Vespers homily

A couple of weeks ago, Reverend David’s sermon explored what Unitarian Universalism is. He spoke the words of Oriah Mountain Dreamer and exclaimed that, in all our diversity, Unitarian Universalism unites us around MORE: More knowledge, more creativity, more clarity, more resilience, more humor and humility…more acceptance, more graciousness. More hope, he said.

 

One of our very favorite hymns echoes his sentiment: “There is more hope somewhere, there is more hope somewhere. I’m gonna keep on…till I find it…There is more hope somewhere.”

 

Like Reverend David, I believe that this search for MORE is at the core of what Unitarian Universalism is, and I also believe that the search for more hope is at the core of what unites us. As Emily Dickinson points out—hope is a thing perched inside of us. So, the search for more hope is always a search inside, a search to break free from our fears and anxieties. A search to break free from our worst-case scenarios and our negative assumptions about the intentions of others.

 

It is also an acceptance of the dangers of this search for more hope. The danger of vulnerability that we accept when we embrace hope over dread, and the threat of pain that accompanies vulnerability. This brings to mind the ancient Greek story of Pandora and her jar, or box for those who aren’t Classics nerds in the room.

 

I won’t get into the details, but after she was bestowed with many gifts by the gods, Pandora was sent to earth with two final gifts: an ornately beautiful jar which she was warned never to open and the gift of curiosity. As much as she resisted, curiosity got the better of her and eventually she opened the jar, inadvertently unleashing all manner of evils upon humanity: old age, sickness, insanity, greed, famine, vanity, envy, death. As she realized her mistake, Hesiod, the ancient Greek poet, wrote, “Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house, she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not fly away. Before [she could], Pandora replaced the lid of the jar.”

 

So, hope remains with us, perched in the soul, singing the tune. It never made sense to me why hope was in that jar in the first place when there is no part of the story that tells of a benevolent god who had pity on humanity when she made her addition to the jar. But now, I realize that hope is dangerous. Recent studies showed that folks with permanent conditions, whether it was imprisonment or medical issues, coped more easily than those with hope for change. But this is precisely the reason that I love Unitarian Universalists—and our search for more hope somewhere. For all our diversity, one thing we have in common is that we believe that the work we do is worth it, no matter how insurmountable the odds seem. In doing this spiritual work and acting together for social justice, we open ourselves up to the vulnerability and pain that used to live in that jar next to hope.

 

Nothing truly extraordinary can happen without taking this kind of risk, and I am so grateful to be a part of a community with the courage to hear the song of the little bird and with the spiritual depth to trust that dedicating our time, gifts and hearts to a vision of a better future is worthwhile. A community that isn’t defeated by the Buddha’s truth that life is suffering.

 

As we engage in this midweek respite, let us give thanks for that little bird, and let us join in its song to know our own minds and those of others. Amen.

new feature: fouralarm’s NPR CMOTW

I take the news very personally. Some people find this strange, but I think it is a relatively common trait of nerdy people like myself whose childhood best friends were in books and who throw themselves into history and other sorts of stories.

So, I bring you my National Public Radio Crying Moment of the Week (CMOTW).

Yesterday evening, I was listening to Fresh Air as I was making dinner. Dave Davies (uh, what kind of cruel parent names their kid David Davies?) was interviewing Father John Barkemeyer, a Catholic priest from the south side of Chicago who became an Army Chaplain in 2003 and is currently on a 15-month tour of duty in Anbar province, Iraq. The interview goes deep and pulls a lot of chewy stuff out of Father John’s experience serving the soldiers in the most dangerous parts of Iraq. Quite meaningful to me was FJ’s openness about the fact that he had given a homily to his church just before the war began insisting that the evidence for going to war was flimsy. But he chose to follow the young people from his parish who were volunteering for service to Iraq because he felt that being there for the soldiers is not supporting the war. His solution wasn’t just to pray for rain the soldiers; it was to stand beside them, to pastor to them, despite the risk.

A couple of images stick in my brain today. One, of FJ describing the makeshift altars he throws together to give Mass to the soldiers. Most often, he reports, he ended up giving the Mass over a litter, a stretcher that had probably carried soldiers who were wounded, dying, maybe even dead. The poignant symbolism of this wasn’t lost on my non-Christian heart. While I agree that this war is a terrible thing, the young people who volunteer are not fighting for oil, they’re fighting for the most idealistic concept of what America stands for, and they’re fighting for their futures and their families. They are kids who have found something that, for them, is worth dying for whether they went into it with the invincibility of youth or not.

