Susie pointed out that Heather had been lighting the chalice a lot lately. I proposed that Heather light the chalice first, then blow it out, then Zach would light it. Heather and Zach said that Dorit should get to blow it out. After a more discussion, that is what we decided to do. Heather lit the candle in the chalice. Dorit blew it out. Zach lit the candle, and we were ready to begin.

We were about halfway done with check-in when tow more people walked in: Bobby, and his father William. (Bobby usually attends the 9:30 Sunday school.) I explained what we were doing, and asked them to join us in the circle. We continued the check-in; I had to explain to Bobby that just one person talked at a time (I believe they don’t do check-ins in his regular Sunday school class). Heather had gone on a sleep-over; Zach had had a good football practice; I had seen a car accident on the way to church; William had gotten a good letter from a client; Bobby wasn’t ready to say anything yet. When we got done, Dorit had “two more things” she wanted to add to her check-in. At last check-in was done.

“Because we have some new people, let’s go around the circle and everyone say our names,” I said. By now, our regulars are used to doing this, so we went around the circle twice and said our names. I asked who could say everyone’s name, and Dorit said she could, and she did.

The children found it hard to settle down and focus today. Zach and Heather and Dorit were that way before Bobby (and William) showed up, and with the addition of a new child, they seemed even less settled. The class has been doing a unit on King David from the Bible, and I tried to get them to review the stories they had already heard about David, but they simply couldn’t focus. So I began telling today’s story, the story of Abigail and David from 1 Samuel 25.2-42 which I posted yeterday on this blog.

As soon as I started reading, the children settled down. Pretty soon, most of them were lying down, either on their stomachs or on their backs (except Bobby, whom was probably still feeling a little unsettled by being in an unfamiliar class). I got to the end of the story, and asked what they thought. Zach opened his eyes and put his head up. “That’s a weird story,” he said.

We talked about it a little bit. I asked who was the hero of the story. Both Heather and Dorit said simultaneously, “Abigail.” I asked if David did the right thing. Dorit said yes, Heather said no. I asked Dorit why she said yes. “Because he protected –what was that guy’s name? [Nabal.] — Nabal’s sheep and didn’t steal from him and didn’t do anything bad.” I asked Heather why she said no. “Because he was going to go and kill all those guys, and, I don’t know, he was just… not nice.” But although the children were engaged by the story, they just couldn’t seem to focus, so I said, “Let’s go sit around the table.”

I wanted to try to make a comic book about the story with the children, and I had an idea: that I would get them to create a storyboard of the story, and based on the storyboard get each child to draw one panel of the cartoon. Unfortunately, it was now five minutes till noon. Furthermore, I hadn’t really thought out how to make a storyboard with children. All year I have been talking the children through the process of breaking down a story into scenes with characters and action; but it’s a big leap to go from that process, to a process where you’re looking at a storyboard template and trying to make sense out of it. Using a storyboard is so natural to me that I hadn’t given adequate thought to how to teach the concept to children.

I began trying to show the children how to do a storyboard. They sort of got it. William said, “It’s just like making movies.” He obviously knew how to do a storyboard. “Do you use storyboards in your work?” I said. He said,” Oh yes. I’ve sat in on many storyboarding sessions.” And I asked him to show the children. One by one, they took a storyboard template, and either copied what William was doing (Heather and Dorit), storyboarded later events from the story (Zach, the oldest), or drew a new scene from their imagination based on the story (Bobby).

“Can we just do free drawing?” said Heather at last. I said yes, and handed them out paper. while they were drawing, Susie told them the story from last week: how David had come to live with Saul; how Saul had black moods where David’s music would calm him down; how he had made friends with Jonathan, Saul’s son; how Saul had tried to kill him; how David had escaped, and later spared Saul’s life. As soon as Susie started telling the story (and she did a fabulous job, telling it from memory), the children quieted right down, focusing on their drawing while they listened.

Parents began coming in to pick up children, and it was time to go. I told the children that maybe we would try to finish the comic next week. During the bustle of leaving, William showed me the letterhead of the letter he had mentioned during check-in — it was from a major film producer. The children didn’t know that they had just heard about storyboarding from someone who had really worked in the movie business.

Long before he became a king, when David was still running from Saul, afraid that Saul would kill him, he and his six hundred followers travelled to the wilderness of Paran.

