Matthew Davis Fox

We call this "pro-life"???

2009-05-31T21:27:16Z

This morning, our country witnessed a lynching. A political execution. The murder of a man for his political beliefs, and the actions he took to help others in line with those beliefs.

Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions, who would find ways to perform them free of charge for those most in need who might otherwise not have access to needed and at times life saving procedures, was murdered this morning. He was murdered while in church, a church he was a long time member of.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01tiller.html?_r=2&hp

I understand there is great division on the subject of abortion in this country, and for many people those passions run deep. But I long ago decided I will not use the word "pro-life" to describe those who work to limit access to abortion, or allow others to use that term unchallenged, for many reasons. I've spoken in these pages about how I see the work of the pro-choice movement as being fundamentally pro-life, and I refuse to let that term be taken from us, but today this is not about that.

Today I am mourning the loss of a hero, a man who was fundamentally pro-life. Dr. Tiller saved the lives of women again and again by performing needed procedures. He was one of the last doctors in America willing and able to perform terminations in situations where a pregnancy had developed fatal anomalies that not only meant the in-viability of the fetus, but would endanger the life of the mother if not terminated. Today more women will die because they can not get access to that procedure.

Today I'm mourning the loss of a hero, and I'm angry. I'm angry at the hypocrisy of someone who can claim to commit murder in the name of life. Who can strike down a doctor who dedicated his life to helping others, a doctor who was sitting in church, and call it a holy or sacred act.

I know most of the 'pro-life movement' deplores this action, and condemns it, and I can not blame the whole movement for the actions of one madman. But I do wonder about the link between the rhetoric of the more extreme elements of that movement, and this murderous act. Particularly as this is not the first time someone has been killed for performing these procedures. Nor, I fear, will it be the last.

Today is a day to mourn a tragic loss of an American hero. For everyone, on both sides of this issue to step back and say, a life was lost and that is tragic. And perhaps we should recognize that we are ALL pro-life. That we may differ on the definition of life, or on what it means to respect and honor life and all that it entails. But that we all honor life. And deplore this terrible act, and condemn it for what it was. Pure, ugly, cold-blooded murder.

America lost a hero today. Please light a candle, or say a prayer, or remember him in your own way. A doctor who celebrated life in the best way he knew how. By helping others.

Ministry. Intensity. One hell of a night

2009-02-20T15:44:20Z

Something happened to me Wednesday night/Thursday morning; the kind of experience that both leaves me shaken and wondering what the hell I’m doing, yet also reminds me why I am so glad I went into ministry.

This is a pretty intense story. It’s about pregnancy termination and fetal anomalies and people dealing with intense emotional pain, and turning to religion, among other things, for a bit of comfort amidst all that. If any of that might be a trigger, or upsetting, or just sounds nothing like what you want to be reading right about now, please feel free to skip the rest of this post. For those who are interested- keep reading.

I should start with a disclaimer or three. First- its been a long time since I’ve written in these pages- somewhere back I just stopped knowing quite what I wanted to say or use this blog for, and every time I’d sit down to write it would feel forced. But this- it feels almost the opposite. A story I’m dying to tell, that I need to tell- but also on some level feels like it’s not mine to tell. I experienced so much that night- but mostly I was there to be present at someone else’s experience.

Part of me feels like it is not my story to tell. But maybe it is, as a witness. Or maybe just because people who are close to me know I went through ‘something’ and I’ve spent all day trying to find the words, and if I can just write it all out here I can share it with everyone.

And a simple disclaimer about time. This all happened Wednesday night into Thursday morning. I’m posting this now on Friday morning, but I wrote most of this post Thursday evening, so it talks about last night, and earlier today. I’ve left that in even though its only going up now Friday morning.

So here’s my story. My version of a larger story. With some details left fuzzy to protect those whose story it truly is.

Around 7pm last night, I got a phone call. It was from a friend and colleague of mine who volunteers at a local hospital. She was working with a woman who had recently discovered that the pregnancy she had been so excited about had developed severe anomalies in the 4th month. Anomalies that would surely kill the fetus before it could be born, and seriously endanger the life of the mother if the pregnancy continued. She and her boyfriend had done a lot of soul searching over the last two week and had decided to follow the doctor’s strong advice to terminate the pregnancy. Now she had come in for the procedure and was preparing for it, but going through a great deal of anguish. The particular procedure she required involved inducing labor and delivering the fetus after it had been terminated- a particularly difficult procedure, both physically and emotionally.

Most of this though, I only learned later. At 7pm, the call I got was, “Matthew I’m with a woman who is about to start a termination procedure and wants to pray- can you pray with her?” This had happened a few times before, and while a few years ago I’d have said the idea of praying by phone was crazy, I’ve seen that in an imperfect situation where real connection in the moment isn’t possible and someone so dearly needs to know that what they are doing will not take them from the loving embrace of God- praying by phone sometimes can do some real good. We talked for a few minutes, enough for me to learn enough about where she was and what she needed so I could offer at least a modicum of comfort, and then we prayed together. Mostly I just created a safe spiritual space in which she could say what she needed to say to God, and hear re-assurance that she was loved and blessed and God was with her, and holding her through this. We recited the Lord’s Prayer, and talked for a few minutes more and then she had to go.

We hung up and I said my own prayer- mostly for her, but also a bit for me. Hope that I’d been able to help her, thanks that I could be present in that moment. And then- I went on with my night. Those moments haven’t happened often, maybe a dozen times or so now over the three years I’ve been doing this work. Sometimes we are able to schedule a more through conversation over the phone, or we can meet in person. But about a dozen times now I’ve gotten that call, from someone who just needs someone to pray with right now, someone who will understand. And every time I get one of those prayer calls- it’s always a bit strange. I’m going about whatever I am, and all of a sudden I’m completely focused on someone I’ve never met, being emotionally and spiritually present with them in the midst of a major moment in their lives. Then we hang up… and they’re gone. And suddenly I’m back doing whatever suddenly very mundane seeming task the phone call interrupted, reminding myself I may well never hear from that person again, never know if my words helped or what happened to them, but instead I need to get back to my day.

This time though, about 10 minutes later, my friend called again. She told me how grateful the woman had been, how much it had helped her to pray together, but she had a further request. She was very worried, in her words, about the baby*. She wanted to know if I could come down when the procedure was complete and the baby had been delivered and perform a baptism. My friend couldn’t tell me when this might happen, though it would likely be sometime in the next 12 hours or so. All she knew was that they wanted me to be on call, so that when they were ready I could come down.

*I should interject a quick note on terminology. The procedure involved inducing labor and the delivery of the fetus after its termination, to prevent it becoming septic while still inside the woman after termination. The question then becomes how to refer to what was delivered. Some call it a fetus. Come call it fetal tissue. In this case, as I’ll get to, the woman referred to it as her baby, and that is the terminology I will use as well, to honor her experience. Now back to our regularly scheduled story, already in progress.

It was 7:30 or so by now. I had dinner plans with a good friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I had a long list of things on my plate for work the next day, and I badly wanted a good night’s sleep. But, whether you wanna call it a mark of good character, or just bad boundary setting, I agreed. My friend couldn’t give me many details, but said she would call me when they were like 30 minutes way from needing me. Since my friend lived an hour north or so, I regretfully cancelled dinner and started getting prepared.

I didn’t want to go to sleep, as if her call woke me up I feared the time it took toget dressed and ready would be far too long before I could get out the door, and there would be only a short window of time between the delivery and when the baby had to be taken. . So I got together what I thought I would need; got dressed in my slacks and clerical collar shirt, found a stole I could wear. It occurred to me that I’d never done an infant baptism of any kind, let alone under such extreme circumstances. I’d taught about the importance of offering that service to those going through fetal loss, and all of a sudden it became so important to me to find exactly the right ritual. I spent more then an hour looking through books and collections of liturgies for reproductive loss and poking around online till I caught myself, and had to laugh. I was looking because I was nervous.

I spent the next few hours just waiting. Talked with friends online, some of whom knew why I was antsy and needed company, others were just good enough to keep talking late into the night. Around midnight I kicked myself for cancelling my dinner plans, since I could have gone and been back. By 3am I was starting to think I should have just gone to sleep cause at this rate I was going to be utterly wrecked by the next day. Finally, around 3:30 my friend called and said they were getting close to beginning labor, and I should expect a call in the next hour or so.

I got the sudden though that I should be close by, that if I was going to wait anywhere I might as well do so by the hospital, so I got in my car and made the drive. I called my friend again when I got there but she could not answer as she was with the patient. It was at that moment I realized I had no idea where in this huge hospital they were, nor did I know the patient’s last name, and I had my doubts about getting into a hospital waiting room in the middle of the night with such little information. All of my discussions with my friend had been hurried and I still had only the smallest sense of what was going on. So, in what seemed both the most logical choice, and the perfect summary of the rather ridiculous nature of my whole evening to that point, I sat in my car parked outside the hospital, alternating between dowsing off for a few minutes and reading my book.

Finally, around 6 am, my friend called. She only had a moment, the patient was about to go into labor, but I should come up as soon as possible, and she told me where to go. It took a good ten minutes or so to find my way to the right room, by which time I was glad I had already driven down because when I arrived she had already finished labor.

I walked in- and there was such a pallor of sadness over the whole room. The first thing I saw was the mother (not using her name intentionally, and again, terminology- in her mind she was very much a mother in this situation, so that is the term I’ll use). She was in a hospital gown, hooked up to various monitors and machines and just looking… dazed. That look of someone who was experienced something terrible and it hasn’t fully sunk in yet. Next to her was a man who I later learned was her boyfriend, and the father of the baby, so obviously trying to push any of his own feelings down as far as he could so he could be there for her. My friend and another volunteer were also there, and you could just tell everyone was spent after the more then 12 hours since they had begun to induce labor. An event that normally has so much work but with a bundle of joy awaiting at the end, and this time, it ended in nothing but sadness.

My friend introduced me to the mother and father, and I came in and held her hand, and for a long moment just stood there, being present with her. We started to talk, and she was asking me if her baby was ok, if her baby was in heaven, if her baby loved her? Heartbreaking questions, but one’s I’d heard before. Here at least I was on comfortable ground and for little while I talked with her, with both of them, reassuring her that her child was with God, and that God loved them both and understood why such a decision had to be made.

From the moment we started talking there were tears on her face and as she cried she wailed so many different concerns- fear that she had killed her baby, that something else could have been done, that some how this had been her fault. After a little while, I was just holding her hand while she cried, and telling her again and again that this was not her fault, that she made the right decision, that God understood why she had done this, her daughter was with God and would also understand, that she had not killed her baby- things that sound like such empty platitudes, but which I have to believe meant something to her. Addressed her concerns, re-assured her- let her know that God was with her. After a while of crying she seemed to come to a place of peace. We held hands, myself her and the father ( who I knew I had not been paying much attention to and who I was concerned about, but I felt she needed to be my first concern) and together we prayed. After the prayer, she dozed off- she was clearly both physically and mentally exhausted, and the rest of us began to wait.

