Love Wins

I always enjoy our UU services on Sunday mornings. The theme this week was based on the book Love Wins by Rob Bell. Bell seems to have had much the same sort of sentiments as George Carlin expressed in this youtube clip, except that Bell decided to give God a bit of a pass -- not only on being mean and punitive, but also on not existing. Instead, he appears to promote the Christian Universalist view that everyone goes to heaven and all we need is love and Luke 10:27. We UUs aren't necessarily Christian, so our view of universalism is rather that we are all inter-connected, although the Golden Rule always applies. We also listened to the following poem by Stephen Dunn:

At The Smithville Methodist Church by Stephen Dunn

It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home
with the "Jesus Saves" button, we knew what art
was up, what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren't
twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men was what
we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.

OK, we said, One week. But when she came home
singing "Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so," it was time to talk.
Could we say Jesus

doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.

It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead,

that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story
nearly as good.
On parents' night there were the Arts & Crafts
all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats
in the church
and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah

and one in which they had to jump up and down
for Jesus.
I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain
about what's comic, what's serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can't say to your child
"Evolution loves you." The story stinks
of extinction and nothing

exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have
a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car
she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do
but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence.

We UUs don't necessarily "have stories nearly as good." Our pastor suggested that we create our own stories with passion that tell of our own belief systems and keep us away from cynicism and despair. I'm not sure this is any less of a Hobson's choice than George Carlin's description. I guess that's part of the attraction of UUism to me -- that we know that we don't really know. We embrace rather than reject cognitive dissonance. 

Friendship

We had an excellent sermon on the theology of friendship at our UU church yesterday. The pastor talked about abandonment (dropping one's guard,) accompaniment (being there for friends,) and awakening (growth through friendly advice) as aspects of friendship. The children's story was from A. A. Milne's collection and was about friendship between Christopher Robin, Piglet, and Pooh. Our pastor read the following poem by Polish poet and 1980 Nobel literature laureate,  Czeslaw Milosz:

Christopher Robin

by Czeslaw Milosz

I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.

Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well. “Old bear,” he answered. “I was in it and I was falling and I wore trousers down to the ground, I had a grey beard, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won’t go anywhere, even if I’m called in for an afternoon snack.”