Faith in the Borderlands

As I am assembling today my materials for my FTE presentation in Atlanta, I am thinking through the most meaningful moments from my summer. At the top of that list is certainly the worship on Sunday morning at General Assembly, with Rev. Abhi Janamanchi preaching. While I am working on a full post today, I will start by just sharing this video from that worship service - in this video, the worship starts at 26:30, though feel free to skip ahead to Rev. Abhi's sermon! Also, here is the reading he refers to as a part of his sermon - it's on page 6.

Lessons in letting go

It is about midway through the 2nd part of Kushner's Angels in America when Prior proclaims, tragically, painfully: Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. It is a stubborn greed: I want more life. Beyond what we should ask for, wanting more of this, wanting life, as Prior says, "past hope." Though the Angel has just warned him that life is but a "bad habit" he should finally release, bringing him and everyone only certain suffering and persistent pain, he insists, relentless, I want more life.

This stubborn resilience is one of the reasons hospice workers are such a needed presence in the midst of death. Having someone nearby to shepherd our giving in, to remind us that giving up can be the greatest gift, to teach us, moment-by-moment, how to let go.

I'm starting to wonder if in my own death, I may need a team of hospice workers, a small town of hospice workers, each to tend to a single muscle, bone, cell, all conspiring to cling to more life.

My tennis coach in high school never told me I was a great tennis player - I wasn't. But she did tell me, repeatedly, how much she admired my tenacity, and for that, I often found myself at state playoffs or the last rounds of local tournaments. Despite my marginal tennis talent, I have won more matches than I can count simply because I had more fight in me than my opponent. I could last longer, dig deeper. I had greater reserves of determination and drive. These are things I know myself by, a way I can identify myself when all else is confused or undone: I can outlast.

And yet, since deciding to leave my job just over 2 years ago, I feel like I've been in an endless lesson about the wisdom of giving up. See, this too is about grace. (Is everything?) It is a lesson where not doing more is ok, not reaching limits is better, going half-way is wise, where resilience is not a gift but an obstacle. It is a lesson where in fact already and always you have attained everything you might ever need - nothing else need be done, or gained, or earned. There is nothing else but now and here and this air and this love and this good earth.

Oh, but I am stubborn. And so although I have felt, from the very beginning, that adding a third trip this summer as a part of my FTE project, would be too much for my family, and for me, I felt it was the only way to make sense of this gigantic quest, these questions. And it was the only way to earn the right to make a claim to such a prize, to gain something grand enough, to gain worth, to be worthy, to be wise. And so I made plans to head to Rochester, NY, to visit First Unitarian there, to witness in person a large church that seems to me alive, and relevant, dynamic, and filled with great depths held by a rich faith.

Generally, when people say to me that they heard the "voice of God" speak to them, I must admit that I have to do a lot of heavy translating to correlate what they expeirenced to something that I can understand. I know I owe this blog a post on God, but since that is still yet to come, suffice it to say that my understanding of God doesn't really include a "voice" per se. Rather than clear directions coming from a burning bush (Ex 3:2), my sense of God and the messages you might say you receive from God tends to be closer to the "sound of sheer silence" (1 Kgs 19:12). But last week I experienced the closest thing I have ever felt to hearing the voice of God, and let me tell you, it wasn't exactly a congratulatory note.

I was getting ready to head to Rochester last week. I was confirming details with people from the church about where to meet, and considering what questions I might ask that would illicit information about underlying cultural norms, what lessons I had learned from my trip to Chicago that I could apply here. But I have to confess, I didn't have enough time to do any of it, at least not well - as a full time mom this summer, one of my biggest lessons is that full time mom really does mean full time. There isn't anything else that can be done but being a mom. But I was pushing on, dammit, getting to Rochester, no matter what.

And then, Monday night, I went to bed after working late, and had just turned off the light when I felt something. I turned on the light, and saw four small red bugs. I woke Carri and we quickly realized what was going on: we had bed bugs.

I know this isn't something that people talk about. There is a lot of shame, and believe me, we have had many moments of feeling like great pariahs and wondering if we should just close off the outside world until we had eradicated these pests - sometime in the next few months, we can hope - and then never talk about them again. But in addition to the fact the work of fighting them off simply necessitates outside help, I can't possibly convey just how stubborn I am, or how loud the lesson was, without sharing exactly the mess my family found itself in as I was preparing for Rochester. So, forgive me while I speak directly about this social taboo...

