The King of Nothing

It's official: I've resigned as President of ANZUUA, which makes me a little sad, since it's the only time anyone's trusted me to be the president of anything in real life. I was rather enjoying that. I sent this letter to all churches and fellowships last night:

19 November, 2018

To all ANZUUA member churches and fellowships,

The ANZUUA Committee meeting held today will be my last as President, after a little over a year in the role. There are two compelling reasons for my resignation, which will take place with immediate effect after this meeting.

First, I have taken on additional work next year as the Chaplain of Pembroke School, close to the Norwood Church. This will be in addition to continuing as Minister of our large, growing, and active congregation until the end of my contracted term in March 2023. This new association between these two Adelaide institutions represents the largest outreach potential in the church’s history and requires appropriate time and energy. To meet the demands of both roles, I am streamlining my work, jettisoning non-contractual activities, which sadly would include any continuing work with ANZUUA.

Second, at the AGM yesterday, the UCSA congregation voted overwhelmingly to withdraw from ANZUUA. This would, of course, put me in a false position, were I to continue as President. The ANZUUA Secretary will be receiving a letter from the UCSA Committee of Management in due course, confirming this decision and its rationale, and outlining how the UCSA plans to continue to support the growth of the U/U movement in Australia, as well as the small and emerging fellowships here that have been seeking our practical assistance.

I realize that...we have another UCSA member on the ANZUUA committee. Whether or not she continues to be involved with ANZUUA is for her to decide, but it should be noted that she would no longer do so on behalf the UCSA.

I hope I have been clear about the reasons for my resignation as President, a challenging role I never sought, but have been honoured to have held, however briefly. I sincerely wish you every success in your future endeavours.

Yours in faith and service,

(Rev.) Robert F. MacPherson

Minister

Unitarian Church of South Australia

What the church plans to do from here to not become isolated is for the church itself to decide. I see three possible directions of varying scope:

• align more closely with the ICUU as an international hub, engaging with similarly large but isolated churches geographically outside the scope of the UUA and GA.
• form a new Australia-based association which can be relatively easily incorporated and audited, and would enable us to concentrate on small and emerging groups within our scope
• go it alone; be an independent church in and for the Adelaide metro region, and developed strategic partnerships with like-minded groups here.

What's clear is that the movement in the region is dying, apart from a few groups, and ANZUUA as it's currently formed seems either unable or unwilling to do much about that. Therefore, a new and effective way forward must be found, and the UCSA has boldly committed to finding that new way, whatever it will be. To do nothing and to go on as we are seems worse than futile, it seems irresponsible.

As someone said in The Godfather in relation to an impending execution--"it's not personal, it's just business." 

Same goes here: neither the church nor I bear any malice toward any ANZUUA member or group. But if we are to be in the business of getting the UU message out to the region, we have been failing for some time now. Time to cut losses and make new plans to promote the movement that called us all, from various faith backgrounds and none, together in the first place.

Watch this space to see how we go.

What I was supposed to say. What I said. What I should have said.

This year's Parliamentary Interfaith Breakfast was again sponsored by the Australian Catholic University, but was held in Sydney this year rather than Canberra. The plan, as I take it, is to take the event around each capital city in turn, wherever the ACU has a campus and thus the support staff to organise it.

NSW Premier Berekjilian at this year's event

Each year, faith leaders are invited to write a prayer from their tradition, and these are printed in the event program. Of these, a few are selected to be read at the end of the event as a kind of pluralist benediction. The meat of the event itself is not these prayers, nor even breakfast itself, but speeches from the Premier or PM, the Leader of the Opposition, and a special guest to what is essentially, a self-selected focus group. This year the focus group represented 120 faith traditions. Who knew there were that many?

So I wrote another prayer, but this year I was contacted by the event organiser:

"Wow, what a beautiful prayer! Would you care to read it at the event along with a few others?"

Ever susceptible to flattery, I accepted. Here's what I sent them, and what was published in the program.

