Good Bye from the Edge

Goodbye, UUers.  Yours was a center of my life, while I was at the edge of yours.  I’m glad for our time.  I knew lots of good people, challenges, and fulfillment, if not much pay or collegial respect.  What I once championed has changed.  Time to regret what it has become lately and leave it behind.  Here’s why.

I was born two hours before my country annihilated over a hundred thousand civilians in revenge and warning, an act I’ve seen rationalized many times in this America First world.  Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and before those, Tokyo and Dresden – the will to kill in general when fighting their armies revived ancient invasive mass slaughter of civilians as if warfare, and it modeled possible future ethics and tactics.  Too gloomy?  Well, it’s the ominous background to my life. 

Dad did test engineering on Cadillac Tanks until the Korean War ended.  He painted an atomic bomb going off above our mantle.  I think Mom was embarrassed by it.  Mom took me to church and Sunday School.  The Catholics taught me from the catechism.  It provided all the right questions and answers.  We weren’t to attend or consider other denominations.  I was chagrinned to learn (at age seven) that Bunny, down the street, whom I had kissed many times, was Protestant, so we couldn’t be married.  The bomb and being Catholic were all I knew.

Later, I was bothered by the Catholic ban on birth control.  As the eldest of five, with Mom and Dad sleeping in different bedrooms so as not to have six, I resented going to a church that I disagreed with.  So, at age fourteen, I met the priest to tell him I was sinning to keep attending; I was out.  This disrupted my family.

Years later, I happened upon a UU church in Michigan where minister Bob Marshall gave a talk on sex on Mother’s Day.  I liked it that there was a church where open-minded intelligence, touchy topics, and even skepticism prevailed instead of dogmatism.  I ended up helping out with the youth.  We surveyed a picture book to see what interested them.  Mostly, it was sex and death.

That fit my experience.  I worked for a funeral home and ambulance service where I both caught a baby at birth and was with some at death.  Ambulance work and embalming got me to junior college, towards going to mortuary school.  My girlfriend’s brother went to Barber College.  I didn’t know what college was. 

I discovered my love of learning, especially scientific things like chemistry and anatomy, and philosophical things like psychology and comparative religion.  Carl Jung and Eastern religions interested me.  Going on to earn a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Philosophy, and considering being a psychologist, I also eyed going to seminary.  Funeral work is a decent way to be of service at a tender moment, but the ministry was more multifaceted, tending all the aspects of life. 

“Let the dead bury the dead,” I quipped to myself as I took on the hero’s journey at the Meadville Theological School of Lombard College, then located at the prestigious University of Chicago.  At that time, Unitarians (the Universalist was barely mentioned) owned all four corners of 57^th and Woodlawn.  Now it has dwindled to one.

1969 was a tumultuous time.  Students came with eagerness to enter the fray of political and religious revolution, perhaps too much so for some faculty.  The SVNA (Students for Non-Violent Action) rented the University’s pool for the year and announced free nude swimming!  The storm of alarm and the fun of the early sessions dulled down to ordinary laps by the end of the year.  Other revolutionary students dug trenches, donned revolutionary garb, and broke a window on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House.  That turned sentiment against them. 

I was impressed with some of the faculty, like Mircea Eliade and Bob Tapp.  Luckily, I also got to attend three years of graduate-level learning at the Humanist Institute, mostly in New York City, which I value to this day. 

I came to like the bold thinkers in my classmates.  To me, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll were all part of the possibility of a truly liberal religion.  Psychedelics interested me and other students.  Now we call them entheogens (in-god-generate).  At my student church, having announced a pro-marijuana service, I rolled an invisible “joint” and passed it around to even the police who came.  To the M/L faculty, such interests weren’t welcome.  Too routy for them.  After two years, I was asked to leave despite good grades. 

