Just a reminder that Raw Faith will be screening at the Hollywood Theatre Sunday, Sept. 18, at 2:00 PM. This is a benefit for Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. Tickets are $10, students $8. Peter Wiedensmith, the director, and I will be there to do a Q&A following the film. Please pass the word on to anyone who may be interested. This will probably be the last time the film will show on the big screen in Portland.

Once again, as I glance down the obituary column, wondering if any familiar names are there, I see a statement that occurs more and more often: “In keeping with Virginia’s wishes, there will be no funeral service.”

I am deeply disturbed by this trend. Ritual is the way cultures in all times and places have marked significant events in their community. Religious holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah carry traditions that have been around for generations. Babies are often christened or dedicated. We gather to celebrate the marriage of friends. Birthdays call for a cake and candles. Why would we allow the death of a loved one to pass without ceremony?

Rituals are not optional to a healthy culture: they tell us where we’ve been, they bind us together, they give us courage for the journey.

The ritual of the funeral or the memorial service has several purposes. First of all, it helps mourners recognize the loss as real. Sometimes a body is present at the service, often not, but always we know that we are there to acknowledge that someone has died, and to acknowledge the death not just in fact, but in feeling. We come together to grieve in the presence of a caring community, and for the time of the service we have permission to give ourselves to the experience of loss.

We also gather to celebrate the life that is now gone from us, to recollect and to remember, as in “to make whole again.” The service is a way of paying respect to the person who has died, one who has lived perhaps not a perfect life, but like the rest of us, a life full of hope and possibility and struggle. If it is done well, the service will bring at least a partial sense of closure to the void that one feels at these times. The purpose of all ritual is transformation: We come to the service in one state, we leave in another.

The service, then, exists for the living, not for the deceased. Virginia is really not the person to decide whether or not she should have a memorial service — that is for those of us who remain, those who have loved her and lost her. What did she mean to our lives? What part of her legacy lives on with us? How do we wish to remember her? How does her life and death inform our own existence, as we pass through this darkling plain? As we think upon the life of the deceased — its beginning, its course and its ending — we are each led to think of our own lives, and to contemplate questions of mortality and meaning.

But what if Virginia was a difficult person? What if she was a narcissist, who didn’t really pay much attention to her children? Or what if she was a raging alcoholic? Do we really want to remember her, to celebrate her life? Yes, we do, just as she was, in all of the various colors of her life. In my experience, problematic persons are the most difficult for the survivors to release in death. These are the mourners who must now give up hope that the loved one will ever change; these are the broken-hearted ones who need to grasp a larger picture of the deceased in order to forgive and move on. A service can sometimes help them move in the direction of healing.

I have asked myself why so many people are now opting out of a funeral or a memorial service. One reason surely must be the embarrassingly bad services we’ve all been subjected to. Too often the minister takes the service as an opportunity to preach to the numbers of unconverted he suspects may be attending. Or he may not know the deceased, and that lack of knowledge becomes evident in his remarks. Or the minister may attempt to console mourners by telling them that their loved one “is in a better place.” This statement sounds hollow to people who are missing the one who died, and certainly is meaningless to those in the congregation who do not believe in an afterlife. It is understandable that many would decide not to have a service rather than risk the emptiness and disrespect they have experienced at other services they have attended.

Some people may decide against a service because they are not particularly religious and do not have anyone they can ask to officiate. But a ritual to mark the end of a life need not be traditionally religious at all. It can be a simple gathering in a space large enough to accommodate those who might wish to be present, whether a public hall or a rented chapel or a home. If an officiant is not known, sometimes friends can suggest one, or the family may decide to structure a simple service themselves. If expense is an issue, or if the attendance is expected to be light, the family might opt to invite only relatives and close friends to a service in a home.

