Neighbor Water

So I didn't go to church today... but I am reading Rebecca Parker's book Blessing The World... and for no real reason, as I read her proposal that we should tithe, we should enforce a day of rest into our lives and we should go on a shamanistic journey, at least those of us who can afford it... I got a crazy idea...

In many Unitarian Universalist congregations it is traditional to begin the church year with a 'gathering of water' from the families in the congregation. Folks bring water from their travels... sometimes from exotic places like Russia or France... or from a summer camp or a canoe trip.

But I'd rather propose a different tradition. Instead of having the water in a water communion come from YOUR summer, what if it instead came from a NEIGHBOR'S house? Each member of the congregation is asked to knock on the door of a neighbor, introduce themselves and ask for a cup of water. The water communion would then be a celebration of the community, and the collected "neighbor water" would be diverse, rather than based on one's ability to pay for a vacation.

I am a big fan of blessing hands with this collected water... teachers, musicians, etc.

Wake Now Compassion...

My Sermon "Wake Now Compassion..."
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Marin, California

The reading was from "Here if You Need Me-- a True Story" by Unitarian Universalist Minister Kate Braestrup. Kate is the chaplain for the State of Maine's Game Wardens. Her work includes praying over the bodies of hunters, snowmobilers, and hikers, and counseling the wardens themselves.
In this excerpt, Kate is preparing to say Grace at the annual Game Warden's Dinner, a dinner cooked by a group of wardens including Fritz Trisdale. (The reading followed here)