We were waiting for them to bring out the baby so she could hold it and say goodbye and I could baptize it. A baby who by now I had learned they had agreed to name Maria, so Maria she shall be for the rest of this story. It took a while- there was a lot to do and they obviously go to great efforts to make the result as less traumatic as possible. Finally they came in wheeling a little basinet, with a blanket over the top. They pulled the blanket back, and for the first time we could see Maria. The nurse picked her up- really picked up the cloth she was resting on, and so very very delicately handed her to her mother. Who held her, and again began to cry.

Maria was- I don’t think I will ever forget that sight, or that I can find words for what she looked like. She was so very, very small- her whole body was maybe the length of my hand. Her skin—I don’t even know if I can call it skin. She was a fierce red- the color of muscle tissue when the skin has been peeled away. I found myself wondering if at that stage of development the epidermis hadn’t even formed yet, and it was just muscle we were seeing. Her limbs looked like they were made of jello, so delicate and fragile. And her head- it was badly misshapen, and the flesh on it was shriveled, so it looked almost like a prune left too long in the sun. My understanding is that this was in part due to the fatal fetal anomaly, and part due to her stage of development- the doctor explained but I was paying more attention to the mother then the medical details. All I know is it a site I will never, ever forget.

For a long time she held Maria, rocking her slowly but so very gently, and talking to her. Telling her she loved her, saying she was sorry. For most of this I was trying to be a presence, let her know I was there and supportive, but I honestly doubt she knew any of us were in the room. She kept focusing on Maria’s feet, these tiny little bits of flesh at the end of her legs, with toes just barely perceptible and beginning to form, and saying that Maria would have had her feet, would have had feet just like her mother.

I had put on my stole and filled a little bowl with water when they brought in Maria, preparing to do the baptism, but now it was clear that her mother just needed this time to hold her, to talk to her. Finally, when she seemed to have run out of words, she looked up at me and nodded and I knew she was ready to begin.

I took up the little bowl of water and held it out for both of them, the mother and the father to put their hands on so we could bless it together. This was the first of a number of times where I may well have deviated greatly from what a baptism ritual was “supposed to be.” Instead, in that moment all I was remembering was one of the greatest things I learned in seminary- that the value of rituals is in what they do, and what they both needed was a ritual that they could experience together, that would speak to their concern that their child was loved and safe and in a better place.

I read through the words, some from the book, some from my head. Spoke some myself, had the two of them repeat others. When I got to the baptism itself… I tipped my finger in the water and touched Maria’s forehead- and it was like touching tissue paper, so incredibly delicate. The whole ceremony lasted only a few minutes, though it felt far longer, and when it ended- I didn’t yet know why, but I knew we weren’t quite done. I finished praying and the mother went back to rocking and talking to Maria. She kept talking about how she would have loved Maria so much, been such a wonderful mother- and more then anything, more then the talking, she was just holding her. The father, who I could tell had been doing such a valiant job to bury any of his own feelings and simply be a loving supporting presence for her, started to let his frustration show, and suggested to her that it was time to put Maria down. But she wasn’t ready, suggesting that he if didn’t want to be there, he didn’t have to be. I saw the anguish on his face and in some ways I think that moment was the most painful. Understanding how much she needed this moment, and that she saw him as trying to take that away from her, but also knowing that all he really wanted was to help her let go and instead had her believing he simply didn’t care. Knowing that in that moment I couldn’t possibly know all the dynamics present in their relationship, and how this was effecting them, just that they were both in pan.

We stayed like that for a while- he came in and took her hand and I think she started to understand he was there for her. It occurred to me that while the baptism was important perhaps there was more that was needed, and when I suggested that could do a memorial service for Maria, I could see on both their faces this was what they had been needing. Again the stole went on and again the book was a guide, though a very loose one. We said a few prayers, reminded each other of God’s reassurances for those who mourn, spoke of Jesus’ particular love for children and that any child who passed would be held in God’s bosom. I gave them each time to say their goodbye to her- both so they could say it themselves and so they could hear it said by the other. Finally I made a blessing over Maria, re-committing her into the arms of the divine, and then holding hands and saying the Lord’s Prayer together. We stayed that way, just holding hands, for a long moment, and then when I asked the mother if she was ready to put Maria down, she nodded her head yes, and we got the nurse to help return her to the bassinet.

By now it was almost 8am. When I entered the room it had been dark out, and now the sun was shining through in beautiful day light, in what seemed a cruel mockery of what we’d been through. She had a few more things to do with the doctors, and they wanted to keep her under observation for a few more hours, and I thought I would stay a bit longer and then make my exit, so I could get at least a few hours sleep and go back to work in the afternoon. But I still had one more surprise in store. When she dozed off, the father started to step outside, and I put my hand on his shoulder, asking him how he had been doing. I felt he had been largely in the background for most of this, and while I sensed he was feeling his own complex, powerful emotions, my impression was that he was mostly just trying to be a rock for her.

So I was surprised when I could see the tears starting to form in his own eyes, and he asked me to come down stairs with him while he got a smoke. My friend and the other volunteer were both there, and would be there for the mother if she woke up, so I went. We got down stairs and he started to pour out his feelings- telling me that while he did not connect with the body of what had been the pregnancy as his girlfriend did, his heart was breaking over the loss of the child he had been so excited to be a parent too. He spoke of how powerless he felt from the moment they first learned about the anomalies and the need for the termination, of his going to numerous other doctors to get secondary opinions. He spoke with pain in his voice about how alone he felt because he knew his own church and his family would not accept what he had done, and neither would hers- that in both cases they would see it as an abortion and thus simply wrong, without any consideration of the anguish they both felt as they realized they simply had no other medical option to avoid losing both lives. He talked and I listened and I said a few things, but mostly I was just there as a presence for him, letting him know he was not alone.

Finally, around 9am I gave them my information so they could contact me to meet again and pray or talk or do a further service, made my good byes and headed out. By 9:30 I was back home and I sent a few emails cancelling morning meetings. I crawled into bed and set the alarm for 11:30, hoping that with 2 hours nap I could get through the day and be in bed by 9 or 10. And yet, I’m sitting at this computer at 1am, and I’m wide awake, trying to tell what I saw.

I feel like all of this should build to some great revelation, some amazing conclusion this story teaches me, that now I want to share with you all. But it doesn’t, not really. I was in that room, feeling like I was experiencing something that was changing my life, changing the world- and I went back out into the rest of the hospital, and it was a normal day. In some ways that makes sense, after all what I’d seen with Maria wasn’t actually that out of the ordinary. As I told the mother many times, situations like this are tragic, but they do happen. But maybe that’s the point of this whole story. That it’s so easy to look at numbers, and talk about aggregates, and how many pregnancies end in still birth or miscarriage or have to be terminated due to fetal anomalies that not only doom the potential child but pose a serious risk to the life or health of the mother. But once I stepped into that hospital room, for me it wasn’t a number. It wasn’t one more. It just was what it was.

I drove home absolutely exhausted. Physically, but much more emotionally and spiritually. As I drove I kept thinking, this is what ministry means to me. This is what it means to, in what I say so often it is fast becoming my own personal cliché, try and balance the prophetic and the pastoral. Because later this month I’m sure I’ll be making a point based on those aggregate numbers, talking about all the things we need to do to make sure everyone has the right and the ability to make the difficult choice those two people did, not to mention all the other related things I fight for that are just as central to reproductive justice. But last night- there was nothing political about any of it. It was just people, going through one of the most difficult moments of their lives, and my trying to find a way to be a pastoral presence, to bring a bit of healing.

I hope I did. I know I did- though I know I did that no where near as much as all the other people who helped them get through that night, from the skilled doctors to the nurses who showed such sympathy and care every time they came into the room, to whoever did such a marvelous job taking the fetal tissue expelled by premature labor at the 4, almost 5 month point, and turning it into a baby they could say good bye to, to those two amazing volunteers who stayed with her not just for the few hours I did, but for more then 14 hours making sure that she was not alone.

I’m glad I got to be one piece of the puzzle, helping them through that night. I’m glad I do the work I do, and I feel so blessed I have this opportunity. Last night was a good night- and one of the most troubling I’ve ever had.

I just needed to tell someone.

Airport Evangelism

2008-11-17T13:17:57Z

Travel has been the word of the day for the last few weeks. November has taken me to Boise, Cleveland, Atlanta, Baltimore, Salt Lake City and Washington DC, not to mention day trips to the seminaries of Union and Princeton, in New York, and New Jersey respectively. There have been a lot of stories from the road that I hope to tell in these pages soon, one of which I already mentioned here- http://anothervoicemdf.livejournal.com/56526.html#cutid1 But one of the defining realities of these last two weeks, amidst all the activism and inspiration and amazing people I have met and gotten to work with, has been the airports.

By this point, I know the security procedures that my prosthetic leg requires so well I could teach TSA newbies (and did walk one or two through it when they weren’t sure of what came next.) I can tell you the relative merits of each of the New York City airports, and where to get an amazing burrito in Terminal B of Salt Lake International. But the moments that have really stuck with me, where when I found myself talking about God.

The first was humorous, the second, poignant

I had gone to Boise to meet with local clergy and give a presentation on the role people of faith can play in the effort to make comprehensive sex education available to students throughout the country. Afterward, I went straight from the event to the airport to try and catch one of the last flights out of town, (Boise to New York, by way of Salt Lake is not the most popular route, oddly enough) and so I was still wearing my clerical collar and suit when I got to security.

That’s when the fun started.

It would appear that a man dressed as a minister, but also having long hair and an eyebrow ring is enough to raise a few eyebrows amongst the good people of the Boise TSA. So after going through the normal security screening they pulled me aside, and while one person methodically went through my bags, the other made a point of sitting off to the side and keeping up a constant stream of questions about my ministry.

Now on the one hand, I think this must be standard procedure. The person asking me questions made a point to sit opposite her colleague so that her questions made me focus on her and I couldn’t pay attention to the woman searching my bags. But the woman quizzing me focused all her questions on why I was wearing a collar- am I really a minister, what did I believe, what kind of church did I come from? My personal favorite- how could I be a man of God if I had an eyebrow ring, since, didn’t the Bible forbid “desecrating the temple of the flesh?” Those were exact words.

It became clear as we spoke that she didn’t believe I was a real minister, and so she thought must be wearing the collar to try and hide something, to try and get past security. She quizzed me, asking me my favorite book of the bible, or how I felt about a particular parable, and was visibly surprised when I not only knew what she was referring to, but could talk knowledgably on the subject.

