That Song by Sheryl Crow, or, Unified

The time it would take me to explain Unitarian Universalism would probably choke up six or seven blog posts, and I would be awful at it.  If you have twenty minutes sometime and are so inclined, you can look it up on Wikipedia.

I’m Unitarian Universalist.

For those who looked it up and think I’m bound for eternal damnation, take a number.  The religion is such an odd one that some Christians, Jews, Islamists and Buddhists have dropped the running conversation and said a few words over me when they have discovered me to be Unitarian, while some agnostics and atheists have rolled their eyes at what looks like a pathetic hanging on of the last vestiges of God.

As what happens in all cases of faith, I didn’t pick Unitarianism--it picked me.

I have been Unitarian since my college days in Missouri.  My religion wasn’t found for lack of trying.  Growing up, my religious education consisted of attending friends’ churches, friends’ Bible study summer camps, and listening to all manner of services, broadcasted on Sunday mornings on the local radio stations.  When all of the services were over (they were able to find every denomination but Muslim, Buddhist, Judaism, and...Unitarian, but this was Northwest Ohio, after all), my mother played the gospel records of Jim Neighbors and Tennessee Ernie Ford well into the Sunday afternoons.

When I was introduced to Unitarianism, I had to look it up, too.  No such thing existed in my world, until friends introduced me to it and my reading of the Transcendentalists in college literature set the mold.  It stuck because even when I found others and my own conscience unforgiving of my soul, Unitarianism seemed to forgive all of it.

Including me.

*****

In other notes, my brother’s name is Michael, an ironic choice on my mother’s part for three reasons:

• It’s Hebrew, like mine; sort of a strange historical pairing with a German last name;
• My father wanted consistency, and wanted to give us German first names, while my mother wanted names from the Bible;
• My brother’s name means, in Hebrew, “Who is God?”

That last reason is the ironic clincher:  my brother is agnostic.

*****

I occasionally go to church.  Not every Sunday.  I would like to every Sunday, but the reasons that I don’t go aren’t good ones and therefore I won’t bore you with them.  I usually make it there once a month.  You would think I would go more as an unemployed person, but it just hasn’t happened.

Last night it seemed important that I go this morning, so this morning I cracked off my morning free-writing pages and then hopped the bus for the Hayes Valley/Civic Center corridor.  I have no particular joy for the Van Ness buses anytime, let alone Sunday mornings, so I walked up the hill on Van Ness from Market, passed by well-dressed children with their parents leaving a morning opera performance, passed by the ripe and muttering homeless, passed by the mammoth monuments bathed in thin sunlight.  I took a left at the KRON 4 studios and climbed up to Franklin, where I took a right.

The Unitarian Church of San Francisco is no Grace Cathedral, but it has more stained glass than this Midwesterner deserves.  I like to arrive early; there’s no batting practice, but attendees are encouraged to enter the sanctuary in reverence and to sit in the same.

In other words, sit down and shut up.

With my mood lately, it's been best to sit down and shut up.

Today I sat down, contemplated the colors and the candles (Unitarians like Advent as much as the next parishioner), and occasionally looked down at my hands.  Whether it’s the appropriate time for it or not, I can’t help but pray to myself in a Unitarian church.  My heart loosens its grip and I inwardly jabber like a monkey, my imagination conjuring up images of God, the one guy who reads my mind before I write.

Today, though, just as I was warming up, a group of seniors came in and sat in the pew in front of me, giving me outwardly competition.  Reverence?  Pshaw, we’ve lived a long time, and life’s too short for f-ing reverence.  The man in the group actually dropped F-bombs--he looked like Mark Twain and swore like him, too.  Their idea of reverence was having a near-deaf conversation among themselves for the rest of us to listen to on how God can go screw himself and how the only reason to come to church was to hear the majesty of the organ.

They were having this conversation while the organ was playing, and they were doing their level best to shout above it.

I should probably explain that, among other things, Unitarians are taught to practice tolerance in places where other churches condemn.  The old man’s atheism wasn’t the offensive aspect of this little tableau--God knows I’ve had my moments of telling God to f-off myself--but the shouting manner of its execution was offensive.  “God,” I snapped in my soul, “lightning bolt.  Now.”