A Unitarian Universalist Prayer for the 2018 Parliamentary Interfaith Breakfast

Spirit of Life and of Living, known by many names and beyond all naming, known in many ways and beyond all knowing:

May You, who illuminates our sacred land with the dawning of this morning, illuminate us.

May Your eternal and loving light guide the steps of our leaders, that they may envision and fashion a social order both peaceful and free.

The lamps we see by may be different--Catholic and Jew, Muslim and Buddhist, Christian and Humanist--but Your light is the same:

Yours is the light of universal compassion, shining as the sun, not on some of us, but on the sum of us;

Yours is the light of justice, a beacon of equality and justice for the lost and searching;

Yours is the light of life’s renewal, a dancing morning star of hope through forgiveness and reconciliation.

Oh You who illuminate the world, shine through our different lamps with the one pure light of Your grace.

This we pray in the name of all that we hold sacred, holy, right, good, and true. So may it be.

However, my host, the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, has repeatedly and publicly refused to abide by new mandatory reporting laws in the wake of the Royal Commission's findings into institutional child sexual abuse, I felt this was rather letting them off the hook a little, despite the atmosphere of cozy tolerance engendered by the event. There are some things that are intolerable, and the Catholic Church's insistence on exempting the seal of confession from civil law is intolerable.

I was scheduled to be the last prayer, following, in order: a Mormon, a Hindu, a Ba'hai, and a Catholic bishop.  This was too good an opportunity to miss, so I hastily re-wrote the prayer at the breakfast table, and this is what I in fact read, the change in boldface:

A Unitarian Universalist Prayer for the 2018 Parliamentary Interfaith Breakfast

Spirit of Life and of Living, known by many names and beyond all naming, known in many ways and beyond all knowing: 

May You, who illuminates our sacred land with the dawning of this morning, illuminate us.

May Your eternal and loving light guide the steps of our leaders, that they may envision and fashion a social order both peaceful and free.

The lamps we see by may be different--Catholic and Jew, Muslim and Buddhist, Christian and Humanist--but Your light is the same:

Yours is the light of universal compassion, shining as the sun, not on some of us, but on the sum of us;

Yours is the light of justice, a beacon of equality and justice for the lost and searching;

Yours is the searching and cleansing light of truth, oh shine this light into the dark recesses of the sealed sacrament of confession that has enabled the suffering of so many innocents, and into those frightened hearts that would shrink from transparency and accountability;

Yours is the light of life’s healing renewal, the dancing morning star of hope that rises in forgiveness and reconciliation.

Oh You who illuminate the world, shine through our different lamps with the one pure light of Your grace.

This we pray in the name of all that we hold sacred, holy, right, good, and true. So may it be.

I was pretty nervous, and even stumbled reading it in a couple places--not like me at all. Still, you could have heard a pin drop. 

Did it land? Would my hosts be resentful? Will I ever be invited back? I don't really know the answers to these questions. The only response I had was from a Catholic Bishop who shook my hand and said, "Nice prayer." Then sotto voce in my ear: "I bet you think you're pretty clever."

Ouch.

Well, it landed on him, I guess. 

We used to believe that God heard all prayers. And that sometimes his answer is 'no'. Well, he's God, so that's just tough. You can't always get what you want from the boss, no matter how earnestly you pray for it.

God's emissary, the Archbishop of Adelaide

But given that here in SA, our local Archbishop Greg O'Kelly has recently doubled down on refusing to subject the rite of confession to mandatory reporting, I am reminded that God's supposed emissaries are just as brutal in their total-lack-of-giving-a-damn about genuine human suffering they could easily help to ease. The heart-heartedness of clergy like the Archbishop (to say nothing of the foul mafia of church-protected paedophiles) has ruined forever the product called 'religion' as surely as cancer research has ruined the enjoyment of a good cigar.

Here's what I should have said, if I only had the guts:

If the Catholic Church in Australia were any other organisation housing and hiding a culture of child sexual abuse, it would have been wound up and its considerable assets sold off for compensation of the victims.