There was a point in the conversation when it seemed she moved from suspicion to curiosity. When she was no longer making me prove that I was a real minister, a real Christian, but was instead learning about how someone could love the same Bible she did, love the same God she did, but come to such different conclusions then she did on the nature of justice and God’s love, and what we are called to do in this world.

Maybe by the end she believed I was a minister and was just being polite. Or maybe the whole thing was just because my razor or something else in my bag set something off, and she never cared one way or the other about why I was wearing a collar. But I have to say I honestly believed she was suspicious because when she saw me, I simply did not fit her idea of what a minister could be, what a Christian could be. I believe that, and that by the end of our time talking, (and by the time her colleague was satisfied I had no contraband in my bag) her idea of what it meant to be a Christian might just have expanded a little bit. If that’s not evangelism, I don’t know what is.

The other event happened a few days later. I was coming home from Cleveland, Ohio where I had done a training with an interfaith group of clergy, and I was bone tired after so much travel. I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize, and as I had a few outstanding contacts I was waiting to hear back from for work things, I decided to answer it.

But it wasn’t anyone I knew. A few weeks ago, I had done a training for counselors at a hospital that deals with second trimester abortions, a two day procedure that can be rather intense. Most of the training was on helping the counselors to handle spiritual issues that the patients might raise, but I also let them know that they could give patients my number if they needed more in depth spiritual care. The call was from a woman who had set up an appointment to have her procedure later in the week, and wanted to talk to a clergy person about some concerns she had about what she was preparing to do. Sitting there in the crowded terminal, waiting to board my plane, I knew this was a terrible place to have that conversation, but she said she just wanted to talk sometime in the next few days so we set a time for me to call her when I would be back at home and she would be able to talk.

So I was surprised when a few minutes later she called again. She sounded near tears, told me she was worried that if she went through with this God would not love her, and asked me if we could pray together. My first thought, I admit, was along the lines of, oh boy what do I do now, how in the world can I pray like this? But that moment, she needed someone to pray with her. So I found a corner that was a little quieter, tried not to notice if anyone overheard and gave us funny looks, and together we prayed to a God of mercy and compassion who loves all of Her children and talked of how God would walk with us during times of difficult decisions, and would know and understand why we make the choices we do.

It was one of the stranger moments of my ministry to be sure. Not the kind of thing I had in mind when I went to seminary. But in some ways- exactly what I had in mind. How often have I heard that ministry is about being present with people where they are, when they are in need? That night- it was on a cell phone in an airport terminal.

anothervoicemdf @ 2008-11-13T08:18:00

2008-11-13T13:28:04Z

This Saturday, 11/15, there will nationwide protests of California's Proposition 8, as well as all of the recent attacks on same-sex marriage and the civil rights of all people.

Here in New York City, the protest will be taking place at City Hall at 1:30 pm. Meg and I will be attending. Let me know if you are thinking of going, maybe we can try and meet up.

For more information about the protest in NYC, or similar protests anywhere else in the country- http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com/?t=anon or on Facebook- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=545914124#/event.php?eid=33598248873&ref=mf

Please come and add your voice.

Joy, sadness, and a bit of hope

2008-11-05T15:10:24Z

There's a lot of joy in my world this morning; joy over Obama's victory, over the victories in the House and Senate where Sen. Elizabeth Dole, of the, my opponent is an atheist, smear campaign, was soundly defeated, and joy over the general sense that this may be a turning point in our national debate.

But that joy is tempered with a good deal of sadness. Not every vote has been counted, but it looks more and more likely that California will in fact enshrine hate and ignorance and homophobia into its constitution. There are still votes to be counted, but it seems likely that Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, will pass.

In my life there have been two states I've been able to call home. California is one of them- my adopted home for the years I was in grad school, and a place I'll always feel affection for. But New York is where I grew up, New York is where I returned to- at heart I'll always be a New Yorker.

Last night, for the first time in my life time, Democrats won a majority in the New York State Senate, giving Democrats control over both houses of the state legislature, as well as the governorship. For years, the barrier to any attempt to move LGBT rights forward in NY state was the hammerlock Republicans held over the state senate.

The majority is a small one, and some of them may well caucus with the Republicans on social issues. But there are also as I understand it some republicans in the state senate who are liberal on social issues, but never got a chance to vote because with the senate in GOP hands, LGBT bills almost never made it to the floor for debate.

It's been years since I focused on NY state politics, so there is a lot I'm still getting up to speed on. But that's going to change. All this sadness, all this disappointment over California- I know what to do with it. From what I understand, a number of groups are gearing up for a big push to get this new NY state legislature to legalize same-sex marriage. Sign me up.

A tiny bit of snark

2008-11-05T14:35:38Z

I try hard to avoid "I told you so" moments. It's a pretty petty urge, and when I feel it I try to squash it, hard.

And as I said in last night's post, this isn't a time to be rubbing victory in the face of McCain supporters. I do truly hope this election leads us at least a little further out of the division.

But that being said- the snarky part of me would love to find every person who claimed that Democrats had to vote for Senator Clinton, because Obama could never, ever win. Not those who genuinely preferred Clinton as the better candidate. But for every person who claimed we were stupid to nominate Obama, because he couldn't win- this morning I'm smiling a bit to myself remembering those words.

Watching History in Boise, Idaho

2008-11-05T07:42:00Z

Tonight I’m sitting in a hotel room in Boise, Idaho, experiencing a moment I’ll likely be telling people about decades from now. Friends of mine are texting and IMing me to tell me about the bars and parties they are at, jumping up and down and hugging each other and tearing up and celebrating this with friends. Part of me is sad to be far from all of that, to be experiencing this alone. But really- this is the best place I could be for this moment. Because I’m spending tonight in what I think of as the deepest of red states – and I’m hoping tonight is when we stop thinking in those terms.

For me at least- that’s why tonight is so meaningful.

The political and economic changes that this will bring are important. The change in how this country will be perceived is going to have ripple effects for a long long time. The election of our first African- American president- I can’t possibly put into words just how fundamental a chance in our national culture that represents, and that alone makes this one of those moments that students of American history will be talking about one hundred years from now.

But for me, more then anything, tonight is about the hope that we can move beyond the, red state-blue state, win 51% and screw the other 49%, style of politics. That’s been what really got me excited about Obama, what brought me over from just thinking he was the best chance to stop Clinton to actually believing in him and carrying me over into full on kool-aid drinking Obamamania. Everyone talks about ending divisive politics, but everything he did attested to his commitment to that- from the way he ran the campaign to how he engaged McCain to his books, to his speeches. He questioned the policies and strategies of his opponents, without once questioning their motives, or their patriotism. He assumed that those who agreed with him had integrity, avoiding the kind of tactics that leads Republicans to label those who disagree on how best to fight terrorism as disloyal, or leads Democrats to claim Republicans are racist because they honestly disagree on how best to combat poverty.

Without a doubt, the most painful, offensive moments of this campaign where those when Palin or McCain or their surrogates would talk about “the real America” of which I and my family and my community and my church most certainly are not members. While I’m sure you can spin these election results to justify almost any explanation of why this happened, a part of me truly believes that this night is in some small way a rejection of those politics of division. That people saw in Obama a way out of that kind of politics, and rejected McCain along with it.

We’re not going to be one big family, our nation has always had factions, and always will. But it seems the cycle is that every now and then they calcify and harden, until debates become conflicts, until a critical mass is reached and the divisions soften and the cycle begins again. That sentiment echoed loud and clear through Obama’s speech, but perhaps even more significantly, it was a central theme of the incredibly gracious speech McCain gave.

I think the GOP is now at a crossroads. They can choose to go deeper into division, to rail against how the election was stolen by Acorn and the media, and spent the next 4 years indulging in their paranoid fantasies of Ayers and Wright stalking the halls of the White House, looking for ways to betray America. In short, they can make the mistakes the Democrats made in 2000, when our hatred for Bush and our disdain for anyone stupid enough to vote for him led us into election defeat after defeat. Strategically it might be great if the Republicans made that same mistake- nominating Palin in 2012 for instance would all but guarantee President Obama a 2nd term. But I’d hate to see what that would do to our country.

So that’s one path the GOP could take. The other is to be a loyal opposition. To fight for their agenda, and attempt to forestall Obama’s, but to act in the knowledge that their disagreement is over policies and tactics, the disagreements of honorable people, all trying to help the country, with different ideas of how to do that. They can take up the gauntlet and the challenge that McCain threw down before them with his speech tonight, and give Obama a chance to live up to his promises to be a president of the whole nation.

I don’t expect the GOP to roll over and play dead- they are in opposition to the president and the majority of Congress and if the only way they can exert influence is through a filibuster or something similar- that’s within their rights. That’s how the system is supposed to work. But it works when we are all Americans, even if we disagree. Not when some of us are Real Americans and the rest are just Hollywood elites, or intellectual snobs.

Obama’s words hit me, because I was as bad as any in how easily I fell into that red state-blue state divide. I’ve lived my entire life in either New York or California, with little to no exposure to the “fly-over states” But these last few years, and the work I’ve been doing which has taken me to so many different areas I might never have gone to has really opened my eyes. It’s given me the chance to go deep into red states, both to find the little pockets of blue that you find here and there, as well as to talk to people with politics and ideas so very different then mine- but whose values aren’t that different.

Earlier today I landed in Boise, Idaho and before coming to the hotel I’m at now, I had dinner with two of the people who help make Planned Parenthood of Idaho run. Dedicated activists, proudly liberal, and they didn’t talk about being alone in a conservative sea, abut being strangers in a strange land. They talked about how much they loved Idaho, their home, even if they didn’t agree with other residents in regard to politics.

A few minutes after Obama’s victory was announced I stepped out of my room and went to the front desk to get some soda and a snack. It’s a quiet night and the woman behind the desk was watching the election results while talking to a friend about it on the phone- and was in tears. Not the tears of many of my friends- though she quickly put the phone down when I came into view, I heard enough to realize she was crying because she was so upset that McCain had lost.

I’m hopeful tonight because I believe Obama will be the president of all the people I’ve met here in Idaho, on every side- as well as all those I know back in New York, and everyone in between.

President Obama.

2008-11-05T04:07:17Z

Yes we can. Yes we did.

Now I'm just keeping my fingers crossed about Proposition 8 in California.

An Open Letter on Same-Sex Marriage

2008-11-03T14:39:10Z

As anyone who has read these pages for a while knows well, marriage equality is an issue of deep importance to me. With all the other potential good news about the upcoming election, I’ve been saddened to read that Proposition 8, in California, which would amend the constitution to ban same-sex marriage, seems likely to pass. I wanted to fly out to California and be part of the campaign to oppose the amendment, but I just couldn’t make it work. So I’ve been doing what I can from a distance. Part of which, has involved making a personal appeal to my family and family friends in that state.