The second image that stands out for me is not FJ’s description of the Chaplain’s “privilege” of holding the only position in the military that is sworn to complete confidentiality, no matter what. It wasn’t even the emotion in his voice when he talked about administering the Last Rites to 19-year-olds who would never see their families again. It was the quiet devotion I sensed when he described the way in which he both respected the faith of the dying Iraqis he comes into contact with, not administering Last Rites, but holding their hands and speaking comforting words to them, through a translator, to calm their fear and ease their pain as their lives slipped away.

So, there it is, the inaugural installment of my CMOTW: a true man of god.

the politics of food

Michael Pollen writes in yesterday’s NYT about the politics surrounding this year’s farm bill. Happily, he notes that consumers of America’s agricultural products (i.e. EATERS) are stepping up to play a role in the policy-making process. For years, American farm policy has screwed things up royally. The policies have the best of intentions: protecting America’s family farms from going under when a drought or wildfire strikes. But the opportunistic consequences of the bill has sent billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of megafarms and the businesses that thrive off taxpayer-subsidized crops. Businesses like Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Archer Daniels Midland. Businesses that make money hand-over-fist selling products laden with high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils to increasingly obese Americans. Businesses whose products wouldn’t be so attractive to poor people (read: cheap) if our tax dollars weren’t subsidizing their corn and soy producers.

I have a personal relationship with this debate since my recently deceased grandfather, my great uncle, my grandmother and my uncle’s family make their living partially from farm subsidies. But they grow their crops the honest way (with sweat and toil rather than chemicals and genetic manipulations), and they grow their cattle the way cattle are meant to be grown (in fields eating grass).

Senators Lugar and Lautenberg have the right idea with their proposal that subsidies only apply to farmers when their revenues have fallen beneath a threshold because of circumstances beyond their control. This would end the per-bushel payments that farmers currently receive and make growing high-yield corn that is only suitable for high fructose corn syrup and soy that will go on to become partially hydrogenated oil so attractive.

Senators Dorgan and Grassley propose another sensible amendment that would cap the annual subsidy to a farmer at $250,000, thereby preventing huge corporate farms from making their profits sucking tax dollars through the farm subsidy system.

Here’s to a farm bill that truly protects our nation’s family farmers and supports locally grown, affordable, accessible food.

Contact your senators and representatives now to do what you can to put this bill on their radar screen as it goes into important markups in the coming weeks. Contact your federal senators and congresspeople to let them know that the US federal government should not be supporting industries that are leading millions into obesity, heart disease and diabetes and yielding billions of dollars in health care costs.

A popular stance these days is to blame the poor and obese for their condition when our public policies have created the conditions that have made processed, fat- and sodium-laden foods the most affordable for individuals and families on limited incomes. Let’s hold our legislators accountable for fixing it.

i wish ED advocates would shut about about needing more funding.

One of the crop of Fordham Fellows (a TFAer from Atlanta, whoot!) blogged yesterday about how we need a new model for the profession of teaching.

I absolutely agree. In our nation’s worst schools, being a good teacher is, in the long run, a losing proposition. I regularly worked 75-80 hours a week when I was teaching. 75-80 hard, heart-wrenching hours, and it was still never enough. There were still papers that went ungraded, positive calls to parents that didn’t get made. I could have worked 24/7, and it wouldn’t have been enough. I was tired, and I was 22. Four years out of the classroom, I feel too old to do it again, and I’m not even 30 yet.

So, G proposes that we have two teachers per class and split the teaching day, nurse-style, with an overlap between for debriefing. I love it! I added in my comment my hope to one day see year-round school with every Wednesday as a planning day. The folks who put together afterschool programs would have to get creative about how to occupy the babies on these days, but it would give teachers a chance to actually plan, grade, contact parents during time they’re actually getting paid for. I choose Wednesday because my kids always seemed most attentive on Mondays, so this would, in effect, give me two Mondays per week, YMMV. Hell, my flame taught at a crappy-ass technical school with low standards that paid for shit for a few years, and even THEY got a full planning day per week.

Anyway, the reason I felt moved to put pen to paper is because the first commenter mentioned that “From a practial standpoint, though, how would you see this arrangement accomplished? With districts strapped for cash as it is, what incentives do they have to spend money on TWO teachers for every classroom? Would each teacher only receive half a salary? That seems like an unfair deal, if you ask me.”

In the case of large, urban districts, I beg to differ. I also am pretty sure (without pulling any real numbers) that most of the kids served by insanely bad schools are in these urban areas. So, I think my point is an important one. We have this friend, R, who made more than my flame and I put together. His wife also (usually) worked, yet these people were always having their phones cut off. I would not call them “cash-strapped.”