In Carmel, which was near the wilderness of Paran, there lived a rich man named Nabal, who owned three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. Nabal was married to a woman named Abigail, who was clever and beautiful. Nabal himself, however, was rude and ill-natured; his name meant “The Fool.”

In the wilderness, David heard that Nabal was shearing his sheep. He decided to send ten young men to Nabal. David said to them, “Go to Carmel, find Nabal, and give him my greetings. Say to him, ‘Peace be upon your peace be upon your household, peace to all you have.’ Tell him that we have been living here among his shepherds, and we have not attacked them, nor have we stolen anything from them;– we have only the best intentions towards him and all those who work for him. You will arrive at his household on a feast day, and ask him if he would please give whatever food and drink he might have on hand to me and all of us.” David knew that anyone who lived in that land would feel compelled by the laws of hospitality to give at least some food to a band of men living in the wilderness.

David’s ten young men went to see Nabal the Fool, and they politely passed on David’s greetings, and his request for hospitality. But Nabal spoke to them harshly. “Who is this David?” he said. “There are many servants who try to run away from their masters. Why should I take bread and meat and water away from the people who have been shearing my sheep, and give it to people who come from I know not where?”

When the ten young men came back to David and told him what had happened, he told four hundred of his men to strap on their swords. “I protected his shepherds and everything else Nabal had in the wilderness, but for this good I did he returned to me only evil,” said David. “Now we will go and kill every male in his household.” They followed David towards Nabals’ house, while the remaining two hundred men stayed to guard the animals and the camp.

Meanwhile, one of the young men who worked for Nabal went to tell Abigail, Nabal’s wife, what had happened. The young mand said that David had sent messengers to bring greetings to Nabal, but Nabal had only hurled insults at them. But, the young man said, when they had been out in the fields with Nabal’s sheep, David’s men had been good to them, and had even helped to protect them. And now David had decided to attack the household of Nabal, because Nabal was so bad-natured that no one can talk to him.

Abigail thought quickly. She ran and got two hundred loaves of bread, five sheep that had been butchered, one hundred clusters of raisins, two hundred cakes of figs, some grain, and some wine. She got her young men to load everything onto donkeys, and, without telling Nabal where she was going, she went along the mountain along the way she knew David would be taking.

When Abigail saw David, she got down from her donkey and hurried towards him. She fell to her knees, and bowed down before him. “The guilt is mine alone,” she said. “My lord, please don’t take the words of ill-natured Nabal seriously. He is what his name says he is, a fool. I should have seen the young men you sent to our household, and then none of this would have happened.

“Now that I am here, there is no need to take vengeance, there is no need to shed blood. Please take all this food I have brought to you from Nabal’s household, and give it to your men.”

David listened to Abigail, and then said, “Blessed be your good sense, and blessed be you. If you hadn’t come to meet me, by the end of this morning my men and I would have killed every male in your household, and I would have incurred bloodguilt. Only Adonai, the God of the Israelites, is allowed to take vengeance. You have saved me from trying to take vengeance into my own hands.”

David and his men took everything Abigail brought to them. “See, I have done what you asked,” David said to her. “Go in peace.”

So Abigail went back to Nabal’s house. He was holding a feast, and he was very drunk, and acting very merry. Abigail waited until the next morning to tell him what had happened: that he had mortally insulted a band of six hundred warriors, warriors who had protected his shepherds, six hundred men to whom he at least owed ordinary hospitality. She told him how she had brought food to David and his men, and had intercepted them.

Nabal realized what a fool he had been, and his heart died within him. He became like a stone, and ten days later he died.

When David heard that Nabal had died, he sent messengers to Abigail, and asked her to marry him. And she agreed that she would marry him, and went off to live with David.

Part of a work in progress, stories for liberal religious kids.

Google Books came to my rescue. A quick search of Google Books turned up several reputable sources that back up my assertion. If this sort of thing interests you, I’ve included lengthy quotations from the relevant books below the fold — then you can go read those books yourself online.

Leaving aside the well-documented practice of multiple partner marriages by such religious minorities as the Oneida community and mid-19th C. Mormonism, we can find evidence of multiple partner marriage within several racial and economic subgroups, e.g., certain indian tribes, African slaves (including African Muslims), poor whites of European descent, etc.