The Catholic church in Australia has proven itself to be nothing more than a long-standing criminal conspiracy.

The Catholic Church in Australia is morally bankrupt.

And if there is a hell, and it has special circles for those complicit in enabling its abuse of power in the suffering of innocents, like the ACU, I do hope to see you all roast for it, and may your eternal, piteous, shrill prayers and scalding tears for release be ignored by the almighty brute you claim to worship. 

Now that's what I'd call divine justice.

But as a UU Minister, and especially as President of ANZUUA, you come to know futility and irrelevance on a first name basis. Breaking the seal of confession seems to be a lost cause, an exercise in futility. Why stick your neck out and risk shaming your own tradition?

Because lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for, as someone said. 

Futility: a still life

Why the right words never come

In the beginning was the logos--the word.

Written or spoken, a word is a symbol. As an aural stimulus, or as a visual stimulus, a word represents some thing other than the sound it makes on the eardrum or the squiggles on the page.

But words are more than a system of signs. They are a means of connecting minds, a pact between sender and receiver.

Logos: the word

Thus, spoken and written words are actions when they are received, and create a relationship between separate minds.

Kurt Vonnegut, writer, wit, and sometime Unitarian, said that reading a book was in effect 'meditating with the mind of another' and thus one of the most intimate relationships we separate selves can ever have. In reading (or hearing--yay audiobooks!) the logos, the words, of another, we surrender to the writer, allowing him or her to restructure our inner world, to create moods, thoughts, ideas, imagery. Reading literally generates an imagined world, full of real-feeling sensations, for a time. At the beginning of the world was the word, says John.

Words allow us to connect with the mind of another

The imagined inner world made by the connection between writer/speaker and reader/listener does not remain as vivid over time as when we are actually reading or listening in the moment, But it leaves traces in the neural pathways. Repeated encounters with the author builds up these traces in something like sedimentary layers. Reading or listening repeatedly thus changes you. So it makes sense to be selective about what you read or listen to over and over and over.

The logos thus assumes a bond of trust. Perhaps this is why every world religion comes down hard on bearing false witness (lying)--which breaks the logos' fidelity to the truth. They also come down hard on gossip, slander, etc.--words that can wound the tender mind of the one who has given their attentiveness to read or to listen.

So just be careful with them

It thus behooves anyone who would deal in words to offer words which are both true and kind. Or at least not untrue, and not unkind.

Words are actions. Words establish relationship.

In my work, I deal chiefly in logos:

I write.
I correspond.
I read aloud.
I preach.
I dialogue one-on-one.
I discuss in groups.

Funny when you look at them for what they are

In so doing, there is a constant search for the right words in each situation. True and kind, or not untrue and not unkind.

This full-time mental google-search reminds me of the myth of Tantalus, whose punishment was to stand neck-deep in a river under a fruit tree for eternity. Each time he bent over to drink water to slake his thirst, the water receded. Each time he reached for the fruit to fill his hungry belly, the branches of the tree lifted out of his reach.

Searching for the logos is a lot like Tantalus...

The exact, perfect, 'just right' words never come. The words of life that end the existential hunger and thirst. They never will. They do not exist, because they're only symbols for a world just beyond our reach. I have had to learn to live with their fundamental inadequacy.

With apologies and respect to my comrades who would dethrone the logos and replace it with silence, the answer to the limitations of words is not to remove them from worship. There is no silent meditation in existence whose context is not framed by words ('just breathe', 'let thoughts come and go', 'imagine a big ball of warm sunlight in your stomach...'). The answer to the limitations of words is not to ladle on more words through 'open discussion', like some directionless university dorm-room bull session (which verbal soup produces a white noise of multidirectional logos, and encourages competitiveness).

The answer is there's no escape from on-going discernment around the words we use to worship. Understanding that the logos is not what it describes, but is a living word-- it can be fine-tuned, clarified, interrogated, rewritten and resaid. The Logos is not insurance form boilerplate or Apple terms and conditions. The Logos opens like the lotus and invites connection. It does not close off and regulate.

