Spaced out on sensation

Tonight, our church held an "Oscar Night." Among more sophisticated numbers, the choir did "Time Warp." A member had won the right to this command performance at the church's auction. I wanted him to get his money's worth, so I tried to rally the troops a little. And so, as always happens, I was volunteered for the lead. Volunteered, which is to say, everyone else took a step back and I was standing there. Which occasioned my buying fishnet thigh-highs at our local sex shop "for church." A great recruitment tool, that.

Girl stayed behind to help us clean up. Driving back home, I imagined other mothers recapping the night's experience for their daughters. I imagined that some of them were telling their daughters how pretty they were, how poised, how accomplished. And I told her, in my life, it is quite possible I have never been the most polished person in the room, the best dressed. I'm not saying I haven't had my moments, but I'm not beautiful. I'm not saying I don't have pipes, but I'm no musician. I'm not saying I'm not clever, but I don't have a well-honed intellect.

But what I have been, what I will own, and what I hope to pass on to her, is I have been game. Our people -- our family -- I think that's what we are. We're game.

Church Shooting

On July 27, 2008, during a children's musical performance, a man entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church (TVUUC) and began shooting. He was reportedly intent on killing "liberals."

He killed one TVUUC member, Greg McKendry, 60, an usher and long-time congregant who stood in front of the gunman to protect other church members. Linda Kraeger, 61, a member of Westside Unitarian Universalist Church (located in Farragut, Tennessee) who was visiting TVUUC for the performance, died in a hospital later. Six adults were also injured but no children. The gunman was tackled by congregants and eventually taken into police custody.

In the wake of this horrific event, Unitarian Universalists have rallied to offer ministry and support to the affected members of both congregations.

Our kids are making origami paper cranes in Sunday school.

Nihilism pisses me off

Last Sunday, for a variety of reasons having to do with being on point and everybody being sick, I was especially raw when suiting up for battle with the beastie boys of the UU church. I've taught UU Sunday school before, and faced a lot of cheekiness. I've told myself, UU parents are anti-authoritarian, and that's a good thing. You can expect the kids to be high-spirited, but they grow into the kind of teenagers who give punk concerts to raise money for Darfur, so it all works out in the end.

Well, this day I faced outright declarations of war on me and the other substitute and I lost it, rooting the kids out of the bathroom where they were hiding out, confiscating skateboards and physically shoving them into place. I finally cracked and let them out, not because we were done but because short of actually locking them in the room I didn't think I could hold them any longer.

So then I went back over to the church to catch the tale end of the coming-of-age service, which is like UU bar mitzvah where early high schoolers develop their spiritual bearings. The one girl was up there saying that her philosophy was why be a good-goody. Why, for that matter, spend her days participating in a church program. Why think about money. After all, if you spend your time studying to be a doctor or something, you'd get to be a rich doctor but you'd have missed the best years of your life. Just have a good time. [Polite applause].

I was the angriest dog in the world. After all, the main argument for us even joining this smarty-pants church is to give the kids a respite from the nihilism that reigns in their lawless school. And then to find it rampant here. I was sputtering.

And then Jones threw up in the Sunday school room. Shoulda just. stayed. home.

Rip Rop Rippidy Doo

What gives shape to my weeks is that Wednesday is choir practice. Because our church and my office are each prohibitively far from our house, it is also my late night at work. I work late and then I go straight there. So we're rehearsing with the other church's choir for this big cantata, and the finale is this big rap number. Our spoken word artist was not at rehearsal, so we just played through the orchestration to get the count right. Well, so naturally I burst into Hip, hop, hip, hip-a to the hip-hip- hop-a, you don't stop-a rock-a.... The uncanny thing is that my hippiechick counterpart in the other choir had exactly the same impulse at exactly the same second. So we ran through the whole lyric together. A magical moment brought to you by the Sugar Hill Gang.

The time is now

The joke about UU's is that they are such bad singers because they are too busy reading ahead to see if they agree. Well, now we have a cantata that Jason Shelton wrote just for us.

Tomorrow we debut it with one of the two other valley UU congregations. We're doing it at theirs this Sunday and at ours on Mother's Day. The songs are different genres and different aspect of the UU experience. At our church, I have the solo on the humanist anthem, "No Other World." I love this, because it is my fave song in the program, maybe in the world right now. It just really speaks to me.

Dig these lyrics by Kendyl Gibbons:

I would live simply, and bravely, and nobly;
Let no illusion remain;
I would seek wisdom in human reality,
Even if wisdom be pain.

Sing me no pious amens and old canticles,
Let doubts and questions arise;
Tell me no providence hidden in prophecies,
But welcome the future's surprise.

The time is now, the place is here;
The good we know, the earth we share;
This day we have, this love we give;
No other truth; no other joy; no other life;
No other world.

Weave me no fairytales frosted with miracles;
Give me a light I can see;
Spin me no promise of heavens and saviors,
Teach me the truth that makes us free.

Create my salvation in earth's endless wonder;
Everything nature provides;
Let me be honest, and wise in compassion;
Make reason and conscience my guides.

