Ben Van Dyne

Occupations.

2007-05-02T02:46:07Z

For those of you who don't already know, on Friday I was offered, and am accepting, a job as an organizer with DART. So I'm graduating on May 20, then off to Dayton on June 17 for a classroom training and then to someplace (I don't yet know where) for a four-month training placement. And then, an Actual Job, perhaps in Charlottesville, perhaps not. Regardless of where I end up it's just the sort of work I want to be doing.

Between graduating and starting my training the plan is to be living someplace to burnish my Spanish, probably Mexico City. Anyone want to come? I mean, maybe, depending on who you are. I don't travel well with just anyone.

3-11 May - Exams
12-18 May - Splitting time between Atown and Cville
19-20 May - Graduation
21 May - Move Out
22-23 May - Cousin's wedding in Tennessee
24 May-11 June - Mexico City
12-17 June - Wherever my training placement is, to secure housing and the like
17-24 June - Organizer training, Dayton, OH
24 June - 6 October - Training Placement

All this, of course, subject to much change.

benvandyne @ 2007-01-18T00:43:00

2007-01-18T05:44:01Z

Each journal entry carries the hope of being the first of many and the burden of prior false starts, as though regularity alone were a virtue, as though every sentence and every entry were justified only if it were followed by another.

I’ve never excelled at writing entries regularly. My last was 380 days ago, or so. This is partly from malaise, partly from business and an easy distractibility, partly from a fear of the banal. Some people write appealing words about their daily lives; I write better thematically. The chronological element is not series of events, but the evolving salience of competing and complementary themes.

I do feel a need to write more, but it doesn’t flow. I want to do lots of things here: I want to make a list of my failings, and talk about them, not as an exercise in masochism, but to understand them. I want to think about the people I know, and why my relationships with them seem so basically unsatisfying at times. I want to get my fingers back into practice doing good, honest writing that doesn’t have all those extra, superfluous, unnecessary, gratuitous, redundant, unneeded words that slide into my academic writing, despite a professed commitment to writing Strunkian prose.

So, a metaentry to exorcise hopes and burdens.

benvandyne @ 2006-01-04T16:29:00

2006-01-04T15:29:57Z

1 Ene 2006, 14:28
Madrid, España

Después de cinco días en Madrid queda evidente el vínculo entre el lenguaje y la identidad. He hablado varias veces con Abby acerca del idioma propio entre personas íntimas (otro tema interesante), pero lo que se me ocurre ahora es cuánto el castellano forma parte de mi identidad. Sea quizás por haber formado tantas partes importantes de ella durante mis viajes (todos, menos varios en carro y el más reciente a Bretaña) a países hispanohablantes.

Por eso me ofendo cuando la gente que puede hablarme en español no lo hace (y aún más la gente que lo habla desde niño, y aún más, hay que admitirse, con una guapa mujer)—aunque tengan buena razón: La verdad es que no hablo bien, o mejor dicho que hablo irregularmente, sin la segura habilidad que viene con ser verdaderamente fluente. Entonces, ¿cuál parte de mí identidad no es real? (¿Y vale la pena averiguarlo?)

Pasando a otro tema, pasé ayer, nochebuena, trabajando para VUUS en mi cuarto, aunque fui a la Puerta del Sol, el Times Square de España, para las últimas minutas de las fiestas. Lo pasé muy bien pero extrañaba a mis compañeros, y agradezco que no fui más temprano. (Después quemaron unas motos, que están todavía el las callejones del barrio.)

Para los que leyeron mi última entrada, que era “sólo-amigos,” me siento mucho mejor y los pesadillos no me han molestado dos noches ya. Todavía no me he acostumbrado a la hora de España. Quizás hoy. Probable que no.

2 Enero 2006, 21:11

Veo una noche sin dormir. Tengo un tren que sale a las 7, no tengo alarma y nadie va a estar despierto en el hotel para despertarme, así que parece mejor que pase la noche sin dormir hasta el tren, o, ya que quiero ver... pues no, la señora acaba de venir y me prestó una despertadora.... Según la tele, en dos días de 2006, tres personas en Madrid se han matado por la violencia doméstica. Increíble.

3 Enero 2006, 23:17
Valencia

Estoy en la casa de la doña Pilar, lugar donde me quedo 10 de las 13 días del curso aquí. (Pasamos dos noches de viaje en Granada y Córdoba.) Voy a salir a las 00:00, por un ratitito, con unas chicas del programa que me invitaron a ir con ellas. Sin embargo, siento la necesidad de dormir, ya que no dormí mucho anoche y tengo que levantarme a las 8. Este programa tiene una reptación de ser para los que quieren tomar mucho. Espero que esta gente que quieren hacer el J-term (y que fue eligida por el Prof. Gerli) sea mejor gente, pero según que hablaban inglés lo más pronto posible, no tengo gran esperanzas. Ya veremos.

Se contará más en otro momento acerca de la señora y de la ciudad.

Home before the holidays

2005-12-14T23:13:39Z

I will be home in Arlington starting tomorrow, Thursday 15 December, and will be home for a week, after which I go to New York for a family Christmas, and from there to Spain for a bit of galavanting and a January-term class in Islamic Iberia. In my week or so at home, my plan is to do everything and see everyone. If you want to be included in this, let me know. I would love to see you. Call the cell, send me an IM or an email.

It will be good to be home.

benvandyne @ 2005-09-13T08:43:00

2005-09-13T12:42:45Z

If there's one thing I've learned from Rose, it's that overcommitment is the key to happiness, and I don't disagree. Here are things I'm doing: Philosophy Circle, a discussion group for sundry philosophical topics; VUUS (pronounced "views"), the Unitarian Universalist student group on Grounds; intramural Softball and intramural Ultimate Frisbee (each has one game and one practice a week); the Queer Student Union, the largest and oldest GLBTAQLMNOP group here; Casa Bolívar, the Spanish house, which lets me come over and speak Spanish even though I don't live there. I've been to mass a couple of times but did not partake of the Eucharist, as I was not welcome to it, and did not want the blessing if it was merely the consolation prize.

Other things which I have either sampled or intend to try are the Passport Program, which provides opportunities for people to go to ethnic, religious, and cultural events outside their normal routine; the Outdoor Club, which, in return for $35 or so a year will let you use any and all of their equipment for your own adventures, plus do things like take you skiing; I still have some mixed feelings about BRMRG, the search-and-rescue group I went to West Virginia with.

