brain because somebody else is STILL shuffling her papers, or whispering too loudly, or clapping, or shouting back “Amen” – in that moment, THAT is your invitation to the opening of your heart to love and the opening of your mind to peace, THAT is the accident that was waiting to happen to show you a glimpse of a new possibility for connection. In that moment, THAT is your worship, that is the worth to ascribe in your heart, not my carefully crafted sermon, not the choir’s carefully rehearsed and lovingly offered spiritual music.

And, by the way, just FYI: studies of noise in church sanctuaries when children and adults are both present, show over and over that it is the adults who make most of the noise.

I really really would like to say that there is one exception. I want to say that one thing that is a distraction and is not itself the suddenly surprising breaking through of transcendence, the one thing that really is simply a despicable and unworthy annoyance is:

Cell phones going off.

Well, I can recognize that that’s my gator to wrestle, while still hoping you won’t be the one push me in.

No, scratch that.

We don’t get to decide what pushes us. We only get to decide whether and how to wrestle. In the end I cannot unequivocally declare that a cell phone going off can never be the sound in worship that will jolt you to awaken to a wider awareness of love.

We don't get to decide what pushes us. We only get to decide whether and how to wrestle. How are your decisions about that working out for you?

I’ve done some gator wrestling. Let me know if I can help.

Amen.

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Part 5 of "Neurodiversity"
Previous: Part 4: "The Second Smooth Stone of Liberalism"
Beginning: Part 1: "Gator Wrestling"

The Second Smooth Stone of Liberalism

I'm addressing neurodiversity, for, as Meg Jobes said in an email to me:

“Everyone will be encountering more than one child who has [autism]. I think Unitiarian Universalists should be speaking not just to racial diversity and social diversity, but we should be including neurodiversity and be welcoming to people with autism and other neurological issues (adhd, etc.)”

I am particulary jazzed to take this opportunity to talk about stretching our welcoming, our acceptance, our radical hospitality, our love to the neurodiverse, the neurologically atypical. You see, in my years as a Unitarian Universalist minister, I have preached about feminism and patriarchy – and I’m a man.

I have preached about racism and the unfinished project of racial justice – and I’m white, in the sense that I’ve been told all my life that I’m white, and society grants me the tacit privileges of whiteness.

I have preached about homophobia and queer theory and transgender fairness and understanding – yet I am straight, and the body that I am trapped inside of, aside from the fact that it isn’t 20 anymore, seems to suit me. It seems, so far, to match fairly well my sense of my gender self.

I have preached about immigration justice – and I am a native-born citizen of this land, and my US passport gets me easily into most other countries.

I have preached about the need to better understand and address poverty – and I was born, raised, and remain solidly middle-class.

I have referenced the importance of accessibility for the differently-abled -- and I have the use of limbs that is called “normal.”

I’ve preached about cruelty to nonhuman animals – and I am human.

All of this is well and good. We need to hear the voices of the oppressed, and we also need for people of privilege like me to speak out for justice. There is a place for US-citizen, normally-abled, average height, average weight, right-handed, middle-class, middle-aged straight white human men to stand as allies of women, gay men, lesbians, the transgendered, African Americans, undocumented workers, the poor, the differently-abled, and of all the critters of God’s green earth.

But when I speak on the topic of neurodiversity, I speak to you as a person who is, himself, not neurotypical. A year and a half ago, in late 2010, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Now, at my Doctor’s suggestion, I do brain training exercises, I take zinc and omega-3 fatty acids, and B-vitamins, and an anti-oxidant and a prescription stimulant. I try harder and more conscientiously to get more sleep, since my doctor says that getting less than 8 hours sleep is the single greatest factor that will exacerbate my scatteredness. ADHD is the gator I’m wrestling with.

You might be wondering: Whatever happened to fault? Isn’t anybody responsible for themselves any more? If we can’t shush a distracting child’s noise, who can we shush? If we can’t criticize our minister without actually talking to him about our concerns and how we can help, then who can we criticize without talking to them about it?

