Disclaimer: These interviews are my account of what was said. I tried to represent to the best of my ability, the intent of the interviewees. They vary in accuracy, however, as some interviewees edited their statements to better reflect their intent; others did not. Some names and places have been fictionalized to protect the anonymity of the interviewees.

Hilvie Ostrow is a member of Grace University Lutheran Church, where I worked for awhile in the early 1980’s.  I recently saw her at the Augustana Heritage Gathering.  Her father was Dr. Oscar A. Benson, who was president of the Augustana Synod for most of the 1950s, not long before the merger into the LCA.  I interviewed her over the phone. 

Hilvie had heard of Matthew Fox but didn’t know much about him.  When I described Creation Spirituality to her, she said it sounded like mysticism.  She feels the term, spirituality, is very ambiguous, very inclusive and rather vague. 

She did a masters thesis on the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, who made a distinction between Religion A and Religion B.  Religion A is spirituality that originates within one’s self.  Religion B, which Christianity is, is beyond the self and centered on Jesus Christ.  Kierkegaard said the striking thing about Christianity is that its center is the person of Jesus Christ, who embodies God in a particular human sexual being, a Jewish male, Jesus; so Christianity is very concrete. 

Through the years, she has developed the feeling that Christianity reaches into the deepest heart of human conditions, like a slum in Calcutta or slum with rampant Alcoholism; Christ reaches out to the deepest in human experience.  Other faiths are characterized by human striving to be perfect, to reach a goal.  Christianity is God reaching down into the depths of humanity; God with arms outstretched, to reconcile humans with each other and God with humans. 

A friend has told her to not pick out scripture from the Bible, get a sense of the whole sense.  Thus Hilvie sees scripture from beginning to end as God reaching out to humans, from the story when God asks, “Where are you Adam?” to the giving of law, to the Prophets, to the final reaching out through embodiment in Christ.   This is spiritual, of course, even though the term, spirituality by itself, evokes vagueness to her.  Her father-in-law was agnostic but very spiritual.  He revered nature, and had a sense of the holiness of things.  She was influenced by Kierkegaard and by her father, who was an intellectual who used skepticism in examining faith, but maintainied a high Christology.

Her father’s role from 1951-1959, in the Augustana Synod, was equivalent to bishop.  She was brought up in a home where Christ was the central and pivotal point of faith.  They were very Lutheran, with the concept of being saved by grace, and that there is no way to win one’s own salvation.  We do good works as a result of our faith; because we love our lord, we can’t help but do good work.  Faith comes before works; works are a result.  As a young child, she learned the “creed and everything in Swedish.”  She was 9 before she started letting go of her Swedish.  Lutheran faith in her life was pietistic: cards, dancing, drinking and smoking were considered sinful. 

In spite of the pietism, Hilvie thought of her mother as being more liberal, because of growing up on a farm.  Her mother had been in Oscar’s confirmation class.  Hilvie didn’t dance throughout high school, but when she was at the university of Chicago, her mother encouraged her to go to a dance.

Hilvie emphasized the background of high Christology, that Jesus is the son of God and part of the Trinity.  She believes that “Christ is the ultimate embodiment of God.  No other leader is equal to him in that particular way.  There are other good leaders, but Christ is the ultimate revelation of God.”

Hilvie went to a small Methodist college for one year because she had a scholarship.  Then she got a scholarship at the University of Chicago.  She majored in French and minored in Spanish and Education.  She taught school for a couple years and later taught English as well.  She worked for at Northwestern University near Chicago for awhile as a student counselor for the Lutheran Student Association (LSA), a national campus ministry organization.  She also worked a year as a home missionary to Mexican people in Southern California, where she helped a pastor in a parish where they had a Bible school for Spanish American children.  She also translated the sermons into Spanish on Sundays.  One year she worked in the business world as floor manager in a department store.  She also worked for a religious education organization. 

She met her husband while working in campus ministry.  They had three children who are all in professions where they serve people and there are five grandchildren.  Her son, Paul Ostrow, is  president of the Minneapolis City Council.  Her oldest daughter Laurel oldest is a nurse practitioner but is now writing and teaching writing.  Her second daughter, Karen, is a Psychiatric nurse. 

When she was 56, she went to Luther seminary and got an M.A. in Systematic Theology.  Her thesis was that the self is most fully realized in relationship to Jesus Christ, drawing from Kierkegaard’s philosophy, that we develop the self.  We’re not born as our whole self, but become who we are supposed to be. 

Hilvie has been involved in the peace movement and was arrested one time in 1983 at a protest at Honeywell, related to their involvement in the weapons industry.  Another famous Lutheran, a minister’s wife, Ruth Youngdahl Nelson (probably contemporary of my grandparents) and also U.S. “Mother of the Year,” was also arrested while in her wheelchair due to cancer surgery three days before.  Ruth Nelson was Hilvie’s heroine.  When Hilvie was arrested, she pled guilty with a plea bargain to pay the fine of $25.00 and address the court.  She told the court she was there because of her Christian faith.

Hilvie has been a member of Clergy and Laity Concerned and Women Against Military Madness.  She still goes to peace meetings but is less active than 10 years ago when she did more marching and shouting.  An article in the Minneapolis Tribune newspaper was published about her and her peace activities in 1988. 

Now she is prefers one-on-one interactions and volunteers for a hospice.  She had been on so many committees, she wanted a change, to do something more one on one and pastoral.  She also plays piano three Wednesdays a month at a nursing homes, and helps with Loaves and Fishes, meals served to people with few resources.

Hilvie is on the Education Committee at Grace Church.  She said she gets her finger in a lot of pies.  Her father was a pacifist and preached the social gospel, re peace and justice way back in the early 20s when most Lutheran pastors were not doing that.  He got into trouble, especially after World War I, when you didn’t talk about pacifism.  They almost lynched him.  She learned very young about racial equality and her best friend child as a 5-year old was a black boy.  Peace and justice were preached and were extremely important as she grew up.  She feels blessed by this background and has never hesitated to see blacks as equal.

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I asked her about the influences on her father Dr. Oscar A. Benson, mentioned above, that caused him to have this social justice outlook.  His parents were born in Sweden  (Skåne and Halland).  What started the Augustana church in the U.S. was an orphanage in Vasa, Minnesota for children who had lost their parents while immigrating.

Her father studied at Upsala College in East Orange, NJ, and graduated before World War I.  Afterwards he went to Augustana Seminary in Rock Island, IL   After being ordained he got a M.A. in Geology.  He earned a Doctors degree in Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.  He took care of worship services on Sunday and drove along narrow, curvy mountain roads to the university every week to study.  He wrote his doctoral thesis on Swedish immigration to America.  He succeeded Dr. Bergendoff at Salem Church where he served in Chicago.  Hilvie recommended the book by G. Everett Arden, Augustana Heritage. 

Dr. Benson was not the “gladhanding kind, to ”slap people on the back and butter them up.  He was very democratic.  To him, the janitor was just as valuable as any other.  In one parish, a wealthy man tried to run the church and her father stood against him.  A friend of his said he wasn’t a good politician.  Nevertheless, he was elected to the head of the church. 

