I have failed. What next?

After a great deal of struggle, I am admitting that I have failed.  I've taken classes from a Unitarian-Universalist seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, that have been both interesting and truly life changing.  Unfortunately, it has led to my understanding of the culture of Unitarianism and the realization that I don't particularly care for them and that there is no way that will accept the person that I am.  While I still identify with the Universalist side of the faith and think the few Universalists left might actually accept me, the Unitarians have been the overwhelmingly dominant force since the first day the "consolidation" (think merger with slightly different legal ramifications).

Since the election of its current president, Peter Morales, the UUA has become very politically active and is taking stands that are diametrically opposed to my own, many of which they base on statements from the liberal press that are demonstratively false.  I don't know whether I would call Unitarians low information voters, or voters who are working with dramatically incorrect information.

Most recently president Morales has released a statement calling for U.S. involvement in Syria that included weasel words about hoping to avoid violence.  Right, he's in favor of sending in the military "if necessary'.  I'm completely against America continuing our involvement in the Middle East.  We have a history of supplying arms to both side of the conflict, which just increases the body count.  We have also been sending lots of American troops in under Rules of Engagement that are not only making our troops ineffective, they are getting our soldiers killed.

The latest issue of UU World includes an essay from a UU minister about how Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman.  Obviously she did not actually look at the evidence that came out in court or the various laws involved.  She parroted the anti "Stand Your Ground" rhetoric that is so popular in liberal circles, even though Florida's "Stand Your Ground Law" had nothing to do with the case.  She ridiculed the idea of a sidewalk being used as a deadly weapon even though there are numerous cases where people have been killed, including police officers, by attackers slamming their head into a sidewalk.

The latest issue of UU World also includes an article on sexual misconduct by ministers.  Naturally this followed the liberal narrative by using an example of a male minister and a female congregation member.  This strikes a bit close to home as the former minister of a church I used to belong to gave up her Ministerial Fellowship after the second time in her career as a minister she was brought up on sexual misconduct issues involving a woman in the congregation.

President Morales (notice the last name) is also promoting the cause of illegal aliens, excuse me, "undocumented immigrants" in the United States.  Personally I think anyone who breaks American law to get here is probably a very bad choice for becoming a citizen.  In addition, they are displacing huge numbers of citizens who are on the low end of the job scale.  Plus, a huge percentage of them are receiving various forms of assistance (welfare) that is paid for by Americans.  Unlike the GLBT effort of the past few decades, these people will never become members of the church.  Personally, I'm in favor of shipping them back quickly.

In 1979 the Unitarian Universalist Association started a campaign to create "Welcoming Congregations" to ensure that GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender) folks were welcome in the churches and to encourage them to join.  I think this was a wonderful idea and it did see great success.  However, over the decades it has morphed into a worship of GLBT folks that sees their issues getting far greater attention than others.  Overall, Unitarian churches have a low level dislike and disapproval of straight white males and the Ministerial Fellowship Committee has a strong prejudice against people like me.  I've spoken with a straight white male who went through the process and he certainly did experience this as well.  He has since founded an independent church that is not affiliated with the UUA.

Unitarians also seem to be somewhat passively anti family.  With all the "you go grrl!" rhetoric that actively discourages women from being wives and mothers to a fairly active stance that fathers are irrelevant, families are marginalized.  Unless of course, it's a lesbian couple who have had a baby through artificial means.

Unitarians have also become very anti-male.  It became obvious after attending a number of church services around the country that there was a fairly strong bias against men, unless the man is gay.  Pretty much in line with the liberal media.  This is another area where Unitarians really don't want to hear the truth, they would rather rage against "The Patriarchy".

Unsurprisingly, Unitarians are also very pro abortion and believe that fathers have no rights when it comes to children, born or unborn.  Personally, I don't think abortion is a good thing, but sometimes all other paths are worse.

American Unitarians (and in this case I use the word in strong contrast to Universalists) have a long history of helping "those people over there".  People who rich urban liberal can pity and feel superior to.  This does go back to at least the 18th century in Boston.  Unlike the Universalists, Unitarians would prefer that the common folk stay in their places.