At a service, those attending will experience a “time apart”: there may be soft lighting, candles, sage burning, flowers. Music is often an important part of the service, because it offers a ready avenue to the feelings. The same is true of poetry. Some will want to include scripture and prayer. Silence, so rare in our society, allows space for thoughts and feelings to emerge. And stories should be told, for narrative is how we remember and how we are able to continue. Humor always arises, as it is the flip side of grief. We laugh and we cry. We acknowledge that we are a part of the stream of life, and we assert our common humanity. We carry on.

Hi, Readers–I reported a few months ago that an arm injury was preventing my writing regularly, but I’m back writing now, both for Huffington Post and with copies for my own blog.  You can follow me on Huffington, if you prefer.  I plan to write every 10 days or 2 weeks.  Here is my new blog, which is an excerpt from my volume A Little Book on Forgiveness.

It is an unfortunate truth that happiness and good fortune rarely deepen us spiritually. It is when we run into unbearable grief and loss we are unprepared for that we are stripped of our vanity and our pride and begin to see, rock-bottom, what is really important to us. These occasions are what I call “leveling experiences” because they let us know that we, along with all human beings, are mortal and vulnerable. At these times so much of our anger and hard-heartedness seems petty, for we come to understand that all human beings suffer immeasurably as they journey through life, and we join them as fellow sufferers on the path. We gain a measure of humility, we become more compassionate and more forgiving.

Profound spiritual lessons can come from those who provoke us the most. People we can hardly bear to be around, the ones who “hook” us emotionally, are the ones who carry our unconscious stuff around, bringing it uncomfortably close to the surface. We want to run, not walk, in the other direction. But we find we are looking in a mirror of sorts. We are led to ask ourselves, “What part of my shadow is this person asking me to uncover and examine?” These individuals are the ones who can stretch us the most, spiritually speaking.

We also grow in our ability to forgive as we reflect upon the circumstances of our own lives. We realize that even our best-intentioned, most spirit-led decisions have the capacity to hurt others, including those we love. We have made mistakes, misjudgments, careless errors, perhaps, that have led to pain for others or even tragic consequences. In fact, there is no way for even the best intentioned, most moral individual to go through a life without hurting others. So each of us has to live with the consequences of our own inevitable harming of others, even when we would do only good — never mind when we have been motivated by less than noble motives. This understanding helps us forgive those who have, for whatever reason, known or unknown, caused us to suffer. We, too, have caused others to suffer. “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” as my saintly grandmother used to remind me regularly.

My father has been dead for almost 20 years now, but I remember having a conversation with him when I was a young adult. It was an awkward conversation. We somehow got around to talking about my growing-up days, and my father asked at one point, “I was a pretty good dad, wasn’t I? I gave you whatever you needed didn’t I?” My memory was different from that. I remembered that money was scarce, that my father threw it away on alcohol and gambling.

“Well, actually, no, you didn’t … you weren’t … actually, our childhood was pretty difficult, Daddy.” My father’s face hardened in pain, and he said, “When you get older, you’ll see. You’ll see, when you have children of your own.” And he was right. Yes, he hurt me grievously through his drinking, the same drinking that came between him and my mother, but I came to see that his alcoholism was not about me. It was about his emotional suffering from way back in his childhood and about his losing our mother, the only woman he ever loved, and about the addictive disease that alcohol is.

Another person’s behavior is really not about us. Most of the time, the harm another does comes out of ignorance, pain, neediness and confusion — the very same qualities that push us to act in ways we really don’t want to act.

I did, in fact, find out what he meant by “I would see, when I had children of my own.” He hurt his children, though he loved us. And though I loved them, I hurt my own children when I divorced their father. I can rationalize and say that they would have been worse off had I stayed with him, but I don’t know that that’s true. I know that I would have been worse off, and I was not willing to live half a life, with possibilities cut off. Will my children forgive me? I hope they will. We all cause pain, and we all need forgiveness.