I am reminded that 30 years ago, a corner was being turned in our culture’s attitudes about domestic abuse. In 1979, as a law against marital rape was being considered, Bob Wilson, representative from California, said, “If you can’t rape your wife who can you rape?” It’s strange to think that only 33 years ago, that question could be asked in all seriousness – that it really did express a real sentiment in our society then. I don’t imagine the sentiment has entirely disappeared, but it’s been a long time since a public figure could get away with expressing it publicly.

The answer that the vast majority of Unitarian Universalists have been giving since well before 1979 is obviously, you can’t rape anyone. It is the second of our "five smooth stones of liberalism" that relations between persons ought to rest on mutual free consent and not coercion. (Click here.)

This idea of consent applies also to the way we treat our children. I'm not talking about formal consent, which requires that the parties have reached "the age of consent." Rather, I mean what is at the core of the idea of consent: a relationship of respect, care, and accountability. Parenting-type behaviors – like shushing a child – need also to rest upon consent. If I have a relationship with both the child and that child's parent, if I share in an understanding of what’s going on in the given situation, then I might not be out of line to give a mild admonishment. But only if I first have understanding, and an established relationship that affords me that role. I would certainly have to be aware of what neurological conditions might be at play. We have to know the child before we can help that child grow.

* * * * *
Part 4 of "Neurodiversity"
Next: Part 5: "Worship"
Previous: Part 3: "The Holy Wholly Other"
Beginning: Part 1: "Gator Wrestling"

The Holy Wholly Other

I thank Meg Jobes (see her May 14 guest post) for her sharing about her son, Eli, and for urging me to address the way that congregations are not always welcoming, are not always understanding, are not always accepting of those who are neurologically atypical.

Can you hear it? Can you hear the call to a wonderful and transformative opportunity for opening our hearts? We have an opportunity here to learn a fuller love.

I’m not going to devote much time today to an interesting and informative talk on the biology, psychology, phsiology of autism and autism-spectrum-disorder. I will just note that autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not well understood. Autism itself, Asperger’s syndrome and PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified are the three recognized forms of ASD, Autism spectrum disorder.

That’s the very basics. Even more basic is the message of this acronym for "AUTISM":
Always
Unique
Totally
Interesting
Sometimes
Mysterious.

Meg's post told us a little bit more, and I encourage us to learn more. Google "Autism". The Wikipedia entry is a start (click here).

Rather than a learned discourse on the nature of autism, my focus is on this question: What are we here for? Whatever the details of how autism works may be, what is asked of us as people of faith, people on a spiritual path, people who have come to worship and find some of our expectations not met? Maybe we didn't expect to find anyone neurologically atypical in our midst at worship. How do we handle the upsetting of that expectation? We didn't expect, right in the middle of Sunday worship, to have a chance to be welcoming, accepting, and understanding of a sudden outburst or unusually active moving around.

LoraKim once said we ought to pass out hard hats for Sunday worship. Watch your head. There's liable to be debris from crumbling expectations.

It was from Meg that I first encountered the word “neurodiversity.” And as she pointed out, diversity is important to us Unitarian Universalists. Diversity is a central part of the self-conception of the thousand-congregation denomination called the Unitarian Universalist Association, and it is central to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville. -Every week we at UUFG, we repeat out loud an affirmation that declares our commitment to be a diverse religious community.

Theologians have characterized God as the holy wholly other – that is, holy, and also completely different. They’re on to something. When we make contact with that which is so different that it pulls us out of our usual patterns and habits, pulls us out of our usual ego defenses, then it does feel transcendent. That experience that some of us call God, then, depends on experience of The Other, which we encounter right here on Earth in the form of other living beings. The holy other is encountered in plants and trees and other animals – living beings outside our species. The holy other is encountered in human beings outside our gender, outside our sexual orientation, outside our race, outside our ethnicity, outside our class, outside our generation, outside our condition of physical ability, outside our casual assumptions, outside the neurological brain patterns we are used to encountering.

That’s where we encounter the divine: outside of our expectations, outside our comfort zone. Sometimes, maybe, it might be an autistic kid who pushes you out of your comfort zone and into a place where the magic happens.

Connecting in compassion is the holy encounter. If I may call upon wisdom from the Jewish and Christian traditions – traditions from which we have diverged but with which we share deep roots – then, friends, I let me ask us again to remember Genesis, chapter 18:

The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.”