We have to start somewhere. In the beginning was the word.

So it pays to be selective about who you read, listen to, talk with. Every word creates relationship. Every word is a feeble attempt to bridge the gap of our solitudes, a leap of faith that we can make ourselves known to another and feel we are no longer completely separate selves locked in the first-person kingdom of our own skulls. Everyone uses words; not everyone uses them well. You become the words that occupy and shape your mind. Not everyone deserves to be allowed into it.

Besides Vonnegut, I have meditated rather a lot with the mind of the poet T.S. Eliot, who put the problem (rather brilliantly) like this:

“So here I am...
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lostAnd found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

And so lately, when I am trying to offer comfort to one of my pastoral charges. Or when I am trying to encourage a young leader trying to get a new fellowship off the ground. Or even when I'm trying to tell my wife how utterly in love with her I am...I have to do more than be still (important though that is).

I have to bloody well say something.

Something true and kind, or at least not untrue and not unkind, something that will never be the magic spell we want it to be, wish it could be, or even expect or demand it to be.

But to keep reaching, keep discerning, and like Tantalus, accepting that the reaching is all there is.

The Art of the Swap

I will shortly be engaging in what is called a 'pulpit swap'. With a difference.

Normally, it's a straight-up like-for-like exchange. I go to another church; that church's minister comes to mine. And we do each other's jobs for an agreed length of time.

In my case, the minister I'm swapping with is retired and so has no permanent ministry. He has instead arranged for me to provide 'preaching breaks' for three congregations in the UK: Leeds, Glasgow, and York. My congregation gets three consecutive services provided by the retired minister and his wife.

Thus, my geographically isolated-congregation will get a rather deeper experience with a highly experienced minister, and this geographically-isolated, mid-career minister (me) gets a rather less deep experience, but of a variety of congregations.

This is therefore a win-win. My congregation, which has had me consistently for 6.5 years, gets another deep experience of Unitarian ministry in a place where there just aren't any. I get a breadth of experience that cannot be afforded in Australia. It should be educative for everyone.

I have not been on a UK pulpit since Dean Row in 2011. My congregation has not had a Unitarian minister other than me since 2010. Much water has, as they say, been passed under the bridge during these years since. I have changed and adapted to the local context. The local context has adapted to me. It's easy to get stuck in our perceptions of what constitutes the Unitarian experience and Unitarian ministry's shaping of that experience. The swap should address that by providing much-needed perspective for both me and my charges,

What about the three congregations I'm visiting? Since I'm only at each for one service, what might they have to gain? "Einmal is Keinmal" as the Germans say. "Only once is never" Or, that which only happens once, might as well never have happened at all. So is this swap a waste of time for them? They are not, as many UK churches are, lacking for ministry. Two of them are run by awesome permanent ministers; one is lay-led, but has retired ministers in the congregation who take services.

So in their door blows an odd species--an Australian minister who doesn't sound it, whose ministry has developed in a context very different from theirs. What can this offer?

First, variety certainly, and at the very least they won't be as easily able to sit back and let the familiar sensory and cognitive experience of their accustomed service wash over them. They will have to engage afresh, learn to listen to a new way of thinking and delivering. Kind of like reading a book by an unfamiliar author--you might never read the author again, but once will have stretched you some.

Second, the swap can offer a handy preaching break for chronically over-worked ministers. No one who doesn't grind out freshly-baked worship on a weekly basis can have the least idea of how welcome that might be.

Third, they're not just getting a peripatetic minister, a wandering preacher, I. They're also getting the Unitarian brand ambassador for the antipodean region. Switching to my ANZUUA President's hat (there isn't an actual hat as part of the role...), I plan to value-add by outlining the state of the market in Australia and New Zealand and, I hope, establish permanent links between our congregations, the better to close the wide gap of distance between us. Who knows? Sister churches perhaps, like the twin-towns scheme?

