The Third Principle

A couple of summers ago, the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg offered a series of summer services based on Unitarian-Universalism's Seven Principles.  (For the complete list of UU Principles, check out http://www.uua.org/visitors/6798.shtml )  At an organizational meeting of the folks who were to be involved in crafting these services, someone mentioned that our minister had each of us specifically in mind for the Principle for which we’d be helping to create a service.

I mentioned this when I got home, and my wife asked, “What’s your Principle again?”  I said, “Number Three:  Acceptance Of One Another And Encouragement To Spiritual Growth In Our Congregations.”


She burst our laughing.


I laughed too.  To be honest, acceptance is not always easy for me.  Frankly, I grumble.  A lot.  About other people.  I clench up inside and start grumbling when I see somebody driving a big SUV, not to mention ANY vehicle with one of those “W ‘04” stickers.  Or "McCain/Palin."  Or anything anti-Obama.  Acceptance is something I find myself struggling with every day.  But I DO struggle with it, because I don’t want to find myself turning into my father. 

My father raised us in an abusive, intolerant household.  Not a day went by without a slur or an epithet of some kind coming out of his mouth.  Like the character of Archie Bunker from the old TV show “All In The Family,” he was an equal opportunity offender -- he seemed to hate everybody equally.  A long time ago, I made a conscious decision.  I could be like him, or I could get out of that house and live a different kind of life.  I got out.

When I come to the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg, I come to the home I did not have when I was a kid.  When I come here, I find myself accepted for who I am, and judged only by what I do.  Here, I am not just listened to.  I am HEARD.  My personal beliefs are not challenged, no matter whether or not those beliefs are shared by anybody else.  I come here and I get to meet, and be friends with, and listen to, and share with:  Pagans and Buddhists and Jews and Quakers and atheists; recent converts, and lifelong Unitarian-Universalists.  What a gift that is!


The Member Reflection part of the service used to deal, not with the sermon topic, but with “How I Became A Unitarian.”  They were fun and they were all different in the details, but week after week, we would hear, more often than not, some variation on these five words:  “It was like coming home.”


Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  Well, Unitarian-Universalism is the home I have to go to.  And I’m so honored that week after week, they take me in.


As far as my own personal beliefs go, well, personally, I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in any kind of life after this one.  But I’ll tell you this:  I do believe in redemption.  I find redemption in Unitarian-Universalism from my grumbling, from my past, from the worst parts of my self, because I share my journey with like-minded folks.  It's a gift I treasure.

The Great Goldini™

I'm counting down the days until my daughter gets her driver's license.  The daughter that I was told twenty years ago that I would never have.  Between my medical history and my wife's, we had attempted to start a family for about eight years before we finally gave up.  It was very hard.  We managed to convince ourselves that we were cool with growing old together, alone.  We'd retire early.  We'd travel.  It would be fine.  Really.

Then I got a phone call at work that I will never forget.  Megan asked if I was sitting down, and shared the news that she was pregnant.  I was floored.  After that, it seemed like everything went my way.  I wanted a girl.  I got her.  I predicted she would have blue eyes and blonde hair.  Megan thought not.  Megan was wrong.  Don't get me wrong -- the pregnancy was very, very difficult.  So much so that Megan had to go on full bed rest at 22 weeks because she kept getting premature contractions.  After Olivia was born, we were advised most strongly by our obstetrician not to try this again.  But we both agree that all the hardship Megan endured those months was utterly, completely, totally worth it.

When Olivia was a baby, I used to use all kinds of things to lull her to sleep when she was fussy.  I became a master of the Daddy Jiggle -- that gentle tiny bouncing/rocking thing men do when holding a baby.  While doing the Jiggle I would talk to the baby about all kinds of things.  My day.  Television plot lines.  Recipes.  To this day, my mother-in-law still can't get over the time she walked in me trying to get the baby to sleep by telling her how to make Bernaise sauce.  And of course I made up stories.

