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Dec 21

Accountability and Responsibility

In one of my last posts I wrote about the need to let go of an insistence upon having to enforce ”accountability and responsibility” in religious expression.  This seems a constant theme of mine these days, but it cannot let me go.

For me this derives from a hyper-awareness of the abuses of spiritual language of the recent past.  Ministers convinced that they were responsible to no one but themselves taking sexual advantage of vulnerable, hurting parishioners come to mind.  People who want to take advantage of the church to pursue their own spiritual quest but who don’t want to give anything in return is another constant theme.  Those who do not wish to be in community because they don’t wish to have anything about them challenged is another category. Read more

Dec 19

Hope – finding the courage to work for something because it is good.

One of the greatest icons of the 20th century died December 17, 2011.  Vaclev Havel was a playwright, a moralist, and a President, among many other things.  The fact that he could combine all three of those with integrity should offer a sign of his extraordinary nature.

In the elegies that I’ve read of him in the last few days, what most people miss is that he was above all a theologian, even if he didn’t believe in God.  Read more

Dec 15

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“Whence suns and stars derive their orbits”

When the Western Unitarian Conference adopted their statement of purpose in 1886 they affirmed this:

“We worship One-in-All – that life whence suns and stars derive their orbits and the should of [hu]man its Ought, — that Light which lighteth every [person] that cometh into the world, giving us power to become the [children] of God, — that Love with which our souls commune.”

Think about how radical this must have sounded in 1886.  For the Western Unitarians they were making their break from a Christ-centered movement into something they felt reflected the new frontiers of American exploration (without remembering that Native Americans had already explored this “frontier”).  For them this was as much spiritual as geographic.  They wanted their religious life to be as expansive as the galaxy of sun and stars. Read more

Dec 12

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“Moving from Polity to Purpose”

I had the privilege of witnessing a profound conversation with my colleagues in the Pacific Western Region.  They were talking about what it would take to really shift our culture away from holding on to “this is mine” to “we are called to serve a larger vision.”  They named it powerfully as “moving from polity to purpose.”

What excites me most about our move toward regionalization is not so much that we can create new and interesting structures, but that this transition helps us uncover a deeper charge of culture change that asks us to claim a larger purpose of serving the larger world, not just “ourselves.” Read more

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