For the most part, I try to keep politics out of my relationships with friends and family. I know there are people I love who I disagree with, and while debating is fun, I mostly try and not make political appeals to family or close friends. But this upcoming vote on Proposition 8 in California- it just feels like something I have to reach out on. Partially as someone who just got married myself, partially because I know so many dear friends who are personally effected by this- and just because it just seems so wrong to set barriers on who can love each other based on gender, and whose love the state will recognize as valid.

Last night, I sent an open letter by email to a number of my California resident family and friends, people who I wasn’t already sure how they would vote, people who had been invited to my wedding and either attended or sent their blessings and best wishes. I asked them, in that spirit of support for my own marriage, to support access to marriage for all.

It’s not my best piece of advocacy. Far from it- somehow the personal nature of writing this made it all the harder to find the right words, and I’m still far from satisfied. But I wanted to send it, and to post it here.

To my Californian family and friends,

A little more then a month ago, as you all know, I got married. Many of you were able to travel the great distance to be with Meg and I on that special day, and as a part of that ceremony you gave us your blessing. Those of you who could not be with us in body made sure to let us know you were present in spirit, and I was greatly touched by your words of support and affirmation as Meg and I took this new journey together. It is in that spirit that I am writing to you all now, to ask you to once again affirm and bless my wedding to Meg by helping to make sure that no one is denied the right to find such blessing in their own lives. I am writing to you to ask you to honor and defend my own marriage by voting against proposition 8 in the upcoming California elections.

Let me start by saying that this email is out of the norm for me. All who know me know how passionately I care about politics and issues of justice, and that I follow CNN and election news with the same fervor with which I follow my New York Mets. Yet I have always tried to let political matters stop at the water’s edge. I adore arguing politics with friends or family and I deeply respect the beliefs of those of my friends and family who disagree with me on political or justice issues, and while I’ve not always succeeded, I’ve tried to never cross the line from conversational debate into advocacy, trying to convince someone to vote one way or the other in a manner more appropriate for a political campaign then a friendly discussion.

In short, I’ve never sent an email like this before. Nor do I expect to again. Yet in regard to this issue, at this time, given the importance of the issue and my own recent personal connection to it, I feel I must make this personal appeal. And I use that phrase, “personal appeal” intentionally. I don’t want to go into all the arguments that I’m sure you’ve heard over and over again, on both sides. Same sex marriage after all isn’t just about the nature of marriage and love, its about access to health insurance and adoption, and tax benefits, and all the numerous ways that same sex couples are discriminated against by not being allowed to marry, but I don’t want to use this space for that argument. I don’t want to use this space to challenge the myths that have been spread about Prop 8, though I hope anyone who thinks that this bill would in any way effect churches, reads this- http://www.noonprop8.com/about/fact-vs-fiction. Instead I want to make a personal appeal. I want to ask you to help defend my marriage.

Because my marriage is meaningless unless everyone is allowed the same right, regardless of the gender of their partner.

I asked Meg to marry me because I knew that I had found in her the person I wanted to build a life with. Because at the center of my own personal theology is the idea that we experience God in our relationship to others, in our love for others, and that nothing in my life had brought me closer to an understanding of God then my love and connection to Meg. I learned what I understand about love as I’ve learned almost all of the most important things in my life; by observing others. I’ve seen love between people of the same gender, and of different genders, and I’ve seen no difference. Just as the God I believe in loves us all with no care for the human classifications of gender, class, race, or what have you, so to I cannot believe that love knows any such classification or barrier.

As part of our journey toward marriage, Meg and I discussed at length and then put on paper what marriage meant to us:

“We, Matthew and Meg, understand marriage and the wedding that creates the marriage to be a celebration of two people vowing before God and their friends and family to spend their lives together in a covenant of love and trust and commitment. In our understanding, and that of our church, the love that is at the heart of a marriage is not affected by gender. The vows we take to each other are not as man and woman but as two children of God, solemnizing their love in sacred covenant, and would be no different and no less sacred were they undertaken by two people of the same gender.”

I must confess, I began this letter more then a week ago. I have returned to it almost every night since, and found myself searching in vain to find the right words. I hoped to give a passionate, personal appeal, to tell you why it so breaks my heart to think that two people in love should be denied the fundamental joy that Meg and I were able to share. To make an argument that was not patronizing or condescending, but tried to tell you why I, as someone who was so recently married myself, takesthis issue so personally.

I’m not sure I have succeeded in walking that fine line. In fact I’m rather sure I have not, and for any of you who are offended by my words, I am sorry. It is ironic that someone who makes his living by convincing others with his words finds himself so at a loss on a matter of such importance. But the election is now but a few days away, and my window to edit and re-edit this is growing short, and this needs to be sent. Because at heart this isn’t about making a perfectly crafted argument, or addressing all of the policy and financial and civil rights arguments that surround the issue of gay marriage.

It is about the simple fact that every time others are denied the right to marry because of the gender of the person they love, it denigrates the love that is at the center of my own marriage. It makes love about categories, about something that can be felt only by one type of person toward another type of person. That understanding of love simply fails to explain what it was that led me to stand before my friends, my family and my God and pledge myself to Meg. On behalf of all of my friends and loved ones who have recently made their own pledges of love to each other in the state of California, pledges that will be dissolved in the eyes of the law if Proposition 8 is allowed to pass, on behalf of all of those who helped me to understand what love truly is, and to help bring me to that garden in Brooklyn last month-- please vote no on Proposition 8.

In closing, please understand that I will make this appeal once, and once only. I am more then happy to discuss this with any of you at length, to hear your responses and reflections and disagreements if you wish to have that discussion. But I promise you that it is not an issue I will bring up again. I will never quiz you about how you in the end voted, or make this a source of strife when next we meet. You are my friends and my family, and we may simply agree to disagree.

But this one time I will ask- if you support my own marriage to Meg, please do not allow California to denigrate it, by declaring the marriages of others less valid. Please defend my marriage, all marriage, by voting against proposition 8.

Invite a minister to your party...

2008-11-02T11:38:58Z

...and you're likely to have a debate about religion taking place in at least one corner of the room.

I was at a friend's birthday party last night for someone I'd been friends with in High School, and was steeling myself for a night of catching up with people I'd not seen in years, and likely wouldn't see again for years more.

So when I overheard a discussion of Bill Maher and how right he is about the evils of religion, and someone else chiming in that of course anyone who is Christian must believe the literal truth of the bible, and thus be laughably stupid, it didn't take me long to find a way to work myself into the discussion.

It wound up being a pretty pleasant conversation, that carried me most of the evening in various iterations with various people. Even the- no, not all religious people are the right wing fundamentalists you want to believe they are, please don't paint us all with that brush- section of the evening was relatively painless as the guy quoting Bill Maher had some legitimate comments about how he'd give credit to the idea that the religious right didn't speak for all religious people, if the rest of them made more noise.

A few times I ducked out of the discussion to try and find someone I knew back in the day and ask what was new in their life since I'd last seen them, and would invariably get pulled back into the religion discussions. But the truth- I didn't try that hard to avoid it.

See, that's the dirty secret. As much as we ministers protest and whine about how we hate going to social events and all anyone wants to talk to us about is religion- for me at least, I know I'll take it any day of the week over making small talk.

My mother in law wins

2008-10-31T15:50:47Z

For anyone who has wondered about the cool sides of librarians- I present, Pimp My Bookcart.

http://www.unshelved.com/PimpMyBookcart/cart.aspx?cart=378

The woman in the yellow hat and blue jeans in the first picture, and best seen at the bottom left of the second picture, is Meg's mother, my mother in law.

Wedding/Honeymoon Post #7: New Hampshire, for the win

2008-09-29T14:57:26Z

We had a pretty ambitious plan, and in the end we wound up hitting New Hampshire and just staying there, because we loved it so much.

We had a pretty ambitious plan, and in the end we wound up hitting New Hampshire and just staying there, because we loved it so much.

Everyday since Wednesday, we would start out with a rough idea of what we wanted to do, and then find 3 other things that caught our interest along the way, pushing some of our original plans back, and making us decide to stay one more day. It wound up being the perfect mix of everything we had talked about, and easily been the best part of this week.

While in New Hampshire we have:

Hiked every day.. Some have been planned hikes that were recommended, others where we just pulled off by the side of the road, noticed a sign indicating a well worn trail and decided to take it. With my leg we’ve not taken on the more challenging trails, but just being able to go a half mile or a mile, and at times go more then 1000 feet higher in elevation, I was pretty pleased. And the scenery has been breathtaking. We’ve hiked to waterfalls, hiked to and then into caves, hiked down into gorges and seen how rivers have cut paths into the rock over hundreds of thousands of years. We’ve seen things that literally took our breath away, made all the more powerful by the effort it took to get to them. It’s one thing to see something beautiful by driving up to it, but there is something magical about feeling the burn in your legs fade when you come up over the ridge and see the waterfall that inspired your hike.

One of our first hikes was a trail that followed a mountain stream back up to its source. We would keep finding places where the trees would part and from the trail we could walk right up to the rocks that the stream had cut its way through, with little waterfalls and polls along the way. About a third of a mile along the way we wound a place where the rocks sloped upward but were relatively flat and we decided to go up the rocks themselves. We went that way for a while, climbing on all fours a few times to get up to the next rock, and coming to a place where the water was running fast with a little drop into a pool. Nature’s own water slide! We’d worn bathing suits under our hiking gear for just such an occasion and while it was pretty cold, we loved getting to slide down and play in the falls.

On another hike we saw a bear! We had been warned to be careful of bears and moose, but also that we were unlikely to see them, especially in the more populated areas. Since neither of us was up to the more intense hiking that would be involved in getting to the more out of the way trails and areas, we resigned ourselves to not seeing much wildlife.

So we were both pretty shocked on Thursday when we were coming back along the trail after having hiked to a place called Sabbaday falls, almost back to the start of the trail and our car when Meg suddenly grabbed my hand and pointed. The trail curved up ahead and through the trees we could see a small moving bit of black fur. It disappeared quickly and we wondered if we were just seeing things but then we turned the curve and up ahead was what could be nothing but a bear cub, maybe 70 feet ahead. We both stopped- as much out of shock and just wanting to watch as much as knowing that it was clearly a cub, and mama must be nearby and so we didn’t want to do anything that could be seen as threatening. We watched for about 10 seconds as it slowly made its way across the trail and into the woods, and then we continued back up the trail, amazed we’d gotten to see that.

