At Pokagon with Colleagues

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I'm enjoying a little time with colleagues in the next couple of days. The Heartland Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association chapter is in its Winter Conference at the Potowatomi Inn at Pokagon State Park in Angola, Indiana, and last night we "checked in" with each other and had a first worship time. There are more people participating than we've had before (in my experience), including a number of the "Big Boys" from our larger congregations. I'm looking forward to learning from their wisdom and experience.

I am looking forward to today's program with Rev. Stefan Jonasson who is the Large Church consultant from our national headquarters in Boston and who also is the pastor to a number of small churches in western Canada. He is an entertaining folklorist with an extensive business background (in Human Resources/Personnel), and is continuing a presentation he began last year on staff supervision.

Our staff at the UU Church of Flint is small. I supervise a half time Director of Lifespan Learning, Amy Derrick, who in turn supervises volunteer teachers and paid child care workers; a half-time Office Assistant, Cheryl Craig, hired last August, who is a joy to work with and who spends a lot of time with key congregational volunteers; a one day a week Music Director, Pia Broden-Williams, who is a graduate student at Michigan State and a tremendously accomplished singer, and who makes me cry when she shares her gift on Sundays. I will be supervising a Superintendent/Building Manager when he (it looks like) is soon hired, pending reference check and other HR issues, and that person will work with volunteer custodians and other key volunteers.

The task of these next few days is to think about how supervision happens in different size churches. Patterns are set in small, family-sized churches where the members are the staff and where lines of authority are unclear; and the patterns persist even as the congregation grows to having hired professionals. My task, just now, feels like I need to set clearer expectations with the people that I supervise and with the Board members who would like to get in the middle of the supervisory relationships to direct the work of the staff. My encouragement to my Board has been to assert that the strongest possible action by Board members will be to strengthen the Supervisor-Supervisee relationship; when staff members have quesitons about priorities and evaluaiton of their work, that Board members will encourage the staff to speak to their supervisors . . . Well, that's how I hope it will work.

I'm pleased, too, in this setting to be able to "let my hair down" with colleagues, to strengthen our collegiality and, frankly, my affection for them. There are a couple of colleagues with whom I am developing much closer relationships, and I hope that these couple of days (and especially at night over a glass of wine!) will afford some time for frank consideration of how we are doing as religious liberals in this economically depressed part of our country.

It is pretty cold out; but the hotel is warm as are the hearts.

Good morning.

Where Did the Week Go?

I wish I could figure out how to download a photograph from my cellular telephone. Last Tuesday morning, I got a phone call from Amy Derrick, Director of Lifespan Learning at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Flint, Michigan. She sounded radiant, and announced the birth of Alexandra Elizabeth Derrick that morning, a little before 3 a.m., a few ounces short of 8 pounds. Within a few minutes of our phone call, she had taken a photo of a little agnel sleeping peacefully, and sent it to my cellphone where it sits in my "saved messages" folder . . . but where I can't figure out how to e-mail it to myself or otherwise download it.

That morning, I was in Loveland, Ohio at Grailville, an intentional community that was hosting a three day meeting of the Heartland Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. The Heartand includes most of the UU congregations in Michigan, a few congregations in western Ohio, most of the congregations in Indiana and all of those in Kentucky. Parish ministers, ministers of religious education and community ministers, as well as retirees and ministerial interns and students, are members of the Heartland Chapter, and we are all part of a continental Association of UU ministers.

Each year, we meet three times. In the fall, we convene for three days near where the states of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky meet. In the winter, we spend five days together where the states of Ohio, Indiana and Michigan meet. In the spring, me meet for one day before the Annual Meeting of the Heartland District of the Unitarian Universalist Assocation, which meeting moves around the district. (in my first spring, it was in Indianapolis; last spring it took place in Grand Rapids, next year it will meet in Louisville.)