From Tribe, race, history: Native Americans in southern New England, 1780-1880, by Daniel R. Mandell (John Hopkins Univ, 2008, p. 155):

There was a similarly mixed picture of household structures and moral standards at midcentury. Earle praised the family stability and sexual practices of most tribes in the state, noting that illegitimacy had declined, and his census shows a decrease since 1800 in woman-headed households in the [Martha's] Vineyard communities. But other records paint a different picture of Indian women continuing to enter informal marriages with multiple partners. At midcentury, the Machantucket Pequot’s overseer wrote that “there is no such thing as regular marriage among them,” and all eith Eastern Pequot children lived in three female-headed households. In 1861, many Monhegan women had “several sorts of children,” which “added greatly to their embarrassment” — although the embarrassment was more probably the commissioners’ than the women’s. Even Earle comdemned one tribe, writing that at Troy-Watuppa “Intemperance and unchastity are but too prevalent,” and, off the reserve, 12 children had been born to unmarried women in two families, with the paternity divided equally between men from all three races [blacks, white, Indians]. But he, like many others, saw such morals, whether admirable or unfortunate, as more a matter of culture and class than race, comparing the behavior and culture of Indians to “others of their class” in the region.

In other words, not only did Indian communities practice informal marriages with multiple partners, but this practice was part of a constellation of practices that were seen by literate whites as typical of people “of their class.”

From Sexual revolution in early America: Gender relations in the American experience by Richard Godbeer (Johns Hopkins Univ., 2002, pp. 120-122):

Many of those who advocated a reformation of sexual mores in the colonial South bemoaned a lack not only of virtue but also of fundamental civility among white settlers. Members of the southern elite remarked scornfully upon the barbarism of their social inferiors, including and especially their lack of sexual decorum. Recall Governor Glen’s comment about the “loose embraces” of folk who lived like “pigs” and Woodmason’s description of colonists “swopping their wives as cattle.” Virginia planter William Byrd declared of a backcountry couple that “these wretches live[d] in a dirty state of nature and were mere Adamites, innocence only excepted.” It is no coincidence that political and religious leaders used similar criteria and language in assessing the behavior of African slaves and Indians, who also seemed sexually fickle and promiscuous. Anxiety about the apparent savagery of poorer white settlers was informed in part by racial perceptions and sometimes framed quite explicitly in terms of comparison with nonwhite behavior….

When Le Jau and others observed slaves engaging in serial or polygamous relationships that would ahve been deemed licit in African societies, they generally assumed that such patterns of behavior were rooted in a savage and depraved nature. The depiction of blacks as incapable of sexual loyalty was reinforced by the instability of family life among slaves, itself caused by the conditions under which they lived. Slave unions had no legal standing….

Here again we see that elite whites lumped together the sexual practices of poor whites, blacks, and Indians in order to contrast them with the sexual mores of the elite whites. An anthropologist would find differences between the sexual practices of poor whites, blacks, and the various Indian tribes. We also see that the white elite delegitimized the cultural practices of blacks, while at the same time setting up economic/social/political systems that would not allow blacks to have the kinds of monogamous marriages that elite whites valued. The same thing happened to various Indian tribes, and probably to poor whites as well.

In After polygamy was made a sin: the social history of Christian polygamy (Routledge and Kegan, 1974), John Cairncross claims to have traced a long history of Christian polygamy — in both theory and practice — dating from the Reformation to the present day. In the Preface to the book, he writes:

From all [my] detective work there emerged a long but largely underground tradition of Christian polygamy (supplemented and sometimes intertwined with a mainly French freethinking current), which extends from the first half of the sixteenth century to about 1800, and indeed, in isolated areas of Utah, to the present day.

Cairncross states that the Reformation, which saw the Bible as divinely inspired and which encouraged everyone to read the Bible for themselves, got some European Christians thinking about those Old Testament patriarchs with all their wives. Some went so far so to conclude that polygamy was divinely inspired. Cairncross finds plural marriage was practiced by German Anabaptists in the 1520s, advocated for by Anglican clergy (including at least one bishop) in the 1700s, and carried out in the New World by Brigham Young and the Mormons.