The whole experience of hiking was particularly incredible for me as someone with a mobility disability. If you had told me 7 years ago that my honeymoon would have involved numerous hikes, cave exploring, climbing up rocks and around or through small falls, I’d have told you that you were nuts. I am so grateful, and so lucky to have had, first friends in California, especially Blair who helped encourage me to re-discover that, and now to have a partner in Meg who has really helped me to become comfortable doing as much as I can and no more, but not letting that ever hold us back. There was so much goodness on this trip, but the hiking was probably one of the real high points.

Along with the hiking, some of the other things we have done in New Hampshire included:

Climbing Mount Washington. My cousins, Eddie and Katie, went to Kilimanjaro on their honeymoon. Our claim is a little less mighty- particularly since we climbed Mt. Washington in a car! But it was still pretty amazing, to drive all the way up the Mt. Washington Auto Road, the last few miles of which we were driving literally in the clouds. From the summit, on a clear day the view I’m sure is amazing, and while the weather deprived us of scenic views, simply walking atop the summit of a mountain, in the clouds, feeling the wind whipping around you at a stop believed to have some of the worst weather on earth, is pretty mind-blowing. I’m also pretty proud of my dinky little Toyota Echo for getting all the way up, and I will proudly display the “This car climbed Mt. Washington” bumper sticker.

Camping and Cooking Outdoors. Our plan was to stay in hotels or bed and breakfasts at least the first and last nights, and camp out other nights when we felt like it, and find places to stay the rest as weather or our energy level dictated. It was nice having that freedom, and wound up working out quite nicely. Our first night in New Hampshire was quite cold and so we got ourselves room at a small little mountain lodge-inn in the Franconia Notch area where we planned to do a good deal of sightseeing. The place was wonderful, and as we realized we’d be staying for a while in that area, rather then having to pack up in the morning and find a nearby campground we decided to just stay another night. Even better, the place had out door cooking facilities, picnic tables and camping style grills, so we got to cook our own dinner the second night and eat out under the stars, one of my favorite parts of camping.

The next night, our third in New Hampshire, we got a spot and set up our tent at Camp Passaconaway, along the Kancamagus, a beautiful route through the mountains in the middle of White Mountain National Forrest. We wound up reserving for two nights, and in the morning drove off for Mt. Washington, fully intending to return to camp that night. But this was when the weather, which had held perfect all through the wedding and into most of our honeymoon turned bad on us. About half way up Mount Washington the rains started in earnest, which actually made the drive all the more exciting. But by the time we got back down the mountain, the pouring rain mixed with us both suddenly feeling how much the last few days had taken out of us, and so when we passed the Swiss Chalet Village Inn, offering individual cabins complete with hot tub, we knew it was time to spoil ourselves. That’s where we spent Friday night; the camp site was so cheap that we had no worries leaving the tent up on the site we’d already paid for and going back to get it in the morning.

All told, two nights of camping, with one more of cooking outside was just about right. We may not go again this season as its getting cold fast, but we’re already planning camping trips for next spring.

Food. New England, it should be said, is not world famous for its cuisine, and as the main staple is seafood and lobster and the like and we spent most of the week a few hundred miles from the coast, so we didn’t expect our dining to be the high point of the trip. That being said we did find a few gems, in particular Polly’s Pancake Parlor which has been open since the 1930’s and served one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had. I normally don’t like sweet tasting meat, but fresh sausage made with just a hint of farm fresh maple syrup was pretty wonderful. Other then that the highlight of our meals was probably the steak and champagne dinner in the woods that I mentioned in an earlier post, though there was also fair food and other small things we got along the way that was pretty wonderful. Back at the Big E fair at the start of our trip we’d picked up a good deal of home made beef jerky that we munched on off and on throughout our driving, and proved to be quite yummy.

New Hampshire/New England tourist clichés. I’m proud to report that the entire time we were in New Hampshire, heck even the entire time we were in New England, we did not visit a single antique shop! We did look at leaves, and enjoy their beauty, which was pretty amazing, but I continue to maintain that though we viewed leaves, we did not “peep” at them. (I did on one or two occasions, as we passed a particularly beautiful set of leaves point at one and say “peep” but Meg understood I was being ironic.).

Scenic drives. While the best scenery was what we found with our feet, it would have been hard NOT to find a pretty view as we drove along for most of our trip, especially since we mostly avoided highways. The last few days especially, as the weather turned rainy, driving through mist and clouds through hills and mountains was breathtaking. When we were finally ready to head home, we started off by heading south, down through New Hampshire’s lakes region which was equally beautiful.

We never made it to Maine, and I hope we do eventually. And we had fun on the parts of our trip that took us to Vermont, New York and Massachusetts. But its New Hampshire we will definitely be returning to.

Wedding/Honeymoon Post #6: Home again, home again, hippity hop.

2008-09-29T11:59:11Z

Meg and I got back home early yesterday afternoon. Twas a wonderful week, and we could have easily stretched it out further, but the combination of the oncoming storms in New England, a desire to have some time to rest and unpack before going back to work and just feeling like after our trip up Mount Washington (to be written about below) was a pretty wonderful conclusion to our travels, we decided to head back a bit early. We took a long leisurely route back, staying off highways and stopping frequently, enjoying the scenery and the time together.

Wonderful trip, lots more to say about it, but it’s good to be home.

Wedding/Honeymoon Post # 6: A meal fit for a honeymoon

2008-09-27T16:10:27Z

Friday, Swiss Chalets Village Inn, North Conway, New Hampshire

Thursday night we spent the night at Camp Pasaconaway, in the White Mountain National Forrest, in New Hampshire. We discovered the following:

Ingredients for a successful honeymoon dinner

A beautiful campsite deep in the woods.
A well build fire, with a grill atop it.
Butcher cut sirloin steaks
A jar of herb and spice dry rub.
A loaf of garlic bread, wrapped in aluminum foil
A bottle of Korbel Champagne.
All the fixens for s’mores.

T’was a good good night.

Lots more to say about New Hampshire and all the fun we've been having here, but I thought that meal deserved its own post.

Wedding/Honeymoon Post #5: Teddy Bears and Ticonderoga

2008-09-27T16:08:57Z

Friday, Swiss Chalets Village Inn, North Conway, New Hampshire

Tuesday, we woke up in our campgrounds and got packed up as soon as we could, as it was quite cold! Once we had everything packed up and headed north to Fort Ticonderoga. Ticonderoga means “place between the waters” and it is named that because it sits on the spot where Lake George meets Lake Champlain. The fort played a small but important role in American history and more important was a beautiful scenic spot with views far along each lake. We enjoyed a morning of wandering through the fort and hearing its history and the views.

As we were heading out we passed our tour guide, now on a break, and working with a hand saw on a large plank of wood which was taking the shape of an oar, with what looked like a large canoe behind him. When we stopped to ask him about it, he explained that he and a colleague had taken on the project of building a boat of the sort that would have been used to attack the fort during the revolutionary war, using the techniques of the day. The sheer joy on his face as he talked about what was clearly a labor of love, mixing deep historical knowledge with hands on skill was wonderful.

From there we drove just up the road to a ferry across the lake which took us into Vermont. Once in Vermont one of the first places we passed was an apple orchard which offered the chance to pick your own apples, and so we quickly pulled off. The place was run entirely by the honor system- a sign instructed pickers to take the bags they needed and put money according to what size bag you filled in a box that was nearby. The farmhouse at the foot of the orchard offered apple pies, apple cider and other delights, all similarly paid for on the honor system. We loaded up a bag full of apples (which we’ve been munching away on throughout the week), found a pie and some cider, stuffed the appropriate money into the lockbox and hit the road.

I should say a word about the driving, since its been a major part of our week. Since we got into Vermont, almost every mile of road has brought beautiful scenery. As often as we could we’ve avoided the highway and stuck to smaller roads, with much ooing and ahhing at all there has been to see, from covered bridges to cows and horses to mountain vistas. We’ve also been sharing a joy that we found we both love- books on tape. Meg and I love reading books where one of us can stop and talk to the other about something we’ve both read, and its been great fun to listen to something together, every now and then one of us reaching for the pause button to comment on what we just heard. So far we’ve listened to an NPC collection about baseball, a Michael Beshloss history of presidential courage, and our currently listening to Guns, Germs and Steel, a anthropological study that Meg loves and has been wanting me to read for a while. I imagine many people would think we’re nuts, but we’ve been loving it.

Our drive took us to the Vermont Teddybear Factory and the Ben & Jerry’s Ice-Cream factory, and then east, through the rest of Vermont and onto New Hampshire. We had both talked about wanting to see waterfalls and mountain streams in New Hampshire, so when less then a mile into the state we were pulled off by the side of the road, sitting on a rock by the water, watching a beautiful waterfall, it seemed a good sign. We thought we’d be in New Hampshire for a day and two nights. As I write this, we’re on our fourth night in the state, and talking about coming back next year.

Wedding/Honeymoon Post #4- A day at the fair

2008-09-27T16:07:00Z

Thursday 9/25/08, Camp Pasaconaway, New Hampshire

After breakfast with the folks who ran the Ivory Creek B&B, we were off to the New England, “Big E” Eastern States Fair. Growing up, it was always a big treat for Meg to go to her county fair, or even sometimes the state fair. I’d been to the Lake Champlain Valley Fair a few times when I was a kid and my family would go to Vermont, so we were both pretty excited to check out “The Big E.”

We wound up spending most of the day there. There were rides galore (Meg went on all of them, and some of the scarier ones twice, Matthew stayed on the ground and watched because he is either a) a fraidy cat or b) has a healthy respect for gravity, thank you very much, depending on who you ask. We got to see chickens hatch, prize winning pigs and sheep and llamas (New Hampshie has a prize winning llama- who knew?), hucksters selling the great new thing in mopping and back massage, all “as seen on tv”.

The main stage boasted a concert by Tiffany, the 80’s pop star, which I don’t feel bad describing her as, since that was how they publicized her. We wandered by a few times and she sounded pretty good, though we didn’t get to hear her do her cover of “I think you’re along now” the one song of hers I could remember, which all of the posters for her concert pointed out had been her big hit. I wondered if a career of playing concerts at state fairs in memory of your big hit 20 years ago would be great fun, or the 4th level of hell. Seeing her up there, belting away with a band for a crowd of a few hundred in the middle of the fair, I thought it would be pretty fun.

We spent money on silly adorable things like getting our name on a grain of rice, that then went in a little glass holder attached to a penguin keychain, and once we had our fill of rides and sun and fried food (of which we had quite a lot) it was time to hit the road. We drove the rest of the west across Mass back into NY, and then started north. Our plan was to make it to the town of Ticonderoga and camp near there, but while we were still about an hour away, and the sun hadn’t yet set, we passed a sign saying “campgrounds, next exit” which is how we wound up at Cold Brook Campgrounds. A quick trip to a local market got us hamburgers and marshmallows, along with sausage and eggs for breakfast and we were ready for a night in the woods.

