Finding the sacred everywhere. Thoughts on religion, art, books, politics, philosophy, and life in general from a Unitarian Universalist minister.
This is as close to totality as we got in San Francisco. But at least the sky was unclouded. The “big sun” must be some kind of glare effect.
Listening to scientists describe totality, I want to see one before I die. Maybe I’ll go to Alaska in 2033, take in Denali and the Northern Lights while I’m at it. In the meantime, I’m watching it on NASA’s livestream right now.
I have been listening to people’s stories from Israel and Palestine (This American Life has had several lately) and looking at photos of the devastation. In one photo, the figure of a man standing in a doorway of a shattered building (his home?) seems so small, but also immovable in both dignity and grief. I was hearing the same in the stories, all the stories. I kept coming back to that photo until I realized that he was the person I needed to draw.
The drawing is conté crayon, about 4″ x 3″. The photo is below. I have seen it with various captions on different websites, usually with some editorial slant, but all agree that the photo is of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, and shows the result of an airstrike by the Israel Defense Force on December 6, 2023.
I have a gym membership, but a few times recently, I’ve put together a home, calisthenics (bodyweight only, no weights) workout in order to keep up with my schedule while traveling. I liked it pretty well, so I thought maybe I would switch to these workouts entirely. It would certainly save me a lot of money. My main concern was whether they would be rigorous enough, being that we have no equipment except a couple of five-pound weights. Bodyweight is all very well, but eventually it may get too easy, and then I won’t have weights on hand to add difficulty.
I can now rest easy on that point. I did some research, created a four- or five-exercise regimen for a pull day, and started in on it. I completed one of the exercises this afternoon, a superman, and have been knocked absolutely flat ever since. Whoof. Lying in bed, aching all over, and now going to take a couple of ibuprofen and a nice soak. It’s possible that I’ll eventually get so fit that I’ll need to get some equipment, but that time is clearly a long way off.
What I’ve been drawing for the past two weeks. One small sketchbook page of pencil and marker doesn’t seem like much, but I’ve been doing it every day–sometimes for a long stretch, sometimes for only five or 10 minutes–and making art a steady part of my life even as job, family, and household fill my time, is an effort and an anchor.
Also, there’s a story with this one. The image came into my mind of dark, receding layers of concentric and overlapping circles, and some brighter rings in the foreground. As is often the case, I had no idea why, or what it might come to mean, but I was intrigued. “Huh,” I thought. “I’ll have to draw that one of these days,” and I went on with whatever I was doing.
Well, I had just given a sermon on the difference between our popular conception of some people’s being geniuses and the much more liberating, fruit-bearing idea of occasionally having a genius, like a spirit that visits. Elizabeth Gilbert writes about this in her book Big Magic, and as soon as I read it I was captivated, or rather, freed, by it. In the sermon, I talked about ways we might invite a genius to visit us, and keep it around when it does, and the most important one was to heed what it says.
So I heard myself not-heeding. Telling the genius this wasn’t a very convenient time. And it wasn’t because I was performing open-heart surgery or driving to an urgent appointment. I just didn’t feel like sitting down and making art. All the little habits of fear and hesitation had me shooing the genius out the door. But thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert, and giving the sermon, and having so many people respond to it, this time I noticed myself saying no and how diametrically that contradicted the advice I had just given. I pushed aside my shabby excuses, got a compass out of the “Sharp things!” drawer in the art room, and tried to put on paper what the genius had shown me in my mind.
Until I said “Maybe later” to the genius, and heard myself saying it, and heard the contradiction, I didn’t realize how habitually I say “Not now.” How I am, in fact, in the habit of saying “no” rather than “yes” to the genii who, by my great good fortune, knock on my door pretty often. I am really excited to discover what might happen when I start to welcome them in.
I’ve just published my 20th Ask Isabel column. I’m still having fun.
Ask Isabel: God and infinity and eternity, oh my!
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Joy and I went to my mom’s in SoCal for the long weekend, and before plans had even taken shape, all three of us said, “Let’s go to Luna Luna!”
Luna Luna was a combination art extravaganza and amusement park, conceived by André Heller and created by an incredible roster of artists: Sonia Delaunay, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Salvador Dali, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Rebecca Horn, Roy Liechtenstein, Georg Baselitz, and many others. Heller asked them if they wanted to create an art amusement park, and they said YES. It opened in Hamburg in 1987, ran for six weeks, and then . . . disappeared. The plans to go on to more cities fell through, and there was nothing to do but pack it all up into 44 shipping containers.