Finally, there’s the question of legal marriage. In 17th C. colonial New England, the imported English legal system did not recognize multiple marriage, but the various Indian legal systems that existed alongside the English system might allow multiple marriage. According to Peter Charles Hoffer in Law and People in Colonial America (Johns Hopkins Univ., 1998, p. 68), English traders on the frontier were adopting native customs of marriage, public address, and reciprocity.” We tend to assume that English law was the only law for whites in colonial New England, but that was not necessarily the case.

Summary: Multiple-partner marriages did exist in America among certain indigenous Indian tribes, among certain persons of African descent, and among certain persons of European descent. Such marriages were not sanctioned by the legal systems or religious systems set up by the economic/social/political elite of European descent; indeed, the elite rejected such marriages outright; nonetheless, such marriages were real.

Let me take a moment to give you a brief rundown of exactly what we’re looking for and hoping to accomplish. First of all, I’m a Casting Producer for Shed Media. We are currently working on a great program that promotes family values by taking teens with relatable [sic] adolescent problems (smoking, drinking, defying authority, laziness, etc), and placing them with loving, welcoming, and structured families in another part of America for one week. The goal is to get to a ‘breakthrough point’ with the teens, help them turn around their attitudes, and maybe give them a new perspective on the relationship they have with their own parents.

All around the Bay Area we will be looking for those families with a big heart and an open home who would like to mentor two unruly teens for a week. Does this family have experience in dealing with teenagers? Do they have strict morals, guidelines, and expectations for teenagers already living in their home? If so, they may be just what we are looking for!

I wiped the slime off myself, and sent off this reply:

Dear Tyler Benton,

As someone who’s spent 16 years in youth ministry, a week-long placement isn’t going to solve any problems for a troubled teen. I can’t recommend using troubled teens for entertainment purposes, nor do I believe that a troubled teen who is a legal minor can give informed consent to appear on reality TV. The short answer is “No.”

Sincerely,
Dan Harper

My reply is brief because I’m quite sure he won’t read it. If I thought there were any chance he would read my reply, I would tell him that it sounds to me as though he needs a week-long televised placement with a family that would turn his unethical and exploitative attitudes around.

If you’d like to respond to him directly, I’d be happy to pass along his email address and work phone number.

Covenantal basis | Forms | Same-sex marriage | Divorce | Changes and challenges | Life in the married state

Three dimensions of a covenantal basis for marriage

The most obvious thing to say about Unitarian Universalist marriage is that it is a covenant; that is, it is a complex of promises exchanged by individuals, promises that are designed to bind them together in relationship. Unitarian Universalist marriage has three basic dimensions: (1) a personal relationship between the individuals who are married; (2) a public or social relationship between the individuals being married and a wider social web of relationships (that wider web of relationships may include family, friends, congregation, wider local community); these first two dimensions may be characterized as horizontal relationships, i.e., relationships between persons. The third dimension may be characterized as the vertical dimension: (3) a relationship with something larger than individual humans or human organizations. This third dimension tends to be flattened or barely acknowledged in many Unitarian Universalist marriages, and may be acknowledged only as some implicit or off-hand appeal to larger ideals; other Unitarian Universalist marriages refer explicitly to a deity (God, Goddess, etc.) or deities, or to something like Bernard Loomer’s theological concept of the Web of Life. However each dimension happens to be understood, Unitarian Universalist marriage is a covenant, a set of promises, encompassing all three of these dimensions.

Unitarian Universalist marriage as practiced in the U.S. is grounded in old English understandings of marriage — English common law, and English folk traditions. Two of these understandings persist in the legal institution of marriage: a marriage must be freely entered into by both parties (mutual consent); and there can be nothing that would prohibit the marriage. The idea of mutual consent ties in with the general idea of covenant, because covenants must be freely entered into. The idea that marriage must have a social and vertical dimension ties in with the requirement that there be nothing that can prohibit the marriage: the Unitarian Universalist minister or lay officiant can refuse to officiate at a marriage if s/he believes there are conditions which should prohibit the marriage from taking place.