Atlanta Public Schools spends over $14,000 per student per year, more than twice what some of the districts in rural Georgia spend. Now, I don’t know where all that money is going, but while scores are creeping up in APS, it doesn’t match up with the progress its peer districts nationally are making.

A colleague recently told me that when you do a scatter plot of achievement vs. per-pupil expenditures for every district in Georgia, there is a negative correlation. More money per kid, lower achievement.

That being said, I’m sure that many rural districts are cash-strapped because of the property-tax system of funding, and I heard all the stories from corps members in the Delta and other rural placements about schools with no books and kids with no shoes. I just think that we should get districts’ financial management systems up to par and their priorities for spending a) in the right place and b) on stuff we’re pretty sure makes a difference before we start crying about needing more funding. Right now we’re flushing money down the toilet while begging for more.

What will be

I’ve spent the last few days processing the emotions I felt when I heard on NPR Friday morning that Al Gore (and friends) won the Nobel Peace Prize. I think my feelings have been bubbling under the surface of my consciousness ever since I saw An Inconvenient Truth.

I’ve had a very hard time with the friction between the faith I am trying very hard to live and the emotional turmoil that I and many others have experienced as a result of the political choices our federal government has made since December 12, 2000 (when the SCOTUS issued Bush v. Gore). I want to have faith that the universe knows what it’s doing and that everything will be as it is supposed to be, but I also see thousands dead, tens of thousands injured, rollbacks of civil liberties and civil rights, and politicians more concerned with power than with people. 

And all of a sudden in that 15 second headline before they cut to haranguing me about donating money to public radio, my dilemma unraveled. Faith won.

Moving toward leaving no child behind

What he said.

Updated to fix the link.

the morality of the lottery, or why 4alarm is a big fat hypocrite.

Today, I read this article from the New York Times on how little revenue lotteries create in the scheme of K-12 education budgets, and how the business of running lotteries is eating increasingly into the already slim profits. In fact, the blog entry through which I read the story was titled “What has six balls and screws teachers?” These lotteries have exploded across the country – 42 states and the District of Columbia now have them. In most instances, the lotteries fund education projects of various flavors. And this is how they are sold to the electorate. “The lottery is great! It’ll pay for cute little children to learn how to read. All for freeeeee to the taxpayers!” That sort of shit. I remember this exact propaganda when Virginia passed a referendum to start a lottery when I was a kid.

But you know what, even when you discount the added cost of the social burden of gambling addiction and such, the lottery doesn’t pay for shit.

what do UUs believe?

i’ve been struggling a lot with what UUism is and what our “elevator speech” should be. i’ve encouraged a good friend who was raised quaker to check out the UU church because our RE curriculums are really in line with her beliefs, she could find her niche here, etc. but she balks and says “well, what do unitarians believe?”

i’ve never really had an answer aside from an instinctive feeling that the joy that i receive from being a part of a UU community isn’t just because i’ve found a big group of people to geek out with about philosophy. but i was sitting at a picnic table on a gloriously autumnal afternoon last week thinking about an odd trip through the grocery store check out line in which the cashier was quizzing a child of about 4 or so on christian doctrine.

game day!

i forgot until i opened google news this morning that today is my favorite day of the year! the georgia-clemson game!!! er…i mean, the college board‘s annual release of average SAT scores. the atlanta journal constitution, atlanta’s sorry excuse for a newspaper, offers this priceless assessment:

The good news? We’re still not last in the nation.

yes, indeedy. all those years of fighting with south carolina for who would occupy the honored 49th highest average SAT score slot, and now we’re in the enviable position of expanding our news reporting to include not just the georgia-clemson game, but a no-holds-barred free-for-all between georgia, florida, hawaii, pennsylvania and south carolina.

why would gen X teachers behave differently from gen Xers in other jobs?

over and over, articles like this one cite very real statistics that about one-third of new teachers leave the classroom within three years, and about half leave within five. okay, yes, this is problematic because in combination with the fact that most teachers’ retirement systems allow teachers to retire after 30 years without substantial incentives to stay longer (22 + 30 = 52), lots of teachers are leaving the classroom at both ends. attrition is something around 9 percent a year, and it has the potential to grow even larger.

now, don’t get me wrong, i know that teacher recruitment and retention is a major problem. but the assumption that young teachers are leaving because there is a problem with the education system seems really stupid considering that changing jobs every 2-4 years is a pretty defining characteristic of generation X in the workforce.