We had bed bugs. We panicked and struggled immediately - it was midnight and there was nothing for us to do but look at each other with grief and fear and weary desperation. We reached the exterminator first thing the next morning, and they advised us to get every single piece of fabric we had out and into the laundry to be washed on hot. Dry-clean-only's and delicates could be dried on hot. All carpets had to be thoroughly vacuumed, and all toys and books needed to be taken out and put in black garbage bags outside to be "baked" in our backyard. And if we wanted the exterminator to come right away, it all had to be done by 3. We were lucky enough to find some help watching our kids, and Carri and I went to work. We got the entire downstairs cleaned out - that's 3 bedrooms and a bathroom, including closets. We got most of the upstairs done, though from our initial inspection, it really looked like they were confined to our mattress, which is downstairs.

Bags of our clothing, linens, towels, baby clothes in boxes, stuffed animals, pillows, shoes...all filled up our cars so that we could take them to the laundrymat. Carri took on the laundry while I picked up the kids and grabbed some dinner. We found a hotel just down the road where we (including our dog) could sleep for the night while the chemicals did their job in our house. By the 4th hour of laundry, just over$50 of change spent, the kids were tired and acting out. I needed to get them to bed. But, we needed enough laundry done and in bags to fill my car so I could take the kids to the hotel - there was too much to fit into just Carri's car. So we were just waiting for the dryers to get enough dry - each family member took their turn crying or screaming. Finally, at about 8:30 (nearly 2 hours after the kids' usual bedtime), the kids, the dog, and I all headed to the hotel. We were exhuasted, and I was feeling a little nauseous, but we were at least on our way. I told Carri to make sure she grabbed a tennis outfit for me -I had a lesson I needed to attend the next day. She looked at me like I was crazy, but I just shrugged - don't we just press on?

We were on I-70, just past the Quebec exit when I knew I wasn't just a little nauseous. It hit fast and hard. I said hold on kids, I have to pull over. Gracie says, why mom? Just a sec, honey, mama has to throw up. Yes, with 1/2 of our family's linens and clothing in black garbage bags, my two kids, and our dog, on the side of the freeway, with Carri laundering the remaining 1/2, and with nearly all of the rest of our posessions in our backyard in black garbage bags, with exhuasted kids and speeding traffic whirling by, I opened the door of my jetta and threw up everywhere. And right then, I felt God speak to me. God said: What in the hell do I have to do so that you will give up?

I wish I could say I decided right then to abandon dreams of going to Rochester in 3 days. But though the night brought a fire alarm (with me pulling the dog and the kids out of their deep sleep and down the stairs and into the dark night - Carri wasn't yet done laundering) and my continued vomiting, I still awoke the next morning unsure. How could I give up?

Eventually, after much personal torment, every stubborn cell conceded. I cancelled my trip to Rochester. We spent the weekend working like crazy to attend to the rest of our home, to clean and scrub and let go. We watched our bed and box spring get taken away by the garbage men on Monday morning, and after finding a bug in our leather couch, we wondered which would bring its demise - the bugs or the Colorado rainstorms it now faces in our backyard. Gracie woke up often every night with nightmares, and asked us repeatedly if the bugs were yet gone. Each morning she opens our back door to just "check on" her toys.

Thursday morning, as I made the calls to officially cancel the trip, I kept hearing Kenny Rogers. Yes, you know, Kenny Rogers' wise words from the Gambler.

I knew it was time to give in, time to "walk away," despite persistent feelings of guilt and fear. Even without the bugs, leaving my family for the 3rd time in 2 months, was too much. And yet, how now would I earn my fellowship? Earn the good things I have been given? Earn this life?

In retrospect, I confess that as I considered how I would respond to the FTE fellowship, I approached it using these questions more often than I should have. And although my project ultimately seeks to explore fundamental questions about congregational life that are central to my own discernment process and what I see as crucial for Unitarian Universalism, its foundation lacks faith, lacks grace. And so the central lesson of my fellowship, despite other intentions, will inevitably be about these things: the folly of clinging to tangible evidence of human worth rather than standing firmly on the faith that regardless of what I have acheived or what I have learned, I am already inherently worthy. And that to receive the grace of God, we cannot go chasing earthquakes or fire, or wind or breaking rocks, but must instead know there is nothing to do, but be open to the sound of sheer silence.

Ya basta!

I have a very low threshold for Jesus

The title of this post is a quote from one of the people I interviewed after worship at Micah's Porch. I have a very low threshold for Jesus, he said, in response to a question I had asked about why he found this church to be a place he felt at home. He meant that in order for him to feel comfortable in a worship service, he couldn't have it too filled with Jesus.