These days, the idea of mutual consent is typically conflated with romantic love, i.e., those who are attached by romantic love are assumed to be able to mutually consent to marriage. Most Unitarian Universalists would state that romantic love must be present in order for a marriage to take place. However, the concept of romantic love is poorly defined except in reference to (a) vague notions of mutual consent, and (b) the notions of romantic love that exist in the surrounding culture. There does appear to be a tendency among Unitarian Universalists to broaden love beyond the narrow definitions of romantic love; if Unitarian Universalists were to articulate a broader concept of love as presently understood, that broader definition of love would probably include notions of mutual respect, mutual support, responsibility to each other and to the wider community, and mutual consent more carefully defined — this in addition to the (not necessarily logical or religious) sexual and emotional attraction included in popular definitions of romantic love. Paragraph added per comment below.

All these factors help to shape the actual Unitarian Universalist marriage ceremony. A ceremony must include three elements: a statement of intention; the exchange of vows; a declaration or pronouncement. In the statement of intention, the officiant asks if those getting married are entering into marriage freely and by mutual consent; most ordained officiants and experienced lay officiants explicitly ask the couple to say aloud that they want to get married. The statement of intention is usually followed immediately by the exchange of vows. The vows are the explicit statement of the marriage covenant, in which those getting married promise various things to each other. After the vows have been exchanged, the officiant will then declare or pronounce the individuals as being married both to the individuals being married, to those who have gathered to witness the marriage, and to whatever constitutes the vertical dimension (in those cases where there are no witnesses except the officiant and those being married, the officiant will still typically declare or pronounce the individuals as being married).

Forms marriage can take

Unitarian Universalist marriage make take several forms. Monogamy which is ended only by the death of one partner is probably slightly more prevalent amongst Unitarian Universalists than amongst the wider population (assuming that Unitarian Universalists can be included with mainline Protestants in the national surveys that have looked at marriage). Serial monogamy is perhaps a little less common among Unitarian Universalists than in the wider population.

Since there is no religious requirement to marry, a significant proportion of Unitarian Universalists couples choose not to get married at all. Some couples may reject marriage under moral or ethical grounds, usually based on feminist critiques of marriage, or based on other political or religious critiques of marriage. Other couples may choose to remain unmarried for legal or financial reasons. Many unmarried couples may be putting off marriage, or waiting to get married. Some couples may prefer a hand-fasting or equivalent ceremony (see below). Same-sex couples who live in states that do not recognize same-sex marriage may decide they don’t want a religious marriage ceremony until they can have a legal marriage, too. While the relationships just described are technically not marriages, many look pretty much like marriages and may include an implicit or explicit covenant; Unitarian Universalist marriage is not a binary either/or state, but rather a continuum from clearly married to clearly unmarried.

Same-sex marriage

When it comes to same-sex marriage, some Unitarian Universalists have argued that the tradition of English common law limited marriage to opposite sex couples. This argument is heard less and less frequently as time goes on. The traditional view of marriage amongst Unitarian Universalists has already undergone major revision during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the tradition of women being subordinate to men in marriage was essentially done away with. Once traditional gender roles in marriage have been eradicated, most Unitarian Universalists have felt that there is little prevent two persons of the same gender from marrying. In addition, most Unitarian Universalists would point to examples of stable (bound by implicit covenant) same-sex couples in the Anglo-American world going back hundreds of years. Finally, Unitarian Universalists have become increasingly aware in recent years that gender is not a binary, either-or matter; biologically, we know about intersexual individuals, we are aware of persons with ambiguous gender identities, etc.; and thus it becomes difficult to say that marriage has to be between two persons whom we can identify in terms of binary gender.

Probably nearly all Unitarian Universalists support same-sex marriage. Such support ranges from those who accept the theoretical right of same-sex couples to marry, while preferring that their own congregation not sanction same-sex marriages — all the way to those who find absolutely no difference between same-sex marriage and opposite-sex marriage. Probably nearly all Unitarian Universalists support the legal right to same-sex marriage, even if they do so only theoretically.

Divorce

Unitarian Universalists have no prohibition on divorce; a covenant that has been freely entered into may be broken by the mutual consent of the married individuals. There should therefore be no stigma at all associated with divorce.

However, divorce as actually practiced reveals a major inconsistency in Unitarian Universalist theology of covenantal marriage: while the initial covenant includes relationships along three dimensions, the breaking of that covenant only occurs along one dimension, the individual dimension. Divorce is generally seen as a legal matter, not a matter which should concern the religious community, or the vertical dimension. Yet at the same time, when a Unitarian Universalist couple gets divorced, most often one or both members of the couple will leave their local congregation; thus the dimension of religious community is in fact acknowledged during divorce. The vertical dimension, weak in any case, is nearly always ignored; except in the personal spiritual lives of the individuals, where it can loom large, with no real way to deal with it in the context of religious community. Some few local congregations do have divorce ceremonies; it has been reported that those who go through divorce ceremonies find them helpful.