So, not just a win-win, but a win-win-win, lifting all our little boats.

That's the aim anyway. Wish me luck, and a spring tide.

Poverty, Chastity, Obedience: The Monastic Vows

There's a wonderful recent piece written by a ministerial colleague on one of the less obvious travails of public ministry--a UU minister can't buy just any car..

The author details his acute awareness of the judgements congregants make about the moral signals a Minister sends when they visibly deploy their cash. The car one really wants and the car one should have are two very different cars. In the end, he drives up to church in a new Smart Car, to the rapturous approval of his flock. And a nagging sense that he's not so much their pastor as their poodle.

Pre-ministry days with my precious--a 1980 Triumph TR7, loaded with a 3.5 litre V8. Off-the-charts power-to-weight ratio. A fond and guilty memory now...

Transitioning into Ministry from academia involved some considerable down-sizing: two years without pay, living away costs, ending in a 40% income reduction once I started working again. So I sold my car, and haven't owned one since. Thankfully my partner makes professor money, so she can and does own a car, and I sometimes even get to use it.

My more recent solutions to transport have involved public buses, taxis, a push-bike, my two big feet, and a 250 cc Vespa. Which method I use depends on the weather, distance, destination, and purpose of the trip. On the Vespa, you can conceivably tool about in a smart suit, like the Italians do. It is of course very energy efficient,  but my partner worries every time I go out on it. I would like her not to worry about me, hence my thoughts turn to car ownership again.

Chosen because it was available in ecclesiastical black...

Poverty, or at least some display of financial modesty, is perhaps the only one of the three traditional monastic vows UU ministers are still expected to keep. Chastity? Well, there is no vow of celibacy in our tradition, thank God (though some could have done with it). Obedience? Our tradition of freedom of the pulpit means our prophetic witness need not obey our associations, boards, or congregants, but only the Spirit as we are given to understand its will. So yes and no.

So the remaining vow of poverty stands as the last enforceable fossil of the old monastic tradition. My stipend is pegged to that of the Uniting Church scale, which I guess is broadly deemed a reasonable standard of living for clergy. Still, it can look like Croesus' bank account if you happen to be a modest pensioner. All relative, I guess, and really not often commented upon, probably more due to the customary bourgeois reticence toward talking about anything so vulgar as filthy lucre.

Still, there are occasions when outward signs of material comfort are commented upon. The subtext, whether approving or admonishing, is always: "How can he afford that on what we pay him?" Smart cloths, stylish eyewear, natty ties, quality shoes, what suburb I live in, and even good grooming all excite comment that assumes someone in the clergy must look poverty-stricken to maintain moral authority.

For the record, before Ministry, I used to make decent money, and invested it in property, and good shoes and suits that wouldn't go spectacularly out of fashion anytime soon. These still serve me well. Over the past six years I have naturally topped them up, but topped them up frugally, and I hardly ever pay retail. I buy:

• buy op-shop shirts and ties of often remarkable quality
• discontinued, seconds, or heavily marked-down suits
• second-hand electronics

The only thing I try not to skimp on is shoes, our primary connection to mother earth. "Look after your shoes, and your shoes will look after you" my father always said. Generally, this means the Florsheim clearance outlet.

Dyed in the blood of the lamb.

But here's the thing: I miss having a safe, fun, reliable car. You can keep it the way you want, play the music you love, have a little privacy on the roads, and stay warm, cool, dry in all weathers. Naturally, like the author of the article, I would want to have the car I want; no one should be able to tell me what to drive. But as soon as I roll up in my ultimate fantasy vehicle (this one)...

1968 Jaguar E-Type. Perhaps the most beautiful and powerful English sports care ever made.

then the JUDGING will commence.

And you know that's true. No, it's not environmentally friendly. Yes, it is a fetish object of conspicuous consumption. No, one does not imagine anyone in a dog collar emerging from it. Yes, it is an index of my shallowness to lust after a hunk of retro metal. I'm only human.