There's also the local church, of course, but I've only been to a couple of services and haven't really gotten involved. I don't plan to, though I'm having lunch with the ministers Wednesday. I'm all about meaningful, spiritually profitable relationships, I just don't want the church to be sucking away my energy.

Also, I just got like nine hours of sleep, but it was still fitful. I don't know whether or not to feel cheated.

benvandyne @ 2005-08-29T22:58:00

2005-08-30T02:59:57Z

A statement of the obvious: This is very much where I live. This place has become Home with astonishing speed, or at least has the appearance of home to my road-weary eyes. I don't really miss Arlington at all, though I do miss the people sometimes. Even that is only in the past few days, as the adrenaline high of the first week in a new place had kept me from home-friend-sickness. I never expected that aspect of the adjustment to go so well.

I'm getting over (what I'm hoping are only) a couple days of crankiness, which started after I came down off the adrenaline, but I do have a few non-illusory dissatisfactions. The relationships I have here, even with people I knew previously are all sort of... incomplete. I have a number of young relationships where part of me is present, but which part depends on what I'm cultivating for that particular company. None are well-rounded, and there are no immediate friendships, none of what Elena called "secret twins separated at birth stuff." That's okay, I guess, because if it happens too quickly it can be limiting. Patience is called for.

Dissatisfactory thing No. 2: I am bored. This shouldn't be the case, coming as I have to a Real College, taking five classes, some of them quite intense (at least by reputation), and being already in the second week of class. There's no reason why I should be able to get all of my work done for tomorrow and for Wednesday in two hours and have the rest of the day to putz about. The bad news is that it's already too late to add another class, which I otherwise might like to do, since all the interesting ones are very, very full, and of all problems, a lack of stuff to do was not one I anticipated, so I'm not on any wait lists. Even this journal entry drifts a bit, without the urgency of being squeezed in among other things, or made a priority over them.

Things should pick up soon. If nothing else, several extracurricular things, like the campus Unitarian Universalist group, start this week and that should take up a little time. Again, patience.

benvandyne @ 2005-08-28T09:37:00

2005-08-28T13:38:07Z

Perhaps it's for the best if no place or person or persons can completely satisfy my yearnings. It will protect me from the subtle and pernicious idolatries of love.

benvandyne @ 2005-08-26T09:31:00

2005-08-26T03:32:49Z

Con Daniél viviendo en el oeste y Davi saliendo, dos de los amigos míos más amigos están idos ya a la Costa Izquierda. Es lo mejor para ambos, y tener a dos en la misma región enfortaleza el propósito de visitar, pero me rompe el corazón encontrar que una etapa de la amistad con Davi se acaba cuando no le he dado ni el honor ni la atención que ella merece. Lamento nuestra amistad fallada, y tengo gran esperanzas para nuestra relación, que vuelva cada vez más unida y auténtica. En él tuve el primer amigo que merecía aquel nombre honorífico, el primer que me creyó cuando hablaba de la revelación y del amor, y que por su ejemplo insistió en que yo sea lo mejor de mí. Lo que tengo de relaciones se lo debo a él, por darme la confianza en compartir.

Is it ethical to write a letter and then post most of it online?

2005-08-25T23:06:36Z

Some of the people I've met here are absolutely wonderful. The best few of them of them already keep me from being ashamed of my seriousness, which is something I really appreciate (since I don't always get it at home, and since it's something I might have been embarrassed about without their examples). A couple of them might yet be great friends. I had feared an absoluter solitude, so it's reassuring to find spirits in any way kindred.

But: after a few serious days of setting up life (a hum of meetings and social gatherings and trips to the store), I'm overdue for regenerative silliness, and there's no one here to share it with. I keep forgetting to tell the joke about the Quebecois with three cats. I don't yet know the boundaries of silliness or offense. I don't know who I can gently tease or be absurd to without absurdity becoming the paradigm of a growing relationship.

A quote (here paraphrased and unsourceable, even by Google) that has always stuck in my head: "As human beings we tend to resist both the serious and silly aspects of ourselves. Most of us end up existing in a great gray muddle that is truly unbearable to anyone willing to pay the slightest bit of attention to their state of being." I have seriousness (if not yet intimacy), and it's gratifying, but it deepens the yearning for play. I've been here less than a week. It's too soon to expect from these young relations the intimacy that ridiculousness demands. Still, I feel its absence.

I fear giving a portrait of my time here that is excessively pessimistic. I am not wholly crippled by a yearning for fun. Really I'm doing quite well--much better, frankly, than I'd expected--and today was my first day of not feeling totally up to things. I mention it mostly because it's the one glaring point of dissatisfaction, and it's mostly in moments of malaise, unfortunately, that I take the time to write. I was never such a lover of Home until I left it, and now it harbors all my perfect memories, cleansed by distance.

I'm excited about all my classes: History of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Introduction to Symbolic Logic, Arabic 101, Spanish Literary Analysis, and Anthropology of Religion. I'd like to take more, but five classes is a "normal" load and I don't want to overburden myself as I make the transition. I feel vaguely priestlike , in a good way, a feeling reinforced by the fact that most of the serious folk I've fallen in with are Catholic. At least one of them has told me I should become a Jesuit, which I took as the compliment that was intended. This is when I really appreciate having learned to speak Christian, albeit with an accent.

A moment to catch my breath

2005-08-23T17:35:51Z

There's a lot to do, and this place is very big. Still, I'm almost done finding things, setting things up, and figuring things out. All that's left is good night's sleep, which I don't expect to get regularly but would like to get tonight since classes start tomorrow. Barring major problems later today, those classes, for those who are interested, namely me, are:

Philosophy 211 - History of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy
Philosophy 242 - Introduction to Symbolic Logic
Arabic 101 - Introductory Arabic
Spanish 330 - Literary Analysis
Anthropology 232 - Anthropology of Religion

I think I may drive to Northern Virginia on the Friday of Labor Day weekend. I know that I made a promise I wouldn't avoid Charlottesville for six weekends, but this would only be a brief trip, there and back in the same day, to drop off extra things, get bookshelves at Ikea, check on Jacomina and James (I think Elena will already be gone) if it's a bad weekend, and possibly give a ride north to someone who's going that way.

