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.

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.

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 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.

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. I hate the direction our country has taken in the Bush administration, and my blood boils and my eyes well up when I walk down to the ground floor of my building and see the dozen-or-so portraits of beautiful young people who gave their lives to enrich the pockets and the egos of powerful men.

But in that moment, I knew that the universe knew what it was doing. The world needed Al Gore to spread the good word about climate change and human impact more than we needed him to be the president.

Over the weekend, I also mused through my own spiritual inspirations, and I kept coming back to the first Noble Truth of the Buddha — life is suffering. As much as I want to make everyone happy and hear birds chirping and see Dick Cheney skipping hand-in-hand with little children of all races and classes who are all reading above grade-level, that isn’t life.

What will be will be. The universe knows what it’s doing, and I have to make the best decisions that I can to do good in the world and to keep my spiritual bucket full enough that I can feel that doing good in the world is worth it. Have to remember to put my oxygen mask on first, so to speak.

Ultimately, this is the faith of Unitarian Universalists, I think. Faith that working for peace, justice and equality is worth it and that things have a way of working themselves out on the side of good. You don’t need a god to have this faith.

Updated to fix the link.

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. The people who buy lottery tickets pay for it, and who buys lottery tickets? Poor people. So, we’re taking money from poor people to pay for education for all the residents of the state — poor and rich. Why not start taxing arthritis medication to pay for highway improvements?

Oh, apples and oranges you say, it’s a choice to buy lottery tickets. But, wait, I say. Why do the schools need the lottery money again? Because the system is broken. Who are the folks who are most likely to be in the most broken schools? Poor people.

So, we’re asking the very people who our education system didn’t teach enough about probability and economics for them to realize that their $5 a week would be better invested in the stock market or in a shoe box under their mattress to pay for education for everyone in our state. So, it is still a choice to buy a lottery ticket, but it sure as hell isn’t an informed one. And in some cases state propaganda makes it seem like buying a lottery ticket is like buying one of those little shamrocks for a dollar at the grocery store. It’s for the chiiiiiildren.

But now we see that it isn’t. The NYT article describes that the proceeds of lotteries are going to the marketing machine and bigger and bigger prizes to encourage (poor) folks to choose to buy more and more lottery tickets. For the chiiiiiiildren. And very little of that money is actually going to the kids. If the lottery were a 501 (c) 3 (a non-for-profit), Charity Navigator would have given it the worst overhead percentage rating in the history of the universe.

The Georgia lottery’s top funding priorities are universal prekindergarten and the HOPE scholarship, which sends any Georgia public high school graduate with a B average to a state college tuition-free. I rant pretty frequently in real life about how the HOPE scholarship in Georgia is patently immoral because a) it “taxes” poor people to pay for rich kids to go to college and b) it was “sold” to the electorate as a program that would increase the number of poor kids who would have the opportunity to go to college when, in fact, its true purpose was to stifle the brain drain of smart kids opting for out-of-state schools and out-of-Georgia lives (read: lots of smart college educated people in Georgia = attractive workforce in a state with pro-corporate laws).

Now, this is where the hypocrite part of me comes in: my flame goes to school for free on HOPE. I’ve never purchased a Georgia lottery ticket IN MY LIFE. Perfect case of what nearly always happens when what’s-best-for-humanity and what’s-best-for-individual conflict. And I’m even a hyper-informed consumer.

So, therein lies the question… how do we wean ourselves off of the poisoned milk of the lottery? Especially when our policy-makers are desperate to wring every last drop into the bucket, lottery customers don’t realize they are being duped and the fat cats in the big business lottery machine are laughing themselves to the bank.

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.

Cashier: “Who is Jesus’ daddy?”

Kid: whimpers

Cashier: “You don’t know who Jesus’ daddy is?”

Kid: whimpers

Cashier: “Okay, well who is Jesus’ mommy?”

Kid:

Mom: (whispers) “Mary”

Kid: “Mawy?”

Cashier: (triumphantly) “Yes! Mary is Jesus’ mommy, and God is Jesus’ daddy. Didn’t you know that God is Jesus’ daddy?”

Kid: (looks at mom)

Mom: “No, I don’t need the milk in a bag, thanks.”