Now Abraham doesn’t recognize who these visitors are. Abraham's use of “my lord,” is a general term of respect. Abraham thinks he’s greeting human strangers. He says:

"Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on – since you have come to your servant. . . . Abraham ran to the heard, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.”

In ancient times, a stranger often represented a threat. Yet Abraham rushes out to show kindness. He sets out his best offering. What he finds out, is that he is serving God. Abraham's act of practical compassion leads to a holy encounter.

As I read that story, it’s not that reaching out to needs greater than our own causes a magical being to reward us for it – though I understand why a group might describe it that way. It certainly feels magical.

Reaching out and connecting to The Other IS the holy encounter. And the more OTHER, the more it stretches what we’re used to, violates our norms and expectations, the greater the possibility for encountering the holy. We touch the divine when we contact in compassion the other, the stranger. Whoever it is, that’s God. Whoever it is! And it might be a child whose brain is wired to upset your expectations.

* * * * *
Part 3 of "Neurodiversity"
Next: Part 4: "The Second Smooth Stone of Liberalism"
Previous: Part 2: "Meg's Story: Elijah Has Autism"
Beginning: Part 1: "Gator Wrestling"

Meg's Story: Elijah Has Autism

Guest post by Meg Jobes

Reflection at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville

Delivered 2012 May 6, Sunday

My name is Meg Jobes, a member of this Fellowship for two years, and a mom of four extraordinary people. One of those extraordinary people, my little son Elijah, has autism.

One in every 88 children is being diagnosed with autism. That’s a big increase, and it is because we understand better what autism really is. Many of the classifications of special needs are no longer being used or are now being correctly classified as autism. For example, it used to be common to diagnose an autistic child as mentally retarded.

Kids think differently and learn differently from other kids, but they are not retarded. Nor are most of them like Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rain Man,” nor are they savants in general. They do take longer to show their skills in some areas.

Elijah appeared to be able to read when he was just a baby – a trait known as hyperlexia. Actually, he had memorized all his books.

Autism Spectrum Disorder is an inability to understand social rules, sometimes an inability to verbalize, and seems to contain another disorder as part of it known as Sensory Processing Disorder, or Sensory Integration Disorder. There’s a lot going on with these kids, and, while they have some things in common, it’s different for each one of them. In Eli’s case, he cannot understand how to do basic things like read an expression on a face and assess what the person might be feeling at that time. I might feel angry, but it is impossible for him to understand the look on my face or the tone of my voice as angry.

He’s a sweet guy, my son. He senses the world in a different way, so he doesn’t act the same way. When he’s sitting here in the congregation, he might find the lights too bright, or the noises too loud or too soft. He might feel the air is strange on his skin or that the smell in the air is unbearable.

He can’t express his thoughts and feelings like others. We’re lucky if he can manage to use words to ask for help or to tell me he needs the bathroom. He has developmental delays so that he may look 9 years old, but he acts anywhere from 2 to 9 years old, depending on the situation. He is not undisciplined or intentionally trying to disrupt or be annoying. He simply cannot control the way his senses process information, so sometimes he jerks or claps or makes a noise so he can cope with the environment better.

Imagine sitting in your chair and an overwhelming light envelops you while discordant noises assault your ears and funny smells assault your nose all at the same time. So you clap, because that can make you focus on only the clap and not the overwhelming amount of information coming in. That’s what we think he and other children with autism are going through every day.

Eli wants to be here. He asks to come to church. Some vibe in the air, some feeling of normal he gets here makes him want to be here, despite how hard it can be.

We talk a lot in our fellowship about diversity of beliefs, of culture, of class, of race. The time has come to talk about neurodiversity. Every brain processes inputs differently and forms responses differently. Some brains – like the ones my other three children have – process within the range we call “neurotypical” – which means their brains work more-or-less the way we expect them to – so far. Who knows if any one of them will be assailed with challenges such as depression or ADHD or something else a little non-neurotypical.

We don’t understand much about how brains work, though, if the brain is typical, it’s easy to act like we know "what’s going on in there." Autistic brains surprise us. The strange and unusual ways they process their world startle us into realizing that we do not, in fact, know "what’s going on in there." With 1 in 88 children now diagnosed with a form of Autistic Spectrum Disorder, we, as a society, are going to have to figure out how to make those kids a part of an adult world that doesn’t work for them right now.

