Day #2 Convo

Again, I am pathetically missing the evening entertainment (Canadian music) in favor of sleep.  Can it only be day 2?  I’m exhausted.  Today was pure workshop (4 hours) and an address by the new UUA President, Peter Morales.  Q&A. 

“Curiosity is the best tool in conflict”  was the note I took today.  I don’t write down much because we’ve been given the power point slide print-outs, but this wasn’t on them, and I thought it was a great reminder.  Curiosity is a skill of the prefrontal cortex, and as long as you’re using your prefrontal cortex, you’re not stuck in the fight, flight or freeze response of the amygdala.  We did a lot of role-playing of difficult conversations trying to use “covenental dialogue” to open up the possibilities rather than getting stuck in the static polarities of a conflict.  I continue to find this material fascinating and helpful.  The word “conflict” may give you the wrong impression about what this work is about – in many ways, it’s simply about learning to live with difference – especially in congregational life.  How do we notice difference, honor it, and engage it – without insisting everyone be the same, or share the same opinion or have the same politics or even religious beliefs….?  I think this is at the core of conflict transformation work.

I went to dinner with a colleague, friend and one of my favorite poets, Kendra Ford, and learned that she knows how to make Baklava.  Kendra was a class ahead of me at Meadville Lombard in Chicago, and is now in her ninth year of ministry, looking forward to her first sabbatical in April.  

Oh, and the really, really sad thing I learned at worship this evening is that when Harry Belafonte wrote Turn the World Around, he used the line “Abateewa” because he liked the sound of it… but he didn’t know what it meant, and it’s not nice.  Oops.  I also like the sound of it, and it is/was my favorite part of singing that in our teal hymnal – shouting “Abateewa ‘… but now that I know what it means, I don’t think I can sing it anymore, and that makes me sad.  I’m afraid if I tell you what it means in the blog, I might get reported for bad language.  Oops.

Which is an example of conflict in action.  We all have conflicting commitments.  He had a commitment to writing a poetic and beautiful song.  He heard those words, liked the sound of them (did not know the meaning!), and included them.  But once you learn that the words are, in effect, derogatory in nature, our commitment to treating others with respect and dignity, overrides our commitment to singing cool sounding syllables for fun.  The song still works with out the words, I promise.  It may not be as fun at first, but we all grow and change and some day we will forget the song ever had that part at all, I suspect.  Turn the world around, hah!

Day #1 Convo

Wednesday was for gathering.  Thursday (yesterday now) I consider day 1. I did my early morning spiritual practice in the gym instead of meditation or yoga with the group. (I’m recovering from a ligament and muscle strain that effects my knee, and have discovered that the stationary bike allows me to exercise my legs without straining under the weight of my body. Believe me, I much prefer meditation and yoga to any form of exercise that makes me sweat, but there it is; I went to the gym.) They ran out of food at breakfast, apparently – I managed to get a bagel just before worship bgan.   They’ve been featuring our Canadian colleagues at worship.  No printed orders of service to save paper.  Lyrics are projected, along with interesting facts about the music and composers, etc. which, unfortunately, sometimes go by too fast to actually read.   

Thomas Moore, author of  Care of the Soul, Education of the Heart, and The Soul of Sex,  is the keynote speaker.  His thesis is that ministry (and caring for the soul) is more about acceptance and trust than improvement.  He says that virtue as a goal gets in our way… (yes!)

Following lunch (of which there was plenty), we divided up into ’short stories’ or ‘chapters.’  I never did quite understand the concept in the registration materials, but get it now.   The short stories are just regular, stand-alone workshops – the kind we generally experience at professional development days or General Assembly.  Topics ranged from clergy ethics, finances, and anti-oppression to mental health, mindfulness and sustainability.  The chapters are longer workshops with 7 chapters in all – you commit to 14 hours of study of the same subject. 