There was a documentary at the time, and these artists weren’t exactly obscure, yet it was all but forgotten. Several years ago, after pulling together a team that crucially included Drake as a funder, Heller and his son brought the pieces out of storage. A small number of them are resurrected in Los Angeles, and even though you can’t go on the rides, it really feels like an amusement park, not a gallery. After this run ends in May, Luna Luna will go to New York. Maybe one day kids will be able to ride the Keith Haring carousel and a classical violinist will once again perform with a professional flatulist in Manfred Deix’s Palace of the Winds (fart jokes were apparently even more amusing to 18th-century Austrian adults, including Mozart, than they are to 21st-century US American fourth graders).
No one need wait for another of Luna Luna’s features, however: André Heller’s Wedding Chapel. “Do you want to get married?” I joked to Joy. “Yes!” she said, sincerely, and soon we were standing before a very sweet celebrant, who took the time to ask how long we’d been together and other details of our lives, sighing sympathetically when we said our first wedding wasn’t recognized by the law. Then we picked up bouquets and I put on a top hat. Joy already had her Flying Spaghetti Monster baseball cap, and I thought that it introduced a key spiritual element, so I urged her to stick with it rather than take one of the top hats or veils the chapel offered. We re-exchanged rings and kissed. My mom video’d the whole thing, and the people gathered around cheered, while one impresario rang a bell and another took our photo. It was fun and funny and lighthearted and art-infused, just like our life together. And to look into my wife’s eyes as she was asked if she would “venture an adventure through galaxies of love” with me, and to have her gaze back as she said that she would–that was a sacred moment I will always remember.
We were married in the eyes of our family and church in 2005, and again in 2008 when the state of California opened its eyes. So now we have our third marriage certificate. It’s good to revisit our decision now and then and remind ourselves that we would marry each other all over again.
That’s the question asked this week on Ask Isabel. It happens a lot, it’s a tender time, and it’s hard to find people who will help us along on our own journey at these moments. Most want to convert us to something new. Or they congratulate us on seeing things more the way they do. Or they try to talk us out of our “backsliding” (which is what a new stage can look like to the others in our community–see Stage 4 here). Here’s my take.
Ask Isabel: Losing My Religion
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Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash
The Judaism I was taught regards trees as a particularly beautiful and sacred part of creation. It is a mitzvah to plant them. Given their slow growth and long lifespans, they are a gift to the future. Humans’ nurturing of trees symbolizes the very essence of ethical living: to think beyond oneself and take actions that may benefit oneself only minimally, but will greatly benefit others, as an oft-retold Talmudic tale relates.
My own tender love for trees came up hard against a fact that, may I be forgiven, I did not know until this newest stage of the bitter war between Israel and the Palestinian people, even though it has been reported in the news over many years. This fact: that the government of Israel has destroyed hundreds of thousands of trees on Palestinian land, and protected Jewish “settlers” as they have destroyed thousands more, dating back at least to 1967, the Six-Day War, and with the destruction (with or without the IDF’s support) if anything only worsening over the past few months. This piece stems from my grief and alienation, which have intensified over the years, took a sharp turn upwards with Israel’s brutal conduct of this war, and are crystallized in the assault on Palestinian trees. To destroy trees in order to attack people is thoroughly despicable. It bears no resemblance to the Judaism I was taught, but of course, the government of Israel has long been out of step with what I love and respect about Judaism.
The beautiful vision of the latter appears here on the left panel, with a phrase from Psalm 96 in Hebrew and English, “y’ranenu kal atzei ya-ar,” “all the trees of the forest will rejoice,” framing a thriving olive tree. Around it are (clockwise from upper right) a dove, hands planting a seedling, an insect that lives symbiotically in olive bark, a birds’ nest, shovels, and a lizard that makes its home in olive trees. (I provide this guidance in recognition that my paper-cutting skills are not quite up to my artistic vision, LOL.) On the right side of the diptych, another of the central ethical teachings of Judaism, “ba’al tashchit,” “do not destroy,” frames a dead olive tree. Around the edge are (clockwise from upper right) a bulldozer sprocket, flames and a tear gas canister, a bulldozer blade, emptiness, axes, and a punching fist.