Though the last alone wouldn't justify the trip, in the swirl of socials and receptions and barbecues, I have rediscovered just how much less at home I am in big groups of people than I am when I can have a conversation. Giving someone a ride back to Greater Arlington might do more for my C-ville social connections than staying. And in any case, I'll be back for the weekend, so I won't miss my types-of-drunk-and-horny tutorial.

benvandyne @ 2005-08-21T18:48:00

2005-08-21T22:49:20Z

Well, I'm here: in Charlottesville and in the throes of anticlimax.

There was the chaos usually associated with Moving Day, plus a little internal stress which I think was only sporadically manifested in crankiness and panic. (Rose and Jamie can correct me on this. It may have been obvious the whole time.) Now that the dust has settled somewhat, there is, of course, a laundry basket of stuff that I wish had gone back with my Dad, but it can live in my trunk. Tuesday morning I have nothing to do, and that will be the day I go out in search of bookshelves.

Oh, yeah. Good news. I have room for bookshelves, since my dresser fits inside my closet. This is excellent news, since I brought a lot of books, though not as many as I wanted to at first. You may be glad to know that I've further weeded out books, including my compact OED, which I'd like to have but really is kind of over-the-top, bookwise. I like to read them, and they're useful, and I won't say that the Encyclopedia-of-Philosophy-makes-women-take-off-their-pants system has never worked, but really it's about feeling safe. Some people have blankets, Rose has that pig, Jamie has knives, I have books. As I feel better and more secure here, I'll need fewer trappings and fewer reminders of what sort of life I want to live.

There is much to be done. More later.

(I think I'll be fine.)

benvandyne @ 2005-08-17T23:23:00

2005-08-18T03:47:29Z

I'm at my sister's place in Brooklyn. I've had a lovely time: We went to Coney Island today for some beaching, went back-to-school shopping (but in an ironic way), and have had several excellent meals of the type that New York so ably provides. It has been a lovely, low-key trip that will accelerate tomorrow into two busybusy days before I move to Charlottesville. I have a flurry of preparations to make, and lots of people to spend time with before then, particularly those who are also leaving soon, like Davi.

My nervousness about going to UVa has not abated, but I'm definitely feeling more confident about the whole thing. Excited, even. I think I'll be okay once I get down there. For the moment, I'm a little more concerned about saying goodbye. I like goodbyes, if only inasmuch as they expressions of affection, which I enjoy generally. But this is a goodbye of the sort which I've never yet had to make. Before it's always been with the intention of returning, but I may never live in Arlington again.

This is a bigger step for me than I've tried to let on, and since my close friends have long since made this transition, I think they don't quite understand the stake I have in it, and the pressure that entails. (The fact that they've made this transition already is one reason I try to be nonchalant about it.) I get sympathy for my nervousness, sure, but it's the wise, infuriating sympathy of those who've done it, not the commiserative sympathy of those who are doing it, too.

On the whole, though, I just feel pensive, in need of neither commiseration nor euphoric sharing. Most of my emotions are expulsive. My contentedness is always solitary.

benvandyne @ 2005-08-15T10:06:00

2005-08-15T14:07:37Z

Yesterday Jamie, Davi, Sam, and I biked toward Purcellville (a 40-mile ride, all told). Two houses from our start point a bungee cord got caught in my gears and we had to take them apart to pick it out of there. This was an omen we blithely ignored, and we finally got on the road about 4 pm.

This, it turns out, was stupid. The heat index in the sun was still easily above 100°F, and despite drinking what seemed like an absolute shitload of water (and more than my companions, by at least .5L/hr) by the time we were in Herndon I felt terrible. A half-hour's break got me going again for another five or six miles, but then I was feeling bad again, darkness was falling, and the taste of almost-vomiting in my throat made a continued sojourn seem unwise.

The really frustrating part is that if my hydration illness is not taken into account, we were all doing fine. In air conditioning right now, my body feels great and wishes it had done the whole 40 miles rather than about half that. Hell, if I'd done better with water, I probably could have burned it all the way to P-ville.

James and Davi biked ahead to the intersection where Rose and Andrew were to pick us up, and when they got there they found a fire station which sent a brush truck back for me, although the guy was not happy about it. I wasn't happy about it, either, but wasn't in a position or mood to argue, so I went back to the fire station, where we were met by Rose, Andrew, and Joy Cobb, whose house was our original destination. We were fed pizza and chips and played pool, and came back to Arlington to sleep off the sun. I feel fine.

A good cautionary tale to have in my repertoire. Not doing it again.

benvandyne @ 2005-08-13T12:23:00

2005-08-13T16:24:33Z

Davi, something else that occurs to me is the ease with which we speak of our sexual-romantic relationships and our friendships in the same breath, as though they were cut from the same cloth, and how this seems so natural to us that it seems strange not to have thought of it so late but to have thought of it at all. That attitude is surprisingly uncommon, and I think it's another legacy of our own created friendship.

//

No lethargy today: productivity. Preparations for tomorrow's bike trip to Purcellville (etd, 11:30am; sorry, Davi) , for my quick jaunt to Brooklyn (currently planned for Tuesday-Wednesday), and all the random little things involved with next Saturday's move to C-ville, which really just involves the reorganization of my entire life.

benvandyne @ 2005-08-12T13:00:00

2005-08-12T17:02:49Z

What
is a wave
‘til it crashes
on rocks?

This morning I wrote four poems. For me, this is an extraordinary output, even if three of them end up being trashed as imperfectable--which they will if the usual proportions hold. I've thought that I missed doing so much writing, but that's really not the case: I've missed doing good writing, writing that (even if it's silly, foolish, giddily oblivious, or pompously sincere) is still honest and full in the moment of its birth. A literary existence is a long-burning fire if it's fed right, but it's awaited a spark.

Today will be another of those lethargic days, but after weeks of resisting I'm melting into its pace. The exterminator will come and I will make the most of my exile--perhaps in the library, perhaps in the basement of 141 contriving organizational projects, perhaps just sitting outside in Washington August's muggy indignities.

//

It was a shorter exile than I anticipated. Jamie and I filled it with coffee, scrounging in Goodwill for a good desk lamp for my Charlottesville room (no luck), and touring WIMSA's new digs on Glebe, trying to figure out the best arrangment of furniture for the reception area given the anticipated flow of people.

Fleeting and future connections.