Her father was not overly fond of pomp and circumstance.  As a pacifist, he was a member of the Friends and Quakers for many years.   He belonged to Clergy and Laymen Concerned, an earlier version of Clergy and Laity Concerned.  Her father was the Vice president of the National Lutheran Council, which preceded the Lutheran mergers.  Hilvie said the Augustana synod was very ecumenical, strong in evangelism and world mission, as well as in social justice.  She is very grateful for her Augustana Heritage.

~~~

Mindy's father was a Lutheran campus minister and her mother, a professor, became a feminist in a big way while she was in high school, which influenced Mindy.  She backed away from the church but her mother kept going because it was their community.  She remembers sitting with her mother in the last pew and changing the “He” God language to “She.”

Mindy began college in the early 1980’s and went to Mills College in Oakland, California for one year.  She went sometimes to First Lutheran Church where Rev. Dave Hurty was the minister.  She appreciated that the membership there reflected a diverse neighborhood.  She transferred to Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois because of the high tuition at Mills.  There she participated in campus ministry because that was where social justice work was happening.  She was the Social Ministry Coordinator for awhile there.  She was also part of a group that put together the Godspel musical on their own, though all the while she was questioning what she believed. 

Some of her close friends from college are ministers now.  She really likes the book, Proverbs of Ashes - Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us, by Rila Nashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, and one of her minister friends knows one of the authors.  Christianity as Mindy experienced it, taught about the blessing of suffering.  However, the feminist movement emphasizes stopping suffering, especially for women and others who are downtrodden and need to have abuse and violence stopped.   For her that led to a shift away from Christianity.  There are some things about her church experience that she valued, as far as the community goes, but as far as what she believes in, she is still sorting some things out. 

Her mother and father were from Swedish Lutheran backgrounds and have friends in Sweden they like to visit.  She said her parents have always been a part of enclaves, or openings, for a different kind of spirituality and had to do with the origination of Holden Village, a Lutheran retreat community center in Washington State.

Mindy doesn’t believe in a male God and sees the teachings of Christianity as metaphor.  Whether things happened a certain way or not is less relevant than the idea that we can be born anew.  She moved back to the Bay Area after college where she was part of a musical group for awhile that was involved in Central American support work.  They played political music from that culture and she traveled to Central American countries several times.  The people she interacted with there were involved with base communities and radical perspectives of Christianity.  Currently, Mindy lives in Berkeley, California, where she is raising small children and her husband is studying for Ph.D. in sociology.

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Rev. Jeff Johnson is the campus pastor at University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley, CA.  He is the person who first recommended I read the book by Larry Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics.  I had hoped to interview him but life at the Chapel was too complicated over the summer with their renovation and reconstruction to install an elevator, add new accessible restrooms & offices, and to make their space more usable.  He did cooperate by editing this short essay which I initially wrote about him and his work at ULC.  

Pastor Jeff and his congregation have caused some controversy in the ELCA.  He is an openly gay man, who along with a growing number of clergy has been unwilling to agree to the ELCA’s requirement of celibacy for homosexual candidates.  In calling him as their pastor five years ago, in the fall of 1999, the congregation defied this denominational requirement and declared themselves to be a welcoming congregation to all people, including lgbt (lesbian gay bisexual and transgendered) people. 

I have attended there occasionally and worked some with their social justice team.  The parish has been very involved, since its founding in the late 1940’s, in social justice issues and concerns.  At times this has meant making and serving food on a daily basis with Berkeley’s population of chronically homeless people; creating from the ground up, one of Berkeley’s leading social service agencies to meet these needs on an ongoing basis; creating a place and a system of sanctuary for war resisters, conscientious objectors and economic and political refugees and providing a safe drop-in space for urban youth living on the streets.  They also have stood with the university and hotel workers unions in organized actions and have resisted and protested the forces of American imperial aggression and empire domination around the globe: in Vietnam, Iraq, the Middle East, and Central America. 

I really enjoyed worshipping there and found myself laughing often, especially when they celebrated the Feast of St. Francis when people brought their animals to church and up to communion to be blessed by the laying on of hands.  Pastor Jeff comes from a Grundtvigian Happy Dane background, which seems to be expressed by an optimistic theology, a good share of creative hymn singing during the service, and a robust appreciation for the issues and concerns needing to be addressed in life.  Within a traditional format, the language of the worship is quite contemporary and expansive reflecting in liturgy the theological commitment to God’s “new thing” being done among us.

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Hallie grew up in Berkeley and didn’t attend church regularly as a child, as both of her parents had left their churches during college. Her family came from a variety of religious backgrounds.  Her mother was from a German and Methodist background and her mother’s grandparents were missionaries in China.  Her father’s family was primarily Norwegian and Presbyterian.  Hallie’s parents were divorced when she was small so she was partly raised by her stepmother whose Jewish and Swedish-Lutheran parents had converted to Catholicism.  Her stepmother had planned to be a nun as a teenager but soon left the church altogether. 

Hallie's mother was into Berkeley’s hippy movement in the 1960’s, and she joined many different types of spiritual centers, often taking Hallie along.  These centers included a Quaker meetinghouse and a Zen Buddhist monastery.  Hallie loved Sunday school at the former, but her mother didn't stay long.  Apparently she was annoyed that, although the Quakers believed in speaking in meeting only when inspired, people were always more inspired to speak than not.  Hallie hated the Zen monastery, as it was much too quiet a place for children.  While she was growing up, Hallie was a firm believer in material reality, and she thought religious people were somehow deluding themselves.

Hallie has two half brothers.  One has recently begun practicing Judaism while the other is an artist and not at all interested in religion.  Hallie’s husband has Scandinavian Lutheran roots in South Dakota, and was brought up attending church regularly.  They happened to get married at the church I belong to in Berkeley.  The marriage service seemed to satisfy all the relatives from their various backgrounds.  Hallie and her husband eventually joined the church, and both find things they like there.  Hallie greatly enjoys the structure, tradition and ritual.  She finds worship to be a spiritual experience and is touched by hymn singing.  These feelings surprise her as she had long reacted against her mother’s overemphasis on spirituality.  Hallie and her husband also feel comfortable and welcomed at the church.  As her husband said after attending services there for the first time, “it’s like having a hundred Great Aunts patting your hand and taking care of you.”

Hallie recently took a class in twentieth-century American religion.  She is very disturbed by the rise of Christian fundamentalism, which she sees as a major source of problems in the United States, and possibly big problems around the world.  At the other end of the spectrum, in Berkeley, Hallie feels that if people know you are going to a mainstream Christian church regularly, they suspect you of being a right wing fanatic.  She has sometimes found it difficult to explain to people that one can be a Liberal Progressive Christian Protestant.

Hallie has read several books by poet and Christian writer Kathleen Norris.  She is especially interested in Norris’s writings about the early church, the martyrs, and Jesus as a revolutionary and radical.  She has also read the work of Anne Lamott, a Marin County novelist.  Lamott found the strength to take care of herself and her son through her church.  From Lamott, Hallie learned that it’s all right to go to church, even when you’re feeling that you don’t know exactly what you believe.

Last year, Hallie was at a family wedding in Florida where many of the guests talked about God in a present and personal way that made Hallie feel somewhat uncomfortable.  For example, one woman talked about praying to God for a certain kind of shoes and immediately finding them to buy.  This struck Hallie as showing off her personal connection to God, and/or simplistically trying to prove God's existence through shoe shopping, both attitudes that Hallie had never encountered before.

Through meeting different types of people, as well as reading and studying history, Hallie has been discovering that she is more like her “very proper and upright” ancestors than she had realized, partly because of her great appreciation of the structure and tradition of the church.  On the other hand, she feels some personal tension, as she doesn’t care for the idea of Jesus as a personal savior.  She believes in the Bible as a form of history and, as Kathleen Norris seems to suggest, as “true metaphor,” because of the true power of stories.  Hallie is beginning to feel comfortable with herself in the church, although she still isn’t entirely sure what it is she believes in.

~~~

I knew Julie in college and spoke to her on the phone recently.  She was in graduate school, the first time she read Original Blessing, she thought it made a lot of sense.   She was participating in a center for spiritual growth where they looked at Creation Spirituality and explored other ways to think about God.  She hasn’t gone to church for a few years.  She has pursued spiritual experiences, however, some of which have brought her to find God whatever community she’s with and in the acts of living every day.

Julie works in social services during the week and became frustrated by church when there was not enough spiritual enrichment for her.  She felt compelled to volunteer for many things and felt confronted with faces of starving people who needed her help.  She wanted to talk about the God of love and all the cool things happening in the world.  She needed to fill her cup back up so she could go back out and do the social service work she does throughout the week.

Julie has found some spiritual enrichment at Benedictine monastic centers.  She started out worshipping with Franciscans.  She has been drawn to prayer life of Catholicism and has found Lutheranism disappointing and lacking a rich tradition about God’s presence in every day life, through  prayer and ritual.  She read a book by Richard Foster, a Quaker, called Prayer: Finding The Heart’s True Home, while at a house of prayer run by Franciscan sisters, which looked at all the ways one can pray. 

She learned to center at work and pray.  A sister told her the word “should” is not the voice of God, which she has found to be incredibly wise.  In recent years, at a Benedictine monastery, she’s been learning a lot about prayer in conjunction with the Sabbath as well as finding God in the ordinary of life.  One of her favorite images is to be a feather on the breath of God, an image from Hildegard of Bingen.  To Julie this means to not take things too seriously, to tread lightly.  She has that on a post-it on her computer.

Another significant book was The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God, by Ronald Rolheiser, who talked about how Jesus is the light of the world, the concept of being the light in the world, as well as seeing the sunshine in others and the light in darkness.  He quoted from the Buddha, “Be lamps unto yourselves, be your own confidence,” which she likes.  It means be confident in the gifts that God has given you, to share them and light the world with them.  To her helps her ask, what are the gifts she has been given and how can she give back to the world with those gifts.  That is the beauty of Creation Spirituality, she said.  All these relationships and connections we have with people are God.  We grew up learning that God is over there.

