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.

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.

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.

unitarian guilt.

i want to talk about unitarian guilt.

background: i think there is a degree of truth to the statement that there are two types of people – intellectuals and people who get things done.

i think most UUs are in the first category. i, however, am in the second category. or truthfully, more like the bridge between the two. i think it’s one of the ways that i am one of the people the world needs because i translate between the eggheads and the people who make decisions. happily i get paid for that. but it doesn’t make me wish less that a) the eggheads would think about their audience more (or realize that their audience is people who make decisions rather than other eggheads) and b) there were more people who choose to do what i do and do it well.

therefore, i feel a lot of guilt because i can’t do everything.

unitarian jihad

so, i’ve only officially been a unitarian universalist for about a year. but i am possibly the world’s only unitarian evangelist. i think everyone should be unitarian.

 My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sister Katana of Enlightened Compassion.
Get yours.

hmm…i don’t even know what a katana is. isn’t it a mannheim steamroller album?