Fortunately, I had also befriended Dr. A. U. Vasavada, of Bombay (now Mumbai), India.  He had just finished training as an analysand with Carl Jung, which fit my interests but not my seminary’s.  I travelled to India to meet Vasavada’s guru, the Blind Saint of Vrindavan.  I also happened to meet Rajneesh, the notorious guru, later known as Osho.  India shocked me. (See: Gurus)

But not as much as returning to the U.S.A.  Desperate poverty was topped by desperate affluence.  Fat, frantic consumerism on top of viscous militarism while pretending piety in Christianism, irked me. 

I had come late to liberal religion.  I missed the LRY and had heard only a few UU ministers.  Out of the usual order, I was ordained by my student church in Michigan (mostly to officiate at weddings), but I hadn’t finished seminary or been fellowshipped by the denomination. 

Ordained but not fellowshipped, I served three years as a part-time campus minister at the Channing Murray Foundation in Urbana, Illinois.  I knew only a bit about Channing and nothing of Murray.  But I knew the sorts of people there.  Karate at 5 AM, yoga later, the cool Red Herring Coffee House in the basement, a black tenant congregation on Sundays, and I led a meditation group – all these made for a dynamic setting.  It was a rounded ministry.  My new wife and I helped get an “educational food service” going in the basement, and I helped clean out the grease trap in the kitchen (one of the yuckiest jobs of my ministry).  Ministers should never think they’re above the mundane.

I sought to round out my part-time employment with something other than delivering mail to small towns at 4 AM and picking it up at 4 PM.  There was some talk with the UUA of my helping stimulate other such campus ministries, but that mysteriously was dropped, so my wife, new son, and I went to Costa Rica. 

Nothing connected there, so I took on being the preacher and pastor for a small, rural, hundred-year-old Universalist church in North Carolina. I got to see what America once was.  Those sweet people liked me and put up with me. 

I tried to do what Emerson advised: “Always a seer is a sayer.”  I would say what I saw, trying to do so with sensitivity, intelligence, sincerity, and humor.  I learned a lot about bygone America and bygone Universalism, once the prevailing new religion on the pioneering western spread of a still-new country.  The “No-Hell Christians” were bent on an inclusive love, much like they believe God is. 

Some regretted my leaving to complete my seminary credentials.  They didn’t want me to go before they died because they liked my memorials.  Old Norman, a Baptist who liked us anyway, gave me a 12-gauge shotgun and the money for my eventual graduation robe. 

Back at the seminary for my final year in 1985, my third son was born (again, as with my second son, with me catching) a few days before I met the Fellowship Committee.  Backwards from the usual order, I was ordained and later fellowshipped.  They gave me their approval. 

This hop-scotch entry into the UU ministry left holes in my theological, historical, and professional abilities.  I hadn’t come up in UU settings.  I remember an early minister meeting where one guy specialized in T Groups.  Another sat in meditation and was teased for his “navel-gazing.”  One guy (Bob Barr?) was conservative but welcomed anyway.  Other than Ed Harris in Urbana and occasional sermons by colleagues at ministers’ meetings, I didn’t get to hear many other UU ministers. We’re always busy at the same time.  I served from the edges as best I could.

At a General Assembly, I came across Ken Patton, author of an impressive array of responsive readings, prayers, and even sanctuary design.  He was disgruntled at how his work was being bypassed by the new crop of UUs.  Why this estrangement in a luminary? 

General Assemblies were great for spirit.  I’ve always liked singing as part of worship.  Change the meaning of the words if you will, but sing out even if you can’t.  Write new words if you want, but pray them with whole-body fervor.  Worthy causes and pageantry celebrated our diverse, inclusive interests.  However, the business meetings and the frequent reconsideration of our tenants became tense, conflicted, and wearing hassles.

Such redefining of fundamentals is endemic in liberal religion.  Back in seminary, we learned what Earl Morse Wilbur saw as the three legs of Unitarianism: freedom, reason, and tolerance.  In his A History of Unitarianism, Socinianism, and its Antecedents,” he claimed this particular Christian sect was fundamentally characterized by its, ”steadfast and increasing devotion to these three leading principles: first, complete mental freedom in religion rather than bondage to creeds or confessions; second, the unrestricted use of reason in religion, rather than reliance upon external authority or past tradition; third, generous tolerance of differing religious views and usages rather than insistence upon uniformity in doctrine, worship or polity.”