Cashier: “Have a blessed day!”

then, of course, it was my turn, and, fortunately, i didn’t get quizzed on anything deeper than whether the green tabasco sauce i was buying was delicious or not.

so, anyway, i’m sitting outside, writing a bit, decompressing, and thinking a bit about that kid and how creepy that whole scenario is. and i realized what the pivotal difference is for me between mainstream religions and UUism. for that christian cashier, it was of utmost importance that that child know and believe that jesus was the son of god. her questions weren’t about the golden rule, or jesus’ teachings, or even about the commandments (most of which seem like pretty good ideas to me). christianity is about imposed, more-or-less uniform belief that, theoretically, leads to positive action in the world.

well, UUs don’t care what other people believe. in fact, we think (being nerds) that diversity of thought makes for way more interesting conversations. we think it takes all kinds — even that old dude who wears the republican tie who once told me that i could sit on his lap when i wondered aloud once where i would sit in the crowded sanctuary.

okay, so that guy got taken down a few pegs by every woman in his immediate vicinity, but for UUs, it’s not belief that matters — it’s what you do. we don’t care if the person next to us in the service is a buddhist or an atheist, and though we find it interesting to discuss our reactions to the sermons, politics, etc, that’s not what defines us as a denomination. or it shouldn’t be, anyway.

i think what defines us is acting as though we have a responsibility to something larger than ourselves in the here and now, no matter what belief drives our actions. okay, that and drinking coffee. we should truly be a denomination of radical welcome — give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… free from the medieval mindset of doing good works in one’s miserable lifetime in order to win a nice eternity in heaven.

we eat our vegetables because they are delicious, not because they are good for us, so to speak.

and, yet, we are a faith community… so what is it that we have faith in? perhaps it’s faith in the fact that doing what we can is worth it. that doesn’t require a deity, or even a cosmic system of karmic energy. faith in the power of one person helping another, in the power of helping that one starfish back into the ocean, faith in the power of leading by example.

so, UUism, like mainstream religions is about how you ostensibly live your life, we just don’t really care why you choose to live your life this way as long as you try your best. so, unlike the religions of some of my former students, a UU couldn’t lie, cheat, steal and fight all week and still be cool on their responsibility as a religious person as long as they go to church on sunday and accept jesus as their savior, etc.

then again, maybe this is just what i want UUism to be?

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.

the media obsession with state average SAT scores-as-grudge-match is completely misguided on more levels than i’ll rant about today, not the least of which is that in roughly half of the 50 states, most kids take the ACT, not the SAT, which means only giant geekmonsters trying to get into ivy league schools take the SAT in those states.

but the part of this story that boils my blood the most is that georgia’s low scores are, in fact, a testament to what georgia is doing right in public education. it’s getting more and more kids than ever before to go to college, especially students of minority races. one in four students who took the SAT in georgia in 2007 was black — the highest proportion in the nation. as the georgia department of education press release astutely points out, that’s one-tenth of all the black students who took the SAT in the US. this is reflected in college enrollments in georgia, and that is a wonderful thing.

it’s also reflected, though, in the state average score. this is the ugly truth part that the AJC doesn’t want to talk about. on average, black students score almost 300 points lower on the SAT than white students nationally on the now-2400 point test. in georgia, the gap between white and black students is gaping, but is, in fact, smaller than the national gap — 267 points versus 292 points. and, when average scores by race/ethnicity are ranked, all of georgia’s groups come in somewhere in the middle.

so, how is it possible that we’re rejoicing because we’re not the worst? even kids in georgia learn how this works in grade-school math. because black students’ scores are so much lower and there are so many black students in the test-taking population in georgia, the black students “drag the average down,” so to speak.

i’m all for working as hard as we can to close these achievement gaps and to get all kids in georgia and in the rest of the nation ready for college and careers. but the truth is, the problem is not that all schools in georgia suck; the educational deficiencies are not spread out evenly to every public school student in the state. if only it were as easy as that.

in order to fix this, we have to address these ugly truths and get to the bottom of how to reverse the relics of centuries of discrimination. hiding the institutional and societal inequities beneath the surface of the gaps ain’t gonna get us there.

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. we watched our (mostly) baby boom generation parents deal with the aftermath of the conflict between their gold-watch attitude and the volatile business world of the ’80s and ’90s. we learned early on that the only place in the world you can’t be replaced is in your family, so we don’t have the kind of loyalty to our employers that prior generations did. we believe that the way for us to get ahead in our careers is to switch jobs and move up the career ladder because no one is going to do that for us.

i started my career in the classroom, taught for 3 years, left and went into a job at a policy non-profit, kept that job for about 2.5 years, left and went to work for the US department of education. so, yeah, i’m 29, and i’ve had 3 major job changes in the 7 years since i completed undergrad. pretty typical, i think.

it seems to me that rather than whining about young teachers leaving the classroom, we should be changing the pay and authority structures in the education system to meet the needs of modern employees. generation X teachers are not going to behave differently than those in other positions, and we certainly aren’t going to stay in a place that treats us from the get-go like we’re going to leave. if we want them to stay in teaching, we need

1. career ladders that allow effective teachers to be promoted in responsibility and salary while still teaching
2. pay scales based on effectiveness rather than years of service and education level
3. to appreciate the contributions that they are making today, nurture their professional development and wish them well when it is time for them to move on

from my perspective, as a former teacher whose future plans were totally changed by my experience in the classroom, young teachers leaving to pursue higher education, other career fields and family will be lifelong activists for high-quality public education no matter where their career path takes them, and that’s not such a bad thing either.