The time is now, the place is here
The good we know, the earth we share;
This day we have, this love we give;
No other truth; no other joy; no other life;
No other world.

Beautiful universe, fathomless energy,
Myst'ries we struggle to know;
This is our paradise; dust is out destiny;
Cherish the years as they go.

The. time. is. now.
The place is here;
The good we know, the earth we share;
This day we have, this love we give;
No other truth; no other joy; no other life;
No other world

Girls Gone Mild

Girl's Our Whole Lives class starts tomorrow. Hogwarts afficionado that she is; she has taken to referring to the class as her O.W.L.'s. The state of Arizona has punted on sex ed altogether, so I look to this class to innoculate my dear fifth grader in the dreaded Reviving Ophelia years to come.

Speaking of which, I am pleased to note that we as a nation seem to have entered a second level of discussion about spring break and the "Girls Gone Wild" culture. I'd say that the first wave of objections was mostly practical -- along the lines of "If you've got it/ You're only young once," but warning about excess, e.g.
"Carry protection!"
"Have a designated driver!"
"Consider the impact of the MySpace posts of today on the doctoral program applications of tomorrow." Which is all very well, as far as it goes.

But with articles such as "Raunch is Rebranded as 'Confidence'" we might finally be talking about what spring break culture is doing to our psyches (or, if you like, our souls). Which is crucially important for me as a mom trying to raise a confident, kick-*ss daughter. And son. Who take (calculated) risks, make (redeemable) mistakes, and get(curably) hurt. Who dive headlong into life (with a helmet).

The observation is this: Where once we played "Beach Blanket Bingo" our nation's youth are now binge drinking shots out of their butt cleavage and girl-on-girl jello wrestling. And they are talking about it in this language, this "Sex and the City" brand of frank, taboo-shattering raunch and it's a language of power and choices and not being a victim. So, what to make of it?

I have to admit that in theory I can see where it's seductive. In college, I posed nude for art classes, which I found "empowering" despite evidence that the subversiveness of the gesture may well have been lost on my horndog peers.

Seduction -- the theater of it; the accomplishment -- is thrilling. And why shouldn't it be? I must admit that I did experience my humble explorations on the subject as yeah, ok, I'll say confidence-building. I'll say a rite of passage. My hope for Girl -- and Jones -- is not that they grow up neutered of this power, but that they use their power for good.

This is in contrast to their daddy, who sees nothing in it but trouble; who, if he weren't such a gun control advocate, would be in the parlor cleaning his gun when the suitor comes to call.

But the reality of spring break really calls my bluff. All that Third Wave, Riot GRRRL stuff I may be on record as spouting in Women's Studies class about how anything goes as long as it's "chosen" seems meaningless when you hear these girls talk. I mean, there just is some new level of degradation going on here and it is not just because I have some kind of nostalgic delusion about my own chaste beach blanket summers.

Teaching Darwin in Sunday School

The UU's have me teaching about Chas. Darwin
to the Sunday School classes. Last week, I had the 2d through 4th graders. We did this very clever exercise that I got out of this clever book. The book had you doing it with pennies and nickels, but I found it much more satisfying to do it with coloring pages of peacocks and with an actual picture of the predator.

I had seven kids, so I gave them each 7 coloring pages with peacocks on them and told them to set one aside and color the rest. If I'd had more time, that would have been enough of an activity for one day, but I only had one class.

I had the kid who finished first also color in a picture of a fox. I made it a fox to keep it fairly true to life. I looked it up. Foxes ARE natural predators of peacocks, albeit eggs and chicks, mostly.

Then I lined up eight uncolored pictures and said, imagine that this is a group of plain colored birds, but then (adding two colored pictures) a few birds are born to the group that have a little mutation -- they have colored feathers. So now I have eight plain birds and two colored birds lined up on the floor. Lined up on a blackboard with masking tape would probably be easier to follow.

Now, why might colored feathers be good news for a bird? Attract a mate (Some giggling from the girls.) Why might colored feathers be bad news for a bird? Easier for predator to find.

OK, so let's have our fox eat 1/4 of the plain colored birds and 1/2 of the brightly colored birds (Fox comes and grabs two of the uncolored pictures and one of the colored pictures.) But then let's have each plain male have only one baby and let's have each colored male have four babies. Bring each of the remaining six plain pictures down to the next row, bring the remaining colored picture down and add three more colored pictures. Now you have six plain and four colored.

Now, let's have our fox eat 1/4 of the plain males and 1/2 of the colored males (Fox comes and grabs 1 plain and two colored pictures.) But then let's have each plain male have only one baby and each colored male have four. Bring the five plain down to the next row. Bring the two colored pictures down to the next row and add six colored pictures.

Repeat until the point is made. Obviously, this is only a model. It's not really all THAT close to real life. But it shows a couple of really important points about evolution.

1) Individuals don't evolve. The bird himself doesn't change. The composition of the group changes.
2) The change is not necessarily progress. In our example, colored feathers are often bad news (Mo' color, mo' problems?).
3) Even if a trait is bad news for the individual, if it is good news for the group, it will still get selected for.