That told of the core of our faith.  A flaming chalice was about the only symbol.  However, a survey was sent out to inquire what we believe and value.  (I remember being the only one to list “salvation.”  Most would see the word as narrowly meaning believing that Jesus was the Christ, thus earning entry into heaven.  I meant a strong enough word to meet the ecological, social, and spiritual challenges of religion.) 

The Principles and Purposes emerged from that survey, tweaked since.  A big brouhaha emerged when more principles were proposed and the whole statement was recrafted by a denominational committee irrespective of a more inclusive and creative process.  Once we were asked; then we were told.

How much to fit in, and how much to lead?  How much to honor the past and ritual habits, and how much to innovate in meeting the new needs of a new time? 

I crafted orders of worship, chalice lightings, and responsive readings, and led “hymns” using popular music.  Because the church steeple was built on such a strong base (steel straps inside concrete blocks and faced with brick), I suggested that if anything ever happens to it, it could be changed from “a finger pointing to God” to “a hand that receives God’s breezes.”  A vertical windmill would provide electricity to the sign out by the highway, at least.  Sure enough, lightning blasted that old steeple to bits!  Sure enough, the more innovative and ethical steeple wasn’t considered.  Tradition has its own momentum. 

At my new west coast settlement as an extension minister, first minister for that fellowship in a liberal, arty town, the only UU minister for hundreds of miles, we grew quickly.  We tripled, went from about 60 members to about 180 in a few years.  We bought a large, lovely church.  I suggested we add a removable dance floor in the sanctuary, a gym or workout area in an impending fellowship hall, and a solar-powered steeple with a glowing blue ball planet at the top.  None of these was seriously considered.  Ministers have a niche.  Innovation in buildings, rituals, and even theology isn’t really welcome when many are grabbing at turf.  Push my ideas or let them develop their own? 

I was well-liked.  I had a way of being deliberate without being pretentious, a fulfilling of the pulpit’s calling.  I bragged about how the UU ministry provided the latitude to think for oneself and say so.  We didn’t have to be a pious persona; we were to model human wholeness.  Many would say they never go to church except to hear me.  (Perhaps those who didn’t want to hear me just stayed quiet or away.)  I felt like I could speak to America through this mix of intelligent and kind people.  I felt appreciated, emboldened, and paid. 

We put up a sign: “A Liberal Religion.”  It worked.  We gave out little chalice pins to new members, a subtle way to be known in town.

Said to be the most collegial of the districts, I had hoped this chapter’s ministers’ meetings would be a place to let loose a bit, share, and shed the inevitable tensions of any ministry.  We could “brag and bitch,” as it was called (“bitch” meant complain, not a slur on women), but both were subtly shunned.  Neither was what you could do safely with colleagues. 

Besides wanting to party with them, I tried to stay politely positive and supportive of colleagues.  Accused of being obsequious by an elderly, successful one, luckily, I instinctively shot back a FU.  When I later looked up the word, it meant fawning praise, an attempt to ingratiate.  How should I maneuver, with guile?  Brandon Lovely’s “A Machiavellian View of the Ministry” spoke more plainly to self-promotion and self-defense.  It should be taught in a seminary. 

A bright friend back in seminary had dropped out after one year.  He and his wife saw the ministry as “living in a fishbowl,” with lots of lookers with their judgments.  He transitioned into a new field: computers, going on to a lucrative career without all the social stress.  Other friends went on into the ministry only to be wearied by petty accusations.  They dropped out and went on to fashion decent ministries of their own sort.

Our so-called “freedom of the pulpit” is there if you live in a fishbowl and don’t mind those who enjoy shooting fish in a barrel. 

Some women of the minister’s chapter didn’t like my friendliness.  They arranged a confrontation.  I was assigned the convener’s boyfriend as my advocate.  I apologized for my forwardness and hunched my shoulders at the tribunal ritual.