I was surprised. Even more surprised when he told me he was raised Unitarian, since generally I find that those who have the most resistance to Jesus in UU churches are those who were raised in a Christian faith. But actually, it is fairly common sentiment within our communities. We have a collective low threshold for Jesus. But I had expected a different attitude at Micah's Porch. Their pastor seems Jesus-oriented, though he hasn't told me that himself. In one of our first conversations, though, he told me that he was a traditional Unitarian. He even half-joked that while there are UU groups for polyamory, we don't yet have a clear acceptance of UU Unitarians. After talking with him further, I am pretty sure that he was not saying that there wasn't acceptance of the upper-middle-class-well-educated-reason-driven-white-male-orientation that is a big part of the Unitarian tradition. No, I think he was talking about Jesus. (And God, but I have to come back to God later. As a Unitarian, we can have these conversations separately. :) )

Despite the signficant presence of the UU Christian Fellowship, a good portion of contemporary Unitarian Universalism has a low Jesus threshold. As one of my good friends observed, UUs are much more likely to turn to Mary Oliver or Rumi than to the Sermon on the Mount for guidance and grounding in our worship.

When I went seeking a welcoming community with whom I could worship and heal - just about 10 years ago now - I confess to my own low threshold for Jesus. I do not know for sure if our collective intolerance is about injury, but mine was. I could not see my way to any kind of healing if it was to be wrapped up in Jesus. The word, the person, the ideas, the religion, even if just a shadow of the religion. I was angry at the church for being against me, and my love, for teaching me that God is love, and then backtracking and revising, asserting that God was only some kinds of love. But I took them at the original promise - God is full love, large love, complicated love, indivisible love. And that understanding and faith meant that I could not find God through the symbol of Jesus. Because Jesus had come to mean division, disintegration - distrust of the body, dis-ease of the heart.

I was relieved to find no mention of Jesus in that first UU church I attended. I don't know if I ever heard his name in the time of our attendance, and I was grateful. It offered me a kind of space and time to recover and rediscover my sense of truth and wholeness among religious community.

Jesus is a real issue for Unitarian Universalism today. I cannot even count how many times people have mentioned to me that they would be Unitarians if they could find a UU church that was willing to welcome them in their love for Jesus, and offer them a worship space and community that allowed Jesus to be a central part of their spiritual practice. I hear it from my classmates, I hear it in my community, and I see it in popular dialogue around religion - I mean who hasn't read Marcus Borg and thought - this guy is a Unitarian! But he's not.

Three or four years after I first attended a Unitarian Universalist church, I was reading a copy of the UU World magazine, and I had an epiphany. Seriously, it came to me suddenly, overwhelmingly: I loved Jesus. And if I was to really follow Jesus, to take seriously the message of Jesus, I would be forever a better human being. And if the world were to follow the ways of Jesus, we would be universally transformed. This was not a rational moment, but rather a deep feeling of confidence. And just as quickly as it came, it left, and in its place, I was afraid. Because I did not know exactly how to reconcile this deep understanding and peace with Jesus with my sense of being called to minister to those who - yes - had a very low threshold for Jesus.

I do think a lot of us UUs keep Jesus at arm's length out of a sense of injury. Whether a personal or societal injury, I do think we have been hurt by the use of Jesus in our world today. By the distillation of God into the image of Jesus dying and bleeding on the cross - which I think also distills humanity into sinful creatures who require the suffering of God to attain salvation. I know this isn't the first thing people usually articulate as the source of their injury as it relates to Jesus and Christianity, but for me, it is the theologically central struggle I encounter as I attempt to rebuild my understanding of Jesus and his message.

What are we going to do about Jesus? What are we going to do in Unitarian Universalism to make a safe and full space for those who are Unitarian in the traditional sense? Those who not only have a high threshold for Jesus, but seek Jesus as a central symbol for their path to the divine? Do we wish them well and best of luck, and send them all to the nearest UCC church? And simultaneously, what are we going to do with all of this anger and resistance we have built up in our communities towards Christianity and Jesus specifically, and theism and God generally? Or the sense as articulated here, that Unitarian Universalism is a 200 year movement away from Christianity? Is it possible for two members of the same religion to see Unitarian Universalism as a movement away from Jesus and the faith that most allows them to follow Jesus?