2005-08-11T19:16:34Z

I've been thinking about my mental list of people to keep track of, people who might someday be useful, or fun, or great friends, but who for various reasons can't be those things now--people of great musical talent and charm, quirky brilliance, literary merit, linguistic skill, or who possess a sad and sparkling look at the world which coaxes my own to emerge, to emerge, to emerge.

Age is the most frequent and most frustrating of those reasons. At the delicate age I inhabit, even a few years can be a world of difference in the outlook we hold on life, on where we are and what we yearn for, or the way that yearning is manifested. Our essences are held in common, but it's a losing struggle (or a Pyrrhic victory) for that to be enough.

Beaten back and forth like seashore debris! And how much of our joy comes from the waves we happen (just this once) to share, though the next one may tear us asunder. And how vain and hopeless to have such a list, as though the memory of a wave could be held as a blueprint for another, better, that I could keep for always.

These long and dogged summer days

2005-08-11T17:19:01Z

Ethiopian food at Dukem's last night with the Findley de Regts and Dad was fun, although not as good as Zed's in Georgetown and more expensive. It does not join the rarefied ranks of my favorite places. That was the last of my events for this week, and now life is punctuated only by the twice-daily emptying of the basement dehumidifier, notwithstanding the fact that I do have a little bit of work today: handing out flyers at the Clarendon metro stop for two hours from 5:30 to 7:30. It pays poorly, but better that you'd think it would and work is work.

These are lethargic days, with sunbursts of motion but none of the humming activity that I thrive on. I've read the whole newspaper more days this summer than ever before in my life, and I look forward to being busy enough that I have to make time for the paper rather than kill time with it. Even my usual time-killing project, the sorting of my books into the takers and the leavers, is now concluded, with some help from Flake-O's ruthless but bibliophilic eye, and I'm left with no major projects to fill my days and no major events to mark the passage of time.

benvandyne @ 2005-08-10T22:13:00

2005-08-11T02:16:36Z

I had a nice time last night with Greater Davi, whose extended farewell events included a Great Big Sea/Saw Doctors concert at Wolf Trap. Ticket was free, which is always a nice way to start.

I'm struck by how few of the people there I really knew: Davi, of course, and Lia, my erstwhile road companion; the Klines, whom I like more each time I see them. Hannah Pocock I got to see once more before our mutual departures. Rachel, whose last name I do not know, and who I had not seen since just after the Mystery Workshop some three months ago. And many more.

Davi is one of my closest friends, even when we've not spoken for a while, which has happened more than once. So it can be a little awkward to find myself in the midst of people who, on the one hand, are my peers, but on the other, really are strange*, and young, and very much in different parts of their lives than I.

[*...in the sense of being strangers, not in the sense of being unusual, which, as long as it is not pretense, I can appreciate.]

Nevertheless, I jumped in with the understated enthusiasm that is my oeuvre, and was utterly charmed by the cleverness and depth and grace of the people whose company I shared. The whole night had a sort of playfulness to it that I've been missing in my life. We danced and ate mustard out of the jar. Rachel and I exchanged jokes, back and forth (the finest sort of affection, of those that can be had with minors), and I finally got smart enough to Google-search "moose cock" and retrieve the joke with that punchline which I'd been missing for years. It was a light and lovely evening. I was aglow.

لإسلام

2005-07-29T12:38:39Z

A theology of atonement: We never quite make up for the wrong we do.

We all need, and by grace attain, fullness outside the self. I've been looking for it in the wrong places: in the fleeting fulfillment of my own perceived needs and desires, and not in the palpable, sustaining Spirit that I used to see through the people I loved that left me so much in awe.

Those needs and desires are real, of course, and to dismiss them altogether is to set any hoped-for transformation up for failure. I still have fears, concerns, insecurities, hurts, and Things I Want to Talk About. But as long as I’m trying to be a little less self-involved, I’ll skip those: They'll wait for me, or disappear.

In speaking with Mary Katherine Morn (for a few days yet, the minister at UNMC) over lunch last week, she suggested that I try letting go and stop grasping at imaginary threads of control. Now, equanimity has never been my strength. A part of me yearns always to act, to change, to be just a little better, until I claw my way to happiness—but so far it's mostly just given me bloody knuckles.

I need to give up on earning impossible redemption and throw myself at the feet of Grace. I am in no position to ask forgiveness from anyone. All there is left is the openness of surrender.

I miss the honesty and fire that submission gave me. I miss being humbled by the simple goodness of people. I miss offering my gratitude in the guise of generosity. I want to be subject to people again. I want that to be my prime delight. Acceptance—of responsibility, of circumstances, of my own smallness—is the only way I see to exist geniunely.

This is a lesson I need every once in a while. How to make it stick?

A non-emo post. How about that?

2005-07-27T23:20:53Z

When I first fell deeply, transformationally in love, Davi and I were having one of the long, deep conversations we erstwhile had, and he asked me a question which I don’t remember but whose gist was “How much do you love her?” or perhaps “How do you know you love her?” Partly because it came out so easily, I will never forget the way I responded: “If I knew that she needed me to leave her and never see her again, it would be the hardest thing I ever had to do, but I would do it without a moment’s hesitation.”

Even then, I had an inkling (maybe a self-fulfilling one) about how that relationship would go. (Most of you will recognize which it is, though it doesn’t really matter here.) More to the point, I instinctively understood on some level that it was—had to be—about her, and not about us. About her, not about loving her, because if it were about loving her it wouldn’t be wholly about her. Loving her was not the aim, it was just the natural consequence of her.

It was adolescent passion, but it also revealed to me a fuller meaning of Paul’s command to his fellow Christians: “Be subject to one another.” That is the relational paradigm of the religious person. Not “Make yourself some friends,” or even “Be in relationship,” but “Be subject to one another.”)

(Ephesians 5:21 is a part of the Bible that's unpopular because it's about who should submit to whom. Immediately after this is a particularly distasteful section about how wives should submit to their husbands, which is part of the reason for Paul's bad reputation among religious liberals. I believe this interpretation, while broader than Paul intended, is consistent with the vision of community with which Paul is ultimately most concerned.)

I am at my best in relationships when I am a little bit in awe. I believe that there is significance seeping from every bit of creation, and I never see it more than in the people I love. In my moments of greatest connectedness, I feel awash in the Holy in everything I interact with, whether a tree or a table or a person. Each of those demands different responses, but all responses are rooted in amazement. All philosophy, said Plato, begins with wonder.