We need to look at any person with understanding and acceptance and strive to understand who they are.

I learn from Eli every day. You can learn from him, too. That little boy or girl who cannot sit still, who seems to be the biggest brat you ever saw, may be facing challenges you can’t see. His parents are probably exhausted, stressed, scared, embarrassed, ashamed. They are also proud, loving and stronger than almost anyone.

* * * * *
Part 2 of "Neurodiversity"
Next: Part 3: "The Holy Wholly Other"
Beginning: Part 1: "Gator Wrestling"

A slightly different version is posted on Meg's blog: Click here.

Gator Wrestling

Here's a story that came into my Inbox a few days ago. Perhaps you've seen it?

A billionaire Florida man decided that he wanted to throw a party and invited all of his buddies and neighbors. He also invited Leroy, a rather less couth fellow in the neighborhood. He held the party around the pool in the backyard of his mansion. Leroy was enjoying himself. At the height of the party, the host said, 'I have 10-foot and very hungry gator in my pool, and I'll give a million dollars to anyone who has the nerve to jump in.' The words were barely out of his mouth when there was a loud splash. Everyone turned around and saw Leroy in the pool! Leroy was fighting the gator and seemed to have the upper-hand. Leroy was jabbing it in the eyes with his thumbs, throwing punches, head butts and choke holds, biting the gator on the tail and flipping it through the air like some kind of judo master. The water was churning and splashing everywhere. Both Leroy and the gator were screaming and raising heck. Finally Leroy strangled the gator and let it float to the top, belly-up like a dime-store goldfish. Leroy then slowly climbed out of the pool. Everybody was just staring at
him in disbelief. Finally the host says, 'Well, Leroy, I reckon I owe you a million dollars.'

'No, that's okay. I don't want It,' said Leroy.
The rich man said, 'Man, I have to give you something You won the bet. How about half a million bucks then?'
'No thanks, I don't want it,' answered Leroy.
The host said, 'Come on, I insist on giving you something. That was amazing. How about a new Porsche and a Rolex and some stock options?'
Again Leroy said no.
Confused, the rich man asked, 'Well, Leroy, then what do you want?'
Leroy said, 'I want the name of the so-and-so who pushed me in the pool!'

I don’t know who, or what, pushes you – what impulse pushes you to seek connection, to seek transformation – a glimpse of the possibility of a new way of being, an inchoate hope that your heart can open up to love, that your mind can know a deeper peace. There you are – jumped in, or thrown in, by an impulse you might not have expected.

Perhaps you arrive at Sunday morning worship for a nice, sedate time – something calming: some nice music, an interesting talk. You probably don't expect a gator fight. As my mother-in-law used to say when I complained of being dealt a bad hand at bridge – or anything: "So sorry about your bad luck."

The spiritual path involves a lot of wrestling. We wrestle with our inner selves. We come together in community to love and support each other. Truth be told, we also come to wrestle with each other. Sometimes the waters get to churning.

We come here with expectations. Part of us knows that the path of growth means upsetting those expectations. We come to worship with expectations. There's nothing wrong with having expectations, and no way to avoid having them in any case. The question is: what about when those expectations aren’t met? You might expect an Order of Service to be handed to you. If there is no Order of Service, how do you react? Or if there were no toilet paper in the bathrooms, how how would you take that in stride?

Getting upset is one option I can choose when my expectations aren't met. I can identify with my expectation: so if it is upset, then I am upset. I can make that choice.

When I do make that choice, there’s another little saying I’m liable to hear – not from my late mother-in-law, but from her daughter: “How’s that working out for ya?”

The path of spiritual deepening runs into the mountains of our resistance: it isn’t easy to let go of judgment about how things should be. Partly, that’s because judging mind has a good and important purpose to fill. We need to be able to exercise good judgment about what’s good and what isn’t. It’s just that if we’re getting upset, angry, scared, that’s probably not terribly functional most of the time. Whenever we choose to be upset, it’s worthwhile to ask ourselves: "how is this strategy working out for me"?

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Part 1 of "Neurodiversity"
Next: Part 2: "Meg's Story: Elijah Has Autism"