Wedding/Honeymoon #3- Brunch and Driving Adventures

2008-09-26T22:54:11Z

Wednesday September 24th, Franconia, NH

On Sunday, we got up, loaded the car with all our stuff for the honeymoon, and then set off to our last official wedding event- a brunch hosted by my mother. With the help of a dear family friend, and a few family members who came by early, they had converted the activities room in my mother’s basement so it looked totally different. We had coffee, mimosas, bagels and croissaints and sandwhiches, and admist the feast those family members who hadn’t yet left town got a chance to chat about their favorite moments from the day before.

A few hours later, our stomachs as full as our car, we hit the road. We had a loose plan of where we wanted to go, but the basic idea was to be as flexible as possible. Meg and I have had wonderful times in the past on trips like this, where we have a vague idea of where we want to wind up, and a vaguer idea of the route we want to take, but plenty of possible detours, and plenty of time to explore whatever caught our eye along the way, and we have also found we love camping together, so the plan was to combine the two. We had a car full of campign gear, and information on both camp sites and hotels, as well as hiking and sightseeing spots throughout New England, and we were ready to go.
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The rough idea was to head up to Western Mass and enjoy the wonders of “The Big E” a New England wide state fair. From there we would continue north and cut back into New York to Fort Ticonderoga, a place I had visited a few times as a kid and had wonderful memories of. From there we would take a boat across Lake Champlain and take a long scenic drive through Vermont, with a stop at the Ben and Jerry’s factory, among others. From there we would head into New Hampshire and the White Mountain Natitonal Forest, particularly the Franconia Notch area which was supposed to have wonderful waterfalls and hiking. Once we had our fill of New Hampshire the plan was to head east to Bar Harbor, Maine, where Meg went to college. After a day or two of camping or hiking or boating or whatever else caught our fancy in Maine we would start to slowly wind our way down the coast back home.

Most of it was wide open. But the one thing we knew was that we wanted to start with a nice night at a bed and breakfast –someplace wonderfully decadent and relaxing where we could spend a beautiful relaxing night and let all the stress of the wedding and all the planning slip away. The perfect way, we thought to end the whole wedding process and kick off our honeymoon.

What’s that line about best laid plans…?

So, we had a reservation at a place called The Ivory Creek Inn, in Hadley Mass. From the website and all we read, it sounded perfect for what we wanted, and close to the fair that we wanted to get to the next day. We arrived about 6, and it was everything we’d hoped. The husband of the couple that owned the place, Todd, greeted us, at the door and showed us to our room, while telling us about how he and his wife, who had 11 children, had build the large house so they could have a place for the whole family to come home to at holiday time. They rented out the rooms when family wasn’t around to pay for it all, and cooked the meals out of their own kitchen. The result was very cozy feeling, and we looked forward to a lovely night.

After relaxing for a while we decided to head into the nearby town for dinner. We had a nice meal and a pleasant drive home, but as we neared the last turn we saw flashing lights.

This was when the fun really began.

It turned out there was a bad accident up ahead, and the road was blocked off. We then set off on a quest to try and find some other route to our B&B, but between the cop giving us bad directions, being far back in the woods with very few roads that went where we needed to, and our GPS not understanding that we needed to find some other way, we kept winding up back at the same spot. After more then 90 minutes of this we finally got directions to another route, all the way on the other side of the river that the B&B was next to. So we went through three different towns, looped around a few hills, found our way to the right road--- and came to a sign that said the road was blocked, as the bridge had been washed out.

As this point we were both at that point of either laughing or crying, and I started looking around for the camera, convinced we were on some reality show for newlyweds that someone had signed us up for without telling us. We debated our options, but since we were at least 30 minutes from the original spot where we’d been cut off, and the cop had said the road might be blocked till dawn anyway, going all the back seemed pointless. Instead we just decided to surrender to the absurdity of it all, and find a room at the nearest, cheapest motel. Having been earlier thwarted, here our trust GPS could shine, and it quickly led us to the local econolodge. The flashing sign advertised a honeymoon room with Jacuzzi, and I figured the honeymoon suite at an econolodge had to worth checking out, but sadly it was unavaible, so we checked in to a basic room, got ourselves into bed and collapsed. We spent a few moments wondering if we’d get our money back from the B&B, not to mention what they would think if they found our room in the morning, bed unslept in with all our bags scattered about, and with that, we went to sleep.

Now I imagine you all are getting sick of hearing, “it could have been a disaster, but Meg and I found a way to laugh about it, and that’s how I know we’ll be a good married couple” stories, and hopefully this will be the last, but it’s the only way I can describe that night. Especially because, it all wound up working wonderfully. In the morning we drove back to the B&B, explained what happened, and they immediately told us that of course they wouldn’t charge us for the night, but they still insisted we stay for breakfast. And the breakfast was amazing! Home cooked, just as we’d hoped when we first had the B&B idea, French toast and country ham and fresh fruit, and all of it wonderful. We chatted with the couple who own the place throughout breakfast; she’s still a practicing bio-chemist and he’s a retired rocket scientist, and we talked about that, about my and Meg’s work, about how the B&B gets lots of people on parent’s weekend at the nearby schools, about how Judy, Todd’s wife, developed a love of elephants when she was a kid from reading Babar, and that’s why there are elephants scattered everywhere throughout the place. It was a lovely morning, and we told them we would definitely be back sometime soon. We packed up our bags, left some money in the room to say thank you, and hit the road for the fair.

Wedding/Honeymoon post #2 The Wedding Itself- Joy and Chaos and Covenant

2008-09-25T04:32:40Z

Tuesday, September 23rd, Franconia, NH

There’s been lots of wonderful adventures on the honeymoon so far, but I should probably say something about the wedding itself. Eat your meal before the dessert and all that.

Weddings, it should be said, are a pretty big deal in my family. Family is a pretty big deal in my family, and weddings tend to be a great way to get us all together in one place; funerals being an almost as effective, but understandably less celebratory occasion. With my family, weddings tend to take up the whole weekend, with a get-together/rehearsal type event the night before and a brunch/debrief the morning after. I’ve always enjoyed that, but this time around I particularly saw the wisdom, since during the wedding itself I barely I had time to talk to all the people I wanted to catch up with.

Friday night we kicked things off with a dinner my father hosted. It was a nice event, very low key, just the out of town friends and family getting to mingle and connect amongst appetizers and drinks. I’m always bummed to go to a big event where 30 or 40 people get together to have dinner, but you wind up only talking to the 5 or so you are seated with, so we had planned this event to allow for as much mingling as possible.

It was a good night- I got to see and catch up with a lot of family, got to introduce Meg to people, and get to better connect with some of her family. Elizabeth, my dear friend from seminary and a fellow UCC pastor who had graciously agreed to perform our service was there and I had a great time catching up with her about our relative ministries, RCRC, seminary friends and the like. Perhaps most important, the night was a chance for Meg’s family and mine to meet and connect. I had spent some time with them, and various members of her family had met various members of mine, but this was a chance for everyone to be in one place. It was really nice seeing the different connections coming together. This whole experience has helped Meg and I to learn so much more about the worlds we each come from, and it was nice to see them start to come together.

The wedding itself was magical. I’ve heard people describe their wedding days with so many clichés, and I could probably use everyone of them.

The ceremony often seems to get short shift, but for both Meg and I, it was the most important part of the day, and we put quite a lot of work into it. We were also blessed to have a good friend of mine, the Rev. Elizabeth Dilley performing the service, who worked with us to help us design a service that spoke to what marriage means for Meg and I- a covenantal vow of love that two people make before their family, their friends, and their God. (For more on that, go to www.westfoxwedding.com, and click on “What Marriage Means to Us.) Throughout the whole process, both during the planning and during the ceremony itself, she made clear how much she shared our understanding that wedding is about a covenant, not a financial contract. Most importantly, she brought a sense of sacredness to the whole affair, praying at numerous times, bringing all the different pieces together. From the moment she began till when she presented us as a newly wed couple, I had a tangible sense of the presence of the sacred in our midst.

The setting was also everything we could have wanted. We were in a meadow at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, facing a beautiful old tree. I kept thinking of all that that tree must have witnessed over the years, all the ceremonies and private moments of reflection it must have inspired.

The reception was also everything I could have asked for. I barely had any food, but everyone else said they loved it. We started the meal with a Jewish blessing of bread and wine, both to honor my father’s/Jewish side of the family and because a blessing of bread and wine resonated with all of our families traditions. Barbara, who has been my supervisor and mentor at RCRC gave one of the blessings which I was quite honored by. My father gave the other, which was quite fitting given all the support he has offered to help make that day possible.

The last two items worth mentioning were the toasts and the dancing. Each of the toasts was given in love, delivered by someone who really knew either Meg or I, or in the case of my sister, both, and was able to speak from their heart about why they were so happy to see this day happen. Each of the three, and my father’s the night before, left me teary-eyed.

The dancing almost went disastrously wrong, in what wound up being the only hiccup of the day. On Friday, on my way to the dinner I got a call from our DJ, letting me know he might be late. He lives in Boston and we had made plans for him to come down the night before and attend the dinner. We were going to pay for his parking and make sure he had the chance to have everything ready for the next day. Now he was telling me that he had booked a gig the night before, IN Boston, and was asking if he could be a bit late so that he could get enough sleep.

I was furious. There had been some back and forth about the music and I knew he was annoyed we’d taken so long to get our music choices to him, but booking a show 300 miles away from our wedding seemed completely out of line. I was very concerned, but he assured me he’d leave early and be on time. I couldn’t imagine getting anyone else at that late date, so I bit back the screaming at him I wanted to do, and hoped for the best.

The next morning, I’m in my tux, I’m almost at the wedding site, when the DJ calls to let me know he’s so sorry, but he’s stuck in traffic. He’s still in Boston.

I’m pretty near panic at this point, but I take a deep breath, and start trying to figure out what we can do. We call a number of friends to see if anyone can bring DJ equipment and hook it up to the playlist we already have in an ipod, and ask the caterers to do the same with the DJ’s they normally work with. Of course, no one is available so last minute, so we just keep our fingers crossed and hope the DJ arrives before all the guests have left.

He wound up arriving almost 3 hours late- but the wedding coordinator who works for the gardens where the wedding was taking place was perfect. We kept changing plans on the fly, and it all went smoothly. We held off on all the dancing until after the meal, and it turned out most people didn’t even notice, but instead thought we had done this on purpose, and said they were glad to not have music during the meal so that people could talk to each other more easily. I can’t tell if they were just being polite, the silence seemed pretty glaring to me, but I’ll take it!