Let's skip the familiar specifics of the last year or so: at some point, I became more concerned for my friendships than for my friends. This was written to me in an email:

“It seems like your friendship[s have]… been brought down to a list of required behaviors and duties without the desire to care for one another that should be inherent in the friendship.”

That’s precisely it. It became about the friendship, not the friend; the position, not the person. At some point I got to be more concerned about the "closeness" (whatever that means) of the relationship than with being in loving awe of the person I was in relationship with. In the debate between living connection and empty ritual, imagine my horror to discover which side of it I've come down on. No wonder it didn’t work.

In the past months I’ve created some fantastic messes. For some people—Rose, Jamie, Fred, et al.—even more than for people in general. How terrible that those should be the people I love most! Thinking about why is almost irrelevant to what I need to do now for the sake of people I love, which is the essential subject of this post. Introspection about the reasons for those failures seems self-indulgent by comparison.

What really matters is that at the end of the day, I do care more about the friend than the friendship. I do love the patterns of friendship, but I love the person more. If devotion to my friends means abandoning the friendships, then I owe them that, without protest or hesitation. Punto. I have to be devoted to people independently of reciprocation, which may or not be forthcoming. I'll do it because it's my privilege and duty. Even if I did have a right to reciprocation, it's selfish to enforce other people's rights less zealously than my own.

You know, most of you, that my vision of friendship is not rooted in fun. You might be forgiven for thinking that it was rooted in "not fun," but at its best it is rooted in love. When I am in active relationship with anyone, I want it to be from mutual love, not guilt or a sense of obligation. Active relationship only has value as fruit of devoted caring. In short, no more bothering people even if it makes me more alone.

In the quantity I produce them words are only getting cheaper. True though it is, it will do little good to say once more how deeply I have been blessed by my friends. When I've said it in the past, it's too often been as a self-righteous cry and not as a grateful whisper. No more. If I say it again, it will be first in gestures and smiles and inside jokes, and then I will submit to whatsoever may come.

###

In which I bonanza your meaning.

2005-04-12T00:46:13Z

As is the custom, here's yesterday's sermon. I am, on the whole, happy with it; it is yet not the sermon it might have been, or may still be, but it seems to have gone over well. Among my major complaints is that it's very thick: if this sermon were batter, it would need a great deal more milk. (And clarification. Yes, vanilla clarification.) Enjoy.

Sermon — “More Intimate for the Distance”

I have always depended on the possibility of meaning in all experience. Nothing is so trivial that I don’t want to discern its significance and put it in a universal context. Every bite of an apple, every bus ride, every conversation, offers transcendent grace, if only we will choose to perceive it. The deeply-lived life is painted stroke by stroke.

In October I began my travels through Mexico and Central America. I was excited that my route through southern Mexico took me through the city of Oaxaca on last year’s Day of the Dead, November second. El Día de los Muertos is a very big deal in that part of Mexico — Memorial Day, Halloween, and a bit of Mardi Gras all in one — and is a vital event in the spiritual lives of many of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. For a person determined to draw meaning from the world, it offered an marvelous opportunity.

A few days before the holiday, I was already in Oaxaca, reading some of the books I’d brought with me. Among them were B. F. Skinner’s books Beyond Freedom and Dignity and Walden Two, which present his theory of deterministic behaviorism, the notion that all learned human behavior is attributable to conditioned responses.

For me, the personal and the philosophical inevitably intersect. The abstract conviction that there is meaning in existence had always been a very real guide and source of strength. It drew me toward ministry as a vocation, and gave me a context in which to understand and better myself. I knew that Skinner’s valueless world wouldn’t jibe with mine, but I thought I was prepared for that. Moderate mental tensions are the growing pains of the soul. So I read.

Well, those two books boil down to this: If Skinner is right, then all human existence reduces to pleasures sought and pain avoided — to mere hedonism, albeit with varying degrees of sophistication. Nothing can be left of human morality or goodness. Nothing remains but the accident of our existence and the evolutionary habit of survival. Nothing remains of our selves, and much less of the God of light and goodness and all-conquering love.

My purpose here is not to argue for or against Skinner’s behavioristic determinism. That’s for another time. Here’s why I bring it up: Even before I exhausted Skinner’s pages, I’d started to panic. The implications of such a compelling and comprehensive determinism were devastating, not least of all because it rang so true. I was questioning whether or not I believed any of this, about the sacredness of Creation, the goodness of God, the reality of Transcendence. I doubted whether I wanted to believe. I doubted whether I really wanted this hard, complicated, illusory life to which I used to feel called. The troubles ran deep.

The crescendo to the Day of the Dead outside my window echoed my internal stirrings. Before reading Skinner’s books, the holiday had promised understanding not only of Mexican culture, but of some small corner of Transcendence itself. Now all I could see were operant conditioners. Before, the fanfare of trumpets had honored the departed. Now they blew, and the walls came a-tumbling down.

Doubt is a particularly insidious form of suffering, because it robs the crutch that makes other suffering manageable. Nietzsche’s words ring true to the reluctant doubter: “[W]ho has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Who lacks it, he neglects to mention, cannot bear any.

I wrote a long e-mail to friends and family at home describing my unbearable disillusionment, and feeling blindly to reclaim some scrap of the purpose with which I’d come. Over three days, I stopped only to eat and to sleep. Writing helped me to think about my problem systematically, but sending it did not salve my sorrow. That night I found myself wandering the Oaxacan streets, passing tortillerías and mole shops, weaving back and forth among the parades and roving fiestas. An inescapable meaninglessness pursued me, darting and hiding behind puppets and tubas and drums.

Only later did I figure out that, despite my suspicions to the contrary, I was not going mad. Victor Frankl survived a number of years in Nazi concentration camps, and went on to found an influential school of psychoanalysis called logotherapy. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:

“Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of an existential frustration. I would strictly deny that one’s search for meaning to… existence, or even… doubt of it, in every case is derived from, or results in, any disease. Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. [D]istress, even… despair, over the worthwhileness of…life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”

So doubt, and its attendant discomfort, are not an illness. Worry over the meaningfulness of life is not an sickness. But my experience of doubt makes me want to go further. More than simply not being harmful, I believe that doubt is a healthy and necessary part of religious life.