I love this lesson. I wish someone had taught it to me when I was little. I think most mainstream American kids are little Lamarckians who can easily be shouted down by any home-schooled kid with a pamphlet about how the earth is six thousand years old.

Next week, I have the kinders and 1st graders. I think we'll just look at fossils.

The House of Black

The Unitarians have organized us into circles of a few households who take turns hosting potlucks for each other. Tonight was the first of these. It was altogether lovely -- for the grown-ups at least. These things are always sort of awkward for kids.

We got on to family histories. Spouse and I were telling the story of the reunion where he and I had unveiled a genealogy and the aunties all set to editing-- cousins marrying, unacknowledged children, etc. Another of our party, said, Oh, like Sirius Black's mother burning holes in the tapestry -- Bzzt, Bzzt! An apt analogy, and we had only just read that chapter last night.

Every Child Our Child

For MLK Day we had speakers in from UU at the UNO, who talked about this awesome program in Ghana. Having already stolen from Girl's girl scout cookie money to buy fair trade coffee from the bookstore, I thought better of attending the briefing, knowing they'd hit me up for a donation. But I did resolve one day to be the kind of person who can and does donate to such things.

Baptism by Committee

UU's don't baptize, since, as the saying goes, the Universalist thinks that God is too good to damn him and the Unitarian thinks he is too good to be damned. What we do is a "dedication." We had our children dedicated a few Sundays ago. Some weeks prior, the minister had had the group of us parents in to personalize the ceremony and we had filled up a white board with our brainstormed blessings.

A lot of our personal baggage shone through. As many of our group are lesbian/ gay, there was a big emphasis on thinking the unthinkable and on unconditional parental love. Also, many were new parents, still in the first throes of I love you so much it hurts; and hadn't quite gotten to our stage, where it's more like, please let some of my civilizing influence sink in. We veterans were in the minority.

Well, the minister was ill and so it fell to another of the staff to distill our thoughts into something coherent for the dedication. The result was that we all stood and recited the following aloud:

We want for our children to be happy, healthy, adventuresome, and to have a reverence for life. We hope that they enjoy growing up and remember their childhoods findly. We want them to be curious, inquisitive, and always have a sense of humor. We want for our children to be strong and wise, to discover and explore boundless opportunities; and to know and never lose their sese of joy. We want them to grown up in a community that is supportive, sustaining, welcoming, and safe. We wish for them to live a life of love with a sense of enduring hope and the knowledge that no matter what they for and where they go, we will alwys look after them, and never love them any less. We hope that they will trust us and know and remember that everything and anything is possible. We want them to have the strength, wisdom, and courage to make the world a better place -- and to do it together. We wish for them to be frank, forthright and just [mine], and to model it in the world; and that we as parents and a community will provide strong examples of that. We want them to have a spirituality based in many traditions and ideals, and to know the fulfillment of work, reaching out to others, and putting forth effort [also mine]. We want them to know that they will never be lost or forsaken; and that they be able to count on themselves, each other, and the rest of us. We hope that they will find a spiritual path at an early age, but to never stop questioning; and to have a sense of meaning and purpose always, no matter what life brings. We want them to find a path and life that they choose, and always know that they are loved beyond our measure.

Yeesh.

That. Is what happens when you are blessed by committee.

The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God

I have never belonged to a church. My parents would sometimes take us when they got to thinking we were growing up to be rudderless heathens and easy prey to cults, but the fervor quickly flamed out and Sundays were reclaimed by Bugs Bunny. Any denomination of non-threatening Protestant would do. We attended the nearby Presbyterian Church long enough for me to memorize a few Bible quotes, learn some cute camp songs, and perform as Joan of Arc in a saint’s pageant. The kids I knew from that congregation would later become the Young Lifers of high school.

Later, when race became a ground of conflict between my parents, my father would take us to an old-school Black Baptist church. He enrolled me in the choir, in hopes that I would thereby gain some soul. There was a lot about that experience that I imprinted on. I liked the way it got hot and bright when the morning light shone through the stained glass windows; the sweat flying off the brow; the grandmas getting the spirit and needing to be fanned.

I liked the message, which was always some variation on the theme of our abject wretched unworthiness of God’s attention and utter gratitude for even the basic fact of our existence – our breathing, our waking – let alone our other blessings too enormous to be contemplated. Seen through that lens, the deprivations which were so evident in that humble Black community on the outskirts of our prosperous suburb seemed insignificant. And the otherwise meek girls sang with the power to make the walls come down.

Homely and yet exotic, this community was my birthright, if I’d stayed long enough to learn its peculiarities. Which I didn’t. And then I spoiled it by thinking too much. It got so I couldn’t see past the minister’s petty agenda and the congregants’ mindless head-bobbing.

And then in college, of course, I was militant agnostic to atheist and rather a snot about it. I came to identify with Shaw's book. Ironic, given how very White that particular pastime turns out to be.

And now, in mid-life, I am joining a church.