My sabbatical ended on Sunday with a very happy return to UUCPA. But I have one more post to write about what I did on sabbatical.
One thing I thought I might do was get back to the book I began several years ago, and maybe even get it completely finished and ready for publication. I did not, but I moved a few steps along that path. I reconnected with the editor, apologizing for letting it drop (I had never signed a contract, but I had been offered one) and asking whether they were still interested; I had a Zoom meeting with her, in which I learned what I would need to do to get the process re-started; and I got my revised proposal about halfway to readiness for submission. I like all the changes Skinner House has undergone that (along with the passage of time) make it necessary for me to revise it, and I’m sure that if they accept it again, the changes will make it a better book. I’m fairly confident they will accept it. But I have not yet finished the proposal.
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The other addition I want to make to this series is the books I’ve read since I last reported on my reading.
I finished The Covenant of Water (Abraham Verghese) and Justice is Coming (Cenk Uygur).
I finished only a couple of chapters of Goodness and Advice (Judith Jarvis Thomson) and then shelved it with the other philosophy books in my office. I guess I wasn’t up for that much dense philosophy. Earlier in the year, I ground to a similar halt with Re-Enchantment Without Supernaturalism, by David Ray Griffin. With a title like that, I have to go back to it–also, he was a process theologian, and a great teacher from whom I was lucky enough to take a theology class during my one semester at the Claremont School of Theology–but it was slow going. I am in the unfortunate position of being at heart a postmodern theologian without having the head to read postmodern theology.
I read:
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. It made me want to reread David Copperfield, which I think I read in high school (I may be imagining that), but I couldn’t do that right away because I had finally gotten hold of the book I’d been impatiently waiting for:
The Fraud, Zadie Smith. I wanted to keep reading Smith after that, so went straight on to
On Beauty, Zadie Smith, which I might have liked even more than The Fraud. They were great in different ways.
Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, Andrew Shyrock. I’ve already forgotten what put me on to this book. I read some chapters deeply and skimmed others. It was very interesting.
The Sword of Summer, The Hammer of Thor, and The Ship of the Dead, Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase trilogy. My daughter had recommended them ages ago when she first got into Riordan. She liked Percy Jackson best; that’s Greek mythology, and I liked it but I have a particular love for the Norse myths, which is the milieu of this trilogy. I finally got around to them and gobbled them up like buttered popcorn.
Also fun, easy reading: Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn.
Let’s see, that’s going backwards. What did I read more recently? Oh right.
The rest of the assigned books for my grad school course: How to Lead When you Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Susan Beaumont; The Art of Relevance,Nina Simon; and The Church Cracked Open, Stephanie Spellers. We were also assigned Salsa, Soul, and Spirit, by Juana Bordas, but I had read it for a course the previous fall, so that was just a skim.
The Angel’s Game and The Prisoner of Heaven, Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I did not read them in Spanish, though a UUCPA member assures me I could do it. These are the second and third books in his series about the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, so the last one, The Labyrinth of Spirits, is on my must-read-soon list.
Most of Music is History, Questlove. Thanks to my mom for recommending this one. Not only has he forgotten far more than I’ll ever know about popular music in the United States, but his thoughts on history itself are deep and fascinating. I let it go back to the library before I was finished, but I’ll resume it one of these days.
Passage, Connie Willis. This one-off, with its serious inquiry into the nature of death, was so, so good that I had to dive back into Willis, so I read two of her Oxford Time Travel series I hadn’t read yet:
Blackout and All Clear. They are really two halves of the same book, as I learned when I started reading All Clear and felt like I had plunked myself down in the middle of something. I had; it should be labeled Volume 2. I had to go get Blackout (unlike All Clear, we didn’t own it) and start from the beginning, and I was really glad I did. Willis has successfully implanted her version of London in the Blitz in my mind, to the extent that I could ask an actual survivor of the Blitz what it was like and I might look askance at them if their version contradicted hers. That’s historical fiction for you. Hers is so well-done that I have to remind myself that she wasn’t there either. She’s just trying to bring it to life for those of us who were born at a later date.
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe, which I reread because the television version was the talk of the internet. I love his lush, dense prose, but it didn’t make me want to watch the show, or read more Poe, for that matter. Sorry, Edgar.