But God I want one. And I could buy one. Tomorrow. It might not be a smart purchase, just an expensive vanity, but what the hell? You're a long time dead...

But you know that ain't gonna happen. The cognitive dissonance will be too great. And worse, in a context where folks get judged for not travelling with a damn 'keeper-cup' absolutely everywhere, this would bring out the worst in UUs--the tendency to sanctimony--a force which no moral authority can withstand. (There's a rich irony for you...)

On the other hand nothing feels as good as judging others, especially by standards one doesn't need to maintain oneself.

For example, I don't use plastic straws, 'cos their bad for the planet. Not using them affords two pleasures: the pleasure in saving the planet, and the pleasure of judging those who do use them. The air on the moral high ground is always Alpine-pure. So maybe I SHOULD buy this car, and give everyone the opportunity to feel more righteous than the Minister. 

But I'll probably settle for Prius...powered, as we know, by the inexhaustible fuel supply of one's own smug self-righteousness.

Kafka-esque Presidency

(This will appear in the next issue of Quest (the newsletter of ANZUUA), as the first of a regular column called "Presidential Ponderings")

Franz Kafka begins his story "The Metamorphosis" with one of the great openings in world literature:

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous vermin."

​Gregor's shock, at once horrifying and comical, has become my own. Waking up from drug-and-flu induced dreams on a Sunday last October to find that I had been elected (appointed?) ANZUUA president in absentia and unopposed will probably not be the only Kafka-esque thing that happens over the course of the next few years.

Because I meant what I said at the BGM (through a healthy proxy)--that I had zero interest in presiding over an organisation content with managing its own decline and irrelevance, and that if you don't want a brisk (and probably brusque) change agent, please don't vote for me. And so it follows (as does the night the day) that you've only got yourselves to blame for what follows from turning me into this...President-creature. 

As regards the 2017 ANZUUA conference, I can't read a room I wasn't in, but reports from eye-witnesses suggest we did ourselves no favours as an association, and I think anybody who was there will know why. Let me say, straight up, that I have zero tolerance for bullying in any context or form. Committee meetings and General meetings will be forums where mutual respect and democratic principles will be firmly enforced. Those who insist that their will prevails by shouting down opposition may wish to consider whether they care to attend any such future events. We need to stop these petty internecine wars if we're ever going to grow and thrive together. 

But maybe that's a mistaken assumption. Perhaps, in our heart of hearts, we don't actually want to grow and thrive together. Perhaps we are prepared to let ANZUUA burn on the altar of our personal/local hobby-horses. Often, the core of such self-seeking destructiveness is having ONE SACRED GOAL against which all others must be disregarded. Social justice martyrdom must trump nourishing fellowship. Atheism must trump theism. Bourgeois politeness must trump speaking prophetic witness. I use the word 'trump' knowingly...

If Unitarians are anything, they are the church of BOTH/AND rather than the church of EITHER/OR. The heart of our spirituality is seeing the divine not in one or another isolated things, but in all beings and all things. This is the stern challenge of our Unitarian faith that has never been as easy as it looks. As an association of churches and fellowships, we have to make enough space in our hearts and in our forums so that all concerns and dreams can be heard and gently held.  Love, and the respect that follows from it, is the one and only trump card we hold.

With that caveat out of the way, here are a few general directions in which the current ANZUUA committee is heading:

1. Freeing up the frozen assets in the Bottomley Trust
2. Developing an annual budget
3. Developing criteria for material support of small and emerging congregations/fellowships
4. Developing methods of greater resource sharing and communication amongst our congregations
5. Developing regional ANZUUA in-house print material for all congregations.

Also, feel free to write or call anytime to express hopes, dreams, concerns, whatever. My personal email is robmacpherson1@hotmail.com and my direct line is 0419 550543.

With every good wish and blessing for our shared future,

Gregor Samsa  Rev. Rob MacPherson, President