Worse, was my being the only minister to not agree to not serve any church or fellowship accused of rejecting a minister because of his or her being gay.  They wanted unanimity and resented my lone vote.  I wasn’t against gays.  A gay friend from the seminary is still dear to me.  (He also is estranged from things UU.)  My objection was assuming that not hiring a gay person was for that reason and thus suitable for blackballing.  The denomination was promoting the “Welcoming Congregation.”  Should all congregations have to adopt such programs?  Who should decide how they want to grow, their own fellowship, or what the UUA and the UUMA expect?

I was asked to comment in the district newsletter.  I did.  But only parts of my response showed up, as if in a back-and-forth with another minister, which had never happened.  Inclusive, respectful dialogue is an ideal, not what I was included in.   

I have since come to realize how timely such efforts were and how widespread the lonely pain of being closeted was.  Far more people care far more fervently than I had realized.  My ignorant naivete was behind the times.  Public gayness came to be celebrated in our fellowships as well as in the media.  But those uneasy with the topic slipped away, leery of being accused of homophobia.  It became a weapon word, but it was vague, somewhere between mere unease and murderous intent.  Only one side of that conversation was welcome.   

AIDS was rampant and scary.  Before the Internet, I obtained statistics from the government showing the stark difference in the rate of catching it between straights and gays, and surprisingly, even more so between lesbians and gay men.  While the public relations campaigns of the government were directed at sex in general, it was mostly being transmitted between gay men and sometimes to their wives.  It wasn’t moving from one bloodstream to another easily.  About 95% of its social spread was in this narrow demographic. 

I published an editorial exploring this, considering a feasible reason, and expressing concern for those catching it.  Bad move.  I thought I was being realistic and responsible.  Others saw it as anti-gay.  It was an uneasy topic misplaced in a general venue.  It hurt the feelings of those I otherwise liked.  I didn’t know this until too late.  I had blundered. 

The stress of unusual success, tripling the congregation and buying a large, lovely church near the center of town, accumulated.  I kept trying to pull the rabbit from the hat in sermons, but walked away with an empty heart and hurting knees.

Although friendly, flirty, and libertine, I didn’t pursue women in my congregations.  But other ministers in other places had.  One had told scores of the women he counseled how much he loved them as he proceeded to use them.  The scandal came out about the same time I inappropriately grew temporarily close to a woman who had come to our church once.  We kissed and necked a couple of times.  It was inappropriate.  I cut it off.

Too late.  The UU World had just published what I think of as a “Ministers are Monsters” issue.  Someone who knew her wrote the denomination.  They issued a letter or reprimand.  I fessed up to my congregation, saying what I had done and not done. 

Bad move.  Bill Clinton, similarly caught in the eye of public shame, defended himself with a classic: “It depends on what is is.”  He eluded and maintained.  I admitted and was pushed out. 

Over half the congregations crafted a letter to the UUA in support of me.  It was ignored.  I sought whatever file on me the UUA had, to see what they might think.  It was ignored.  The woman who headed my Committee on the Ministry and another woman surveyed the women in the congregation on whether I was hitting on them.  They found I hadn’t, but their report never reported that. 

Just before all this, I had on my own opened up counseling with the former chair of clinical pastoral education at a prominent West Coast university.  However, the new woman head of the Department of the Ministry had three district women pick the approved counselors I should pick from to explore the issues.  I picked the local woman counselor, but it turned out she wasn’t credentialed, so payment for the completed mandated sessions couldn’t come from insurance. 

The Good Offices minister assigned to coach me was ending his stint in that role.  He suggested I could sell cars instead of being a minister.  The man who replaced him in that role went on to over twenty years of dealing with problems with ministers and congregations.  I had liked him as approachable and caring.  When he was pushed out during the Gadfly upheaval, I saw it as more of what I didn’t like about the ministers’ chapter meetings had grown in the UUMA and UUA – only worse.