What she likes about monastery is going to prayer services.  She went at first with  a friend and finally one of the sisters said she should attend the prayers.  When she participates in their hour long prayer service, she feels the presence of God.  Her cup is filled up in the ritual of the canting and the reading and the stillness in the room.  When she is not there, she has the sense they are always praying for her at the monastery.

She can walk in the door at this Benedictine center for spirituality, have had the worst week at work, and feel a sense of calm come over her, which gives her goose bumps.  She did a whole retreat there on finding God in the ordinary, which was really cool.

There are profound moments.  One person was not able to make it and they were lighting votives and saying prayer.  They were trying to light a candle for her and could not get it to light and gave up.  That night she happened to open the book Sabbath Keeping, by Donna Schaper, to where it said we can rejoice even in the wicks that will not light.  Those are God moments also. 

Julie’s family belonged to the American Lutheran Church (ALC), which was a good experience for her.  They belonged to a large suburban church which was central to their lives.  They went every Sunday.  She taught Sunday school, confirmation, and was active in the youth group.  Then she went to a Lutheran college where she was exposed to a different kind of worship, a more intimate communion and deeper kind of worship than the social atmosphere she grew up in.  She has carried that idea of being active in church forward and was active in Lutheran campus ministry in graduate school. 

During graduate school she became involved in a center for spiritual growth where they looked at Creation Spirituality, Chaos Theory, Hildegard of Bingen, and other ways to look at things outside of the Lutheran tradition.  They talked about spirituality vs. religion.  In graduate school she did a lot of coursework on American religious history, and papers on Biomedical Ethics.  As a result, she decided she wanted to teach children how to make decisions based on values, which brought her to work in a social service agency where she can make a difference in this way.

She has spent the last three Easters at the monastery, celebrating the Triduum, from Maundy Thursday to Easter Sunday, which is a very powerful way to experience meditating on the Crucifixion and Resurrection.  Friday evening is the only time when the head nun can serve full Eucharist.  Because they don’t serve the wine that evening, no monks are needed.   Julie finds this gender dynamic to be incredible because of all the accomplishments of the Benedictine nuns, yet they can’t celebrate their own mass.  As an outsider she can’t reconcile that.  She goes there for retreats a few times a year, and while there, participates in daily prayers.  Sometimes she attends a spirituality weekend retreat where there is a set course.  They read a book and share meals and worship with the sisters.

Her Sunday morning worship is often sipping coffee, watching birds and meditating.  To her, that’s God too.  It’s alone, not in community, though she recognizes there is also a sense of God in community.  She participates in rituals of getting together with a rich group of friends.  She still feels grounded in church because her friends children invite her to plays at Lutheran churches.

She went through a period of awareness of feminist spirituality vs. patriarchy in church, and read a work by Rosemary Radford Ruether and others on “The Feminine Face of God.”  One of most memorable experiences was meeting Roberta Bondi, a theologian, who is at Emory University at Atlanta and also is a Benedictine oblate.  Bondi wrote a book about her memories of God, rituals of Resurrection and Crucifixion and one’s memories as a child versus what you come to know as an adult.  She writes a lot about community, and is a professor of monastic and contemplative religions.  Julie quoted a book from her during a retreat, to find out that Bondi was studying down the hall.

Julie is seriously thinking about going back to church. She would like one large enough where she doesn’t feel she has to always volunteer or organize all the programs she wants to participate in, but have great programs to just go to.  Though she realizes that may be hard to find as her views are not very mainstream, she would like a good adult education program to challenge her intellectually and spirituality.  She wants a church service that balances filling her cup up with challenging her to live her life as a Christian.

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I first met Nancy Taylor at an early morning vigil on Good Friday at the laboratory at Livermore, California, protesting nuclear weapons several years ago.  I was beginning to look for Lutherans to connect to and attended because of familiarity with Ecumenical Peace Institute, a main organizer of the event. 

Nancy was part of a group that read Original Blessing at her church, several years ago.  She remembered that they thought it turned everything upside down. Instead of Original Sin, there was Original blessing, the notion that God created us to be perfect beings and that the idea that to we are born with sin is wrong.  They invited Peter Krey, a minister who was writing his dissertation on Luther’s teachings, to give his reactions to Original Blessing.  Many in her group felt it was totally opposed to Lutheranism.  There are so many things in the order of worship and liturgy that are focused on original sin and they felt Matthew Fox was an antithesis.  Pastor Krey said, no, Luther would have agreed with him very much and he explained how, but she didn’t remember the details.

When Nancy grew up as a child there was more emphasis on sin with the Sad Danes the United Evangelical Lutheran Church (UELC) in LA County, California.  Her mother grew up in a UELC church in Iowa.  When she moved to Bay Area in her 30’s, she joined First Lutheran Church where the pastor and his wife, Dave and Kathleen Hurty were, who were from the Augustana Synod.  John Nasstrom, interviewed earlier, is a member there too.  The Hurtys placed more emphasis on a theology of Grace versus a theology of the cross.  The theology of the cross emphasizes Christ dying for our sins.  The theology of Grace is that by God’s grace, Nancy said, “we’re loved and accepted and forgiven,” and she emphasized again, “We’re Loved.”

Though I know I have tried to tell Nancy about the Happy Danes, she didn’t have a very clear picture in her mind and I tried to fill her in.  She said when they read Original Blessing at her church, a lot of it resonated with them, but they were skeptical that it fit with Lutheranism.   She was taught to trust inspiration from God and her own ideas over and above dogmas by a Lutheran woman pastor, Sue Kyle, a seminarian at her church 20 years ago.   Nancy said Kyle was incredibly sensitive and perceptive, traits she has found in other woman pastors.

She was reminded of Luther’s Small Catechism about the Creed, about the Holy Spirit, the third article of the creed, which ends with “this is most certainly true.”  She started to recite it from memory and she seemed to know most of it but she wanted me to look it up, so I did and here is an excerpt. 

I believe that I cannot come to my Lord Jesus Christ by my own intelligence or power. But the Holy Spirit call me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith, just as He calls, gathers together, enlightens and makes holy the whole Church on earth and keeps it with Jesus in the one, true faith.…Yes, this is true! (Smith 1994).

She said it is “wonderful stuff, the meaning of the creed, the idea that we’re all unique people… none of us alike genetically.  Unless we’re twins, none will experience God in the same way and we have to trust our own experience of God because he comes to us in our way.  I may not agree with other people about their experience of God, but we shouldn’t be experiencing God in the same way because we’re all unique,

She said that “That’s in there, what Luther teaches.”  Also, therefore, that part of Luther’s teachings, opens up possibilities to more to God’s power that is available… what’s available for us to tap into, the holy spirit, if you want to use that phrase.  She prefers to refer to God, meaning God’s presence and power and the connection through prayer and intuition.

It is important to be able to watch and to have to watch for God’s guidance, “believing in that God power, that part of our psyche where we just know it’s right and true.”  She doesn’t have a better name to describe “opening up the psyche to receiving all that healing and truth.”

Her group also read books about Hildegard, one edited by Fox with pictures, and another written to sound like an autobiography but really written by a woman who had of research her life extensively.  Nancy felt sorry for Hildegard, because she was in a lot of physical pain and had a lot of ailments such as arthritis.  Nowadays, we have treatments to help with pain.  She said that Hildegard’s faith carried her through a lot of that in an incredible way, but if she hadn’t have had that pain, she wondered if her faith could have taken her farther or would have brought different insights about God.  She remembers that Hildegard also interested in herbs, and painted, visited the Pope, was quite a rabble rouser and got herself into trouble.  Hildegard was not into dogma.  She designed a system of writing music and composed music.  She said we were barraged with Hildegard for awhile.  “It got popular.” There was a CD called Chant that played on pop radio, 15 or more years ago.

She said that Luther felt we could go directly to God, instead of having an intermediary.  We didn’t need to go through Mary.  Hildegard had a lot of focus on Mary, that struck her.  She found the feminine focus very interesting, which is different from what she had experienced before.  I said that Mary is a different part of the Godhead Protestants included much in their worship.  Nancy said she doesn’t think of God as a human, but a cloud or power.  If God has a face, she doesn’t see it.  It’s not a man’s or woman’s face, not masculine or feminine.

She said that what we were talking about is very personal, and creation spirituality talks about God in more of a personal psychological way.  She couldn’t remember if it tied in Martin Luther, social justice, or God’s place in the world.  Of course, Jesus is a good model for Christianity who brings social justice in to focus.