We need to be careful of piety — that is, the dutiful obedience that is so often tinged with self-righteousness and pride. One of the most fascinating stories in the Hebrew Bible is the story of the Prodigal Son. You may remember the story: a wealthy landowner has two sons, the older one, who follows his father’s every wish, and the younger one, who is something of a hell-raiser. So the younger son tells his father, “Give me my inheritance.” (Read: “I don’t want to wait until you kick off. I want to party on, now!)

So the father does as his son asks. The son goes into a far land and spends all his inheritance in profligate living, and when he runs out of money, he runs out of friends. He finds himself caring for the animals on a pig farm, and he realizes, “Why, even these pigs have better food than I have! I should go back home and tell my father that I really screwed up, and that I’m sorry.” And that he does.

When his father sees him coming in the distance, he says to his servants, “Kill the fatted calf! Invite my son’s friends over for a party!” The son approaches his father, falls to the ground and begs for forgiveness, and the father puts a ring on his finger and rejoices, for that which was lost has been found.

Now, the really interesting part to the story to me is the reaction of the older brother. He says to his father, “Father, you never killed a calf for me, never even killed a goat, for me and my friends. So how come he disobeyed you, left home, wasted all your money and now he gets all the goodies? I’ve obeyed you all these years, and I get nothing.”

Which brother would you like to have for a friend? Which one would you like to go out for an evening with? Sometimes we have to make mistakes — and big ones — before we learn a better way. But we are apt to grow richer and deeper, as we experience the bumps and bruises. Sometimes we bump and bruise others, as well. But how much more desirable this path, than the way of this prig of an older brother, who holds himself back from life and experience, and who judges himself worthy and his younger brother unworthy. Why could he not be happy at his brother’s return? His piety had stolen his joy, his ability to rejoice in his brother’s redemption. He is the big loser in the story.

The problem with piety — and self-righteousness, in general — is that it separates us from others. In the safe and secure citadel of our own goodness, we place ourselves out of human reach. The law is what directs us, then, and mercy takes a back seat. We become blind to our own failings, so intent are we on judging others, and in fact on projecting our own flaws onto them. A person can follow all the rules and yet be lacking in the milk of human kindness. In fact, when people are too rule-driven, that is what generally results.

The one law that is large enough to contain all the lesser laws, the one law that must be considered the grounding of the life well lived, is the law of love. If that law is grossly violated, it really doesn’t matter how much money we make or how many accolades we receive. If we are able to live by this larger law, we will find within ourselves a kind and understanding heart, both for ourselves and for others. Forgiveness will come more easily because we know how morally frail we ourselves are, because we ourselves have blundered and because we know that the story is not over, that redemption is possible.

It is comforting to me to remember that my very weaknesses form the tension that pulls me again and again to the Holy One, asking that my brokenness be made whole. Paradoxically, it is often when I feel most satisfied with myself that I find myself losing faith — or becoming, as it were, faithless. Self-congratulatory, I say to myself, “I’m doing great … wasn’t I?” Humility makes space for the Holy in our lives, whereas self-righteousness and judgment alienate others and elbow God out, as well.

It seems to me that forgiveness is all of a piece: When we are unable to forgive, we then perpetuate the fruits of non-forgiveness — anger, hatred, revenge, pettiness of character. And the fruits of forgiveness — humility, compassion, love, peace — are lost to us. The place to begin is not self-condemnation, but the sincere desire to begin anew. If we earnestly seek to forgive, if we seek a change of heart, we will at some point have what we seek, for the nature of God is love, is forgiveness. We ourselves are forgiven even before we think to ask. We don’t have to earn it. We just have to be willing to receive. As we ourselves are forgiven, we can through that same fount of grace forgive the injuries done to us.