Since Christmas, when I gave and got a pile of books: The latest No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency book, From a Far and Lovely Country, Alexander McCall Smith; A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid. Joy picked books for us based on the recommendations of Alix E. Harrow, since all of us liked her novels. Harrow is right; Reid is an excellent writer; but this one was for young adults, and it had one of the failings to which young adult fantasy (though not Riordan’s) is prey: the strikingly beautiful young female protagonist is so clueless about love that she keeps having experiences where suddenly noticing that she can feel the main male character’s breath makes her flush, “for some reason,” and she wishes he would stay in her room awhile longer, “for some reason,” and he looks at her for an uncomfortably long time, “for some reason,” until I start to have fantasies of being a young-adult-fantasy editor so that I could hit Ctrl-F, search for “for some reason,” and delete its every appearance. This one was particularly egregious because before she started crushing on him, she found a piece of paper where he had written her name over and over, and it still came as a surprise to her that he was crushing on her. No one in the real world is that naive. The plot was a bit of a mess, too, but despite all of this, she is a writer I’ll watch for. There was just so much there that made me want to keep reading.
And on our way to Solvang just after Christmas, I downloaded a few books I was willing to read or reread, hoping the fam would all agree on one. They did: The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki. So I reread it, first listening en route, then finishing it via audio and eyes after we got home. What a great book. The only problem with Ozeki is that she can’t write as fast as I can read, and I am forever impatient for her next book.
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Finally, I assure anyone who has read this series of posts and thought “Did she sleep at all during sabbatical?” that I did, as late as I wanted to most days, and that I also took time to do two crosswords (New York Times and Washington Post) almost every day, and also do my daily Spelling Bee, Connections, Wordle, and Quordle. I didn’t think my word games took that much time until this week, when I got back to work and my Spelling Bee game really began to suffer. I wrote this series of posts because I have an overwhelming tendency to look back at opportunities like this and think I wasted them (anxiety: it’s the fun mental disorder!). I needed to document, for my own sake, what I’ve been doing, so that I could look back on these posts and reassure myself that I did not waste the time.
And it is totally legit for sabbatical to be a time of relative relaxation. For me, the biggest stress reliever is simply not having anything I must do. Reading–even books that are pretty heavy, slow going–and making art and playing piano and going to the gym are all challenging in their way, but like the Sunday crosswords, they are the challenges I enjoy. The daily tasks of maintaining a household also continue during sabbatical, but add next to no stress when they aren’t competing with work. So for six months, I could sleep until I was ready to wake, then go up the hill to the gym, then come back and fold and put away a load of laundry, then play piano, without feeling like I was stealing time from my job. I could sit down at the art table at 10 pm and not go to bed until 12 without worrying that I was going to be exhausted during the next day’s meetings.
Now, to add the job back in without unbalancing myself: that’s the next joyful challenge.
Inspired by a colleague who uses Year Compass annually, and freed by the leisure of sabbatical, I decided to do the whole booklet this year. (I can’t remember which colleague, and can’t find whatever Facebook post she had commented on, so thank you, whoever you are!) I say “booklet”; what I actually did was write the headings in my journal and take it to Solvang when we traveled there between Christmas and New Year’s, and answered the questions there. I change journals whenever one runs out, not at the end of the year, but as it turned out, the 2023 questions brought me right up to the last page of my journal, and I began the next volume with the 2024 questions, which was lovely. Now they are on the first page, the easiest place to look when I need to remind myself of my intentions for the year.
Many of the headings in the Year Compass are “magical triplets,” such as: “I am ready to let go of these three things.” “These three people will be my pillars during rough times.” The last of the triplets for the coming year is “I will reward my successes with these three presents.” Those were hard to come up with, and in fact, I have still only come up with two: luscious yarn, and a really nice notebook. I have plenty of both, so buying more would be a special treat. Maybe I’ll make the third one that sundae at Fenton’s Creamery that I’ve fantasized about for a long time. Nothing too crazy, just a couple of scoops of Coffee Cookie Dream with hot fudge and whipped cream. Can you believe I’ve been an ice cream lover in the Bay Area for 20 years and never gone to Fenton’s?
But really, what made it hard to think of rewards was that successes are usually so sweet that they are their own rewards. For example, I aimed to end each work day this week with an empty inbox. (As I’ve written before, for many people this is not a worthwhile goal, but for me it’s invaluable.) Yesterday, just before I turned off my computer and headed home from UUCPA, I snapped a screenshot of this lovely sight.
Who needs more reward than that?
Sermons in Stones 
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