The conventional argument for doubt is that it’s a means to a stronger relationship with the divine. Scar tissue is stronger than unwounded flesh, and doubt ultimately binds us more strongly to the divine. But I believe the real goodness and power of doubt has less to do with the strength of our bond with God than with its quality. The strength of our need for God is always absolute. It cannot be greater or lesser, only more or less recognized. But the nature, the quality of our need, and the way in which we satisfy it, changes. This is where doubt and uncertainty are indispensable organs of authentic faith. Doubt is a symptom of living religion, not its antithesis, because it breaks the artificial boundaries we have established and demands that we stretch toward the Infinite. Doubt is an idol-breaker.

It is possible to go too far. Modern Unitarian Universalists have avoided the historical error of looking on doubt at something to be avoided for a person of faith. We are unlikely to burn anyone at the stake for professing honest doubts, or to pull at their fingernails until they recant. We are unlikely to torment ourselves too much one way or the other. This is surely progress.

But in making our little, sophisticated universe safe for doubt, we have too often confused doubt and disconnection. Doubt is different than not caring, or than actively avoiding relationship. These do not serve us or honor our place as “divinely human” creatures. Both are endemic in our congregations. Though ours is a liberal orthodoxy, and not a conservative one, it is just as idolatrous, and just as unfaithful toward the Divine. To say that doubts of God preclude transcendence is to admit the truth of the very dichotomy we ought to be rejecting, that doubt and faith are opposite, irreconcilable poles.

The essential choice is not between faith and doubt. It is between relationship and separation. It is between seizing the Holy from every morsel, and ignoring the prospect of holiness. It is between breathing with two full lungs, and a slow suffocation unto death. It is between relishing all the flavors of awe, and numbness.

Doubt can serve us well; we mustn’t be afraid of it. Like all suffering, it is wasted if we fail to breathe it in deeply. God can handle our doubt of God’s goodness and grace, God can handle our denial of God’s presence in every being — if we use our troubles for deepening.

As Universalists, we are called to be receptive to the meaning in every experience, pleasant or not, to draw out its significance and make that our own. We are called from every direction, even through doubt, not by booming voices from the sky, but by the innumerable elements of a single reality.

I had a terrible fight once with someone I loved. I said some things I didn't mean, she said some things she didn’t mean, and we found ourselves in the middle of a Montague-and-Capulet, I-don’t-even-remember-what-we-were-fighting-about fight.

There we were, furious but holding hands, loosely and more intimate for the distance
Our loose-locked hands left room for breeze, midwife to a common soul

All sin is separation, and separation is the only sin. Conflict, even detachment, when it is an intimate experience, is not sinful, but sacred.

Relationship demands more, and in unexpected ways, but that’s healthy, and appropriate for Universalists. Whether we perceive it or not, whether it is intentional or by some subtler design, the challenge and reward of all relationships — except dead ones — is in their shifting winds.

Existential crises are healthy. They keep us in a living, dynamic, and intimate relationship with the possibilities of existence. My panic in Oaxaca was partially a result of having allowed that connection to stagnate, and noticing it, catastrophically, only when I slowed down enough to let it catch up with me. All the stages of my doubt — heartbreak, uncertainty, and even avoidance — have been valuable. They have kept me from retreating to a new certainty. When I read B. F. Skinner’s books, the walls I had built, that had separated me from a vibrant connection with God, tumbled down.

To the extent that knowledge sparks these little revolutions, it is in the service of God. Faith and knowledge draw the same sleigh. Their real value is not in the contentment, but in the anxiety they provide, in the way they spur us to ever-deeper, ever-better, though perhaps more difficult, lives.

Being in relationship with the Infinite requires recognition of our own finite dimension. Not to doubt is idolatry because it requires a certainty that is, and must be, beyond us as created beings. As followers of Jesus, we are called to be eternally skeptical of any idol, even — especially — one hidden in the trappings of a beloved and all-too-certain idea of what our religion ought to be. The key to self-actualization, Victor Frankl writes, is self-transcendence. If we can transcend ourselves by not fearing doubt, then, paradoxically, we will overcome our attachment to our own narrow perspective and become closer to the Universal God.

Love is the most subtle of idols, but even love can suffocate a relationship with the divine. In my case it certainly did: I was so enamored of a theology, of an idea of God, that I lost the real pulse of Spirit. I thought I had lost my God, but I had only lost my idea of God, and the distinction is crucial. In Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lenny suffocates a mouse from love. He simply doesn’t know not to squeeze so tightly. Similarly, a part held too tightly keeps the Whole unknown to us. Only by constantly shedding ideas of God can the real, unknowable God be approached. Be not afraid. No soul is ever lost from God.

Our understandings of God are inherently inadequate, and even our cherished beliefs can become idols precisely because we cherish them. If our love of Christianity, or of the church, or of each other keeps us from that which transcends and includes all, we will have defaced Christianity, the church, and each other them by making them into merely the objects of our vanity.

So this is our challenge: to exist between the extremes of separation and ossification. We must learn to be serious but not self-important. A cult, after all, is just a religion without a sense of humor. We must seek a mature religion that is whole and of one piece, without ever being so idolatrously complete that it prevents evolution of our relationship with the ever-flowing Waters of Grace. God is not finished. The holy age continues. Revelation is not sealed. A living relationship, with all its doubts and dark crooks, is a surpassing beatitude.

—Blessed, therefore, are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.
—Blessed are the poor in sureness, for they are surely the rich in purpose.
—Blessed are they who see through the glass darkly, for they shall see the full and variegated countenance of God.
—Blessed are they that stumble, for ever shall they dance.

May we ever be poor in spirit and rich in devotion to the one God, the Ground and Goal of all our travails and all our joys. Amen.

Benediction —
May we speak with conviction whatsoever we may say,
savor the fullness of whatsoever we may taste,
and do in love whatsoever we may do.
Alleluia, Alleluia. Amen.

Sermonotony.

2005-04-05T13:29:34Z

I'm preaching again next Sunday (10 April), at the same place I did the last two times, the Universalist National Memorial Church. If the information below isn't sufficient, comment here, email me, or IM me, and I'll tell you anything else you may need to know. The sermon will be posted in this space and on the website of the church.

"More Intimate for the Distance" -- on the goodness and power of doubt
Mr. Ben Van Dyne, preaching
Sunday, 15 August; 11:00am

Universalist National Memorial Church
16th and S streets NW
Washington, D.C.

www.universalist.org
www.universalist.org/directions.html

Leavetaking..