Prior to all this, I took my Extension Minister role seriously, trying to serve the minister-less fellowships with occasional preaching visits.  As the only UU minister in southern Oregon, I regularly traveled up to a hundred miles to do so and felt I served the larger movement that way.  On Sunday afternoons, I would travel 45 miles to a neighboring town to tend the emerging group there.  We revived a long-lapsed fellowship status, and I went on to serve them from afar for twenty-five years.  We bounced from a bank to a service center to a theater to an art museum.  We grew. 

Following the harsh upheaval and my resignation from my primary settlement, I found myself so shaken I couldn’t write or preach a coherent paragraph.  I had stood tall to try to tell my meager blunder.  It was inappropriate, but was it so egregious that it outweighed all other effort and success?  Apparently so. 

After a few years, the little fellowship I had helped revive appreciated my trying again.  I preached once a month or less.  I earned the $150 to $250 honorarium, which I needed.  I published some of these sermons on my website.  Another more experienced minister couple had settled in that town and began offering the hands-on leadership that I was leery of attempting.  They helped marshal them into a solid building near the center of town.  My “leadership” had been tentative and passive, but the spirit of the fellowship was friendly.  I did less and less.

A member of that congregation was attempting a cross-country trip alone despite a serious medical challenge.  I helped him make the drive.  He saw the turmoil in me about ministry in general, but assured me I mattered to him and the fellowship.  He wanted to stop by the General Assembly in Spokane, Washington in 2017.

The tension at that gathering was thick.  (I didn’t learn of the Gadfly Papers upheaval until much later.)  Edgy hostility seemed rampant.  I had mouth sores so bad that it was hard to talk.  Dehydrated and loading up on ibuprofen to manage the pain, it also wrecked my innards, leading to a bleeding hemorrhoid – not great for the rest of the long drive.  By the time we got to the east coast, I had lost 20 pounds and was peeing less than a teaspoon of urine a day.  It took a few months to regain my strength.    

I later learned about Todd Ekof’s The Gadfly Papers: Three Inconvenient Essays by One Pesky Minister and how he was barred from speaking at that GA, barred from selling his book in his own hometown, and later hounded for daring to object to onerous UU pressures.  (I’ve since also read Used to be UU, A Self-Confessed White Supremacy Culture, Toward Multiracial Unity: Fighting Neoracism in Unitarian Universalism, and especially David Cycleback’s Against Illiberalism .)  What I hadn’t liked and pulled away from in my UUMA chapter has gotten worse.  The “We Quit the UUMA” letter, estrangement, and controversy go to the core of why many joined the UU movement and ministry and why they quit. 

But you’ll look in vain for news of it in the official “UU World.”  It is simply ignored, and the people involved are abandoned.  Scattered and worn, the nascent NAUA (North American Unitarian Association) offers some community support for such disaffected UU ministers, individuals, and fellowships.  Beyond that new emerging denomination, how many good men and women ministers and laypeople have sad/mad stories of estrangement? 

Back at the ministers’ meetings, I remember the advice to “Pay attention to the pinch,” the little tensions that could lead to bigger problems, and “When it feels like you have to tiptoe around eggshells, stomp.”  The pinch in UU circles about pushing “woke” inclusion and agendas warned of both our denomination’s internal alienation and our country’s reactionary lunge into a fascistic coup. 

Henry David Thoreau, in his Walden, said, “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” (ChatGPT retrieved the quote for me, adding, “The full passage explores Thoreau’s emphasis on individual experience and inner purpose over societal reform, although he was not indifferent to improving the world.”)  Emerson put it this way in his journal, “I hate goodies. I hate goodness that preaches. Goodness that preaches undoes itself.” 

So is it for many of us.  We care to live fully while also caring in our ways about social reform.  Being told what to do, how to do it, and which words to use – alienates.  There is a big difference between welcoming gays or blacks as specific causes and the larger cause of welcoming the inherent worth and dignity of everyone.  When, where, and how to do that varies from person to person and congregation to congregation.