Highly committed to self-improvement and virtue myself, I signed up for the chapters.  Though my motivations are suspect, my choice was the right one for me.  I had registered for the Thomas Moore chapter, but through the lottery system didn’t get in.  So, having experienced a little of Terasa Cooley’s work with conflict transformation at the last Dreaming Big session in Portland, I registered for that one instead.  I’m slowly reading all the books she had recommended in Portland so I figure this is an opportunity for really grasping it.  I am half-way through The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky and brought along Polarity Management by Barry Johnson and The Power of a Positive No by William Ury when I finish with the first.  However, as I’m discovering, there is no chance for reading during these days here.  The scheduled breaks are inadequate to say the least…

After 4 hours of conflict transformation, I joined the choir under the direction of Jason Shelton, author and composer of Standing on the Side of Love.  (One of the most moving parts of worship so far was the wrapping of the rainbow flag around our worship space – the same rainbow flag that 5 youth from a Canadian congregation wrapped around the Parlaiment building when the decision was made to uphold same-sex marraige in Canada… we were singing Standing on the Side of Love at the time.)

I went to dinner with Lisa Friedman, who served the Flint congregation when I first arrived in Lansing, and who was my mentor during the first 3 years of ministry.  We ate at a nice Indian restaurant (I love lentils!) and I confess to missing worship and the evening events.  It was, as so often the case at these things, an insanely packed day with few breaks.  So, in the conflict between my need for rest and a desire for seeing and experiencing everything, I had to choose rest.  And so ends today’s (well, yesterday’s) blog entry.

Convo

I’ve arrived in Ottawa, Canada for “Convo,” a gathering of UU ministers across the continent that takes place every 7 years. The perfect sabbatical trip, huh? I must have known half the people on the plane from Detroit – they were, like me, making connections there.  There is definitely a party atmosphere, when folks from far away that you’ve known for many years gather together.  People I hadn’t seen since I was a student living in Chicago gave me my nametag and program.  There were 21 of us in the shuttle bus coming from the airport – all UU ministers.  This will be quite a trip. 

I brought my new blackberry along to see if I could get collegial advice about its best use for the ministry, and was told by some iphone and blackberry users that they’d turned off their phones for the duration because of the price of international calling.  So I called my phone company, Credo, and asked if I could get a temporary international rate deal like other Sprint users.  (Credo, previously known as Working Assetts, uses Sprint as their carrier).  But no, they said it would cost me .55 a minute to use the cell phone and .02 per kilobyte for emails.  My first reaction was to want to switch to Sprint, and then I realized that it’s Sprint that’s not giving Credo the deal and the reason I use Credo is about the liberal causes we support with our money, not the savings.  And then I realized why we’re meeting in Canada at all!  UU ministers in Canada, whenever they travel to the U.S. to attend UUMA meetings, have to worry about cell phones working, kilobyte costs, and exchange rates and all that.  We’re meeting in Canada to show solidarity with our Canadian colleagues, even though the Canadian Unitarian Council and the Unitarian Univeralist Association have officially split.  We still belong to a single Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association.  So, I’ve turned my blackberry on and will pay higher rates to support my liberal causes, and learn from my colleagues about the use of “smart phones” in the ministry…. the fun is about to begin.

Also I should mention that, in a moment of unrealistic expectation, last fall I volunteered to blog for my colleagues in the Heartland UU Minister’s Association chapter who can’t afford to attend this meeting in Ottawa.  I had it in my mind that somehow I would be learning to blog while on sabbatical… that is, now.  However, I’m no closer to knowing how to blog except that I read the book, Julie and Julia:  My Year of Cooking Dangerously (and saw the movie too!) and the book has some snippets of blogging contained within… so, dearest colleagues, if any of you are reading this, I recommend you turn to the Rev. Cindy Landrum’s blog at http://revcyn.blogspot.com/  She actually has a smart phone and knows how to use it, too!  I told her when I ran into her at dinner tonight that she’d need to blog this meeting for you.  I’ll keep trying, and there may be as many blogs of this event as ministers there were on the plane from Detroit, so don’t despair.   We’re here for you.  “Here,’ of course, being Canada.