While Unitarians claim to be liberal, they are actually very closeminded, intolerant and bigoted along very politically correct lines.  I have been welcomed much more at Pentecostal churches that I have visited than Unitarian churches I have visited.

So, I have failed.  It is obvious that I have no future with the Unitarians.  My personal theology is much more Universalist and my beliefs reach beyond the limits of Christianity.  I am still looking for alternative paths to gaining the skills and resources to help others, to minister to those in need, particularly those who are overlooked in modern society.  There are a lot of people in serious spiritual pain and I want to be able to help at least a few of them.  I have lost my way and I'm tying to find it again.

I doubt if more than half a dozen people in the world will ever read this, but just putting my thoughts down in words has been a beneficial exercise for me.

Not going to church tomorrow

I'm not going to church tomorrow. With this evening's verdict, there will be yet another reason for more bile and hatred from the pulpit for people like me, straight white males.

I've actually taken seminary classes and I did find them to be life changing. I have also come to realize that the school would kick me out once they found out more about my political beliefs. Things like being an NRA Life Member, being the proud holder of a Rifleman patch from the Appleseed project and being a straight white male. Even if I did make it through to get a M. Div., the Ministerial Fellowship Comittee would never accept me because of my political, not theological, beliefs.

Do I feel a call? Absolutely and it sucks. I still feel driven to become a minister so that I can help others in need, so I can bring peace to some troubled souls. I'm just at a real loss on how to proceed.

I'm not suffering a crisis of faith, my faith is stronger than it has ever been, but my beliefs in churches are weaker than ever.

I'm really struggling.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about James Holmes and how he wound up where he did.  The answers I've come up with have been disturbing and very thought provoking.

From his background, James Holmes seems to have been extremely intelligent.  I'll bet he would make most Mensa members look mediocre in the brains department.  This in itself makes him a fairly rare individual.  Being a statistical outlier can be really tough.  By all reports he was also quite polite.  This also helps corroborate the reports that women couldn't stand him.

So, he worked really hard in school, did well and then discovered he couldn't get a job.  One of the obvious paths to postponing having to pay a likely heavy debt load from school was to go back to school, which he did.  PhD programs are tough.  STEM PhD programs are even tougher.  I suspect he was cracking under the strain, particularly with his lack of social and moral support as well as the the continual media message that there was something wrong with him for being an intelligent straight white male.  That message can get very tiresome.

After all of this, he broke.  He killed several people.  While a lot of folks are going on about how many he killed, I glad he didn't kill a lot more.  I can think of a few ways to kill almost everyone on the theater.  A lifetime of reading science fiction, mysteries and spy novels will give a person a few ideas.  James Holmes, is a lot smarter than I am and had a lot better access to both chemical and biological, so he could easily have come up with a dozen of so methods that would be a lot deadlier.  Instead, he chose a method that was deeply personal and in everyone's face.  It wasn't about killing as many people as he could, it was about saying a huge "Fuck you!" to society.  He didn't even make any effort to get away, and he told the police about the boobytrap he had left at his apartment.

It's not hard to deduce some of the logic he probably went through.  He was under financial pressure from student loan debt that is pretty much inescapable.  He had done everything that he had been told to do to have a good life, and it had been thrown in his face.

So why am I writing this in a blog about becoming a minister?  Because James Holmes was one of the people on the fringe.  One of the people our society doesn't believe could ever need help.  Maybe if one person had gone out of their way to help him, to treat him like a real person, maybe this tragedy could have been avoided.  From what I have read about him, I would have liked to have been his friend.  There are a lot of people out on the fringes that no one wants to know about and who don't inspire enough of a sense of pity for the liberal mindset to even care.  These are the people I want to be able to help, not the people who are written up in the newspaper on a regular basis. I pray I can actually do it.

Making a difference

I spent a little while this afternoon talking to some veterans who are running a charity for disabled veterans.  It was interesting, I've know for a while that returning veterans are getting a really raw deal, but we talked about it in more detail.  The suicide rate among veterans has gotten to be way too high and very few people want to talk about it.  There are a lot of factors involved, but I think one of them is our current society where if someone is having a rough time, the only response is "too bad" instead of "Is there anything I can do to help?".  I expect quite a number of them were just ground up by the uncaring system where no one ever bothered to connect with them as human beings.