One of the stories I made up was called "The Great Goldini."  It became one of her favorites, and I wound up telling variations of it to my girl for years.  When she was in elementary school Olivia told me I should publish it.  I did shop it to several publishers, but I never did get an agent and I never did make the sale.  I'm still pretty proud of it, though, and I therefore present it to you here for the first time -- enjoy!


"The Great Goldini"  © 1992 by Tom Hayes

Goldini should have been a perfectly happy goldfish.  And he would have been, too . . . if it hadn’t been for his dream.  For you see, Goldini dreamed of becoming -- The GREAT Goldini, The World’s Greatest Fish Magician!!!

Every day, Goldini would practice his magic act.  But he had a very hard time of it, because fish have a lot of trouble doing magic.  Since Goldini had fins, not hands, he couldn’t exactly make a nickel disappear and then pull it out of his friend’s ear.  (Especially since his friends didn’t really HAVE ears.)

Since Goldini lived in water, making things float was not exactly magical.

Card tricks were a disaster for Goldini, because the cards always got soggy before he could really do anything.

And causing a tiger (or ANY kind of cat!) to magically appear was, of course, COMPLETELY out of the question.  And that made Goldini quite sad, because making animals appear out of nothing was the trick that he wanted to perform most of all.

But there WERE some tricks that The Great Goldini could do very well indeed.  He could make a pebble disappear completely, after covering it with a Fish Flake.

He could make the flag on the castle in his bowl magically change color.

And (this was his best trick of all!) he could turn the seaweed into a beautiful bouquet of flowers, just by waving his fin.

One day, Goldini was practicing his magic act, changing the colors on the castle flag back and forth, when the most terrible thing happened.  He glanced up, out of the bowl, and into the most ferocious face he had ever seen!  THERE WAS A CAT IN THE LIVING ROOM!  And it was reaching into the bowl!

Goldini and his friends started swimming around the bowl furiously.  “What are we going to do?” they shouted to each other.  His friends made a dash for the little castle and tried to hide inside as best they could.  But there was no room in the castle for Goldini.

“I know,” thought Goldini, “I’ll use my magic!”  First he snatched up a Fish Flake, covered a pebble, and made it disappear.  The cat didn’t even notice.

Then Goldini changed the color of the castle flag, back and forth.  The cat stopped for just a second, but then it started reaching into the bowl again.

Finally, Goldini changed the seaweed into a beautiful little bouquet of roses!  This time the cat stopped, and blinked a few times.  But then it gave its head a little shake and once again it started reaching into the bowl with its sharp cat claws.

“What am I going to do?  What am I going to do?” thought Goldini, as he swam around the bowl, trying to stay away from the claws.  “The only tricks I have left are the ones that don’t work in a bowl of water!”

And that’s when Goldini got his great idea.  “If my tricks won’t work INSIDE the bowl,” he thought, “maybe -- just maybe -- I can work them OUTSIDE the bowl.”

Goldini swam behind the roses, took a deep breath of water, and began to concentrate.  He waved his fin, and suddenly the cat’s paw lifted up out of the water.  It lifted up out of the water because Goldini was making the cat float -- in the air!  The fish hiding in the castle applauded!

“I can’t keep that cat floating up there forever,” thought Goldini.  “What do I do now?”

Then Goldini got another great idea!  He began to concentrate again.  Then he waved BOTH of his fins.  The cat fell to the ground.  “Oh no!” said the fish in the castle.  “Goldini dropped the cat!  Now it’s going to come after us again!”

Instead, though, a truly amazing thing happened.  There was a flash, and a pop, and a big puff of smoke.  And just outside the bowl appeared the biggest, scariest, meanest-looking dog that the cat had ever seen!  The dog let out a tremendous yowl, and it chased that cat right out the door!

“I did it!” Goldini said.  “I actually did it!  I made an animal appear!”

“You did it!  You saved us!” shouted the other fish.  And they all began to applaud, and to cheer -- for The GREAT Goldini, The World’s Greatest Fish Magician!

THE END (or perhaps I should say, "FIN!")