I told her about a dream my husband had.  He dreamed that he met God but God said, “that’s not what you should call me.  Really, it’s General Manager and God’s really busy right now.“  Nancy said that whatever you call it, it’s the same God but it depends on whether the focus is God/Spirit that is really zeroed in on us or on like a CEO, overseeing the whole world.  Sometimes our minds have trouble wrapping around both, to tie two extremes together, though she knows both aspects of God are both there.  Nancy must be aware of social disparities in her work life as she told me she is an accountant for an East Oakland Community Project.

*

I called Dr. Peter Krey at Nancy’s suggestion, who had come to their discussion group on Original Blessing.  He called me back and was too busy for an interview as he teaches philosophy of religion and critical thinking and is helping his brother translate a book on Dietrick Bonhoeffer on Freedom of the Christian Person.   He was interested in meeting me perhaps in the fall when he finishes his translation. 

~~~

Theodora’s definition for Creation Spirituality is the divine is in nature, similar to the Buddhist understanding of the connection of all life.  As a child growing up in San Francisco, she did not go to church.  Then, she attended a youth group at age 13, was converted, and joined the Presbyterian Church.  It was very meaningful for her to be on this spiritual path.  She wrote a letter to herself at 15 or 16, that she had heard about the career of Director of Christian Education and thought the Lord was calling her to do this.  She became a religion major in a Presbyterian college and active in the Student Church.

Theodora went to Union Theological seminary and enjoyed the topics but was uncomfortable there.  She thought she would marry a minister and they would serve together, but that didn’t sound very glamorous, especially for single women.   The expectations for single or married clergy in the 1950’s were very strict.  She did go to work for Migrant Ministry, under the National Council of Churches, for four years.  Then she pursued a degree in social welfare in the Bay Area.  She was still active in church but couldn’t find a job there.  An Episcopal priest she spoke to about possible jobs, commented that he didn’t know why they bothered to give people like her theological training, when they were just going to get married.  

She was confused and resentful and ceased to be interested in Christianity.  To be a Christian seemed more of a block than a support.  She was married twice, to Jewish men who were both anti-religion.  She didn’t believe in many of the doctrines because she had studied the Bible under scholars and realized that the original message of Jesus had become obscured.  She became a Buddhist.  She now doesn’t believe in God up there and something to pray to.  She is not conflicted about her wonderful Christian experiences and feels close to what she experienced as Christ as a young woman.  That hasn’t changed but the institution and creeds don’t fit in her life.  She feels it was unfortunate that she was prepared to be a leader in the church, but no one wanted to hire her.  When she would join a parish, people didn’t understand her credentials.  

After her second husband died, she began to question why she had experienced so much suffering in every family she was a part of and she wanted that to stop.  She took a course in Buddhism.   Buddhism offered an understanding of life which helped her work through her confusion.  

She and some other Buddhists recently participated in a project done by a Lutheran graduate student to introduce Lutherans to other faiths.  It was done at the campus church in Berkeley, California.  The student who came from the east coast, was surprised at how non-orthodox the people she met in the Bay area were and how lay

Christians were not that interested in exactly what the Bible said.  People here are not that doctrinal, take a lot of it symbolically and could just as easily be Buddhists, Theodora said.

Today, a main activity for Theodora is volunteering for the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant based in Berkeley.  She sells crafts to help refugees from Central and South America. 

~~~

Laura has a doctorate in anthropology and teaches in a large metropolis in California.  She grew up going to a Lutheran church.  Her parents were fairly involved when she was very young.  They went to Sunday school and were involved with special holidays.  She doesn’t remember a whole lot about it, but church was considered important to family life. 

She recollected that references to grace were the only thing she remembers as an important element or doctrine of Lutheranism.  She remembers her parents inviting the pastor for dinner to talk about concept of Grace, and that it was a big topic.  Later there was a falling out by her parents with the church, but she doesn’t remember just why.  They joined a more liberal/radical splintered off church, where she went for a couple of years.  By then she was in early adolescence between ages 10 and 12.

The first church they belonged to was Missouri synod.  She wasn’t sure about the second one.  It might have been different, though she didn’t know the differences at that time.  After awhile the family stopped going to church.  They had Sunday morning bible readings at home, but it didn’t last long.  Her father had some health issues and that might have made it more difficult to go to church.

They moved to another state and never did go back to church regularly. Church and the whole religious side slipped away.  Then in high school, through a girlfriend, she was introduced to the Pentecostal church and went to regular prayer meetings.  In the mid to late 1970’s she became a Jesus Freak.  They were hippies who were Born Again Christians.  They went out to witness with people on the streets.  She had mixed feelings, but church always felt like a place of belonging and was reassuring.  On the other hand, it was very Pentecostal and serious and she wasn’t sure what she was involved in.

She went into crisis her junior year of high school and realized how exclusive the religions seemed to be.  The idea that some could be condemned to hell because they were not exposed to these beliefs and how judgmental she was about how people weren’t living Christian lives.  She went through turmoil, an identity crisis.  She was distressed about whether she believed in God or whether Christianity was right as it was so absolutist.  She started on an anthropological path.  She couldn’t reconcile or resolve these issues and gave up.  She thought, “I don’t know the answer… I’m not going to participate in any religion.”

Later she pursued the study of anthropology, which led her to view all of this in those terms, seeing religion as a cultural artifact and product of a group of people that need to find an answer and explanation, to make sense in terms of their history.  Rooted in mystical experience, religion takes on a life of its own with a doctrinal base and loses its mystical connection while still offering comfort, so people stay with it.  She doesn’t adhere to any religious explanation, as she sees how all address mystical experience.  Adopting one for herself seems too limited.

She has been observing and learning about the phenomenon of upper middle class Caucasians choosing religion and spirituality.  She’s interested in this phenomenon.  Many feel disaffected and alienated by religious institutions they grew up in and want a more earth based ideology and spiritual connection since the 1960’s, with the turn toward Eastern religions and on from there for several decades.  Now there are all these different options with people picking and choosing elements that suit them.

She can talk about it in an about in open way and positive or a critical way.  On the one hand, it  seems there is an inevitable unfolding of spirit consciousness in the world that now has access to so many different worldviews and explanations and mechanisms for direct mystical experience and it seems natural for people to pursue them.  On the other hand, she is critical of the typical American Middle Class consumerism.  It’s not enough that our ancestors took peoples’ land and life away.  They now want to consume their spiritual perspective.  She can see both sides, and talk about both.  It’s not either or. 

It’s easy to say that people are just going after the latest thing, are not sincere and don’t care about a way of life.  They just find something to give them access to intense experience or help on a path to happiness while co-opting and consuming the essence of other people’s lives.  That’s a valid point, however, she sees the hunger, alienation, loneliness and disconnect in people because they are not able to follow religious forms that are exclusive, authoritarian and domineering.  They are searching as all people search for something real to hang onto, something deeper, that’s real.  They want a deeper answer and you can’t dismiss that because they are ignorant or careless or uninformed of the consequences of their actions.

She teaches a course in religious studies.  From the perspective of herself and many of her students, most people can’t figure out how to reconcile as Christianity has been socially and institutionally a dominator religion.  They don’t know how to reconcile that with values of cultural and social relationship and harmony.  A lot of people get stuck. 

There are core values to all religions.  However, there is a difference in that indigenous religions are traditional.  Part of their defining characteristics is that they are about a people.  They do not presume answers or explanations for other people.  They are inherently aware of the relevance of their way of life. 

Other world religions are based on the premise that they have the answer for everyone.  That fundamental difference is very hard to reconcile.  There are similarities.  The notion of God/Spirit within, which we are all part of, is universal.  Somehow other religions have expressed that more than Christianity.

She engages in political social analysis and sees how institutions build around spiritual ideas, then become political and social animals.  The people in them become vested in particular points of view, status and power, in the institution rather than spiritual philosophy.

She considers herself a spiritual person and adheres to the philosophy that we are expressions of one universal spirit, so everything we do is a spiritual moment.  She’s explored Native American spirituality, vision quests, sweat lodges, and taken classes in shamanic journeying, among other things.  She is not part of group or institution and doesn't attend a specific regular ceremony.  She sees her work as part of her spiritual life, as well as how she does what she does every day.  She talks about this with her students. 

Laura’s ancestors came from several European countries who immigrated to the U.S. a long time ago.  She doesn’t have much sense of their ethnic cultural traditions.  She thinks her ancestors struggled to survive and become American, so any holding onto any particular culture was less important.

Laura has gone on retreats for healing and vision quests which has helped her in her own spiritual journey.  She has talked to the woman who has organized these events about her questions regarding dabbling around in different traditions.  The woman has not had any confusion as for her this is a strong calling and purpose, from a higher source.  The woman is very connected in a community and practices her beliefs in her life.