So even that wound up working out fine. I was bummed to have our dancing time truncated, and after having taken so much time (and gotten so much input from you all!) I was sorry that a lot of the songs we picked never got played. The first dance got a little screwed up (wrong song, but one that was almost as important to us) and the planned danced we wanted to do, most notably the polkas that were important to Meg since they were a part of every wedding she went to growing up, all wound up being rushed. But everyone had fun, people got to dance, or mingle, or do whatever they wanted to celebrate. Everything turned out fine.

There were a few other hiccups. A few other things didn’t make it to the site until just before the wedding, throwing off our schedule for photos. Some of the seating arrangements got screwed up, largely our fault, but it caused some problems. But in the end, it all came together. Best part- the moments when we had so many reasons to collapses into balls of stress and Meg and I would just take each other’s hand and remind each other that at the end of this, whatever happened, we would be married to each other. And given that, what else mattered? A number of people, including both of our families, made a point of telling us how impressed they were at how Meg and I stayed calm throughout and focused on what mattered.

I’ve heard so many times that a wedding is a great test for a couple; that the stress and the chaos bring out the fault lines, the tensions that are beneath the surface. There were moments on Saturday when it seemed like everything was coming apart, and all I knew was I was the luckiest man on earth to be marrying someone so wonderful, and that when I held her and we laughed about all the chaos, none of it mattered.

Playing Frisbee with my boys, while we all wore tuxes, was also pretty sweet, and a nice way to keep calm.

To round out the day, a bunch of us headed out to Coney Island, where Meg and I had originally been engaged. There was more Frisbee on the boardwalk, there was all of us riding the Wonderwheel, where Meg and I had originally gotten engaged. The looks we got on the subway and on Coney Island, with me still in my tux, Meg still in her dress, many others still in their finery, were priceless. Most importantly, not only did a lot of our friends and family come out to Coney, but so did a large number of people who we hadn’t been able to invite to the wedding, but who still wanted to come out and share our after party with us, to be part of the celebration. People from our church, from our various social circles, people from my past who I hadn’t seen in years but who have been following me on face book, dear friends who were in some ways surrogate parents to me in High School and who, along with their daughter played a major role in bringing me to Christianity so many years ago- they all came out.

All in all, one hell of a good day.

Wedding/Honeymoon post #1- Intro

2008-09-24T03:31:00Z

Monday, September 22nd, Adirondack State Park, New York*

For the next week or so, I’ll be blogging about my wedding and all the events that surrounded it last weekend, and the honeymoon that followed. In today’s world, it seems something didn’t happen unless you blog about it

Now of course, that’s ridiculous. The events of last weekend will be remembered by everyone who attended for some time I hope, and certainly need not be written down for Meg or I to remember that magical day for a long long time. Nor is a blog the only means I have to document what took place, we had not one but two professional quality photographers snapping away, not to mention a host of friends and family who have already started sending me their snapshots from the wedding. Emails have been zipping back and forth amongst family, sharing favorite stories and gossiping about who wore what, and I’m sure just as many phone calls have been made.

So there’s no real need to blog about the wedding, or the honeymoon that is now following it. But it seems to have become a bit of a tradition now, that when Meg and I take a journey together, as we did when we drove cross country, or when we traveled to Israel, that I recount our journey in this forum. Friends and family have told me they enjoy following along with our journey, and I find it an interesting way for me to gather my own thoughts on important events. It gives me a moment of forced reflection, a time to step back and consider what has been going on.

And if anyone is wondering why the style of this initial post seems so ponderous, I blame it on how much NPR we’ve been listening to. I’m writing to you now on day 2 of our honeymoon, Monday night, from the Cold Brook Campgrounds, enjoying the quiet and stillness of our campsite, and taking a few moments to type away as Meg sets up camp. (Our deal was, if I do the driving, she sets up camp, and its working out to be a nice division of labor, as it lets her nap when there aren’t pretty things to look at.)

Here are some of the pictures we’ve gotten back already, from Tom, the senior pastor of my church, and photographer extraordinaire.
More pictures, and blogging, to come soon.

Stay tuned.

*Note- Some of these posts will be dated a day or two, (or more) earlier then when they actually get posted, as my internet access is spotty. I’m writing posts when I have the chance and then posting them when I can get online, so the dates may not match up. The date and location listed are the date that the post was written, not necessarily when it was posted or when the events in question took place.

The Faithful Steward- A Sermon on Stewardship and Comprehensive Sex Ed.

2008-07-22T17:19:40Z

Last week I preached a sermon on the stewardship, the sacredness of sexuality, and the importance of comprehensive sex education. The two readings that were part of the service are first, and then the sermon itself.

READINGS:

Matthew 25:14- 29

For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, “Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, “Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.” But his master replied, “You wicked and lazy servant! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.

Genesis 1:23-29

And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.

Last weekend, I got to perform one of my favorite duties as a minister. A wedding.

When working with a couple, I always try to learn as much as I can about what marriage means to them, so that the service can best reflect that. In the case of the couple I married last weekend, they had used the metaphor of stewardship to describe their marriage. They saw themselves, not as losing their individuality or ceasing to be individual people, but as creating a new entity-- their marriage, of which they together would be stewards. They together were responsible for nurturing and protecting their relationship, seeing it grow and flourish.

It was, I thought, a beautiful metaphor, and it got me thinking about the whole concept of stewardship. It’s a rich word, a very “churchy” word-- a word we can see so many ways to understand and apply.

On the most basic level being a steward simply means being given the responsibility to maintain and care for something which is not yours.

In the church setting, it has become a polite way to talk about money. A stewardship campaign, as anyone who has been a part of one well knows, is a fundraising campaign. When we talk about the responsibility of those who oversee the church finances, of the responsibility of all of us in deciding how best to use the church’s resources-- we talk about that as an act of stewardship.

That’s what the parable that we heard from Matthew today is about. Look at any bible dictionary under stewardship, and this is one of the first references you’ll find. The servants are given something by the master and are judged by what they did with it.
To protect it is important-- but they are called to do more with it. To grow it. To help it flourish.

That’s what stewardship is, in a sacred context. Like the servants in that story, we are given a responsibility-- a sacred trust. We are called to be stewards of that which God gave us.

And as that couple I mentioned before demonstrated, financial resources aren’t the only things we are called to be stewards of.

You may have seen those ads, where Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson talk about how the one thing they agree on is protecting our planet? The ad doesn’t go into theology, but I imagine if you pushed each of them as to why protecting the earth matters, they’d both come around to some version of stewardship.

Because if stewardship means taking that which has been given to us by the divine and holding it, and protecting it, and nurturing it, and doing so in a respectful, reverent way that lets us pass it on to those who come after us, what better way to describe a sacred understanding of our relationship to the earth?

Simply seeing the earth in terms of sacred stewardship can radically change how we approach the earth and our relationship to it, but today I actually want to take this idea of stewardship just a little further.

In my work with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, we’ve recently done a series of events partnering with the Sierra Club and looking at the connections between environmentalism and sexuality-- safer sex, reproductive justice, the issues that RCRC focuses on. In these events we’ve looked at a number of ways in which environmental and sexual issues are intertwined, and one of the ones we most focused on was stewardship.

For just as we can see the earth as a beautiful gift we have been given by God, which we can enjoy but must use responsibly, so too we can see our bodies, of which our sexuality is an integral part, as a sacred gift we are called to be responsible stewards of. What if we saw our bodies, our sexuality, not as dirty and shameful, but as sacred-- and our discussion of how to be safe with our sexuality, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually, is approached from that perspective of stewardship?

Recently, while attending RCRC’s annual National Black Religious Summit on Sexuality, a wonderful event, I got to hear one of this country’s most acclaimed preachers, Rev. Frank Thomas, give a wonderful lecture on how we talk about sex in church and at the pulpit. One of his central themes was that we exist in this country in two different worlds-- Fat Tuesday and Lent.

The world of the carnival and the world of confession.

Now forgive me here if I’m summarizing and skipping over a number of his points, I’m trying to take a 3 hour talk and use it as just one part of this sermon. But his idea that I wanted to share with you all is that we have this kind of schizophrenic existence where there is the world of the flesh, the low down world of Saturday night, the world of pleasure-- and then there is the world of the spirit, the pristine, pure world of Sunday morning.

We think of sex as in that world of the carnival. And we want to keep our Sunday morning church world pristine and pure. So we never, ever talk about sex within these sacred walls.

How much damage is done by that silence, by the fact that we try so hard to keep those worlds separate, so that we don’t let ourselves talk about sex once we step into the sanctuary?

His point was that we must try to integrate those two worlds, to bring the carnival into the church, to talk about sex, not as dirty and low down, but as beautiful, as sacred.

Maybe one way to do that is to again use that lens of stewardship. To see sexuality as one more beautiful, sacred gift of the divine that we can treasure, enjoy, and treat with the reference and respect that such a sacred gift, a sacred trust, requires. That our discussion of how to enjoy our sexuality in ways that are respectful, and safe, both physically and emotionally can be seen through the lens of respectful use of a powerful gift, rather then the fear or shame that so often colors such discussions.

Now, I want us to hold that idea of sexuality as something sacred, something we can have stewardship over, and go just one step further, to another duty we all take on, together, as good stewards.

I’m speaking of stewardship of the young.

Now, I’m not a parent, but I imagine anyone who is would agree that parenting is a ministry of stewardship-- of being given a sacred gift and getting the chance to protect it, and help it grow and flourish. But I’m speaking here today, not of the relationship parents have with children, but the relationship we have, all of us, to the children in our church, in our neighborhood, in our country, in our world.

Here at All Souls Bethlehem Church, when we talk, as we often do, about our excitement at seeing new young faces coming through our door, and our excitement about getting a Sunday School program up and running-- we’re acting as stewards.

But if we think of stewardship as a responsibility, as a duty that accompanies a gift, then surely it is far broader then just the children in our church or our neighborhood. Don’t we all, as a community, as a nation, have a collective responsibility to our young people? Aren’t we all stewards?

I think we are. And holding that idea in mind, I want to tie together this whole long journey I’ve taken you on, bring it all full circle, because my main focus this morning is on a stewardship that I think we-- we as a church, we as a community, we a nation-- have failed at. Grievously.

I’m speaking of our sacred duty as stewards to teach our young people about sexuality.

We’ve all heard the numbers, and numbers can never tell the full story, but they are shocking enough that they bear repeating.

In the United States:

Every year, there are ¾ of a MILLION teen pregnancies- 82% of which are unplanned.
Every year, 9 million teens and young adults acquire a sexually transmitted infection. (STI).

But here in church, of all places, we know and understand that where numbers fail, stories can often far better drive a point home. So let me share this one brief story that a colleague of mine told to explain why he thinks the church must be front and center in the push to educate our young people about sexuality.