When I was first working through my project for the FTE, I returned repeatedly to a sense of injury within our Unitarian Universalist communities. And as I shared these thoughts with others, they assured me that this is not unique to Unitarian Universalism. The religously wounded walk into all kinds of faith communities, every Sunday, seeking recovery and rebirth. But what they find there, to be truly healing, to be bread for their journey, and not stones, as Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza asserted - cannot shirk away from addressing this injury directly. By acting as if Jesus is a taboo subject (a love that dare not speak its name?), what possible way do we have for healing what is finally a distortion and misrepresentation of all that Jesus spoke of? If the only way we speak of Jesus is with derision or dismissal, what hope do we have of understanding our true historical inheritance, which includes many who were so committed to their sense of the Christian message that they were willing to die for it? And if we call ourselves open to all spiritual paths except the one which calls itself Christian, what way do have to know ourselves as fully interdependent with all of those who, as the central message of their lives, feel saved by their relationship with Jesus Christ?

Although I walked into Unitarian Universalism with a very low threshold for Jesus, I am coming to believe that now is the time for us to re-make our relationship with him and his teachings. Now is the time for us to heal these wounds once and for all, to offer worship and fellowship which is truly welcoming of those who find in his message life, joy, and healing. To offer counseling and support for those who find in this work buried pain and profound injury. To create systems of life which can, over time, meet all those who enter our sanctuaries seeking recovery from their own religious injuries, and offer them a greater path of life. To re-image Jesus for ourselves and for our world as a teacher of love, of a giver of life, of sign of hope. To foster imagination and strengthen relationships within our communities as we allow this work to draw attention to our differences in spiritual beliefs and practices. To encounter Jesus in a way which honors the true pluralism of our world, in a practice and exploration of what it may mean to find Jesus beyond notions of belief or creed, imperialism or colonialism. And to seek this and all of our spiritual healing with the faith that diversity reveals to us the divine, and that by being in a community which celebrates and relishes in its differences, we are ultimately made whole.


The amazing artwork on this post is from janet mckenzie. You can find a great summary of her work on the Tikkun Blog.

Grace

The freedom to be together, to know one another, to be known, to love, to be loved - these are gifts of grace. The gift of life, of breath, of time, of this moment - and the knowledge of a past, and a future. The gift of imagination, of envisioning something not yet true or real, but possible simply because we can see it in our minds and in our hearts. These are gifts of grace.

Sometimes I day-dream that my church, my future church, will be called Grace Unitarian Universalist Church. From my searches, I have not found such a place to exist. We seem to have a low account of grace in Unitarian Universalism - which I find confusing, given that Universalism is all about grace. Perhaps it is true, what my TA in theology class last quarter thought - in order to have a strong understanding of grace, you must have a strong understanding of sin. Neither concept is robustly developed in contemporary Unitarian Universalism, at least from what I have witnessed.

In my interviews with Revs. Jennifer & David Owen-O'Quill in Chicago last month, they both articulated that their gospel, their good news, is that God loves you - no matter what. That God's love is unconditional. They, like my TA, connected this good news to a strong theology of sin - we are all sinful and broken, and in the midst of that, we are ontologically and essentially good - for God is good, and God's grace is eternal.

I don't know. My sense of grace is not necessarily connected to sinfulness. Instead, I want to think about grace in the sense of unearned and undeserved gifts. Not unearned or undeserved because of your personal negative qualities or actions, but because there is no way to earn, or deserve, the kinds of gifts that constitute grace. Such as life. What could one do to "earn" life? Such as love. What could on do to "deserve" love? Such as those mountains my family and I stood upon this weekend. The children my partner and I held in our hands. Nothing a human can do could measure up to these things - because they are immeasurably good, infinitely valuable.


But UUs like to earn things, and so we tell ourselves that grace is an unnecessary concept - because human hands strive together and bring us all that we can conceive of. I count myself among this group I like to earn things. I don't know how not to feel like I've earned something - measurably good or otherwise. Have I done enough? Am I worth this gift? The good news Jennifer and David propose, if temporarily lifted out of a traditional theology of sin (I'll come back to this later, I promise), grants us the possibility that irrevocably the answer to these questions are: Yes, and Yes.

What a relief grace might be for those of us who seek salvation through endless lists of tasks. To know that even if we do nothing at all, even if we come empty-handed and directionless, we are already and always ok - what good news this might be.