This past Sunday the young adults presented a fine worship service at First Unitarian.  Joseph Boyd spoke movingly of his father (it was Father’s Day), and I asked him to be a guest writer on my blog.  I’m sorry that you will not see here his evocative delivery, but the words hold power, still:

My father loved baseball. As a kid he dreamed of going to see a live baseball game, and at the age of 38 he got his first opportunity. I was nine, and he took me along to see the Seattle Mariners. My father wanted to get the most out of this experience, so he did some research, and discovered that the teams held batting practice two hours before the start of the game. If you stood in the outfield during batting practice, you would have a small chance of catching one of the baseballs that was hit over the fence. My father bought us both baseball mitts and we drove up to Seattle, and arrived two hours before the start of the game.

When we arrived we saw hundreds of other fathers with their children, all wearing baseball mitts. We took a spot in center field, and up to bat comes Ken Griffey Jr., one of our favorite baseball players. On the first pitch he smacks it to center field straight toward my father. It is such a straight shot that everyone around us backs away and gives my father space to focus on the ball hurdling toward him. The ball comes closer and closer, and he has his black mitt in front of his face. The ball hits the top of his mitt, smacks him in the forehead, and bounces onto the field.

Without skipping a beat my father shouts to the outfielder: “Hey, that’s my ball. Look!” He points to his forehead where the baseball has made an imprint. You can see the stitches of the baseball. The center fielder laughed, and then threw the ball up to my father. My father then gave the ball to me as a memento of that day.

When people ask me about my father today, I usually tell them that he died years ago, and that’s about all I usually share. My father struggled with depression for most of his life, and I let that struggle define who he was in my mind. When I thought of my father I saw a man who was sad, a man who was lonely, a man who was broken. It was a two dimensional view of him that I clung onto.

God and father are often synonymous in many spiritual traditions. “Our father who art in heaven,” for example. Growing up, our fathers are gods to us. They are certainly bigger than us, and more powerful. They are there to protect us, to guide us, to love us.

As we get older we quickly learn that our fathers don’t have all the answers, and that they’re not always going to be there when we need them. For some of us our fathers were never there. They were absent- physically, emotionally, or both.

My father knew he wasn’t perfect. One day he came into my room, and he asked me: “You know I love you, right?” I could tell by his body language that the question was not rhetorical. It was a real question for him. “You know I love you, right?” I saw in that moment that he doubted himself as a father, he doubted his ability to communicate his love to me.

My father communicated his love to many people. He was a minister, and his ministry has served as a guide to my life. Through his life, he taught me two important lessons:

1. Strength is not the absence of weakness. True strength is leading with your weakness.

2. How to write a sermon. As a boy I was fascinated with the process of constructing and delivering a sermon that would move hundreds, thousands, millions of people. My father slowed me down and taught me: Don’t worry about writing a great sermon. Live a great sermon, and the words will follow.

Our fathers are divine, but not in the way we expect. Their divinity does not stem from perfection, but from their fallibility. It stems from the imperfect love they offer us. It comes from their hurt, their vulnerabilities. To give love, and to raise a child in the midst this hurt and vulnerability, is truly divine.

As a boy I saw my father as a man who was sad, a man who was lonely, a man who was broken. Today I see my father is more than that. My father was a man who loved baseball, a man who loved God, and a man who loved me.

A dramatic moment unfolded on May 23, 1960, for Unitarians and Universalists, two small liberal denominations that had considered a merger for at least a hundred years. Simultaneous sessions of both denominations met in adjoining rooms in John Hancock Hall in Boston. They were connected with a public address system which faltered in the midst of the historic proceedings. Scattered, passionate acrimony remained, but a strong positive vote was given on both sides. Donald Harrington, minister of New York’s Community Church, proclaimed that on this day was created “a new world faith” which would stand alongside the other great American religions: Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish — a bit grandiose for this new denomination, Unitarian Universalism, which numbered at the time a grand total of 141,821 members. The last formal act for consolidation took place on May 12, 1961, at the first annual meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston, when the constitution and by-laws were ratified.