Some things are very hard to reconcile and from what Laura remembers from established churches, they don’t acknowledge much about direct mystical experience.  For others, how to use that experience is what it’s all about.  Most Protestants, except for groups like Pentecostals, don’t teach how to use mystical experience.  Catholics have more of a handle.  They have exorcists, for instance, thus recognize direct connections.  In her classes they discuss the difference between spirituality and religion and talk about personal and direct religious experience vs. organized religion and how theology leaves out direct experience.

~~~

Sam’s issues with Lutheranism and other forms of Christianity have been a love-hate relationship.  However, as a child, he belonged to the Swedish Covenant church.  This was a free church movement that broke off from the Lutheran State Church of Sweden, disavowed the liturgical structure, and was more akin to Methodists than Lutherans. 

Sam is Swedish American from Chicago, though he also had German and Irish ancestry and was influenced by a mix of other cultures, including Dutch, Polish, English and Lithuanian.

His early memories of the Swedish pietists who raised him is that they were loving, compassionate, very kind and very Swedish in ways and behavior.  He remembers Julotta, a service early on Christmas morning, smorgasbords and strong Swedish voices singing hymns and music which still brings a lot of nostalgia to him.

Their piety included an emphasis on behavior.  They were not allowed to go to the theatre or to smoke.  However, there was a tavern not far from church, where many husbands stopped by afterwards for Sunday beer.  They jokingly called it John the Baptist Saloon.

There were multicultural influences in his early years.  Many family friends were either Irish or Italian.  At family gatherings there would be Irish singing and Irish or Italian food.  He feels that more of his genetic influence was from Sweden and Scandinavia.  He heard Swedish all the time but didn’t speak it.  He could catch the drift but didn’t pay a lot of attention.  He was also influenced by Dutch and Quaker culture through family and community.

Sam was very active in church until his teenage years.  Issues of pietistic behavior came up for the youth group he was active in.  There was discussion as to whether or not it was OK to go to public high school dancing, which technically was not allowed for them. 

Looking back now, he sees his things as an illusion and two sided.  The reality was that people did drink alcohol and smoke, but in church they disavowed this.  Most young people left the church.  A debate was planned about the morality of dancing for the youth group.  He had danced before at school and  thought it was fun.  Most of the group wanted to be against it.  He was the president of the group and decided to stand up for it.  He led the foray that proclaimed the qualities of dancing.  The minister chastised Sam and told him he was sinful and leading people to sin.  He was so incensed, outraged and angry, that he left and has never gone back.

One of his classmates in high school belonged to the Missouri Synod and invited him along to church and he started going regularly.  It was very German, and very Prussian in its style.  It felt secure and organized.  He liked the tradition, enjoyed the choir and especially, Bach music.  It was a Berlin style in that it was militarized, strict, and very formal, but they didn’t say anything about dancing

Sam’s family was very accepting and never said a word telling him he needed to come back.  They let him be and find his way.  He found it characteristic of Swedish temperament to be accepting and to not interfere with this radical change.  He had linked to the historic State Church that the Covenant church had rebelled against and in that way, he was rebelling from his family.

Sam decided to go to a Lutheran, Missouri Synod college.  It was a Mecca for the Missouri Synod and was also a refuge for ministers driven out of strict congregations, accused of heresy.  They found refuge there as faculty.  The big schism of the branch that broke off that later joined the ELCA was starting while he was in college. 

The sense of history and great tradition of the Lutheran church, theologians and liturgy which he likes, was epitomized at that university.  There was wonderful Bach choral music, artistic architecture, all of which he appreciated, and wanted to experience.  He did not experience these in the Covenant church which was pretty plain and composed  primarily of working class people, and mostly Swedes.  The Missouri Synod had more middle and upper middle class members, which was attractive.   Many new faculty came there to start teaching their career.  He found many professors who were wonderful, stimulating, exciting, intellectually progressive and free thinking.

Sam received financial assistance and a first rate education, for which he is grateful.  He visited many congregations.  He was a seeker and attended a Methodist Episcopal church for a long time, which was the high church of Methodists.  The minister was a famous and well known author who gave stimulating sermons and there was exciting, good music, which appealed to him.  In summer, he attended the Missouri Synod church again. 

Sam went to Youth for Christ conventions, Baptist conventions and Billy Graham gatherings.  He was always curious and eclectic and maintained connections while looking around and searching.  He went to Catholic masses as well as Rosh Ha Shana with college friends.  A close friend was Mexican Catholic, who married a Lutheran.  He experienced a lot of freedom.  There were sunset laws in the town that forbade Blacks and Asians to be in the city after sundown, which were repealed while in he was in school.  There was a potpourri of ethnicities and religious traditions in his fraternity, including Asian and Mexican.   He prepared a smorgasbord for his whole fraternity once, from herring to rice pudding and with Swedih music.  They were stunned. 

During his senior year he maintained a membership in the Missouri Synod church but also worked and went to school and didn’t attend his home church that much.  He took communion at the chapel at school, which was required.  Not long before graduation he received a letter that he was excommunicated from the Missouri Synod because he had not taken communion there for some time.  He was outraged by the letter on the grounds he had not taken communion and that he had not attended church,  He had been to chapel at school, just not in his home church and had attended many services, though not all Missouri Synod.  He was quite angry, and thought he would show them and fight back.  So he enrolled in divinity school nearby and he ended up with a Bachelors degree in Divinity.  He attended an Augustana church, Emmanuel, the mother church for Midwest Swedish Lutherans, which  received immigrants coming through Chicago.  It was near a Swedish museum and a recreated immigrant town called Andersonville.  The Augustana Synod was merging into the LCA at that time. 

Sam began to recreate his Swedish connections and ties and realized that the Swedish community he had grown up in and taken for granted was disappearing and dying.  The European immigrant neighborhoods he had known were dissolving into African American communities and dispersing into a Diaspora.  What he had known as a child was all gone.  He made a fervent reinvestigation into all things Swedish.  He started learning to speak Swedish from Swedish immigrants at church and became more familiar with contemporary Sweden than the old Sweden learned about in his childhood from the community formed by his grandparents.  Then he moved on and went back to school to study sociology at the University of Chicago.

Sam made his first trip to Sweden.  His younger brother was in the service in Germany.  They met and went to a café in Stockholm.  They were eating and talking in Swedish when a waiter came and said, “Where have you come from?  I haven’t heard that Swedish for 50 years.”  He was shocked as if in a time warp.  They had been speaking Gamla Svensk.  Sam was taken aback that he was so “out of it.”  He didn’t know the modern slang.  Now he has a Swedish group that meets with regularly and talks in Swedish; which is his surrogate family. 

He realizes now that we make decisions at an early age and keep acting on those decisions, but forget that they were made.  His whole life has been spent searching to rediscover that community where he was as a child and felt safe and comfortable.  He also realizes now that there had been a lot of alcoholism mixed with the sanctimony.  There was melancholy and depression and swings between light and dark in Swedish moodiness that came along with the alcoholism.

Sam sees religion on the one hand as not a structure of intellectual, theological and prescribed assumptions and codes about God and ourselves.  On the other hand, religion is a source of creative art, Bach music, and the sharing of food created with care and effort as an art.  He appreciates the Swedish expertise in the presentation of food, smorgasbord and its elegance, along with an appreciation of flowers and interest in nature.  The expression of art among Covenant people was to see interesting films as an expression of art. 

The merger of synods let go of an expressive spirit in the Augustana synod which was the most liberal and ecumenically minded.  He sees Norwegian Lutherans as more gloomy, rural, prejudicial, judgmental and unforgiving about transgressions.  He remembers the amusement in the Swedish Covenant church about St. John the Baptist tavern, that this is the way things are, it’s OK and they mean well. That church dissolved and became a Black church in the Covenant tradition.  The changes to his old neighborhood came quickly as each week a block would become resegregated and people moved en masse to resettle in the suburbs, not quite as neighbors.  Some remnants of that exist today in the suburbs and kinfolk systems. 

Grainger Westberg, a Chaplain and an Augustana Lutheran, was one of his professors who started one of the first alternative holistic health programs in the country and wrote the book Good Grief.  Sam wove sociology and theology together in his graduate studies.  Part of his divinity training had been with Karl Barth, the famous Swiss theologian’s son Marcus Barth, as well as Paul Tillich, both of whom taught at the University of Chicago.  He had an opportunity to meet some of the very significant thinkers of the 20^th century.  Westberg taught classes in counseling and taught Carl Rogers' theories of nondirective counseling.  Rollo May and Carl Rogers both had taught there. 

Sam also has studied the works of Carl Jung.  He is interested in Matthew Fox and has read his books, though he has not gone into it with great scrutiny.  After finishing academics he thought about hospital chaplaincy as an alternate career, but decided against it.  He has worked in hospitals since as an administrator, as well as in hospice care. 

While doing graduate work in sociology his mother had a stroke.  She came out of it without speech and was paralyzed with major brain damage.  He needed to work and she was hospitalized for a year and lived for 28 more years.  He took care of her for many years.   He has found that people at the edges of life, though they lose many functions, still can have a lot of love and compassion, a sense of humor, and connect to children well with an innocent childlike soul.  He believes in a theology of the divine, that we can glimpse the soul within us that’s perfect and doesn’t age or change and that still can be reflected in spite of adversity. 

Sam went to work in hospice care.  He did hospice work, using methods of poetry, story reading, gardening and art as therapy and spiritual healing.  That has not only been powerful but extremely affective in helping people go through these experiences and be transformed.

He has had other tragedies of losing close family members.  The church was no help.  When caring for his mother and going through other personal tragedies, he asked the church for help and they said no.  He found them friendly but there was nothing behind it.  They wanted him to do things for them but it didn’t go the other way.  He now frequently attends a Religious Science church and occasionally visits an Episcopal church for a fix to hear the liturgy and choir.

When his son was 7 or 8, he started objecting to the Lutheran church and said, “They are not loving there.”  That was a defining moment.  He began exploring and went to Unity, Unitarian, and Methodist.  He had been close one pastor who left and has not felt the same about his replacement.  Sam has been tired of the message that you are unworthy, unclean, sinful, a poor miserable sinner and dammed to hell.  That was not his understanding, and the LCA rejected that in the mid 1960’s.

Sam considers himself divorced from the Lutheran church.  He questions whether the Lutheran church will survive beyond this century and is surprised it has lasted this long.  He expects it to splinter and merge into the Episcopal church.  There has been a rapid increase of Protestants leaving mainline churches.  The statistics of Americans who indicate no religious connections has risen from 4 to 14 percent in the last decade.  The change is happening so quickly that people aren’t recognizing it.  A national opinion research was done at the University of Chicago, by Rev. Greeley, who founded an opinion research center.