He told the story of the girl who came to his office, in tears. She had just found out she was pregnant, and she didn’t understand how it had happened. After all, as she told him, it was her first time, and her friends had assured her she couldn’t get pregnant her first time.

He started talking to her about sex, about birth control, about all the myths that teens hear about how things do or don’t work, about all the ways she could have prevented this-- and she looked him dead in the eye and said “Pastor- why didn’t anyone tell me this? I didn’t have to be pregnant now- why didn’t anyone tell me”

All of us failed that girl. Failed in our duty to be stewards. Neither her school nor her church taught her any of the things she needed to be able to healthy in her use of sexuality.

She was the product of “abstinence only” education, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Abstinence only is a method of sex education which teaches students that they should abstain from sex until marriage-- and that’s it. If safer sex or birth control practices are mentioned, it is either to demonize them, and anyone who would use them, or to give statistics, often wildly inaccurate ones, about their failures, specifically intended to discourage people from using them.

Now I confess I can understand why someone might want abstinence only to be what we teach our children. I mean-- sex is a scary topic. Let’s be honest-- it can be dangerous. It’s dangerous physically, in terms of the potential for pregnancy or STIs, and it’s dangerous emotionally. And as stewards, isn’t it our job to keep children from danger?

I can understand someone saying, look, we have to protect the children of our community, of our nation--let’s just keep them far far away from sexuality, keep them safe and protected until they’re married, and we can trust them not to get hurt. Children are so very precious, our responsibility to care for them and protect them so very great-- erring on the side of safety like that-- that’s our proper duty as stewards, isn’t it?

But think back to the parable we heard, the parable that forms the basis of so many of our ideas of stewardship. Three servants are all given something precious, and one of them-- well, we could call his the abstinence-only method of caring for that talent. He holds it as precious, he takes it and he buries it, he makes sure it is safe, and nothing can ever harm it. And does the Master reward him, thank him for keeping his precious talent safe and sound?

No. That servant is cursed, told that he has failed in his duty as a steward. It is the other two, the ones who took risks, the ones who took what they had stewardship over and allowed it to grow and flourish--they are the ones who are rewarded.

Sexuality, particularly how we talk about sexuality with young people in our churches and in our schools--it is a scary topic. But we can not just bury it under a rock. We have to find ways to teach our children about sexuality in ways that are comprehensive, holistic, that teach about sexuality in all its facets, including the biological, the emotional, and the spiritual. We must not only be stewards of our young, but teach them to be stewards of their own bodies, learning to understand and respect their sexuality, so that when they become sexually active they do so in ways that are responsible, sacred and safe.

Every study-- every single legitimate study that has been undertaken-- has shown that teaching abstinence only simply does not work. It does not delay the age at which teenagers begin to become sexually active. It only makes it that much more likely that when they do they will do so without using birth control or safer sex practices.

We can and should teach abstinence-- it IS the only way to truly avoid pregnancy or STIs. But we have to teach it in a way that teaches about the other options; that truly empowers young people. Empowers them with knowledge, taught at age appropriate levels, that prepares them to make responsible decisions about how to be stewards of their own sexuality.

Remember that lens I spoke of before, that idea of integrating both confession and carnival, of breaking that duality so we can see sexuality as sacred, and beautiful, and something we are stewards of?

We have to teach that in our churches. And we have to teach it in our schools.
In our churches—well, here at ASBC at least, we’re in a good place. We are affiliated as a church with both the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ, which have come together to create the Our Whole Lives curriculum, which does a wonderful job of addressing these issues at various points throughout a child’s development. I hope that as we start to develop a solid idea of what our Sunday School curriculum looks like, we will give serious consideration to including elements of Our Whole Lives in that program.

Other denominations and faith communities have developed similar programs or are in the process of doing so, and I dearly hope that work continues. It is sacred work, and it is dearly needed.

But as I said before, this isn’t an issue to be handled just within communities of faith. Our call to stewardship does not end at the church door. Just as we are called to feed the hungry and cloth the naked, so to we are called to do all we can to protect all young people, not just those in our family, our church, our neighborhood. And that has to include demanding that our nation’s public schools provide students with sexual education that is comprehensive; that teaches the value of abstinence, but also speaks honestly and frankly about contraception and protection; education that teaches the biological facts of sexuality and reproduction, but also teaches communication and negotiation, teaching young people how to be responsible and safe.

In recent years, in opposition to abstinence only, there has been a strong push toward what is referred to as comprehensive sexual education. CSE:

 Teaches in ways that are appropriate and medically accurate
 Teaches that abstinence is the only way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections and stresses the value of abstinence while also teaching about the benefits of contraception and protection
 Encourages family communication about sexuality
 Teaches negotiation skills for young people
 Teaches about the effects of alcohol and drug use on responsible behavior

This form of teaching goes beyond abstinence only, which does nothing to help young people be safe and responsible. At the same time, it also goes beyond fear-based methods of education, where all that is taught is biology and risk and how to be safe.

As one young person I spoke with told me-- I didn’t just need to learn how to use a condom. I needed to learn how to talk to my partner about safer sex.

There is a bill before Congress right now, the REAL act, which would provide states with the much needed funding for Comprehensive Sexual Education.

At the back of the church, you’ll find a petition for people of faith to declare their support of the REAL act. Similar petitions are being gathered all over the country, to show our nation’s leaders that protecting our young people is an act of faith. An act of stewardship. I hope you’ll sign the petition and take some of the information. I’d be happy to speak with any of you about what we can do, as individuals or as a church, to take action in support of the REAL act.

What we can do-- as stewards.

In closing, there’s one last kind of stewardship I’d like to turn our attention to this morning. One more responsibility of stewardship. My own.

You see, you all have made me a steward. You have given me, for these few minutes this Sunday morning, the gift of this pulpit. The gift of your attention. And just like those servants, I have a responsibility to use what you have given me wisely and responsibly.

So what have I done with it?
I’ve given you a few ideas to think about.
I’ve told you about a problem we should be aware of, and suggested one thing you can do about it.

But even with all of that, I would fail in my own duty, if I didn’t also tell you the good news.

And really-- this whole sermon IS good news.

The good news about the beautiful planet we live on, and what God has given us-- the chance to live here, and to be stewards of Her beautiful creation.

The good news about sexuality. That we can integrate carnival and confession. That our bodies, our sexualities, are sacred things, of which we are called to be responsible stewards. That our flesh is so sacred, so precious, that God took the form of that flesh and walked among us.

The good news that we have been given this responsibility. That we have all these beautiful gifts. That we have the opportunity to be stewards of all these gifts and to help them grow, and flourish.

Our world.
Our sexuality.
Our children.

Sacred gifts.

The question now is how will we use them.

Amen.

This is what gives me hope

2008-06-30T13:52:50Z

This is a great great article about the fading power of the religious right, as more and more Christians start to reject the idea that being a Christian means being a Republican.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1818313,00.html

I have no words...

2008-06-13T20:02:50Z

Tim Russert, NBC Chief Washington Correspondent, Host of Meet the Press, has passed away.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25145431/

I've never met the man, never seen him in person, only known him as a TV talking head- but I feel like I've lost a good friend.

I'm a political junkie and have been watching Meet the Press regularly for as long as I can remember. His voice has come into my home on a regular basis for an hour a week for years. This last year, its been far more frequent, as he's hosted debates and been featured on newscasts so often.

More then that- as much as you can tell from just watching someone on TV, he came across as such a good guy. One of the only major media people who would ask hard questions without letting his guest off the hook, one of the smartest minds in politics. And while he loved politics he had such a love of the rest of the world, especially sports. He ended so many shows with a plug with whatever one of his sports teams was playing that day, especially Buffalo, and it always made me smile.

Good bye, Tim. You will be missed.

Weddings

2008-06-09T21:58:07Z

This summer seems to be all about the weddings. I performed a beautiful service a few weeks that took place in a Brooklyn back yard, with the happy couple singing to each other as their declaration of intent. Later this summer I’ll be performing the wedding of nex0s and midnightstation. A few other people have talked to me about their own upcoming plans for services, maybe for me to take part or just to give some advice. And of course, in September, Meg and I will be getting married ourselves.

Politically, marriage is big news, and for good reason, and after the presidency I don’t think there is a political issue I will care more about this fall then the effort in California to defeat a measure that would overrule the court’s ruling allowing same sex marriage in that state. I’ve written about that subject before, and I’m sure it will grace this page again, but today what I’m thinking about isn’t marriage, and all the political and social and economic issues that surround it- its weddings. The day. The ceremony.

More then anything, I’m finding one of the things I most love about my work as a minister is meeting with a couple and helping them craft their ceremony. Walking through their ideas for what it should look like, separating out what they want from what they think they should have, finding ways to incorporate thing from their spiritual/religious/family histories that have real meaning to them, whether or not they still see themselves within that tradition. Sometimes I’m pushing things along, but most of the time I’m more an observer then a participant, getting a front row seat as they figure out how they want to declare their love to each other before their friends, their family and the sacred, however they understand that.

Its going to be a good summer.

Mostly quiet on the political front, but...

2008-06-05T13:31:22Z

For the most part, I’ve been quiet about politics the last few weeks. I’ve said a lot about the Clinton-Obama issue in the past but I just got to a point where I didn’t feel like there was anything more I could add, and any time I started talking to someone about it, it would quickly devolve to a fight where neither of us was hearing the other.

Plus, I’m not arrogant enough to think my posts would be anything more then one more voice adding to the chaos. So I’ve mostly just been quietly watching the last few weeks, waiting to see how things will play out. I imagine once all the dust from this last chapter of the primaries finally settles I’ll have more to say, but for now I’m just keeping my own counsel.

That being said, one thing this morning does seem worthy of comment- the almost ten minutes of my life that I will never get back because I spent them watching CNN do an in-depth analysis of the “Obama Fist Bump.”

Apparently the night he won the nomination, Senator Obama not only kissed his wife on stage, but also shared a bumping of fists and thumbs up with her. Cute- sure. Worthy of a moment’s notice- why not, it’s a slow news day. But ten minutes of analysis!?? CNN really went all out, even giving us a promo- “stick around, after this commercial break we’ll go in depth to ask, what is behind the Obama Fist Bump?”

Now I suppose my own decision to watch this is just as worthy of questioning as CNN’s desire to show it, but in my defense I was working out.

But 10 minutes? On a fist bump? I think we can officially call this a slow news day.

Why I do what I do

2008-06-03T13:27:09Z

The work I do is about so much more then keeping abortion legal and safe and accessible, but sometimes I'm powerfully reminded of just how important that part of this is.

This is a great article. It brought tears to my eyes, and reminded me of why I'm doing this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/health/views/03essa.html