Sermon:
Although it's not traditional here, I'm going to start my sermon with a Gospel reading. I found this tiny bit in the Gospel of Thomas, the most recently discovered of the major gospels... and I'm only going to give you a fragment of saying number 6, though there is a similar sentiment in Luke chapter 11:
"His disciples asked him and said to him... How should we pray?" (Five Gospels, Hoover, Funk)
That's all... just that simple question. In the two different gospels where the question is asked, Jesus gives very different answers. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus replies that God knows everything anyway, and in Luke Jesus responds with a version of "Our Father"-- the prayer commonly called "The Lord's Prayer."
But... I am savoring the answer to "How shall We Pray" we find in Kate Braestrup's book when she writes: “Heigh Oh Silver!”
As a Unitarian Universalist, I’m much more comfortable with a prayer that begins “Heigh Oh Silver” than one that begins “Hail Mary” or "Our Father". But over the last two months I’ve actually said more Hail Marys than Heigh-o-Silvers.
I want to thank Sally Schroeder for asking me to be with you today. Sally and I go back a few years, when we both lived near Princeton New Jersey.
I lived in a community called Kingston, and like most of the men in town, and a few of the women, I served as a Volunteer Firefighter.
Kate Braestrup's memoir of the Maine Game Wardens touched my heart in that it resonated with my firefighting past.
Kingston had lots of open space, and when someone gets lost—a suicidal teenager, an Alzheimer sufferer—the fire companies are the quickest way to get lots of people searching the forests and swamps.
Elsewhere in "Here If You Need Me" Kate Braestrup tells about another lost-person search, on an icy, rainy November night.
Chaplain Braestrup is asked by one of the wardens: "Listen, Reverend Mother, as long as you're here, could you pray for it to stop raining?" Kate replies: "I'm a Unitarian Universalist. We don't DO weather." (109)
So, from Braestrup’s point of view, UU prayers should not ask a supernatural power to change atmospheric patterns. And, believe me, I’ve been out on lost-person calls on snowy nights, and if I thought they’d do anything, I might have acted differently.
Two summers ago I saddled up my minivan left New Jersey, an engineering career, and volunteer firefighting and drove across America, to come out to Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley. My goodbyes didn't include a prayer, but "Heigh o Silver" would have been a perfect.
At School when I inquired how to pray, the students who were further along would say: “Charlie, wait until you are a Hospital Chaplain Intern — then you will learn how to pray!” So I waited.
As with many denominations, the training of Unitarian Universalist ministers includes a critical step, called C P E. That stands for “CLINICAL PASTORAL EDUCATION”, and it’s a process in which we learn how to be a pastor in a clinical setting.
Each ministerial candidate is required to do CPE. We can choose to be a chaplain in a Hospital, a Prison, a Hospice organization, or a Mental Health facility.
My choice was a VA Hospital.
I wanted to work with Military Veterans, and specifically to work at the Palo Alto VA because that hospital has a wide variety of units.
It has almost 1000 beds, and everything from Hospice and Nursing Home units to addictions, blindness and spinal cord injuries, as well as the usual heart bypass and hip replacements.
So two months ago I appeared at the Palo Alto VA Hospital… ready to learn how to pray, to pray and also to be present to patients.
There is a saying. A chaplain must meet patients where they are.
If a patient is Jewish, I am a Jewish chaplain.
If they are atheists, I am atheist.
If they are Catholic, I am Catholic.
But I’m not a Rabbi, or a Priest or even a Minister. If a patient is Catholic and wants communion, I arrange to have a Eucharistic minister to come to him—or her, though most patients are male.
If a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints wants to talk, I will provide a compassionate listening ear. If they need a ritual, I will contact the Mormon minister on call.
I spent some time wondering... is working for the VA really working for the military-industrial complex? Another of our chaplain interns was actually challenged on this point... challenged so strongly that his ability to be ordained came into question. But he and I see it this way:
A recent study shows that one-in-five returning OEF/OIF (Those are the official names: Operation Enduring Freedom, in Afghanistan, and Operation Iraqi Freedom) …one in five… has symptoms of what is called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and is at a higher risk of suicide. Last year a national suicide hotline got 22 thousand calls from veterans.
In my opinion, it does not matter that our incursion into Iraq was based on deception and out-and-out lies... the soldiers who fought and are fighting there are human beings.
AND If a Gulf War veteran is suffering Gulf War Syndrome, he or she deserves to be cared for spiritually as well as physically.
And those my age, who were drafted into Vietnam-- only to have their sense of safety permanently destroyed-- they also demand our attention. They were IN THE WAR, but they were NOT THE WAR. They deserve dignity, just as all human beings deserve to know that they have worth and dignity. So I chose the VA.
One thing I should tell you... because of privacy concerns in healthcare, in this sermon I will be fictionializing patient names and information.
For our internship each chaplain selects several units to cover, one or two days per week. The rest of the time is spent doing classwork.
Of the twenty possible assignments, I selected THREE to work with all summer.
One is a ward full of Vietnam-era vets suffering from alcohol and drug addictions. And when the alcohol is withdrawn, the nightmare of Post Traumatic Stress reappears... sometimes with hallucinations.
It is a locked ward where patients have no belts or shoelaces -- a precaution to prevent suicides.
Another of my wards holds paraplegics and quadriplegics, some on ventilators.
And my third ward is a relatively normal hospital ward, full of old farmers, car salesmen and teachers spending a few days or weeks in surgical recovery for cancer, diabetes related conditions, back problems, and things like that.
How would you pray for these precious people?
Maybe you have had a friend waiting for a cancer biopsy result. What would you say to your friend other than "It is God's Will"?
Maybe you have a friend who suffers from the disease of alcoholism, drug addiction or depression, whose life spirals into chaos. What do you say to your friend that doesn't drive you two apart?
Maybe you have a friend who has lost physical abilities, through accident, through disease, or simply because of how they were born. What do you say to your friend when "Don't Worry" just sounds hollow?
And what do you say to yourself? How do you comfort YOURSELF when you are in relationship with struggle?
I must confess, I have had friends in all these situations, and I've never known what to say.