Like my friend shying off from living in the fishbowl, I eschewed new settlements.  I gave it a go to stay in a liberal town in a great setting.  Great schools.  Lots of actors, artists, musicians, and gays in a mostly friendly town. 

I earned money by building dry-stack retaining walls out of volcanic rock and boulders backed by crushed rock.  (Concrete isn’t needed, just skill in how they’re placed.)  Just as the Blind Saint had advised, it felt good to do hard physical labor for straightforward pay. 

My Master’s of Divinity didn’t apply much with such troglodyte work, but I could find spiritual lessons in mere rocks and dirt.  Each rock, well-placed, supports others.  They don’t balance each other; they nestle each other.  What I built was functional, aesthetic, and lasting.  Unlike the ministry, when I showered from the day’s labors, the dirt went down the drain, gone.  I liked to joke that such work had its perks – boogers worth picking!  (See Labor and Mysticism)

I preached less and less in the fellowship I had helped found.  The in-town, more experienced UU ministerial couple tightened up the worship, worked with the board, and oversaw the buying of the building.  Oddly, after twenty-five years with them, when I was to preach, I was introduced as if some stranger, which, to some extent, I was.  I got invited only a couple of times a year. 

When the newsletter editor asked me to reintroduce myself to the congregation in a monthly “Meet the Member,” I wrote up a blurb about me and my path.  I put in one paragraph telling of how I was trying to tend them with “spare time and spare change” after my unfortunate and upsetting departure from my initial settlement.  

That roused the ire of one of the other ministers.  Instead of suggesting I delete that one paragraph, she blocked my entire submission.  I had signed a simple one-page Letter of Covenant saying I wouldn’t meddle in the fellowship’s business, which I mostly didn’t.  Seen as a violation of that, the son of the woman who had barred that entry called together their Committee on the Ministry to demand I sign on to the 17,000-word UUA/UUMA expansion of it, The Recommended Agreement for Developmental Ministers.  I saw it as fraught with accusation, calling even for the monitoring of a minister’s social media.  I refused.  They declared I was “out of Covenant.” 

There was no negotiation.  Okay, I was out. 

They even removed me from the mailing list for the emailed newsletter.  Years later, I found out the husband of a couple I had married had committed suicide, but a year earlier.  Express sympathy and support?  Would that violate the Letter of Covenant?  I called, but it was too little, too late.   (See “Emeritus,” “Endings,” and “More Endings.”)

During my nearly 50 years of gathering ideas and inspiration for periodic sermons, I had developed an almost circadian-like rhythm of doing that.  Instead of presenting to intelligent, liberal people for some pay, I published on my own website.  Instead of the involved participation I expected with such essays, only a few came.  One guy contributed $10 a month to my Patreon for a while, the only ministerial income I’ve received for years. 

Meanwhile, I tried to live up to my former preachments involving meeting each and every unit (person) as inherently worthy in a universalist belief that they are (no matter how that individual unit manifested), despite a lack of recognition or pay.  Coupled to declining testosterone, I lost my mojo.  I kept finding rabbits to pull out of the hat, but few cared.  My college and seminary training, my 50 years of talent tending to persons and small fellowships, my extensive library – all these languish.  Perhaps my years of wedding and memorial records, my filing cabinets of marked articles on everything from ministry to war, my books, my vestments – will all be tossed out after a garage sale. 

Like a lot of Americans, I get to get by.  I change my own oil.  I upgraded a three-speed transmission in my ’66 Ford truck to a four-speed by myself.  I managed to buy an old electric car that worked well for two years, but now needs a battery renewal.  I sing karaoke and at open mikes for the fun and challenge of it.  I kept the house from which my three sons launched.  After 38 years and two refinances, the mortgage is down to a bit less than the purchase price, less than rent would be.  I work out a few times a week at the Y and meditate daily.  I thank God (as it were) for my vitality. 