As I have been attempting to re-assemble my yoga practice, I have been remembering what yoga has taught me about grace, and how hard a concept it is for me to believe or embrace. Whether in handstands or downward dogs, I found myself perpetually solving my struggles through muscle. Through determined force. I can get there if I push my way into it - I am strong, I tell myself. And sometimes I would. But often, I would hit a block that I could not overcome. Because to move forward, you need not only strength, but openness, willingness to receive from somewhere other than your muscles, faith in something uncontrollable and intangible, that is, grace. To move into a pose, you must not move into the pose, but let the pose be in you. Breathe, relax, wait. You cannot push your way in to these places, and in fact your pushing only delays your arrival. Your wanting only gets in the way of receiving. This is grace.

My friend from seminary (who I hope will sometime soon come and post a comment or two), who was raised UU, told me that finding the concept of grace as an adult was a deeply liberating encounter. It was something she found utterly lacking in her religious upbringing. Again, I find this bewildering given that Universalism makes no sense without a strong theology of grace. As we continue to manifest communities of depth in our congregational lives, I have a sense that we must do so alongside a great dialogue and growing appreciation for the concept of and witness to grace. And so I continue to dream of this future church, and imagine it might one day be real.

Sacred Space

I walked into the Chopin Theatre in Chicago's Wicker Park late on a Friday evening a few weeks ago, to see TUTA's production of Uncle Vanya. I was there with my sister Kristina, and quite unexpectedly and fortunately, my friend, Mark Lord, who just happened to be in town from Philadelphia. I don't think I had seen it live before, though I had read the play a few times, and of course Vanya on 42nd Street was a college favorite. It was performed in the basement space. The stage was covered in doors but no walls, the air was filled with music melancholy enough for Chekov, and the occasional subway train rushing by.

What makes a space sacred? What constitutes holy ground? How does it serve us, or allow us to better seek God, to consider some spaces hallowed and others just plain space?

I wrote in my entrance essay to seminary, that after feeling alienated from the cathedrals of Catholicism, I found God in the theatre. Sitting there between Mark and Kristina, with just a few other bodies sharing space nearby, experiencing together this funny and sad piece of theatre, the occasional brilliant moments of actors speaking old words with new life, I remembered just how much space matters.

The book of Exodus spends a ridiculous amount of time explaining just what would make a space holy for the God of Israel. If we take Exodus literally, God is gravely concerned with circumscribing the dimensions of a space that might be considered holy. By the time of David, God is less concerned with a space, and more concerned with having a good representative in God's King David. Of course, it isn't too long before David's son Solomon takes on his crazy-fabulous building project and creates the first version of the great temple of Jerusalem, which you could argue completely re-makes the entire identity of the Hebrew religion and the way the people see themselves and their relationship to their God.

The Sunday after I saw Uncle Vanya at the Chopin Theatre, I attended the worship service for the UU community, Micah's Porch held in the same space. It is hard to know what others saw in that space, if it could carry the same kind of borrowed meaning it held for me after seeing Vanya there just a couple nights before. But either way, I was reminded again, of just how much space matters. And not just because it shapes how people experience the service itself, but maybe more for how it communicates who is being invited, who might find this to be their place of worship, their place for community, for (as James Luther Adams suggested) practicing what it means to be human.

Spaces are like any part of the myths we use to access and experience Ultimacy - we must be careful not to confuse them with Ultimacy itself, and to be clear that their boundaries are constructed and performed for our benefit, and not at all real, as all the world is potentially and essentially holy. But we need these boundaries and performances of space, to help us recall who we are and are not, what we are made for, and what we are called to become.

One of the things that often confuses me - and I know I'm not alone on this - is just how predictable UU church spaces tend to be. Here we are, this free movement, affirming of an unbounded, expanding, alive faith, insistent on our congregational uniqueness and independence, creative expression and relentless discovery - and yet all our churches look alike. They look like each other, and they look like a good majority of other religious spaces. And although we are developing "alternative" worship spaces here and there, I'm still not sure why our "alternative" service isn't the main service.

People like to explain this to me in one of two similar ways...first, that our religious expression and theological inqury is so free, that we need the predictability of our space and our worship forms to ground us. It helps us recognize ourselves as "church." It offers us safety to explore ideas freely. Second, they tell me that because we have so many people who find us from other faith traditions, that this group prefers a more traditional church set-up for their worship experience. It makes them feel like they are going to "church," even when the ideas or experiences go beyond what they might have previously understood as acceptable for church life.

I don't know if these statements are true, but they have been repeated to me often. But even if they are true to some extent, they come with their own not insignficant issues, not the least of which is how these spaces that meet the needs of "come-outers" may fail to be inviting or worshipful for those who are raised Unitarian Universalist.