Goin' Down The Road, Feelin' Bad

The only north-south road that goes into the area I live, Colonial Road, is generally well-patrolled by our local police.  They rigorously enforce the 35 mph speed limit -- go much over 40 for very long and you will almost certainly be ticketed.  With my daughter about to get her driver's license, I am trying extra hard to be good behind the wheel.  Plus, since I travel Colonial Road regularly, I know that there is almost always a police presence and I don't need any speeding tickets, thank you very much.

And yet.

Just about every single time I travel down that road, I am tailgated.  So is my wife.  It makes her crazy.

I have undertaken an experiment in which I am traveling Colonial Road doing exactly the posted speed limit.  If it's the stretch where it's only 25, I go 25.  If it's the long stretch of intersections where it's knocked back to 30, then by gum, I am doing 30.  And under no circumstances am I going over 40 even at the bottom of some not inconsiderable hillage.  And it seems to be driving people absolutely batshit crazy.

I don't get it.  Unless every single tailgater is new to the road and has no idea that they will almost certainly be stopped for speeding, which in my area has GOT to be impossible, these drivers HAVE to know what the limits are.  And being licensed drivers they HAVE to know the dangers of riding someone's rear bumper so closely that said someone cannot see their headlights in the rearview.  And yet they persist, in daily infinite variety, to hug my trunk.  Some go so far as to pass illegally (which on the winding two-lane that is Colonial Road is INCREDIBLY dangerous) or will pull into a turn lane next to me at a stoplight so that they can roll down the window and curse at me in full road rage glory.  (This actually happened to Megan, my wife, who is a scrupulously careful driver, but you get my point.)

I think I'm going to go back to driving at around 40.  I think it'll make me less likely to be the victim of some loon with too much testosterone and a gun, while rendering unto Caesar the approximate obedience to the rules of the road that Caesar and the township require.  And maybe I'll get one of those electric smiley-face things from ThinkGeek.com that can be programmed to scowl at tailgaters and flash the message "back off!" 

I try to live my life according to the Golden Rule, I really do.  I feel that it's the only ethical rule that makes perfect sense to anyone, in any culture.  But these asses who tailgate my family and me are making it very, very hard.

Staying home

I became a stay-at-home father largely because of what I now know to be the very patriarchal attitudes of top management at my workplace.  While my immediate supervisors, who were women, were very sympathetic to things like requests for time off because of a sick child, the male head of our organization was quite the opposite.  Frankly, my wife and partner had a far more difficult time cancelling her day to stay home than I did.  She was, in fact, the primary wage earner for our home, and a lost day of work for her affected us far more than a lost day for me did.  But whenever I had to take time off to stay home, our director was the first to ask, “Well, why can’t his wife do it?”  He constantly made comments in front of other (female!) staff about how it wasn’t really my “place” to take time off for that.  Ultimately his feelings about my situation resulted in my being assigned to duties and hours that were more and more difficult until they became untenable.  Unfortunately I chose simply to leave rather than to fight the situation.  I chose to stay at home full time.  We have never regretted my decision to stay at home, but I often regret having allowed this individual to get away with perpetuating his stereotyped ideas about what constituted my proper role as a worker, as a parent, and as a man.

Thinking about Gandhi

When I was a student at the University of Virginia, back in the early 1970’s, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I became involved with a protest against the war in Viet Nam.  We planned to drive up to the Pentagon, meet up with protesters from other colleges and universities, and picket the main entrance.  It was going to be a pretty big deal.  When word of the protest spread to the authorities, they let it be known that our picketing was illegal, would not be tolerated, and if we tried it, we would be arrested.  I remember being amazed at the time at how many people dropped out of the protest when they realized that their arrest was almost certain.  Maybe they didn’t want to hurt their records, or damage their future careers.  Maybe they were afraid it would hurt their chances at getting into the right grad school.  Or maybe, this close in history to the tragedies at Kent State University and the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, they were simply afraid.

Whatever.