Yeah, what can I do?  I can make a point of treating them as humans and make a real effort to listen to them.

Sanctuary

I'm sitting here at a Theravedan Buddhist monastery enjoying the peaceful atmosphere.  Historically, churches have been a place of peace and refuge, but these days this is the only place of sanctuary I have found where I am welcome.  It's sad that churches seem to have lost their way over the centuries particularly in the last couple of generations.  So much of the kindness and caring has turned into just another big business.

In the late 1950s, the words "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance to distinguish the USA from the godless communists of the Soviet Union.  Since then our society has not only become non-religious, but actively anti-religious.  While there have been a large number of horrible things done in the name of religion, it has also provided us with a moral and ethic basis to reach the success we are enjoying today.  Along with the loss of religious beliefs, we are seeing a precipitous decline of Western society.  Maybe they are connected or maybe not.  Personally, I think they are connected, I think we have lost our way and our dedication to something greater than the individual.

I can't say that I know what to do about this situation, but the problem has become so acutely obvious that it's a significant part of my motivation to go to seminary and try to do a little bit of good in the world.

Visiting other churches

I have started visiting  various churches in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of what religion means to different people.  It has been quite an interesting experience.  Here are a couple of them.

A minister I know pointed me at one church that turned out to be rather Pentecostal in nature, it had the whole "speaking in tongues" thing going on.  A number of people I know would have been seriously freaked out by the service.  Personally, I found it interesting.  Most of my history has not included what I've heard described as "the ecstatic experience" of religion.  It was also one of the most racially diverse congregations I have seen.  I'm very glad I went.  I've written a more detailed review that I sent off to my friend, but I'll be brief here.

The other church I visited was a "non-denominational" Christian church that is being "planted" by another branch.  This was the first service and most of the attendees were members of the preacher's extended family, which is quite large.  It's a very family oriented church, which is something I think our society needs more of.  On the other hand, their God is a lot more meddlesome than what I believe.  It was also a very evangelical service, which is yet another approach I need to understand in greater depth.  Learning to communicate in a way that influences and inspires other is one of the many things I need to learn to do.  I expect I'll be going back to other services there.

Both churches had live musicians playing some very modern kinds of music with lots of electronic amplification.  I'm not quite sure what I think about that.  Maybe I'm a bit too old fashioned.  I also need to develop a deeper understanding of the effects that music can have in religious services.  I know I'm not wired the same as a large number of church goers, so I'm going to have to go about understanding in a very deliberate manner.

At this point, my plan is to continue visiting a very wide variety of churches.  There is still so much more for me to learn.

Thought from listening to Sunday's sermon

The church I go to has two ministers, at least for the next few weeks, then both of them are moving on.  One of them I really don't connect with at all, the other one is the only minister who has offered any support in my going to seminary.  He's an interesting guy, with a somewhat diverse theological background.  He is also far more compassionate than most of the ministers I have had a chance to spend time speaking with, he doesn't just put on a good act while he is on stage.

Anyway, I just wanted to put in a bit of background.  Today's sermon touched on a few subjects, one of which was working with an interfaith group dealing with the poor and homeless.  I have often criticized my faith for only helping "those people over there" and making sure they stayed "over there" instead instead of making it easy for them to pick up many of the values and beliefs of the church.  Mind you, I'm talking about promoting the church and its values by leading by example.  Today's sermon was very passionate about people actually getting involved instead of just paying lip service by throwing some money at the problem and then feeling virtuous. 

It also got me to thinking about what I will be able to do once I finish my schooling.  I don't think I will be very good at dealing with the typical homeless beggar, I am much more likely to be working with people who are working their way up out of a bad turn of events.  Or, working with those who are on the fringes of society.  During my last trip to New Orleans I found that I built up connections with a number of the street performers and fortune tellers.  I'm also friends with some musicians who will never be big names or big successes, but they are getting by.  I'm sure there are those who will criticise me for this, but I need to play to my strengths.  My goals are to do good things, not great things. 

Even though it is years in the future, I'm trying understand myself better and where I will fit in.  It's challenging.