My experience has been that God doesn’t do command performances, and He’s even leery about taking requests.  So the next prayer grade was, “Help me deal with this without switching to a face that would scare off the drug lords of the Tenderloin.”  Then there is a shift up one more level, asking for helping this guy deal with his own anger.  He came to this sanctuary to blot out his own love of music with his need for all of us to hear about what a crock God is.  “And I’m saying it in a church!” he exclaimed.  “This is really sticking it to the Big Guy, isn’t it?”  The two old women egged him on, like a Shakespearean chorus, following his pronouncements as though he were...

You guessed it.

As though he were a god.

You had to think, listening to him, who had he alienated to get to the point where he had to come to a church, surrounded by patient members and to surprised strangers, to say what he felt.  I didn’t pity him, per se, but I stopped being angry.  A weird situation, forgiving someone for ruining reverence.  It was my only way for obtaining reverence in a City that turns away when someone weeps or screams.

After the service I walked slowly down to Van Ness again, and found thin sunshine to walk in.  For the length of a stoplight, the world went quiet.  Then a siren ripped off somewhere, and reverence would have to find another venue, again.

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is the inspiration for today's installment of Life For Rent.  I do everything late, and it is my last chance to invest.

That Song by The Boss, or, Where I Was

For the last two weeks, all kinds of media has asked me to remember.  "Share your story," demands Twitter, Facebook, the New Yorker, The New York Times, the LA Times, most cable networks, even some libraries.

You talkin' to me?

Ok, once upon a time, on September 11th, 2001, back in the States...

• I was working two jobs at the time.  I was working two jobs because I had thought that I would be in a higher paying job in New York City training people to make fundraising calls on behalf of art organizations like the opera and museums and such.  My training was to have been held, starting in August, 2001, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  I turned it down because I would have to pay for the relocation.  I would have been fine with one job but my mother got sick and created a boatload of expense to go back and forth from Missouri to Ohio to take care of her.  That's why I had two jobs.
• My morning job, from 7 am to 12 pm, was to enter benefit paperwork for Blue Cross and Blue Shield.  My evening job, from 1:30 pm to 10 pm, was to train people how to be nice and knowledgeable on the phones at Bass Pro Shops.
• That morning I was wired, because my mother was starting radiation 680 miles away.
• My morning job was solely data entry.  During that time, because I missed learning and missed college so much that I ached, I listened to NPR on headsets.  Everyone else listened to rock stations.
• At around 7:55 am Central time, Carl Kasell came on the radio with his news update stating a plane had hit the World Trade Center.  At that point the news was being broadcast as though the crash were a malfunction.  I still found myself standing up, nevertheless.  The woman working next to me said, "What are you doing?"  I replied with the news.  "You're crazy," she said, and begged me to get back to work--we were measured on metrics.
• Five minutes later was our break.  We made our way to the breakroom and turned on the television.  By the time we had just about settled into watching the news, the second plane hit.
• When we all finished our break, everyone's radio was on NPR.
• In the distance between my first job and my apartment, gas prices were rising faster than I could drive.  And I was on a third of a tank.  Luckily, all of my workplaces were in one city.
• When I got home, my brother had left a message that WW III had started.  My parents had left no message at all.  I didn't eat lunch.  I just rotted in front of the television until 1 pm.
• When I got to my second workplace I sat and watched the news in the breakroom for my entire shift.  No calls were coming in to the call center, save for one notable one that someone got wanting to know why he had not received his camping gear when he paid for one day air.  We issued a credit and told him his gear was probably grounded, and that he might want to turn on the news.

That's where I was.  As to all this 9/11 remembrance hype, you've missed it with me, dear media.  That was the year my mother was sick.  In my selfish, scarred heart, I was just glad for the diversion that day from the silent phone from Ohio.  But I do remember 9/11 in my own way--every time a digital clock reads 9:11, either am or pm, I think of this song.  That number seems to remind me not to rot in front of the news.

P.S. - This song is where the title for today's post of Life For Rent comes from.  You can call me Jo.