The Chopin Theatre, with all its chairs and stairways, with actors' props set alongside the walk-way, with its multiple spaces for eating and drinking, and with its posters of past and upcoming events, with all that comes with a Chicago theatre space - felt to me, as much like a church as any church I've ever attended. And yet, I wondered, if there were children in this church, would they find a place to be? How about differently abled individuals - would it have been accessible? And for all those who do not feel at home in a theatre - would they find this place just as alienating as a traditional church setting? Would they find God here?

Space does matter - as a point of access, as a component of the invitation we make to those with whom we hope to be in community. It matters experientially for the phenomenon of the thing - the sensory experience of it all, and it matters for what it signfies, what it communicates to us based on our culturally encoded shorthand - for its semiotics.

And space only matters inasmuch as it fails or affords us to allow us to find each other, to meet with each other, to experience that which is bigger than us, to know ourselves and each other, to practice being together, to practice and become fully human.

Meeting Places

UU minister Richard Gilbert’s words, “whoever you are, wherever you are, I bid you welcome,” come to mind as I kick off this blog. More than anything, I am aware of the uncontained and unpredicatable audience factor involved in writing something like a blog. Though I can imagine most who read a “kick-off” post will be somehow personally connected with me – hi friends and family! – the hope of course is that these conversations will reach beyond my community and make ripples into worlds I might never find if not for the internet.

However, if we believe in the theological concept of utter interconnectedness, all the “world wide web” allows is to make explicit what is already at play spiritually. So, these words, these hands, they are reaching out across time and space, even if I do not yet imagine it to be so, even if I am afraid, even if I do not understand, even if the web address has not yet reached beyond three or four of you. The impact may not be in the ways I intend or envision, but the world is changed nonetheless by my presence, by my choices, by showing up in the ways and in the places I do, by meeting the world in the ways that I do.

Which brings me to my project. It starts with a promise. That church is something that matters, and matters more than other things, or in ways more profound, more Ultimate than other places. Or, to use a less power-laden image, that life in church encompasses, addresses, enlivens, illuminates, heals, transforms, incites all other parts of life. The promise that if you show up here, in this meeting place, you and the world will be offered life, abundantly. "...That they may have life, and have it abundantly." (Jn 10:10)

And it starts with the ways we break this promise, the ways this promise has been broken. Sometimes actively, sometimes less obviously, though just as incessantly. The ways we come together and only repeat the superficial ways of relating with each other and with ourselves we attempt to escape and overcome by forming religious community. The ways we find not God but greed, not Ultimacy but injury, not intimacy but alienation. The ways we think of church as something for Sunday mornings, and this is when we do not have something better to do, something more relevant, meaningful, life-giving.

And before we get too far along, I better just confess. Although this is one of the things I've preached on - that church matters - my preaching is further along than my practice. I am speaking from faith. Because I wonder too. How can real communities ever form (religious or otherwise), except by magic, and time, and love? How does something come to be meaningful to us, to the world, to offer us solace and fuel, and hope and healing?

This is a project that comes out of my experience in Unitarian Universalist congregational and seminary life, which is to say, being a UU at a progressive Methodist seminary, being a 33 year old ("Young Adult") in a church community significantly lacking in young adults, a queer woman in a mostly straight church (tho a gay-if-perhaps not-queer welcoming one)....a queer woman in a church at all...a baptized and confirmed Catholic, with strong Catholic cultural ties, who does not find in the Catholic church something to reject, but rather to be in relationship with, which means, not exactly Christian, but a part of Christian community...this is a project that seeks to understand the UU congregational context especially, but not exclusively.

Over the course of about 10 weeks this summer, I will be traveling from Chicago to Rochester, Salt Lake to Atlanta, and up and down the front range, listening and watching, forming relationships and weaving together stories in my mind, in my body - stories of communities forming, of worlds being made. Though I am focusing in on Micah's Porch in Chicago (micahsporch.org), and First Unitarian in Rochester, NY, I hope to in relationship and conversation with churches from Albuquerque to Seattle, San Jose to Louisville - not to mention the churches here in the Denver area.

I hope you feel comfortable posting your comments, questions, and other responses to my notes. I hope we can find here our own meeting place of sorts. I invite you to show up here with me - from whatever context you are in, whatever struggles you may have, whatever hopes you keep always in the back of your mind, driving you to a site such as this, or to a church / meetingplace of your choosing. I look forward to the journey ahead.