The Grailville meeting begins on Monday evening. Because I am teaching a course in our Monday School, and because Amy is on maternity leave (!), I felt I needed to miss the first evening of the Grailville meeting, and drove with my colleague Rev. Jane Thickstun, minister of the Midland, Michigan UU Fellowship after class, leaving Flint a few minutes before nine and arriving in Grailville a just before two a.m. And a few mimutes later, Alexandra was born, and a few hours later I got thr call!

Throughout the day on Tuesday, my ministerial colleagues and I shared hours of sitting and sharing around the Four Divine Abodes of Buddhism, metta (loving kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (appreciative joy) and upekkha (equanimity). We shared in a style like the Covenant Circle small group ministry of my congregation, sharing readings and stories of our own lives, attentively listening to each other and sitting in silence, noting questions raised by our being with one another, and then leaving. The format of the day reflected an aspiration of our chapter: that we not only meet and learn together, but that we practice our spirituality with one another in a sustained way.

I have been without a laptop since I used my Powerbook as a toboggan in mid-August and broke its hinge. (I continued to use it as a desktop computer through the end of the month when the display began to flicker. Then I bought a shiny new iMac for my desk at church, along with this old iMac at home.) Had I had a lapotp in Grailville, I might have used it to blog. Instead, I took a few notes on paper (which are now in my study at church). But it is probably more important to me that I actually stopped for a day, sat still, let my emotions (fears and anxieties, you know) be present and then followed the breath to another, deeper place. That place, so distant in my everyday life. With even the feeblest intention, and a few very deep breaths, that place becomes imaginable.

I love maps. On the way down to Loveland and back, I wanted to be sure about where we were on the map, to be sure that I knew where Jeffersonville and Indianapolis are, places where I have colleagues whom I'd love to visit. I used to have an atlas by my bed. At night, as I prepared to dream, I loved to look at that atlas, to see the latitude of Mosow and l"Anse aux Meadows, of Reykjavik and Santo Domingo. I loved to see where I'd been in the world, places to which I longed to return, places I wanted to visit for the first time. I love maps.

Sitting with my colleagues, I longed for a fuller map of the soul, of my soul. For a richer, more descriptive pattern and plan for achieving some kind of illumination. Not that there haven't been moments on my life of deep "knowing," but how often they have come to me in dramatic, unexpected ways. I speak of the majesty of the world often, of the large bodies of water that put me in touch with everything, of the train-trek to Pilatus to enjoy a snowball fight in July, of the Grand Cayon where I sat and stared and wondered.

But I haven't shared with anyone, that I can remember, my story of being overwhelmed "by everything" when I visited the basilica of Sacre Coeur on Montmartre in Paris, or my varied experiences with pentecostal worship, or even the step by step climbing to the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal. How do these experiences fit into the map of me? How does my desire to study maps of the St. James pilgrimages in France and Spain mirror and more fully explain my desire to delve mor deeply into my spiritual path? And what does it mean that I "know" that my "knowing" has much to do with walking side by side with janitors and nursing hme workers and undocumented immigrants in their quest for full humanity and justice.

Wednesday brought the long ride home, and on Thursday lots of catching up. The study, e-mail and phone messages. The calendar. A delicious dinner with Marion Van Winkle and Dr. Van. A distinguished lecture at Mott Community College by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Friday morning (on my day off) I met with Dr. Rayna Bick to cover last minute arrangements for Sunday's service, a special report by our congregational volunteers who went to New Orleans to do post-Katrina rebuilding. More tasks! Then on Saturday, the March for Peace in honor of Gandhi's birthday; and a wedding; and technical preparation for Sunday morning; and too short a night of sleep; and then a full Sunday.

And then some exhaustion.

What stops on the map of the week? Picking tomatoes. Watering newly planted birches. Harvesting a dozen gladioli, and sharing them with a neighbor. Walking to work this morning. (I'm just about to do this!)

And watching the sun rise. So late! Nearly eight o'clock before the sun is really up. (Almanac says sunrise was at 7:40.) Muggy morning, with the sound of buzz saw in the neighborhood. The "white noise" of the expressway in the distance.

And me breathing. Hmm.

Good morning.