GA Journal: "GAdding About"

Prepared for UUA.org by Doug Muder

Friday, June 23

morning. Before heading off in search of new adventures, or at least breakfast, I'll try to collect some snippets from the past two days.

Opening Celebration. I was late for the Opening Celebration on Wednesday evening because I failed to make the obvious deduction: If thousands and thousands of people are going to attend something at 8, then thousands and thousands of people are going to look for a restaurant at 7—or even a little sooner if they're smart. So I arrived at the tail end of the banner procession (which looked as if it must have been a lot of fun) and I got a seat way in the back.

A worship services with thousands of Unitarian Universalists takes some getting used to. You've got the sea of people, the tiny person behind a podium way in the distance, and then the same person blown up to Godzilla size on the projection screens. Nobody needs hymnals or programs, because all the words get projected onto the screens.

In other words, it's the basic megachurch, huge-revival-meeting set-up. Nothing we haven't all seen in the movies, if not in person. But in the movies Godzilla is somebody like Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell, the hymns are about being washed in the blood of the lamb, and the whole thing feels kind of creepy. You keep waiting for the mob to realize you're not one of them and tear you to pieces.

Except ... except this time you are one of them. The words on the jumbo screens are about seeking the truth in love and helping one another. If you've never seen it before, it takes a few minutes to realize that what you are seeing is even possible, much less that it is happening right in front of you: Thousands and thousands of Unitarians all singing together in one room.

It makes you wonder: What if UU World wasn't just a magazine? What if the real world were a UU world?

The Hilton clerk. I left my room key in my room, which is a problem in the Hilton because you can't even get the elevator to take you up to your floor without inserting your key. So I had to have the desk clerk call my room so that my wife could come get me.

While we're waiting for her, the clerk (a young black woman) asks, "Are you with that group?"

"The Unitarians?"

"Yeah," she says with some amazement. "You people are all so nice."

Dialog tips. I covered the workshop Peter Laarman and Bill Sinkford gave to promote the book Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel. (You can find my play-by-play on the GA website under event 2045.)

I was reporting rather than blogging, so this observation didn't make it into that coverage: The last third of the session consisted of Meg Riley reading questions from the audience to Laarman and Sinkford. Finally, she asks them if there is anything else they wish they had said. Laarman tells us: "Contempt cuts both ways in these religious wars." And then he explains that he's trying very hard to have "respectful conversations" with his opponents on the Right. "That's my spiritual discipline."

From my conservative Christian upbringing, I have a tip that may help Laarman in those dialogs. He might stop referring to the Religious Right as "Christofascists" and "American jihadists." It puts them off, for some weird reason.

afternoon. I love exhibit halls. Years ago, in my previous career as a mathematician, I snuck into the exhibit hall after a math conference closed so that I could watch them set up for the next conference, a convention of beauticians and cosmetologists. On the surface, everything looked strangely the same as it had for the math conference. Over one booth stretched a long poster of hairstyles entitled "The History of the Permanent Wave."

This afternoon was the first time I found space in my schedule to make it to the GA Exhibit Hall. My mission was to find the best t-shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons so that I could tell you about them.

My favorite was a t-shirt showing a running dog whose leash is trailing behind him freely. The shirt says "Untied Dyslexic Church of Dog." At the same booth was a shirt I had seen before, but still like: "God was my copilot, ... but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him."

Someone who hasn't eaten his God might put this sticker on his car: "God wants spiritual fruits, not religious nuts."

A button at the HUUmanist booth says: "I support the theory of evolution ... and they can have my opposable thumb when they pry it from my cold dead hand!"

The best UU shirt has a light bulb on the front and says "UUreka!" The back explains: "I've discovered Unitarian Universalism." The most ambitious shirt was at the UU Campus Ministry booth: "GA 2056 ... on the freaking moon!"

In the shirt-I-could-actually-imagine-wearing category: "I do not intend to tiptoe through life only to arrive safely at death."

Of course, there were many political shirts and stickers. "I'm already against the next war" is pretty good. And if you want to be really out there, you can wear the "Bush/Cheney 2008" shirt. It has the same colors and fonts as the 2004 campaign shirt, but also includes a picture of Bush and Cheney behind bars and adds the slogan: "Jail to the Chief." Another shirt shows a picture of Native American warriors with the slogan "Homeland Security: Fighting terrorism since 1492."

The shirt with the longest slogan: "English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

A button you have to think about: "The cost of innumeracy is incalculable." But that's only to be expected, because "Human beings are a rough sketch for an intelligent species."

The other striking thing about the exhibits is their sheer diversity. You can buy free trade coffee, robes and stoles for ministers, flaming chalice jewelry, and enough books to last even the fastest reader until next year's GA. A UU church in Houston is fundraising for a building expansion by selling a variety of attractive paraphrenalia. (I got a book bag that says "Unitarian Universalism" around a design based on a stained-glass window in their church.)

And then there are the issue booths: AIDS, the death penalty, the occupation of Palestine, ethical treatment of animals, just economic community (as opposed to a community that is "just economic"), religious freedom, reforming the drug laws, separation of church and state—I'm sure I missed a bunch of them. The polyamory awareness booth, whenever I happened to pass it, was staffed by grey-haired, 60ish folks who looked happy, healthy, and not at all like the kind of people you're afraid will steal your spouse.

Divinity schools had booths—including some explicitly named for other denominations, like the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

There are the hyphenated UU theological groups: UU-Jews, UU-Buddhists, UU-Christians, UU-Humanists, and probably a few others. And the groups focused on demographics or gender identity: men, women, singles, GLBTQ. (I deciphered the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered part, but the Q puzzled me completely.)

The Exhibit Hall is also where you are most likely to run into people. I almost yelled out, "Hey, ChaliceChick!" But then I remembered that her blog is anonymous and she was wearing a convention badge with her mundane name on it. At the tables where you can rest and eat your overpriced convention food I ran into a gaggle of my fellow parishioners from Bedford, who all seemed to have converged on the Exhibit Hall at random.

And then there are the people you almost know, or who almost know you. I'm sure there are people who do these interactions well, but I haven't figured it out yet. The guy at the HUUmanists booth recognized my name from something I'd written online, but between us we couldn't figure out what it was. (Is that fame or what?) And then I walked over to the UUMen booth, where I was surprised to find the new issue of their newsletter Male Call, with my article "Is Feminine the New Normal?" at the top of its front page. I didn't think the article was out yet, and didn't expected it to be so prominently displayed in any case. I felt strangely embarrassed to be standing there with my own article in my hand and my name around my neck, as if waiting to be recognized. I slipped the newsletter into my UU-Houston book bag and slinked away.

On my way out I stopped back at HUUManists to renew my membership, and then went down a table and picked up the membership forms from UU Mystics. (Emerson, you may recall, said that consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds. That's my rationalization, and I'm sticking to it.)

And then I finally bought a button for myself: "If your coalition isn't driving you crazy, it isn't broad enough." Sometimes the coalition inside my own head seems very broad indeed.

Unitarian Universalist Association
25 Beacon St. | Boston, MA 02108 | 617-742-2100