Union Sunday 2013

Are you in the Baltimore area? Come to the Union Sunday service at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore tomorrow morning, May 5, 2013 at 11AM!

This special service commemorates the sermon given in 1819 by William Ellery Channing at the ordination of our first minister, Jared Sparks. The sermon, titled "Unitarian Christianity" and popularly know as the Baltimore Sermon, was essentially the first public declaration of Unitarianism as a distinct thread of Christian thought in the United States.

Although we are no longer predominantly or nominally Christian per se as a body, each year on the first Sunday in May, we invite a distinguished Unitarian Universalist to challenge us in a manner that pays homage to the way Channing's original sermon challenged the orthodoxy of his day (and ours?).

This year's speaker, from the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, is Rev. Galen Guengrich, preaching on "A Departure from the Course Generally Followed".

All area Unitarian Universalists are invited for this wonderful service, and as usual you are welcome to join us! It's going to be packed, so come early to find a good seat. See you there!

Click here to read Reverend Channing's "Unitarian Christianity".

Click here to see the facebook event for May 5, 2013.

Sports and Spirituality, or "GO RAVENS!"

I am not much of a sports fan. And although basketball - and to a slightly lesser extent, football - played a role in my youth, I have always been more of an "arts & humanities" lover than a sports fan. As a kid, I would almost always prefer to play than to watch a sport. In school, kickball was the most popular game, and I was pretty good at it! My father played basketball, and I think my brother inherited most of his athletic interests. Still, I can enjoy a good game when the mood strikes.

This fall will mark ten years in Baltimore for me. To this point, I haven't paid much attention to our sports teams. Of course, I know that our baseball team is the Orioles, our football team is the Ravens - I even know that we have a soccer team called the Blast. I recognize some of the names when I hear them: Tejada. Rice. Markakis. Lewis. I have been to a few O's games, but never to any other professional sporting event since moving to Maryland. I wouldn't know any players by face, except for Joe Flacco and Brendon Ayanbadejo, the latter primarily due to his outspoken stance in favor of marriage equality rather than his athleticism.

And yet, I live in Baltimore and so I root (if at all) for our teams. Especially when visiting my partner's family in rural western Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. Especially when the Ravens are up against the Steelers. Especially then!

Now, there is little to no chance that I am going to morph into a sports nut overnight. But when I heard that the Ravens defeated the New England Patriots and were heading to the Super Bowl, well, that felt good. All of Baltimore (and even some Redskins fans down the road in DC) felt good, excited, hopeful. And boy is it nice to see the city decked out in purple - my favorite color! Some folks have insinuated that people like me are fair-weather fans, and charges of "jumping on the bandwagon" have been leveled, to which I respond no, I am not a fair-weather fan. Although the joy of a game is indeed easier to perceive on a bright and sunny day, I generally just don't care much about professional sports.

Right?

The reason most often cited in Unitarian Universalist circles for belonging to a religious community is the satisfaction of the desire for just that - community. As spiritual beings, we yearn for the intimacy of belonging - of being known and valued, of knowing and valuing others, of knowing that we are really real and that we actually do matter. "Roots hold me close" go the words of Carolyn McDade's Spirit of Life, arguably the best known piece of music sung (frequently) in our congregations. There is a safety and security in being rooted to a community of ultimacy, where we explore together what it means to exist. But beyond all that, it actually feels good to belong, to not be alone, to know one's tribe.

Watching yesterday's Super Bowl match between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers was a religious experience. No, I don't believe that there was any divine intervention and that God favored one team over the other. However, the palpable excitement - and even the tension and anxiety - served to bring an entire city together, if only for a few hours' time. After a decade in Maryland, I only recently stopped hemming and hawing when someone asked me if I was "from" Baltimore, preferring instead to tell folks I am "from" the NYC Metro Area but "live in" Baltimore.

Yes, indeed, there is something basic in human nature that yearns for that intense tribal experience - that visceral high and rush of adrenaline only brought about by the elation of a team coming through together to victory, whatever its pursuit.

Unitarian Universalists can be so intently focused on the spiritual advancement of the individual, notwithstanding our social justice bent that focuses on the betterment of society at large. What would our congregations look like if, even some of the time, we allowed ourselves to experience the wild wanton passion - the ecstatic joy - of collective worship, in a way that taps into our root-chakra primal selves? What would that be like? How might we do that? I have heard stories of summer institutes and retreats that do this for people. The closest I've come is General Assembly...which I guess is a Super Bowl of sorts in this faith tradition.

Would it make the experience less extraordinary if we had a Super Bowl every week? Is the fact that it happens so infrequently part of its allure? Perhaps. But it doesn't hurt to dream of a world where so many people experience so much joy together more often.

Go Ravens!