Youth Group Sleepover

I am writing this blog from my church ”office.”  (only in parenthesis because I don’t go to work these days.)  I managed to unfold the futon in my office in order to make a bed.  I have volunteered for the 3am to 8am shift for tonight’s high school group sleepover, but before 3am I intend to sleep.   The youth and their advisors cooked all day.  They served food to the work crew raking leaves and working on the yard, and tomorrow will prepare “Stone Soup” lunch for the congregation.  One of the downsides of being the minister is that I don’t get to be a parent when it comes to church events.  I don’t get to teach my son’s religious education class, or volunteer as a parent chaperone for sleepovers.   But tonight I can.  I don’t lead worship in the morning, and in fact, intend to leave the parking lot by 8am before most people get here.  This is a strange vocation I’ve chosen that claims my family as well.  My son doesn’t experience church the same way most of his peers do, and my husband doesn’t either (as you can read in his blog entry from October 10).  I’m keenly aware of members of the congregation who have been married to ministers or whose parents were ministers.  They generally tell me.  I think  they mention it because it is such a formative experience – it is no small part of their identity.  I remember it, of course, because I know they are especially attuned to the unique position the members of my family hold in this community.  PKs (preacher’s kids) understand things my son experiences that I really can’t, not being a PK myself, just a P.

Right now, I’m not a P at all, but a tired mom, so I’ll quit writing this entry and get some sleep.  I’ve got a good book to look forward to for 3am… and I want to go set some coffee for my early morning rising.

I want poetry in my life!

I think that’s a line from the movie, Shakespeare in Love, which I love.  (c0-written by Tom Stoppard who also wrote one of my favorite plays,  Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead)  I want poetry in my life also, which is one reason I attended my Ohio River Study Group this year even though I’m on sabbatical.   The papers were good, and the discipline of reading poetry in order to get ready for the meeting was welcome.  I visited poets I’ve loved forever, and remember poets I hardly knew, and was introduced to poets I didn’t know before the meeting.  Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno is one I now add to my list of loves.  I ordered her book, Slamming Open the Door, but though it arrived in the mail yesterday, I’ve yet to open it.  The poems I heard while at Ohio River Group were so powerful, I know that the impact of her words will enter deep and I want to read them when I’m ready to spend a day recovering…  (writes Robin Becker on the book jacket, “From the uspeakable – the murder of her daughter – Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno creates a poetic sequence like no other.”)

While at Ohio River Group, we created a word tree, which you see below.  Words, in case we needed them while we were there.  Words, to take back to our homes and congregations.  One of the aspects of my job that I love and despair the most, is the task of putting words together on a regular basis.  I love it, when the words arise seemingly out of nowhere (but most often, as the title of this entry and my blog suggests, from someone else before me).  I despair when I can’t find the right word to express a feeling or idea that lurks just below the surface.  I’ve enjoyed this break from regular sermon writing.  I have been reading more than writing while on sabbatical, and that’s been restorative.

Wislawa Szymborska is the other poet that surprised me.  She wasn’t new entirely, but I heard her words again and differently at this meeting.  “My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before.  A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.” 

  

 

How Ministers Unwind

The Great Dalmuties

Yes, those are coffee filters on our heads.  For a very brief but shining moment, I am the Great Dalmuti, and the Rev. Jory Agate, Ministerial Development Director at the UUA, and the Rev. Nathan Detering , Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Area Church at First Parish in Sherborn, MA, are the “lesser” Dalmuties….  This photo was taken last week while I was in Portland with the Dreaming Big group studying the First Unitarian  Church there.   You can learn more about the church at:  http://www.firstunitarianportland.org/  The only explanation for the coffee filters is that in seminary when we (a different ’we’ than photgraphed here) used to play this game, our game master had a wonderful collection of hats that we would wear… and in Portland we didn’t have the hats.  Despite the photo, we worked hard in Portland, studying conflict transformation and social witness in the large congregation context.

I’m writing this blog entry in Dayton, OH, however, as I meet with the Ohio River Study Group of colleagues that I’ve been gathering with since  2002.  We’ve never played the Great Dalmuti here, but we have been known to watch The Vicar of Dibley together, write bad poetry, and create postmodern collages.  I got a preview of the sermon you will hear this Sunday when the Rev. Dr. Cindy Landrum presented her paper this afternoon.  (You’re in for a treat!)  As usual, I was inspired this year, and look forward to incorporating the ideas we’ve explored and the poems I learned when I return to lead worship after sabbatical.   (Our topic was poetry.)  However, I am looking forward to being home again and with my family.  I’ve been away from them too long, and suspect my son has grown another inch in my absence….