~~~

Iftekhar Hai is a Muslim who presented a program on Islam that I organized in Berkeley, nearly three years ago before the 9/11 tragedy.  He talked about reconciliation between faiths by tracing the roots of Islam to the roots of Judaism and Christianity through Abraham.  He talked about the greater Jihad and the lesser Jihad.  The Jihad he embraces is to educate people about Islam; to dispel stereotypes and to build an American society of religious, racial and ethnic harmony.  He endeavors to compare and update the message in the Koran to the values in our Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence and Universally Accepted Charter of Human Rights. Another point he makes is that Muslim women are not as much oppressed as others think.  It varies from country to country, depending on to what extent culture and tribal loyalty rules the society.  Many Islamic societies have encouraged women to get higher educational degrees.  Several leaders of Islamic states in the past have been women, in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey.

Iftekhar brought a Sufi group to sing and lead prayers at the gathering I participated in.  They led the evening prayer.  Everyone was invited to kneel to the ground to pray.  To me, this related to creation spirituality, as I felt I was getting in touch with the earth by bowing to and touching it.  For Muslims, this is a way to become humble.  They assume the fetal position and touch the tip of their head, nose, two palms and knees to the ground and remember that they were created from dust and to dust they shall be returned.  In their prayers, they are reminded to have love, compassion and forgiveness.

I called Iftekhar Hai for an interview as the subject of Islam had come up in other interviews and I thought it would be good to get his input.  I spoke to him on the phone and met him for lunch when he gave me a copy of the Koran.  When I spoke to him, the first thing he said was to ask if I had seen the program on public TV about Galileo and how he had been persecuted by the Vatican.  Galileo was beheaded because he said that Earth was not at the center of the universe, which conflicted with the Vatican’s religious beliefs.   Iftekhar said that traditionally, Islamic scholars never thought science was in conflict with religion.  Since the beginning of the millennium, especially in Spain, there was a lot of progress in science.  Science was seen as a tool for discovering God.  

This was so, especially for the main theologians of those days of the Renaissance, when Jews, Muslims and Christians came together.  He said that Moses Maimonides, Al Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas, all preached during the days when Muslims were in Spain.  There were a lot of books in Baghdad (1,000) one thousand years ago.  It was a center of learning, as was Cairo, Cordova (Spain), Delhi (India) and other Muslim cities.  One thousand years later, things have changed.  The kind of Islam that was practiced in those days was much more ecumenical in interpretation, embracing the wisdom of the Torah, the Gospels and the Koran..  Jews and Muslims got along and lived together.  He said that the seeds of renaissance were sown in Spain by this Abrahamic society, which also spread into Europe.  Muslim countries were safe havens for European Jews who were persecuted in those times.

Iftekhar said that the first Constitution came from Mohammed, where he made Jewish tribes and pagan Arabs, citizens of the Islamic State under Mohammed.  Jewish and Christians places of worship were protected and honored by this Constitution.  Mohammed was in Medina for over 10 years.  Islam has always had an ecumenical side.  One is not a Muslim if he does not believe in the revelations that came to the Jews through the Torah and to the Christians through the Gospels.

In the last 200 years, much has changed in the Islamic world.  The Crusades and Colonialism changed the perception the Islamic community had of Europe and the West because it was dominated by them.  Islamic books, libraries and communities were destroyed.  An era of confrontation and liberation from colonial powers perpetuated animosity which lingers to this day.  He said we need to change this.  American Muslims need to stand for the universally accepted Charter of Human Rights all over the Islamic world.  Many American Muslims now see a need for reformation in Islam to help create peace in the world.

Iftekhar was born in southern India and lived near the disenfranchised lower Hindu caste, who were the poorest of the poor.  At the time of independence from the British in1947, he was five years old.  He moved from a village to the large city of Bombay. There he went to St. Joseph’s High School, which was Catholic, where he learned Christian values and ethics.  He went to a Hindu fundamentalist college which developed after independence.  It was not a good place for minorities.  He thought of getting out and came to the U.S.  

After he came to the U.S. he lived with a Jewish landlady who gave him food and a room in exchange for work, for four years while he worked on his Masters degree.  There he was exposed to the Jewish political ethic and learned about the movement for Israel by the Jewish people.  The idea of Israel only for the Jews surprised him, as people who had been living there for 1000 years, had instantly become landless and homeless.  After getting his masters in business administration (MBA), he settled in the U.S. with his family.  He saw a movement of strong neoconservatives, including moral majority Christians and pro-Israelis.  Seeds were sown in speeches saying that Israel should be only for Jews.  America favored Israel in the Middle East conflict.  He saw a strong influence of the American Jewish community in politics, science, and on Capital Hill.  Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians came to be branded as enemies of the USA. 

Iftekhar saw the need for and became involved in the interfaith movement.  He found most people were moderate and valued life.  These connections have been a tremendous support.  He is a founder and executive director of the United Muslims of America Interfaith Alliance since 1982, which he is very proud of.  He has visited almost every major church and synagogue community in the San Francisco Bay area.   He has met many good Jewish people who see that people in Israel and Palestine need to live as neighbors.  He sees that the people in control of the government now are “neocons…  The majority doesn’t matter for them.  That’s where we are right now. We are at war with our own values.  It is like in the days of slavery, some are for and some are against.  It is strongly divided right now.  People are either pro-Bush or against Bush.”  Iftekhar is for reforms.  There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world.  Two to five percent of Muslims are fundamentalist, just like the neoconservatives.  A majority of Muslims from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh do not interpret the Koran or Hadith in extreme ways.  They are strongly against usury, taking advantage of debt, which is economic slavery.

On the subject of Jihad, Iftekhar said that this part of the teachings in the Koran have been often misunderstood, regarding that which regulates a soldier's behavior in the thick of battle.  There are teachings that talk about ethics and others about how to act in a time of combat.  A lot in the Koran is not being followed.  A lot of extremists will not follow the basic human side.  There is a need for reform, the same process that Martin Luther did for Christianity.  The documentary on Galileo also questioned the policies of the Church.  Galileo was tried by 11 educated theologians who found him guilty of heresy.  There was a tyranny of the majority.  All Galileo said was that the Earth is not the center of the universe.  Islam needs some reformation too, but the question is, “How can that be done?”  He has some ideas, however, this will never be encouraged when Islamic countries like Iraq are destroyed and turned into a big garbage dump with lawlessness, desperation and uncertainty everywhere. 