At the start of my internship I also had to be explicit about my personal goals. The other five interns also wrote out their own goals, and then we shared the documents, so each of us could help the other.
One of my goals was to "Experiment with Prayer"... and for how little I knew of prayer, I might have just as reasonably said, "Experiment with Heart Surgery". But once stated, you know, a true desire cannot be withdrawn. And so I have been mindful of this goal in my work.
For example, as part of the addictions unit I learned the "Serenity Prayer"-- a standard part of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, though it dates back at least to the time of theologian Reinholt Niebuhr...
God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change.
The courage to change the things we can.
And the wisdom to know the difference.
AA leaves the understanding of "God" to the particular group and individual. The one AA meeting I attended was in a church, and the serenity prayer had a Protestant Christian preamble, but this need not be so.
The patients in the addictions unit are mostly desperate, and in dire straits.
They have burned bridges with family and friends, lost house, car, savings, job, and sometimes health. To accept that the ex-wife, the condo or their drivers license-- accept that all these things are gone... that is a step toward recovery. And while I don't participate in their AA meeting, my job is to support the words of that prayer.
And one step at a time, the VA will help them build a new life... if they can learn serenity, and work to change.
The spinal injuries unit has not involved saying any prayers. For these men and women, the "things I cannot change" are as obvious as morning bowel care. They will never be what they once were.
For them, prayer takes the form of presence.
To listen to their lives and hopes, to be with them as they suffer setbacks when bedsores reappear and progress when they are healed again, to embody a sense of their worth, that is my prayer for them. It is a prayer of joy.
The surgical ward has had the most prayer in it.
One day I was asked to pray the Hail Mary and the Our Father in Spanish… I took German in High School.
My pro-nun-cia-tion was horrible, but the patient was,...... thankfully patient, as I read the words off a tiny card.
Another prayer was with a young veteran's family, where we all held hands.
I asked him to start... His start included an invocation of "Our Lord Jesus Christ" and statements of humility and unworthiness... and he continued for several minutes asking for blessings on the hospital, his nurses, and even me. When he had mentioned everyone and everything I could imagine to lift up in prayer, he turned it over to me. All I had to do was say "Amen!"
I had given my first fundamentalist prayer.
And consider George... "George" is an old veteran recovering from a painful procedure. I sat at his bedside as he talked of his life, losses and what he held dear. When it came time to go, George started the prayer in his traditional way, but he didn't do the whole thing. He let me take over:
Let us be mindful of our friend George as he does the hard work of recovery,
Let us be mindful of the love he felt for his mother and his father, and the love he feels for his children. (And, after a few more like that I said:)
May he find peace amidst the work of healing. May he get enough sleep, (and so on)
Amen.
I was nervous. My mind raced... It was awful... but it was perfect.
Back in our reading, Kate Braestrup gives a prayer: "Oh God, whose name is love and whose work is justice, I offer thanks to you for this day and for this fine and funny company" (104)
And now I understand.
Prayer is like my goals for the summer. It is the way to make explicit, to expose, develop and place in public view that which is within the heart.
For Kate, it was the love she felt for the Game Wardens of Maine.
For the recovering alcoholic, prayer can be a reminder of need for inner peace and an affirmation that there is a way to change.
Prayer can also expose sadness, loneliness, fear, and anger. Prayer speaks personal truth into the world beyond the self.
I can see how directing your prayer to "Abba"-- the Aramaic word meaning "DADDY" could be comforting-- Abba, translated "Our Father" is the word used in Luke at the start of the Lord's Prayer.
And I can understand how using a female name for "the divine" provides more comfort to others.
For Reverend Braestrup, "God whose name is love" is beautiful, biblical, non-AN-THRO-PO-MOR-PHIC and not gendered.
But others do not need God as a witness. Declaration to the community, declaration to the trees or the sea or a picture on the wall, all these are prayer if they come from the emotional center we call the heart.
Where one person might say, perhaps: "Oh Lord may this snowstorm stop and my daughter arrive home safely." It's not about the weather. Another person might say: "I love my daughter, and am afraid for her as she drives through the snow."
Both statements name the emotions of the heart. Each could be a prayer.
And so, last Sunday, after I heard of the murders at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, I thought for the first time that prayer might be worthwhile in my life.
I have no illusion about being able to change weather patterns, to change the past or change what occurred that day. I cannot undo the damage of the shotgun blasts. I cannot give them life again. But I can speak my emotions to the world.
So with this definition, do you think we can pray together, TODAY?
I want to add a COMMUNITY PRAYER here in our order of service.
Let's change roles... a moment ago you were audience, now you are a participant.
I want to give some time for those of use whose hearts were touched by the attack in Tennessee, and who want to try verbalizing it in prayer.
For some of us, the children on the stage, witnessing the events at the door is a vision of profound sadness. For some it is the bravery of Greg McKendry, the usher... and the bravery of the parishioners who tackled the gunman.
Perhaps it is the loss of innocence in liberal religion -- an awareness that violence can touch us even during our worship service.
Or is it the sad story of Linda Kraeger, a visitor to church that Sunday, who was also shot dead.
Let's take a moment, let's give ourselves space to speak the prayers of our hearts to our assembled community. May we take a few minutes?
Here's how it will work. We are creating a shared prayer... each of us contributes a sentence. If you wish to help create our shared prayer, stand or raise your hand, we'll point at you... and shout it out your statement or whisper your words.
It is the saying, not our hearing, that is important.
And I will start, using Kate Braestrup's formulation:
"God whose name is love and whose work is justice," we turn our attention to the murderous attack at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. May we share this morning with this our community the emotions and meditations of our hearts.
May we remember the loving action of the usher, Greg McKendry.
(a community sharing of prayers followed)

