Herding Cats

Yesterday I attended a delightful party in honor of my "vintage friend" Cathy's 65th birthday. Cathy, who will always be a year younger than me as long as I stay alive (think about it) looked marvelous in a necklace of birds made from precious stones. The hummingbirds had long metal beaks.

Conversation at my table focused not on our own medical stories, which are getting less attractive all the time, but on our cats. They, too, age and, like us, they are living longer due to advanced medical techniques. If I got this right, Jim's cat is getting insulin twice a day, a quick and easy shot he claims. Kathleen's cat, who was named Sugar long before she showed up with diabetes, gets insulin too. Gini's cat Mariah, who was getting thin from kidney failure, gets hydrated every other day, which has lifted her general energy so that she's gone back to being "very assertive" during the ten-minute treatment. Marilyn has a dog, but we let her sit with us anyway.

I got to thinking about this. (Thinking about unimportant things is one of the privileges of an unbusy life.) Why do so many Unitarians have cats? For this large collection of Cathy's friends, while it did not exclude the rest of the world, was mainly composed of those of us who have known her through church, often for decades.

I trust that my readers can think of many ways my observation itself could be wrong, based on a limited sample and so on; and my conclusion could be wrong even if my observation were right, and you are welcome to try to set me straight. But I couldn't help but remember that one of my favorite ministers once said, "Trying to get Unitarians to agree on anything is like herding cats."

A delightful image, isn't it? But it is true that you will see the bumper sticker that says "Question Authority" more often in Unitarian parking lots than at other churches. So many of us come here because we need and want a church but can't stand having anyone tell us what to believe. Even what to say we believe. In other words, we are not pack animals.

There are many cities that, like Rome and Paris, have sizable cat colonies. It has been noted that in these colonies, each cat tends to have an area about three feet square that is theirs. Cats, then, dot certain plazas arranged in a fairly orderly fashion, together, but each in its own space.

All this didn't really lead me to post the poll I just put up today. I've been wanting to do that ever since I saw that it was possible. This is just an excuse.

The Reality of Jesus

As far as I know, this Jesus is by Rembrandt. Not quite as Semitic as I think he may have been, but real. I note the smudges on the forehead, perhaps Rembrandt decided showing a crown of thorns was a bad idea, and painted over it.

This painting is a fact, a thing. An art historian could probably tell me whether my supposition is true; paintings are examined by x-ray techniques sometimes.

Was Jesus "a fact"? Did he actually exist? Recently I was conversed with by a radical atheist, who brought forth several "facts" that proved to him that Jesus was not "a historical figure."

Do I care? Not at all. And it does seem to me that people argue passionately about the damndest things.

If I "am" anything, I am a Unitarian Universalist, and subscribe to the principle of approaching all religions and world-views with respect, and asking what value they have. Perhaps there is no intrinsic value to ideas, so I ask what value a conceptual framework has for me.

The idea of Jesus was a window for me when I was five, and my mother dragged me (literally, furious that I had slipped in mud and fallen down) to a Sunday School. Baptist, maybe. On the wall in that room was Jesus the Shepherd, holding in his arm a little lamb. The idea: that there was someone who cared and protected us. As a child in an abusive family, oh how I wanted to think that somewhere, someone would hold me in their arms. The concept of God was too misty for me; the idea of a handsome, rather feminine young man in robes, I could relate to that. (In the late forties I never saw a man with long, wavy hair.)

I think it was that Sunday School that taught me the 23rd psalm, the one that begins "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." I was to use that some fifty years later to combat the terror I felt during radiation treatment for breast cancer.

No historical figure is real. The past is no longer real, except as the consequences of past actions unfold in our lives. What is strikingly real is the need of some people to argue vehemently and irrelevantly against some particular religion. The people I run into who call themselves atheists are in fact anti-Christian; the theism they are specifically against is the Christian concept of God, as they understand it. What is real is their contempt for everyone, it seems, who does not agree with them one hundred percent.

I know dreadful things have been done in the name of Christianity, and of other religions, like Democracy. And I know, further, that all dreadful things done under any banner are based on contempt for someone who does not think like us: The Other. What I liked about the Jesus I met when I was a child was his message of universal love.

Grandma Answers a Tricky Question

I imagine I am one of a fairly small number of Unitarian Universalists who can honestly say, "I was born again." This makes me the best kind of expert, experiential.

I got inspired to think about this by reading in this morning's NYTimes that one of the crucial attributes that got Sarah Palin (yes, her again) elected to her first office, as mayor of Wasilla was "the religious born-again thing." (A quote from former city administrator, Stein)

I don't know when Mrs. Palin (as she probably prefers to be called) was born again. I was twelve years old and had been taken firmly in hand by a new friend whose family was so profoundly fundamentalist Daddy wouldn't pay Social Security. She took me to their Evangelical United Brethren church one Wednesday evening for prayer meeting, and as we all sang, "Just as I am without one plea . . . " she muttered in my ear, "Would you like to accept Jesus as your personal savior."

I nodded. Well, sure. I was raised more or less Christian, my family went to a liberal Congregational church.

This turned out to mean that my friend proudly walked me down front, where I was made to kneel at a railing and prayed over loudly. Then I was taken around back and counseled by a woman who could see, I think, that I had no idea. The text was John 3:16, and the part that was emphasized in this 1950's Ohio fundamentalism was ---

. . . that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Next thing I knew I was carrying a little red Bible everywhere and going to Youth for Christ meetings, and behaving in a very holy way. Even my father noticed.

Within two years, I "backslid," on the indeed slippery question of why I was suffering so much if God was all-powerful and all-loving and I was being so damn good. That was a sad time. But my extensive immersion in this religion has often been helpful. When anyone asks me, "Sister, are you born again," I say truthfully, "Oh, yes."

And what does that mean? Seemed odd even then---all you had to do was say to someone that you believed something. That still doesn't seem like enough to me. As a student of words, and of Zen, I find words pretty empty. But it was enough to set a little knot of us off from our peers, indeed, from the rest of the world, which we saw as overwhelmingly wicked, with its dancing, cards, movies, and makeup. Jeez.

Maybe that was the point. Being so special. So much better than just about everyone else. Having, as it were, a secret handshake with a select few, though we didn't have at that time anything like the nifty keychain shown in today's photo.

I once had a Zen teacher who began a dharma talk, "All religions are used by some as tools of oppression." I loved him right then. Indeed, they are. And they are also used too often to make us feel superior. All religions.

My mother was tended in her last years by a middle-aged woman who clearly identified herself as born-again, wore a cross, "prayed over" problems. She must have worried about me, as I had Buddhist artifacts in my home. At last she found the opportunity to ask me, "Are you familiar with The Scriptures?"

I thought a moment and asked her, "Which ones?"