Why had these two small, struggling denominations failed to join before this time? Do they really belong together? Some Universalists, who were ever more pious than Unitarians, would still say no. And many Unitarians have little understanding of what Universalists brought to the union, and so do precisely what the Universalists feared: disregard the Universalist heritage, referring to the denomination simply as “Unitarian.”

The main problem with the merger always lay with the Universalists. They were the smaller of the two groups, with fewer resources and less stability. In fact, at the time of the merger, they brought only 36,864 members to the joint membership, about 25 percent of the total. But the domination of the Unitarians was not merely numerical — there were class differences which had kept the two groups apart. Both groups emerged about the same time in this country — at the end of the 18th century — and both had roots in England, but the Unitarians came from upper-middle class stock, and the Universalists tended to be from rural areas and were less well educated. Their worship styles were different, too, the Unitarians tending toward the cool and intellectual, while the Universalists were warm and emotive. As one anti-merger Universalist put it, the Unitarians seemed more interested “in analyzing the nature of infinity … than in the spirit of love. I … feel that I ought to put on my company manners when I go into a Unitarian Church.”

Nevertheless, the two groups had much in common. Most significantly, each was a free faith, with no creed, and both had a strong policy of congregational autonomy. They were compatible theologically, though each brought a different emphasis. The Unitarians brought the concept of “one God” rather than the Trinitarian God of conventional Christian churches. Too liberal for both Calvin and Luther, they had come out of the left wing of the Protestant Reformation, and were adamant that each person must be free to follow the dictates of conscience. The Universalists, who believed in the doctrine of universal salvation, were widely known for their tolerance and generosity of spirit. Both groups allowed the umbrella of their religion to encompass an increasingly diverse range of beliefs, including atheists, agnostics, humanists, Jews, as well as Christians. And by the time of their consolidation, the class differences were more historical and perceptual than otherwise, especially in urban settings. The merger, then, was a practical move to strengthen two small denominations that had limited resources. Long in coming, it was the right way to go, not only for pragmatic reasons, but because each faith continues to teach and strengthen the other.

I personally entered the church in the 1970′s. Like a majority of the members, I was a “come-outer” from another faith, in my case Southern Baptist. As a newly divorced woman, I no longer felt welcome in the Baptist church, and so I found myself isolated, cut off from my community. One day as I was bemoaning my fate, my therapist said to me, “Why don’t you go over to the Unitarian Universalist Church? There are a lot of divorced people over there.” In the Baptist church, I could not be a deacon, much less a minister, but the Unitarian Universalists soon engaged me in leadership positions, and six years later, I was on my way to seminary at Starr King School for Religious Leadership in Berkeley, CA.

At that time a kind of cool academic intellectualism characterized the pulpits of many of our churches and fellowships. This approach emerged not only from the Unitarian emphasis on reason, but also from the influence of the Humanist Movement of the 1920′s and 1930′s, which dominated the lay-led churches that the UUA started from 1948-1967, mainly in university communities. That style began to be questioned as more women and gays and people of color entered our ministry. Newcomers to Unitarian Universalism were looking for more than intellectual searching — they wanted spirituality. At the same time, many of the come-outers brought with them a fear of religion from their painful growing-up days in more dogmatic churches, so ministers had to work with that fear, reframing conventional theological language so these folks could feel safe to explore new forms of spirituality. Church music moved from the rigidity of all-classical, all the time, to music more ethnically and stylistically diverse.

And so today, we are Unitarian, with a strong emphasis on reason and learning. Our congregants tend to be highly educated and we love ideas. But we are not satisfied to rest there. We are also Universalists, wanting to explore emotional and spiritual depths, wanting to be whole persons, generous and loving and ever more inclusive. Considering population growth, we’re not much bigger than we were 50 years ago, for only 0.3 percent of American adults identify as Unitarian Universalists. But we are influential far beyond our numbers, because we are found at the edge of change, wherever change is needed. We are informed, and we are passionate, heartful people. We are Unitarian Universalists, and we belong together.