2004-10-06T23:56:32Z

As many of you know, I leave for Mexico next Tuesday afternoon at about 3pm. I'll be gone until mid-April of next year, and soon after that for Rome. (Though I plan to be back for Christmas, I don't expect to see many of you. That has to do with my own state of being, not at all with how funny you look ar how wretched you smell, both of which I got over a long time ago.)

If I haven't made plans to see you before I go, it's nothing personal. Give me a call if you'd like to see me: I'll be around most of Monday and on Tuesday until I leave, although you may have to help, or at least watch, me pack.

After I go, my cell phone service will be suspended, so please don't try to call. I will still be reachable by email, but I can't promise to be very responsive.

~

Also, I take the SATs on Saturday morning; I never took them in high school. Does anyone have a digital watch I could borrow for the test? Comment or give me a call.

For the late sleepers

2004-08-15T18:18:59Z

The sermon this morning went well, and I was flattered that so many you were able to make it. For those of you who weren’t, never fear—it’s all right here! The pastoral prayer is also here, after the sermon. I am ever curious what you think.

If you’d like the readings that were used, I’ll be happy to send them or post them in a comment.

[SERMON: “The God who outgrew itself”]

“You Universalists,” said J. M. Pullman around 1900, “have squatted on the biggest word in the English language. Now the world is beginning to want that big word, and you Universalists must improve the property, or move off the premises.”

At the time, the great tension within the Universalist movement was whether, and to what extent, Universalism would be a Christian faith. Brainard Gibbons asked this very question in 1949:

“Is Universalism a Christian denomination, or is it something more, a truly universal religion? This issue [he continued] is the most vital Universalism has ever faced, for Christianity and this larger Universalism are irreconcilable. A momentous decision must be made, and soon! Unless Universalism stands for something distinctive and affirmative, it falls in[to] indistinguishable, negative nothingness—neither loved nor hated, just ignored!”

Christian Universalism, or the “larger Universalism.” You could not have both.

This congregation chose Christian Universalism; most of the rest of the Universalist churches are now Unitarian Universalist churches like the one in which I grew up, and they chose some version of this “universal religion.”

I’m certainly not here to try to persuade you to take their formula; for one thing, it hasn’t been universally successful, and more to the point, Christians have a necessary witness. But as our world grows more interconnected, it’s becoming more difficult to hold onto our old ways of talking about God. Our God is getting too big to remain within the constraints of our Christianity.

I’d like to recount (in English) a story that Richard Hurst told at last month’s Spanish-language service. None of you were there, so I don’t feel bad about appropriating it. The story is about a young Jewish chaplain in Japan during the Korean War, and his young Catholic assistant:

“The rabbi realizes how far he has come from the cramped apartment in the ethnic neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up. He senses how big the world is and how much there is to know and explore. The prospect is frightening but also exhilarating. ‘I was taught when I grew up that the Jewish religion made a fundamental difference to the world,’ he says to his companion. ‘….[But] more than half the world is on this side of the planet. They don’t even know what Judaism is, and they’re content without it.’

“The two of them … notice an old man, standing before the railing of an altar. He has a long white beard that lays upon his chest and seems possessed of a life of its own, like a waterfall. It catches the soft lights of the candles and glints of the sunlight that come through the door of the shrine. His body sways slowly back and forth, back and forth, as he prays.

“‘The rabbi says [to the priest:] ‘Do you think our God is listening to him, John?’

“‘I don’t know, chappy,’ [says his friend]. ‘I never thought of it.’

“‘Neither did I, until now,’ says the rabbi. ‘If God’s not listening, why not? If God is listening, then—well, what are we all about?’”

A universal God is bigger than we can manage to conceive of. God is always wider and deeper than we, no matter how wide or deep we manage to stretch. God has to be, or there’s no point in it. Now more than ever, it is clear that the idea of God that we have shared, couched in Biblical language and Western ideas (not to mention Western and Biblical prejudices), is not adequate to fully express the human experience of the divine.

This is not to say that there is not truth in this vision of God; there is a great deal. Christianity, like anything other than the Everlasting itself, may be true, and complete—but it must be insufficient, because only God is unbounded. The natural state of all things is yearning.

The Rev. John Beuhrens has written that “God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” If God is a sphere, and we are each at its center, then depth is breadth. We cannot go deeply into God without going out into the wideness of God. Like outer space, God has no up or down, left or right—only out, out, and ever larger.

I believe that we cannot be deeply Christian without being broadly religious—without engaging our Christianity in the truth that is to be found in other religious traditions, and in other parts of our existence that are not generally considered religious—but must be, or Universalism is not worthy of the name.

Our religion should be Universalist in its sources and in its application. We must engage our expanding perspective in every aspect of our lives—not just for consistency’s sake, but because the particulars reveal the Universal, and the Universal feeds the particulars.

No item is so small that we shouldn’t seek to put it in its universal context. How does your breakfast fit into your religious life? How are your pants connected to the divine Presence? How will the color of paint on your bedroom wall affect your relationship with the vastness of the Cosmos? These sound like silly questions—on some level, perhaps, they are—but as a poem is composed of words, and as a year is composed of days, the big decision to lead a meaning-full life is painted by countless small moments of transcendent grace.

Perhaps a year ago, I was driving home from school, and while I was stopped at a light, I happened to touch my earlobe.

oh brave new World
of Earlobe
I have known You not before
You End of new-found explorations
You vestigial Edge of skin
and soul

We all naturally explore our bodies from when we are very young; I imagine a similar glee when I first discovered that I had toes, or eyebrows. But I have no memory of that novelty. And surely in twenty years I had touched my earlobe before—but never like this. Whatever the source, this was a touch infused with significance.

Hang You there so
loosely
so soft and limp and cold
You final Stop of blood and breeze
You Flesh that bends
and knows

A major revelation? Maybe not. But like any religious experience, it was a source, albeit only briefly, of transcendent understanding, which makes it an experience worth cultivating.

Just as any of these everyday experiences are opportunities for communion, every religious tradition is a response to the stirring currents of the Eternal. The mere fact of their existence grants them legitimacy as conduits for divinity; the fact that they share certain truths makes it a little easier on parochial human minds.

The real dilemma is what to do with their differences. We can invent a cheap ecumenism that sands away their corners and whitewashes their brightest hues, but this leaves us dissatisfied. Different religions do differ—not only culturally and aesthetically, but ethically and spiritually. There are not just subtle differences—there are outright contradictions. The whitewash fails because the very fact of their differences helps us to understand the complexity of their common source.