"Thank God It Wasn’t a Bullet!" Or, the ways in which we train ourselves to cope with (and accept) injustice in the world.

On Thursday night, April 22, 2010, after a long day at work, I arrived home and found that my partner Joel had gone out for the evening. He had decided to go dance at a local bar where we hang out frequently, just blocks from our apartment in the ‘gayborhood’ at the heart of Baltimore City’s midtown cultural district. After a quick phone call to him, we decided that I would go to the bar and have a beer or two while he danced, and then we would walk home together. It was nice out; there were lots of people there, having a great time, but I just wasn’t in the mood for it. Even though I opened a tab, expecting to be there a while, I drank exactly one beer (which I didn’t really like) and made up my mind to close and go home.

Sitting at the bar, I must have looked odd. Normally, I am what people call a “social butterfly” – I walk around a lot and talk to different people, I’m bubbly, I’m loud, I have a good time. That night, I just sat there thinking, “Why am I out? I’m tired”. But Joel was having a great time, and that made me happy, so I quietly had my beer and then sent him a text message that I was ready to go.

Shortly afterward, he came over from the dance floor and we headed home. Happy. Tired. In love. Holding hands. Smiling.

And then, we got egged.

Now, I am pretty sure that I have never been physically assaulted in my life. At first, I wasn’t sure what happened. I heard a crack, and thought that perhaps someone had dropped a glass bottle that shattered on the sidewalk. Then, I thought that someone threw a bottle at us, and was concerned that Joel might have been hurt. When I saw the fragments of eggshell on the ground, and felt the goo dripping down my clothing, and realized that there was no blood, I calmed down long enough to allow my anger to surface. It all happened so quickly; it was confusing. The egg had been hurled at us from a moving vehicle travelling toward us, and by the time we figured out what happened it was too late to discern which vehicle it came from, much less get its tag number. At this point, I’m just angry…and sopping with gooey egg.

We went home. I called the police. They arrived within 5 minutes, filed a report, and left. I must admit, the responding officer was very nice, cordial, and efficient. We understood that there wasn’t much that could be done, but I was insistent that there be a record of the crime. Joel thinks these may be the same hoodlums who yelled insults at him a few weeks prior. As someone remarked, “silence is hurting [our] community”, and I refuse to silently accept injustice, no matter that some might think this a petty offense not worthy of so much attention, especially when there are so many more heinous crimes happening in Baltimore. I beg to differ, and here are a few of my reasons.

#1 “Thank God it wasn’t a bullet”. Well, sure. I’m very thankful that it wasn’t a bullet – this time. It started with words (have you ever had some random person yell an epithet at you from a moving vehicle, in your own neighborhood?), and has now progressed to physical violence. Yes, it was ‘just’ an egg. Are we supposed to wait until after we get shot to speak up? Does someone have to be seriously injured before it’s ok to report a crime? Hell no. This is how things start, and the situation escalates when you allow it to.

#2 Throwing things at people from moving vehicles is ILLEGAL. I’m tired of people suggesting, whether they intend to or not, that you should just roll over and accept what they deem to be trifling matters. Yes, relatively speaking, this was not the worst that could have happened. But it was still a crime, and it happened to my partner and me, and the right thing to do was to report it to the police, despite the unlikelihood of these criminals’ apprehension. So what if there are more severe crimes? Those should be reported as well! When will it stop if we don’t work to stop it? Why shouldn’t we be outraged that someone thought this was ok? This is how it starts!

#3 This is a safety issue. Granted, we tend to get a little too comfortable in our affirming churches and our progressive urban gayborhoods and forget that the wider world out there is still broadly dangerous, and in this time of political vitriol, xenophobia, and tea partiers, our little havens aren’t necessarily as safe as we once thought. We have to heal the world. Safety, like peace, is something that we have to create. Safety is the presence of peace-of-mind provided by structures that support and sustain, not just the absence of violence. I want to make the world safe, for me and for others.

#4 This was a hate crime. Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t motive play a role in prosecuting crime? When you perpetrate any crime against another being, you are creating a victim. When you target someone specifically because of some demographic that you despise, you are terrorizing an entire community of people. Some say that “a crime is a crime”, but I don’t think that these two types of crime should be treated in quite the same way. Yes, they are both awful. But when your motive is based in hatred for an entire group of people, the punishment should be commensurate. Of course, designating some acts as “hate crimes” is not the solution, yet prosecuting said crimes more strongly is a response that can help alleviate the detrimental effects of having one’s community under constant potential threat, and may increase an individual’s willingness to actually report crime!

So yeah, let’s all thank God it wasn’t a bullet. If it had been, you might be attending a funeral or two now, wondering how such an atrocity could have come about, instead of reading my rant about a single hurled egg.