Emerging changes and challenges

Marriage with more than two partners continues to be rejected by the majority of Unitarian Universalists. This rejection may happen for a variety of reasons. Feminists may reject multiple-partner marriages with one man and more than one woman as probably exploitative of the women involved. 19th C. Multiple-partner marriage is most often associated with Mormonism in the U.S., and most Unitarian Universalists prefer to distance themselves from Mormonism (or even the perception of being like the Mormons). In the Anglo-American tradition, multiple-partner marriages have existed for centuries, but usually among people of low socio-economic status who are (metaphorically) far from positions of power; since Unitarian Universalism tends to be a religion of high socio-economic status, multiple-partner marriage is proabably experienced by many as a threat to the socio-economic status of Unitarian Universalism. Many Unitarian Universalists still remember the “wife-swapping” and sexual high-jinks that took place in Unitarian Universalist congregations in the “sexual liberation” movements of the 1970s, which were often perceived to be sexist, irresponsible, and destructive; these Unitarian Universalists do not perceive much of a difference between those failed social experiments of the past, and multiple-partner marriage of the present. Finally, advocates of same-sex marriage may believe that accepting multiple-partner marriage may lower our effectiveness in advocating for same-sex marriage (with the current state of U.S. society, this fear is probably warranted). Given the resistance to multiple-partner marriage due to several unrelated causes, it seems unlikely that multiple-partner marriage will achieve widespread acceptance amongst Unitarian Universalists in the foreseeable future.

Unitarian Universalist weddings have been severely affected by the consumerization of wedding ceremonies. Because Unitarian Universalists tend to be more wealthy, and because Unitarian Universalists are not particularly counter-cultural, their weddings seem to follow the wider societal trend of increasing expense and elaborateness. The consumerization of weddings has also tended to remove the religious dimension of Unitarian Universalist weddings. Unitarian Universalist officiants are unlikely to insist on much of a religious dimension, and consumerist pressures gradually force more and more elements into the wedding ceremony that have nothing to do with Unitarian Universalist theological understandings of marriage, e.g., expensive accoutrements; liturgical elements such as unity candles; weddings that require attendance at a weekend-long retreat; etc.

Unitarian Universalist weddings have also been severely affected by the lack of a serious theological grounding. Wedding ceremonies appear to be drifting away from a covenantal understanding. The vertical dimension of the covenant has already been flattened; now two of the three essential elements of a wedding — intention and declaration — may be attentuated or even ignored.

Unitarian Universalist weddings have seen the growth of non-traditional liturgical forms. Perhaps of greatest interest is the handfasting ceremony. The handfasting ceremony make take on neo-pagan trappings, but it shares some important roots with Unitarian Universalist weddings: the Anglo-American tradition of mutual consent; similar notions of covenant (i.e., it is a covenantal not a sacramental ceremony); and the three dimensions of the covenant. Because hand-fasting has been shaped by the neo-pagan movement, it has been shaped by the feminist grounding of neo-paganism. Handfasting fits in very well indeed with contemporary Unitarian Universalism. Furthermore, handfasting ceremonies may feel more honest and genuine in certain ways: if serial monogamy is the current norm, a handfasting ceremony that lasts for “a year and a day” may feel more honest than a wedding that claims to be in perpetuity but which soon ends in divorce; and handfasting ceremonies may feel more genuinely aligned with Unitarian Universalist theology than a wedding ceremony which has been coopted by consumerism on the one hand, and religious conservatives on the other hand.

Life in the married state

Compared to religious conservatives, Unitarian Universalists have not given much public emphasis on marriage maintenance. We have no “Promisekeepers,” no prominent public groups supporting the institution of marriage, etc. It seems likely that Unitarian Universalist congregations hear many more sermons about the right to same-sex marriage than about how to keep one’s existing marriage alive and vital. Public statements and public witness about marriage remains uncommon amongst us.