For an infinite God, paradox is essential. There is no single way of understanding the Transcendent—just as there is no single way of understanding a flower. There are many poems about flowers, but none of them has to be wrong for another to be right—even though they may contradict one another, or contradict themselves. The poems don’t need any unity except in the flower they describe.

This is how God can come from all these directions at once—and why Universalism and Christianity are not only reconcilable but mutually necessary. Just as a poem may point to a flower, but is not a flower, Christianity points to God, but is not God. A God who does not transcend Christianity is too small to be the Christian God. It is in God itself, and not in the religions that nod toward it, that unity is found.

“When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” Buddhism teaches that religion itself is the final obstacle to enlightenment. The finger pointing at the moon, the Taoist saying goes, is not the moon. If we allow our affection for our Christian heritage to get in the way of pointing heavenward, we will have defaced Christianity by making it into an idol.

Like so many pointing fingers, religious ideas may be paradoxical, even conflicting, but they are all directed toward the God in whom they find their unity. This tension, far from being damaging, is a vital force in our religious lives. We are invigorated by paradox because it is a paradoxical Power that maintains us.

Michael Stewart, a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, has written of the paradoxes that help sustain him:

“At this point on my own journey, [he writes] I consider myself a mystic, atheist, Goddess-affirming, rationalist, married bisexual husband and father. Is there unity in my diversity? For me, U[nitarian]U[niversal]ism provides a ‘zone of the lovingly and intentionally unexamined.’ Within the walls of [my church] and within my own U[nitarian] U[niversalist] heart, I do not have to justify my contradictions, as the outer world insists—or abandon parts of myself—but can celebrate my own inner paradoxes and gain strength from them.”

The deeper our paradoxes go—perhaps not unexamined, as Mr. Stewart says, but not artificially reconciled, either—the deeper they go, the deeper we find ourselves in the very soul of God. It’s not only okay, it’s necessary, to examine our paradoxes, find them contradictory, and adore them anyway, because they are the fingers that point to the moon.

I don’t have to choose between being a brother and being a son, or between being a friend and being a lover. I am all these things. I must tread all these sundry paths at once, and allow each to guide me to the corner of God that resides there. Are you Universalists, or Christians, or Buddhists, or atheists, or poets, or sisters, or husbands, or lovers? Universalism means that you do not have to choose, as long as you are honest in your loving, committed to your growth, and open to the truth that inhabits all things and all people.

To tread so many paths can seem easy, if one ignores the terrific burden of freedom, but in truth it is the hardest and noblest task of human beings. Universalism ought not be comfortable. God is big, and we are small, and Universalism is the conviction that to approach God we must grow our spirits evermore.

We imitate God by walking so many paths, because in truth this is what God does—seeps in through all the chinks at the same time, if only we will perceive it. The great burden of religious liberals is that freedom strips us naked of excuses. We have the freedom to choose the part that makes us comfortable, and ignore the rest; but our calling is to refuse to choose—to insist that God isn’t just in one of those places, but in all of them—in every moment, in every person, in every experience. When we have no governors but ourselves and God, the comfort of boundaries deserts us. We have no earthly authority to hide us from the blinding light of the Whole.

This is the message that Christianity and Universalism share—the removal of all barriers to an authentic and expansive experience of Divinity. I believe, as John Murray did, that “Jesus Christ was the greatest Universalist.” Like Christ, the broader Universalism should come not to abolish, but to fulfill.

It is time, in short, to improve the property, or move off the premises. The Christian gospel demands movement—not beyond Christianity, but to a renewal of it in a larger, Universalist witness. Universalism is still “the biggest word in the English language.”

May it ever be so.

Amen.

[PASTORAL PRAYER]

Gracious Light, we are gathered to revel in your infinite refractions, that make for us an abundant life whose every moment carries the import of the ages. We would ask for the humility prerequisite to awe, and would respond with natural gratitude for your enduring and ever-giving love.

We pray for the earth, that we may still heal its scars and restore its splendor, and make it a fitting home for every creature.

We pray for those who bear transitions, particularly ________, as she searches for a job. May they confront every circumstance with energy and grace.

We pray for the forgotten and powerless, that they may know and claim their equal stake in the salvation of themselves and of humankind.

We pray for those who spend the night in wakefulness, in pain, grief or care(1). Remember the ill and the recuperating, particularly ________, ________, ________, and ________. Watch over them and their families, and keep them in your care.

We pray for those who have lost faith; that they may be sustained and comforted by your embrace. We pray also for those who walk oblivious to your touch, that they may know, by whatever name or none, the Miracle which composes all miracles.

We pray, O God of all Nations, for the whole world, that it may be delivered from its turmoil. Remembering the work that has yet been done, we give thanks for the succession of prophets, apostles, and martyrs, continued even to this very hour(1). We remember ___________, and all those who labor far from home for peace and justice.

Guiding Spirit of our souls, whom all worship under many names and diverse forms(1), we pray for your holy Church Universal, and for this congregation, that we may be delivered from hardness of heart, and show forth your glory in all that we do(2). Give us no victory but fellowship, and help us labor to build the Commonwealth of God, where nevermore shall we despair or dissemble, and where none shall be judged but by nearness to you.

For you are our Mother and Father, and we the children of your love, and naught can separate from you the souls which you have made and which you sustain forevermore(1).

[Silence is kept.]

Amen.

Notes for the prayer: Some phrases are inspired by (or, in some cases, appropriated whole from) those from Hymns of the Spirit (1) and the Book of Common Prayer (2).

Preach cobbler

2004-08-08T01:55:21Z

I'm preaching again next Sunday (15 August), at the same place I did last time. All of you who read this (and, for that matter, those who don't) are welcome to come; I would be most flattered if you did. If the information below isn't sufficient, comment here, email me, or IM me, and I'll tell you anything else you may need to know.

If you can't make it, that's fine, although less fun for me. The sermon and the pastoral prayer will be posted in this space and on the website of the church.

Universalist National Memorial Church
16th and S streets NW
Washington, D.C.

www.universalist.org
www.universalist.org/directions.html

"The God who outgrew itself"

Mr. Ben Van Dyne, preaching
Sunday, 15 August; 10:30am

What happens when we discover that God is too big for our idea of God? How can we prevent an idea of God--even a much-cherished one--from getting in the way of an authentic experience of the Divine?