RevCyn

It's something I learned in seminary -- I went to one of our two UU theological schools, Meadville Lombard, and attended the other one, Starr King, for one semester.  When you're at a school full of people who want to dedicate their lives to serving our religion, your heart will be broken.  Something will go wrong or toxic or just plain hurtful, and it'll hurt all the more because it happened in a place of love and trust and faith. It happens again and again in our churches and in our ministry, for congregants and ministers both.  A congregation will behave badly as a system, and congregation members will leave, hearts broken, from pain that the institution they loved could behave so badly.  Ministers will behave badly, too, and people will leave, hearts broken.  And people will stay, hearts broken. For ministers, we will see colleagues we know and love behave badly.  We will see a friend leave the ministry, forced out by their own misconduct, and our h...

I met with a local high school's GSA a week or two ago, and was talking about what the Bible does and does not say about homosexuality.  I believe that even Biblical literalists are choosing what parts of the Bible they take literally and currently and what parts they choose to understand either as metaphor or as written for a certain historical context.  Even the fundamentalists don't follow all of the purity laws.  And they're choosing to place emphasis on the passages that judge over the passages that preach love and forgiveness.  Given that you have to pick and choose, the question really is why some people choose to pick hate.  I said, "I choose to pick love." The hard part about choosing love is the same as the hard part of believing in the inherent worth and dignity of all people and the hard part of believing in universal salvation.  The hard part of choosing love is applying it to someone you see as having chosen a path of hatred and pain.  ...

I'm still in the beginning of reading Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived .  Meanwhile, the controversy over Rob Bell's book and whether or not he's a Universalist continues.  Now, Rob Bell has come out and said he's not a Universalist.  There are those who will say he is anyway, of course.  But it's not so clear.  The universalism he denies is one where, "a giant cosmic arm that swoops everybody in at some point whether you want to be there or not."  It's easier to not be something that you paint as ridiculous, of course.  I've been accused of doing that with theism, so I know.  I also know this because I teach the straw man logical fallacy in English composition classes to first-year college students.  Rob Bell set himself up a bit as a straw man by saying that he's not a theologian and also "I'm not very smart but I do know that there is good news."  But...

My uncle asks, "If God is love, how does that work?" To elaborate, he means does God still act in people's lives the way God does in the Old Testament? How is a God who is love different from a God who loves ? Does it mean God is all kinds of love--eros, agape, etc.--or just some? Paul Rasor writes in Unitarian Universalist views of God , "Others may use the term God to convey very different ideas, such as the creative power of evolution in the universe, or the power that makes transformation possible in our lives, or the ongoing power of love , or simply the ultimate mystery within which we all must live" (emphasis mine). God, in Rasor's description, is not the God of the Old Testament who acts directly in people's lives, who is a larger-than-human but human-like personality who speaks and makes demands and rewards and punishes. This God who is love is more like a power, as he uses the word in the two preceding phrases about God. God is the power ...

One of the ugliest aspects of the fallout around Proposition 8, which struck down same-sex marriage, is how quickly African Americans have become blamed by so many for its passage. For example, here's an article on the subject by Dan Savage, noted sex-advice columnist and himself a gay male. In it he says, I’m not sure what to do with this. I’m thrilled that we’ve just elected our first African-American president. I wept last night. I wept reading the papers this morning. But I can’t help but feeling hurt that the love and support aren’t mutual. I do know this, though: I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color. Now, on one hand, Dan Savage is known for being inflammatory. On the other hand, we have had him speak in a workshop at the UU's Genera...

I've been struggling to put words together on how I feel about Proposal 8 in California in an eloquent enough way to post publicly. I feel like I'm just too emotionally torn between anger and sorrow to speak rationally, much less eloquently, on the subject. I'll try to do so soon. Meanwhile, the UUA has produced this lovely video.