Holden Lake

                    One of my sabbatical projects was to spend a week at Holden Village in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state focusing on my spiritual practices. I did yoga every morning, hiked all day, meditated in the afternoon, and journaled about it when I could. This ecumenical religious retreat was the perfect place for this kind of reflection. Holden Village reminds me of  ‘base Christian communities’ in Latin America. Village life centers around daily worship, communal living, and sharing the chores. The remoteness of the location (an old mining village) means that the chores are considerable – from seriously sorting and dealing with all garbage created to cooking for 50-100 (in the off season) three meals a day, generating and conserving energy, and cutting and splitting firewood for the winter when the water-generated sources of energy slow down.

The first time I went to Holden Village more than 20 years ago, I was finished with college and waiting to hear from the Peace Corps and aware that my eventual career path would lead to the ministry. The last time, I went as a school teacher in the Chelan Public Schools with 6th graders.

When I arrived this time, the 6th graders were there! (clearly, different 6th graders) How amazing that I would choose the one week of the year that 6th graders from Chelan came for their environmental camp… It’s been so long, I didn’t know a single teacher accompanying them.

But it was the perfect environment to consider my life path and choices along the way, and to imagine what comes next… There was one moment hiking, as I was considering the church, that I felt like telling the board how much I think this sabbatical will benefit the church overall. It’s true. But I think the proof will be in our work together in the next few years. Mostly, among the glaciers, mountains, rivers, and lakes, I felt a deep gratitude.  I feel a deep gratitude still.

                       

 Glacier Peak Wilderness Area                                Hart Lake

a note from “Mr. Bert”

Hello All, This is Stuart speaking,

It has been a while since you have seen me around the church.  There are lots of reasons for this, and I wanted to see if I could explain what is in my heart and mind these days.

First, I am really enjoying the sabbatical!  As you can imagine, having Kathryn around these past few months has been fantastic.  Traveling to Europe, wonderful.  With Kathryn home most nights (when not traveling) I realize how much her focus on the family has eased the normal household tension, invigorated and empowered us to do things we have been wanting to do for a long time.  With Theo, in his Junior year, he remains our loving focus.  This sabbatical has allowed us to be there for him, talk to him, get to know him all over again & have family dinners together.  This is a gift.

In February, Kathryn will return to a full schedule, Theo has been active all summer and will continue to be a leader in the High School Group.  But what about Stuart?  What is the right involvement for me, the spouse of the minister?  I am taking a sabbatical break, also, to think about these questions.  I don’t have all the answers, but this is what I’m thinking right now:

Over the years, I have found this to be a balancing act, in a way.  Balancing between a church home, and support for Kathryn in her work.  It is a really a wacky and strange kind of relationship, seeking community, friendship, support in the organization that employs my wife.  I have made many friends.  I have made mistakes.  I helped with some great projects, and watched my son grow up.

Going forward, I am going to lean toward support for Kathryn in her job, her ministry.  She likes me in the pews, so I will attend when I can. I enjoy working on the facility, so I may help out there.  Where I can help on special projects (like the floor or the fall clean up) I will.  I may stay for coffee hour, I may skip out after services.

What this means is that, come February, you will again see me from time to time at services, doing odd things around the building, at new member welcomes, but may not see me at social events, at coffee hour, in covenant groups, as a committee chair or a leader.

Thank you for all you have done for us over the years. I look forward to the next chapters.  To seeing Theo graduate from the High School Group, seeing how the church works through the space issues, watching Kathryn do her magic, and supporting her in the ways she needs me the most.

Lots of love to you all,

Stuart  (whose last name is actually Campbell)

Willamette River

Willamette River

I’m on the Willamette River (in Portland, OR) today, but later I head by plane, bus, boat and bus again up into the Cascade Mountains where I’ll spend a week at a Lutheran Retreat Center, Holden Village, that offers a free week of mountain air and serenity to clergy on sabbatical.  I’m taking hiking boots and books, but no computer.  There is no cell phone coverage or internet access…  needless to say, I am looking forward to the quiet.  I’ve been to Holden at least twice before:  once after colleage while waiting for acceptance into the Peace Corps, and later when I taught 6th grade for the Chelan Public Schools.  The 6th grade environmental camp takes place at Holden Village and Stuart and I were chaperones.  I think he still has the name tag they made him.  It says “Mr. Bert.”

Promised photos

  Here are what I hope are more interesting photos of La Alhambra:  the Nasrid Palace and the looking out on the city of Granada from the castle.