However, many local congregations actually provide substantial quiet and implicit support to married couples. Support groups for men and for women often provide forums for talking about married life. Ministers and lay pastoral care providers provide support and counseling for those in marriages. Same-sex couples in states that don’t allow legal marriage for them can find that their local congregation provides real support in their religious and personal marriage. It would seem to make sense for local congregations to be more explicit and more public about the support they are already giving to people who are married, and I’m not sure why this is not happening.

So…

That’s a rough description of Unitarian Universalist marriage today. I’m sure I’ve missed some things, or gotten some facts wrong. if so, please correct me in the comments below.

“My own feeling is that if you emphasize responsibility too much, you are undervaluing others or the other. Also, you are over-valuing yourself. You are operating with an individualistic conception of the individual, not a social conception of the self. If you have a social sense of the self, you cannot maintain that you are wholly responsible for what you are. You can be responsible within it, but there are limits to which your responsibility extends. I also think that within this attitude of responsibility there is the idea that gratitude beyond a certain point leads to dependence and this is a basic form of weakness. As much as we may not admit this intellectually, many of us feel emotionally that dependence is weakness.”

– Unfoldings, Bernard Loomer, 1985.

…I don’t mean money. Communities need regular inputs of time and effort from their members, or they collapse into mass societies of isolated individuals — roughly speaking, what we’ve got now [in U.S. society]. Communities also need subtler inputs: a sense of commitment, of shared purpose, of emotional connection, of trust. To gain the benefits of living in community, it’s necessary to sacrifice some part of the autonomy that so many Americans nowadays guard so jealously….

And in fact one of the great weaknesses of today’s Unitarian Universalist congregations is that so many of the people who think of themselves as Unitarian Universalists aren’t willing to sacrifice any of their autonomy to participate in the congregational community. But here, as in so many aspects of life, ya gotta pay to play. Rule number one of congregational community:– if you want a Unitarian Universalist community, you have to give up the much-loved American autonomy that says it’s better to sleep in or go for a walk or play video games on Sunday morning. Then add some volunteer hours on top of that. Otherwise, you’re not part of a community.

And, as Greer points out, many of the people who claim to love-love-love community don’t actually belong to a functional community, and in fact deliberately participate in “communities” that are bound to fail:

I know a fair number of people in activist circles who speak in glowing terms about community; most of them don’t belong to a single community organization. I also know a fair number of people who’ve tried to launch community projects of one kind or another; most of these projects foundered due to a fatal shortage of people willing to commit the time, effort, and emotional energy the project needed to survive. Most, but not all; some believers in community have taken an active role in trying to build or maintain it; some projects have managed to find an audience and build a community, or at least the first rough draft of one. One of the reasons I don’t dismiss the Transition Town movement, though I have serious doubts about some aspects of it, is precisely that many of the people involved in it have committed themselves to it in a meaningful sense, and the movement itself has succeeded in some places in building a critical mass of commitment and energy.

It’s important, I think, to assess the ventures toward community that are under way now or have been tried in the recent past, both the successful ones and the ones that have failed, and try to get some sense of the factors that tip the balance one way or the other. It’s also crucial, though, to recognize that there’s a difference between fantasies of community that provides all the benefits with none of the costs, and the reality of community in which each benefit must be paid for by a corresponding commitment. I suspect the common passion among some peak oil activists for lifeboat communities that just happen to be too expensive ever to get off the ground, which often goes hand in hand with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for participation in real communities of real people that exist right now, is simply one way of evading the difference.

The theoretical and theological grounding for this post will be very familiar to Unitarian Universalists who have studied James Luther Adams’s work on voluntary associations (see, e.g., his collections of essays Voluntary Associations, ed. Ronald Engels, 1986, and/or On Being Human Religiously, ed. Max Stackhouse, 1976). If you read much of Adams, you will discover that he believes voluntary associations — a.k.a. “communities” — are the major line of defense in preventing fascism. This point is also implicit in Greer’s post.

Yet while there’s nothing really new in this post, Greer sums the main point up nicely when he writes: “There’s a difference between fantasies of community that provides all the benefits with none of the costs, and the reality of community in which each benefit must be paid for by a corresponding commitment.” Go read the whole post — it’s worth it. Then come back here and ‘fess up — do you really invest your time, energy, enthusiasm, and yes money, into a real living organized community? (And let’s be honest, “my circle of friends” is not a community, it’s a circle of friends.)