Out of 1.2 billion people, what some people say is not what everyone believes.  It boils down to how you interpret the scriptures.  As is the position of the rabbi or priest to interpret and be the representative of God, in the old days of Islam it was more like that.  However, the Koran abolished the priesthood.  The belief is that the book is complete and that for anyone who reads it, God will speak to them directly without any intermediary.  Millions of lower caste and disenfranchised people turned to Islam as they didn’t like being the underclass.  Many of lower caste people of the past became the rulers of Muslim societies.  Islam was a big attraction for them as it included them socially.  

Iftekhar said that Islamic basic teachings are based on  peace, love and compassion on the one hand and taking up arms in self-defense on the other, which the extremists and fundamentalists have exploited.  Fundamentalists have used violence, in response to political injustice.  Suicide bombing is one such example, which did not even exist 20 years ago.  Muslims have felt dominated economically, politically and militarily by other countries and this forms one of the cardinal points in the list of grievances from the Muslim world.  I think this is an important point, as the perception of the “neoconservatives” as Iftekhar often refers to, is that terrorists are simply against the American way of life.  It needs to be pointed out that they have there own side to the story.    

Iftekhar said that there are three forms of Jihad (or struggle or effort) for justice.  The lesser Jihad is for the battlefield.  When someone attacks you, you defend yourself and fight to win.  You fight to defend your home, your people, your honor, your country and to stop aggression and tyranny.  

The second is to protect people from getting hurt, to do good and not harm. An example is the need for campaign reforms in this country which calls for a spiritual Jihad from the family of Abrahamic people.  

The third is to read the Koran every day, to pray five times, practice charity and follow fasting and pilgrimage rituals.  This is an internal Jihad.  It means that it is up to an individual to do the right thing.  It is the Jihad of the senses, where one controls greed, gluttony, jealousy, anger, etc. This Jihad of self-denial and purification is much greater than the lesser Jihad, that of going to war.

He said that Muslim society is just like any other society.  Not every one follows the essence of the message. There are leaders who worship power and riches, which is a political interpretation of Islam.  There is also a spiritual interpretation of Islam, characterized by love, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation.  The Sufis have this kind of thinking.  The earlier Christians were persecuted by Roman Catholics, like the Sufi are today.  They have been persecuted for 5 years in Saudi Arabia, but their movement is growing in Turkey, parts of India, Pakistan and the far East.

When the Roman Catholics controlled Christianity, it was easier to persecute all Christians.  There are 58 Muslim countries in the world.  It is not monolithic. Each country is culturally and socially different.  The internet culture and mass communication are bringing positive changes among the Muslim countries which are continually in transition.      