We went from being a bus full of people to a van full, but we went.  We WERE arrested, herded into RFK stadium, processed and jailed with as many as 20 of us jammed into a cell meant for four.  We were released a day or so later.  I was never tried, and some years later an amnesty from President Ford wiped even our arrest records clean.  It was, overall, a grand experience, and I’m glad and proud that I went.  I continued to protest the war until it ended.

There’s a story about Gandhi, perhaps apocryphal, about a mother who asked Gandhi to tell her young son to quit eating sugar.  She said, “I know it does him harm, and I know he will obey you.”  Gandhi asked her to come back in a week.  She was puzzled by the delay, and frankly, a little put out by it, but she figured that Gandhi was a busy man, so she agreed.  In a week,  she came back; Gandhi sat down with the boy, joked and played with him for a while and then said to him, “Please don’t eat sugar.  It’s not good for you.”  The boy agreed to stop.  The mother came over, thanked Gandhi, but said, “I don’t understand why it took you a whole week to tell him that.  Why couldn’t you just do that a week ago?”  Gandhi smiled at her, showing her the gaps in his own teeth, and said, “Last week, I, too, was eating sugar.”

To me, sacrifice means talking the talk and walking the walk.  It means not giving up just what's comfortable to give up.  I believe you have to sacrifice for your beliefs when it becomes uncomfortable, or inconvenient, or hard.  The sacrifices you make could be sacrifices of time, or money.  It could mean going on a march for a cause you believe in even though it’s raining, or it’s cold, or you’re hurting.  Even the Bible references this kind of sacrifice in worship:  look at the story of the widow’s mites.  The widow is praised because her donation of two tiny coins is worth more than a rich man’s sack of gold -- it's all the money she has.  Or look at any of Jesus’s rebukes of the all-talk-and-no-action Pharisees.  (Oh, those Pharisees.  When will they ever learn?!)

Could I be doing more, giving more, living my beliefs more?  Of course I could.  But awareness is the first step.  I don’t ever want to be a “do as I say not as I do” person.  I had to remind myself of this last Monday when my daughter and I were freezing outside for a couple of hours on the Dauphin County Courthouse steps, protesting for equal marriage rights for gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender persons.  Quite frankly, there were times when I wanted to go sit in the car with the heater on.  I think my daughter did, too.  But we stuck it out.

I am so proud of her.

Turning Japanese? I really think not....

I suppose I should be blogging about the great two-part Death Storm that ravaged Pennsylvania this week. It is, after all, the first time in recorded history that two storms of this magnitude hit the mid-Atlantic in the same week.  In a way, it did lead to this blog, but only incidentally.  I'm sure that there are better accounts of the blizzards elsewhere.

One of the things that I share with my daughter is a love of Japanese culture.  We enjoy Japanese food, architecture, animation (anime) and comics (manga.)  We often talk about what we would like to do on our dream tour of Japan -- the temples we would visit, the cities we want to see, and of course a visit to Studio Ghibli where many of our favorite anime were produced by that wonderful genius Hayao Miyazaki.  Some of my favorite films are those starring Toshiro Mifune and directed by Akira Kurosawa, particularly "Rashomon" and "Seven Samurai."  Some of my favorite collectibles are my Japanese toys based on various anime like Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis EVAngelion and Keroro Gunsou.  Hell, the names are even fun to type.

But last week, while holed up during the storms and passing the time by reading manga and watching Japanese movies I caught a news report of a Japanese whaling vessel which deliberately rammed a ship which was trying to protect a pod of whales from those hunting them.  And it got me thinking about the dark underbelly of Japanese culture.  While there is much to admire and even, for some, to love about Japanese culture and society, I sometimes forget about the other stuff.  The whaling.  The xenophobia.  The racism.  The denigration of women.  The insane importance placed on "face."

I have to believe that time will heal some of that.  I have to believe that each succeeding generation diminishes the hatred and prejudice of the preceding generation.  I like to think I am less prejudiced than my parents were, despite growing up in their home and under their influence.  I like to think that if I, imperfect as I know I am, can transcend some of their hatreds, then anyone can.  And I do see some progress by Japan, which I find encouraging.  Although women's rights there are about thirty years behind where we are (and we are by no means where we should be), they are better than they were.  Their blind prejudice against other races and cultures seems to be less than it was.  They are kinder to their own indigenous people, the Ainu, than they ever have been.  But they persist with whaling, which is alien to me as anything could be.