Had I continued on as a funeral director or become a psychologist, I’d be making a lot more money than I now do.  Had I followed my interest in Chicago’s 2nd City, perhaps I’d be one of these truth-telling comedians now popular.  Had I stayed tuned into the psychedelic movement, I’d make for a good “sitter” (what we used to call guide) but even that meager training costs towards $10,000, and that’s far less than my more ambitious aspiration to study state-of-the-art brain science as it applies to persons and social trends.  Like a lot of Americans, I watch the blatant fascism of a declining empire weaken and wound every decent aspect of the enlightened democracy we took too long to value and improve.  The Enlightenment has darkened.

Then there are the nuclear bombs, far worse than the one coterminous with my birth.  Much worry and accusation are directed at Iran for possibly developing one.  How many does Israel control?  Given the history and habits lately of the U.S., Russia, Israel, and others, what’s to worry?  Given Netanyahu and Trump, I’ve given up on the Judeo-Christian Heritage.  Gaza shows why.

Also, global warming is another huge problem modernity has generated.  Instead of cooperatively addressing it, wealthy forces ignore and worsen it.  I’m agin’ it too, but so what? 

Woulda, coulda, shoulda.  I don’t blame anyone else for my ineffectual plight.  I ineptly applied myself to a liberal religion, a denomination that often tried to address such social/spiritual challenges, only to see it become the dogmatic antithesis of what once drew me to it.  Whining here in a too-long screed won’t fix it, my country, or myself.  I can only remember with fading gratitude the many times I stood to do it as best I could and was often appreciated for that.

In every personal or congregational situation, I gave the best I could.  It was a learn-and-do-as-I -go ministry.  Standing up to challenge was an unsure reward, usually satisfying.  We used to include talkback after a sermon, a chance for others to augment or argue, as they chose.  It was sometimes uneasy, but it sometimes improved the message.  The spirit was mutual, if varied.  Sermons, weddings, memorials – in all cases, I’d realize people are listening.  My only salvation was to “deliver the goods” as clearly as I could. 

Could I do more now?  Sure.  I’d gladly visit an appreciative group to give sermons, teach meditation, sing, and even build arty rock retaining walls.  As is, I’m mostly estranged, one of many scattered around our country, out of my religion, while bemoaning the anti-intelligent, anti-kind, anti-environmental scourge of fascism.

Unitarianism and Universalism were once the hopeful, shining beacons of a liberal American Christianity.  Reason, tolerance, and the Enlightenment aren’t the primary values and ideals of any other religion in our secular array of faiths.  Deism never developed.  Environmental ethics were only barely considered in most religions. 

Now, we’re left with evangelical Christians adulating and electing the most obvious anti-Christ in our history.  Pretty women elevated from the Fox News PR machine sport prominent crosses as they lie and lead. He uses an upside-down Bible as a prop, sells overpriced ones as if his, and wouldn’t put his hand on one when being sworn in.  A frenzy of religious fervency and self-righteousness imposes his fresh fascism with zealotry and zeal.  The Judeo-Christian Tradition shows its shadow in Gaza. The bombs and bugs that could end us all are still here.

My deeper gripe is with my own faults and failings.  I often was bold, but never so much as I could and should have.  Too much, I would shrink from prayer.  I tended but didn’t lead.  This is my own lack, not the UUs.  But I also bemoan the dwindling influence of this unique denomination.

If interested, take a tour of my now over two hundred entries in my website www.earthlyreligion.com.  It started as a place to put my sermons, but it’s morphed into general essays, reviews, and rants.  Your comments and especially monetary contributions are welcome there.  

Here’s what I’ll post to the NAUA newsletter with a link to the Goodbye essay.

Had purpose, praise, and pay

Had an unassuming sway

Had Moxy and Mojo

Had testosterone to coax me

Now, neither recognition nor support

None with whom to cavort

Trying to live up to what I once tried to be

Only on my own, with only me to see

A has-been, barely-was

A misled-by-the-applause

Get-by, get high, nearly was

A could-have-been, should-of-been worthy cause

Never pushed my way as the way

Never worried about my future pay

Never wanted to join the fray

Okay, I’ll go away