Memorial Day...

From the very messy desk of Charlie...

It's Memorial Day, and I'd spent many years working on the Battleship New Jersey... but now I'm in Berkeley... so I can't go down to Camden!

So I felt especially driven to go the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, in nearby Alameda. I took the bus... the 51 to the 63.. which took an hour, it being a holiday... and got there about 12:30 PM.

Here is the USS Hornet:


Now most of you would say 'wow, big ship'... but I took this picture because there are four white antennas on the right hand side... it's the ham radio operator in me!

Here is the view from the "island", looking forward. The Oakland hills are in the background.


And here's our tour guide, explaining what we were about to see:


And this is what we were about to go see, the flight control center:


I had a few more pictures, mostly of radios and the like. I won't bore you with them.

After that I went below decks to the hangar deck. This was the Memorial Day ceremony:


I missed most of the speeches, but caught the blessing. Next, the wreath was brought outside (sorry about the blur):


And everyone was offered a flower:


After a blessing by the chaplain:


Then we threw our flowers overboard:


I tried to think of who my tulip was for, but in the end it had to be for everyone. Rest in Peace.
---

That was my day.
Peace,
Charlie

(Taps)

I rather like this line...

Sometimes it's fun to take something drecky and turn it around. We were chatting about our carbon footprint...

"And then I stopped and looked back on the sand, and 6.7 billion sets of footprints were beside me!"

Ok... where is this ORIGINALLY from...

Here's a wonderful, fascinating website, and specifically a manic talk by Clifford Stoll, who wrote " The Cuckoo's Egg", a book about tracking computer hackers. I read it back when I was an electrical engineer... But now he's thinking a bit more broadly, as you can see in the video:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/237

He ends the talk with an inscription on a bell, in the bell tower at SUNY Buffalo:

"All truth is one.
In this light, may science and religion endeavor together for the steady evolution of Mankind:
From darkness to light,
From narrowness to broadmindedness,
From prejudice to tolerance,
It is the voice of life that calls us to come and learn."

I assume that this is something said by the school's first president... or at a building dedication...

But it was interesting...

Miracles (by W. W.)

...

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass--the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all
       that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.

To me the sea is a continual miracle;
The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the waves--the ships, with
       men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

ARE YOU HUNGRY?

Yea, I knew you were in the mood for Chicken and Waffles too! And where better to get them than Oakland California, at "The Home of Chicken and Waffles"??



So my friend John agreed to show me one of the Oakland hotspots, in exchange for lunch. We jumped into his GTI and headed down to Jack London Square.



No, not to build a fire, but to eat chicken! Here's John showing you the history of the eatery...



It seems it started way back in 2004.. as part of the Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles chain. But then they went independent and 'upscale'! I think there's now a Roscoe's in New Brunswick, NJ, but I didn't make it there, saving myself for Oakland.

To order, you can just look at the wall: I got a Lord BJ's...



And John got something light... with Mac&Cheese instead of the grits...



It's a great place, if you like trains...



Even if you like passenger trains...



Another wonder of Jack London Square is the Star Wars creatures...



It seems George Lucas lived in Oakland for a while, and his imagination ran wild.

And speaking of imagination... we spotted this futuristic item on the way back to John's VW...



I guess they are now for sale! I better put my order in... if I fit in it. There's a SmartUSA dealer in SF.

John dropped me off back in Berkeley, and then went to shop for diet books. Time to do some serious digesting!
-Charlie