Before I can ever in good conscience visit Japan, they have to stop hunting what may very well be the only other sentient species with whom we share this world.  They need to give up the ridiculous sympathetic magic ideas of much of Eastern medicine.  Rhino horn will not give you a bigger manhood, guys, and panda bile is not a miracle cure.  You have hunted creatures to near extinction in the pursuit of a fantasy made of smoke.  And none of the products you get from whales are of any real use to anybody except the whales themselves.  Your argument that whaling is an important part of your culture is belied by the factory ships you use to hunt these magnificent creatures.  It's a business, not a cultural ritual.  So stop it.  Just stop it.  Now.

Thank you.

Politics & Religion

Growing up, I was always told that there are two subjects which you should avoid in polite conversation:  politics and religion.  Granted, this was practically a non-issue, since my family, my neighbors, and most of my town were all Republicans and all went to the same church.  I think that finally ended when Kennedy ran against Nixon in 1960 and the decision had to be made whether to vote Republican, or Catholic.  Nowadays religion is far more likely to come up in conversation, especially along with politics, and I still find myself reluctant to get into it sometimes.  People usually wind up asking me why I go to church if I have no belief in God, or the soul, or an afterlife.  I’ve been asked how I can even consider myself a spiritual person if I, quote, don’t believe in anything, end quote.  It’s hard to convince some people that you can be a spiritual person, that you can believe in personal redemption, for example, without extending that belief to include a God.

But at least most people have HEARD of Unitarians now, if only as the punch line to a joke on Prairie Home Companion, or The Simpsons.  (As much as I love Garrison Keillor, my favorite Unitarian jokes come from The Simpsons.  Probably because back when I was an actor I always wanted to do cartoon voices.)  My favorite Simpsons moments are when Lisa goes to the Church of Springfield’s Ice Cream Social and gets an empty bowl from the VERY right-wing Christian Reverend Lovejoy.  He calls it a "Unitarian Sundae."  She says, “But the bowl is empty!” and he says, “Exactly!”  I also laughed when Bart went next door to his Christian neighbor’s house to play a video game called Bible Blasters, where you shoot unbelievers with Bibles in order to convert them to Christianity.  Bart thinks he’s hit one, but his neighbor says, “No, you just winged him; now he’s a Unitarian.”

Well, I haven’t been winged by the Bible, but the fact is, I DO consider myself a spiritual person, and I do have beliefs.  As I said, I believe in personal redemption.  I believe that through your actions now, you can redeem past mistakes.  I believe that coming to church regularly helps keep me on that path.  I also believe in scientific fact.  I believe in the enormous human potential all around me.  I can appreciate the wondrous architecture of nature and the universe without feeling any need to believe in an architect.  For me, one does not necessarily lead to the other.

And this drives my Christian relatives CRAZY!  You’d think that by now they’d have learned that they’re never going to change my mind.  (I certainly know I’ll never change theirs.)  And yet, some of them still ask me what I believe.  I’m not sure whether they’re hoping for a new answer or an old argument, but now I just tell them, “I believe ... I’ll have some more dessert.”  It obviously hasn’t helped my waistline any, but it does wonders for saving family gatherings.

So.  I don’t believe in a deity.  But I DO believe, strongly, in Unitarian-Universalism's "Seven Principles."  I especially appreciate the Fifth Principle of the Unity of Experience.  I like the idea that there is no conflict between faith and knowledge.  Other beliefs do not threaten mine.  And this doesn’t mean that I am not open to other beliefs.  I have found beauty and wisdom in many places, not only in Einstein and Hawking, but also in the words of the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Buddha.  I like to read, and learn, and most of all, I like sharing my journey.  With toleration; with that unity of experience which denies any conflict between Sacred Faith and secular knowledge.  After all, we all get to take this trip together.