In Europe and Germany, the Sufi are respected; also in Tunisia and Morocco.  The only place they are not respected and persecuted is Saudi Arabia.  In some places it has spread to Pakistan, where there are many types of Islam.  As an American Muslim, Iftekhar can learn a lot about the whole world and sees that we are borrowing each others’ values.  Because of communication and dialogue we can talk about where we agree as well as where we disagree.  He realizes that the process of talking with one another is a way of transformation and is a renaissance by itself.  The Koran is the Cornerstone of their religion, however, there is no compulsion in and respecting diversity is a very important part of the reformation of Islamic thought.

~~~

Nani is someone I met in Scandinavian cultural circles and I am now a member of the church she has belonged to since she was a child in Berkeley, California where Nani was born and raised.  Her mother was Swedish Lutheran, part of the Augustana Synod and was born in Sweden, but immigrated with her family.   Her grandmother, who was part Sami, was interested in all religions, including mysticism.  This quest may have been inspired by her husband becoming gravely ill.  She traveled back to Sweden twice looking for a cure.  As a young girl, her grandmother was tutored in the home by the minister, as their school had burned down.  Later she attended a finishing school at Lund University in Sweden. She was extremely well-educated and spoke many European languages, though was not fluent in English.  She traveled with her father who was a merchant, inventor and landowner, to Germany and France to help sell merchandise.  She read Jehovah Witness tracts and went to palmists and seers to find out about the future.  She also read writings from thinkers of that time, including Emmanuel Swedenborg. 

Nani’s father was German and Danish and was raised in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.  Nani went to a Missouri Synod school but belonged to a Swedish Lutheran Church.  The Missouri Synod influence was much stricter.  The liturgy was more old fashioned and women couldn’t do certain things.  They weren’t allowed lipstick and had to dress a certain way.  She remembers asking both pastors, which heaven would she go to, the Augustana Swedish Lutheran or Missouri Synod Lutheran? 

She experienced religion partly as a way to control children.  She experienced abuse in many ways, particularly verbal and physical.  She lived with an extended family that had drug, alcohol addiction and mental health issues.  She didn’t understand why people were so saintly at church but not at home.  She was told that God was always watching her when they weren’t.  She was told to honor her father and mother, even if they were unkind to her. 

They said grace at meals and prayers in the morning.  At night they said the Lord’s prayer and the Nicene Creed.  Over her bed was the Swedish Children’s Prayer, ”Gud som haver barnen kär, se till mig som liten är” (God who hold the children dear, watch over me, for I am small.)  In her prayers, she blessed all the people she knew by name, who had done terrible things and who were spiritually, mentally and physically challenged.  She thought God was a punishing God and most adults were punished.  She thought she was sinful because she had bad thoughts, especially about how she was treated.  God heard and knew what was in her heart.  She rebelled when she was mistreated, therefore she must be bad.  Children were to be seen and not heard and to do what their parents told them.  She had to work hard doing chores around the house and to never question or talk back.  The children were not to bring any shame to the family and be mindful of what the neighbors thought.  They were not to break the 10 commandments, which she said was impossible.  If you did, or thought about it, you were dammed to hell.  The Lutherans have no purgatory, she said, so there is no second chance.  You had to be perfect and not make mistakes.  You had to do things cheerfully and not grudgingly, even if you were not feeling well.  Her parents were divorced and her father moved out and she had little contact with him after that.  She thought she might have done something wrong to cause it.  Her mother started drinking then, like her other relatives.  Every night she prayed and cried out loud to God to let her die because she hurt so much, was so “good” and everyone misunderstood her.

At her mother’s church, everyone wore hats and gloves on Sundays.  One time a drunken man came in and sat down.  The people said things like, “He stinks.  Why is he here.  Someone should do something.”  The minister was preaching and said he would rather preach to that man who came to hear God’s word, than to all the people who came to show off their fancy clothes.  She remembers the people rustled around in their chairs. 

In retrospect, Nani feels that hats and gloves are symbolic of the hypocritical lives many people lead.   In her family, she saw that people put on their Sunday best to go to church but when they get home they took off their Sunday clothes and got drunk.  She sees this as endemic of society where people talk the talk of religious belief but in every day life, don’t act it out.

Nani didn’t have a lot of playmates.  If she laughed or skipped, she was punished.   She was happy working in the garden, or enjoying art, music or dancing, but she felt guilty and that she was supposed to be working.

She finally got out into the world as she got older and burst onto the scene of the 1960’s and Haight Ashbury’s Summer of Love in San Francisco.  She investigated Eastern religion.  For her B.A., she majored in History, and minored in comparative religion and Mediterranean archaeology. She studied Zoroastrianism and Egyptian, Islam, Hindu, Zen and other international religions, as well as Catholicism and Protestant theologians, Calvin and Luther.  As a child, she learned why not to trust Catholics, not why we are Lutheran.  Then she was married three times, all to Catholics.  They worshipped saints, we were living saints.  They could buy their way out of hell.  We were saved by grace.  She did not feel very graceful and looked for a common denominator.  She studied hard sciences, including astronomy as well as astrology and did charts.

She found that many hippies who talked about flower power and love, still used each other, though in retrospect, they were less hypocritical than the people she had known growing up.  She married a manager of several big name bands, the elite of Rock and Roll.  She felt they were the idle rich, using drugs and alcohol.  Her husband would want to fly to L.A. just to go to dinner.  Her husband, like her, was breaking away from a rigid childhood and developed his creativity through songwriting, clothes design and investing in start-up businesses committed to social change.

She went for awhile to the Satanic Church in San Francisco.  She concluded the minister was an excellent psychologist making money off New Age religion.  She went to the Jim Jones church, among others, for awhile.  She checked out the Hari Krishnas, Indian mystics, Buddhism, shamanism and creationism.  She couldn’t relate to all her friends who were spiritual and travelled to India and Tibet to do good works, though they came back with intestinal infections.  She felt they were embracing spirituality superficially.  She enjoyed nature and dancing.  She studied psychology at Esalon and eventually left her husband who was addicted to heroin. 

She wanted a normal life and got married again.  Her second husband was killed in a motorcycle accident.  She entered into a terrible abyss of emotional pain.  She married again to a nice normal guy who was a Republican.  She felt she was living a dual life.  One side of her was a progressive, interested in equality, while another was a wealthy Republican who was very well connected.  She felt she could do anything.  She didn’t realize this was a good thing, but felt conflicted.  All the hippies she knew were rebelling from their wealthy families.  She went to peace marches and registered voters in the South.  She wasn’t racist and was shocked at how many family and friends were bigoted or elitist. 

Her third husband was killed in a plane crash four months after they were married.  She had had a premonition and has had them before when negative things are about to happen.  She moved back in with her mother whether there was a lot of negative energy.  She didn’t feel good about it, but didn’t follow her instinct.  People thought her mother took care of her but it was the reverse.  There was one fire and then several months later, a second.  During the second, her mother’s bedroom exploded.  Nani dragged her mother to the door but by then was to weak to unlock the door.  A neighbor called for help.  The firefighters broke down the door on top of Nani.  Her mother had passed out and was fine.  Nani was taken to the hospital and remained in a coma for some time.

The story was in the news and the Lutheran Bishop from Sacramento came to the hospital to see her.  As he bent over to pray for her, her hand reached up and grabbed onto his shiny cross, swinging over her and wouldn’t let go.  After that she started to come out of the coma slowly.

Nani remembered going through a tunnel, then experienced a surreal place, floating down a hill to encounter a man who radiated white light, with people around him.  He put his hand up and said, “You can’t come.”  She thought it was Jesus.  It felt so good.  Her grandmother was there, the white light was blinding and had a purplish tint.

As she came to consciousness, she saw and observed her body and didn’t know if it was a dream.  She thought, “Shit, my father will kill me if I die.”  She felt like a sacrificial lamb and didn’t want to live.  She had saved her mother, thus had done her part.  She didn’t feel pain but bliss.  She didn’t want to come back to life.  Everything after that was very painful, physically.  As she came to consciousness she heard multiple voices and was confused.  She felt like she was swimming.  When she regained consciousness she was glad to be alive and vowed to change her life. 

It took several years to recover.  She felt like no one wanted her.  Her father took her to his home but she was not well cared for there and left within two weeks with nowhere to go.  Kind strangers took her in, including an Oakland Raider.  People helped her get social services and she began to rehabilitate but didn’t know how to advocate for herself.   She was grieving for her husband and for miscarriages.  She felt that everyone wanted things from her and for her to take care of them.

She joined Adult Children of Alcoholics, which guided her spiritual exploration and emotional recovery.  The Bishop wanted her to go back to church, but she didn’t for 10 years.  She couldn’t climb the stairs to church and no one offered to help.  She felt spiritual but not religious, with no dogma.  The religious institutions didn’t foster spirituality.  They were phony and didn’t walk their talk and help the less fortunate or do what a God of love would want them to do.  She did a lot of reading in the Bible.  She read that even though one’s parents forsake you, God doesn’t.  She phoned churches to talk about religion.  A Missouri Synod pastor responded to her and she went to church there for several years, even though she kept her membership at the church of her childhood.  They let her take communion there, even though technically, outsiders can’t.  The pastor counseled her often.

She explored her own spirituality and came to choose a God of love and nature, taking the best from different religions.  To keep her spirit in her body, every day she needed to ground herself in exercise as she continued to rehabilitate.   She learned to say no to others and to love herself.  She went back to school and reparented herself through 12 Steps, with love, understanding, approval and gentleness.  She developed resilience not based on spite and resentment.  She realized she would never gain approval and acceptance from her family of origin.  She concentrated on being and didn’t look for praise, but got it anyway.  She achieved praise and recognition at college.  They even praised her for mistakes and taught that you can learn from mistakes.  She learned to take care of her problems, not to deny them, as she had been raised to do.  It was difficult to go to school, even though she still had to care for her mother.  She decided that “if my God is a God of love and social justice and creativity, I can’t be a phony and need to walk my talk.” 

Nani went to Sweden and Germany to try to understand how her family became dysfunctional.  She wanted to understand their religion and believed it was a major component that made them the way they were.  She felt like less of a failure and accomplished a lot.  She tried to give back to society and had leadership roles at church and in the community.  She felt good about serving others in society.  She came to realize that one person doesn’t have to do everything, but can do small things and make a difference.

Though she excelled in many ways, she still had trouble getting her body out of bed because of pain.  She tried to ground herself every day and to be in nature.  She stopped listening to the voices of family members, telling her she was lazy.  She started redefining what was selfishness and what was self love.  She says a daily prayer of thanksgiving, instead of complaining.  She tries to concentrate on what is going well and to stop paying attention to judgmental thoughts.  She listens to healing music and studied women throughout history such as Hildegard and St. Theresa of Avila.  She wanted to see how women who had personal freedom used it, given what they were allowed with their place in society.   She was nominated to be a Rhode Scholar but couldn’t leave her mother to pursue it.  She was granted a full scholarship to Harvard graduate school of education but couldn’t abandon her mother. 

This was a crisis of faith.  She had to decide, is God the center or her ego?  She felt she was stumbling in the dark, and that faith is not knowing.  She tried to become quiet enough to hear God’s voice.  For years she felt she didn’t have a right to ask God for anything good, but she could ask it for other people.  She decided it was OK to ask for good things for herself.  It was hard to overcome a lifetime of abuse with just one vision.  Nani learned about forgiveness and how to not hold others to a higher standard than herself.  She decided she can choose to forgive even if others don’t repent, and not make herself a victim.  Her job was to do her best and take responsibility for herself.  She is learning not to hold resentment and to be grateful. 

Nani thinks of prayer as petitioning God for something.  Meditation is sitting still long enough to hear God’s answer.  Spirituality is not just about personal achievements, but is balanced with spirituality and loving.  This is difficult as she gets older and is aware of how few material benefits she has.  She has a picture with a saying from the Dalai Lama, that it is important to lead with your heart, not your head and that too many people lead with their head.  It says one should listen to one’s heart, be compassionate and never give up.  She is trying to train herself to listen with her a heart but that can be hard when one’s heart is still healing.  She believes and envisions peace, rootedness and connection in the universe. 

Nani achieved a Masters in Scandinavian studies at U.C. Berkeley, then went on to achieve a Masters in Rehabilitation Counseling.  Her mother died the day of her graduation from San Francisco State so she couldn’t attend the graduation. 

Nani’s favorite poem is in Swedish, Du är Släkt, by Birgitta Onsell, meaning you are related.  I translated it with her help, for her mother’s funeral.

You are kin with stars and night violets
kin with the ocean and wind
You are kin with warmth and springtime sun
kin to lilies and linden

You are kin with the bear and lamb and lynx
kin with the ants and the heather
You are kin with the valley and mountain and moor
kin with the wild young bird

You are kin with divinity and heaven's house
kin with all on earth
You are kin with space and distant lights
See--thus is Creation formed....

Someone named Virgil, who she met through her mother, has sent her positive cards for many years.  She considers him an angel and doesn’t know if she could have made it without the three cards a week that he sent continues to send her.  She realizes she can become so wrapped up in negativity that she doesn’t hear God.  Since her last husband died, until recent years, she was walking through and felt more akin with the darkness than the light.  Her spirituality has kept her going through all her life, including the darkest times.  She didn’t find this support through organized religions but kept looking for a community which she felt completely a part of.  She had a positive intuitive feeling that led her to help in the process to call the woman pastor of our church.  She now feels she has that spiritual community and is especially pleased with the church’s work with community issues, particularly its shelter for homeless youth and young mothers.

Nani said that if she doesn’t look for God, she doesn’t find God.  She has to make time every day to connect with her spiritual center.  She often finds answers through expressing herself in creative ways.  Sometimes she goes to a spiritual center where there is a sand box for creative expression.  She has creative boxes around her house for creative activity.  For much of her life, her experiences from family and organized religion were that it tried to make people nonhuman.  She now believes that in our humanity is where we are most connected to God.  She has learned that it is OK to make mistakes.  She has had a major transformation.  I told her I thought she had come to the four paths of Creation Spirituality: positiva, negative, creativa and transformativa, ala Matthew Fox, all on her own.  Thus I have started calling her Nani Lama.

~~~

Rev. Dave was raised in the Augustana Lutheran Church.  He grew up in Hutchinson, Kansas and attended Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas, a Swedish community.  He never did a lot of questioning of his faith.  He found seminary studies to be intellectually in agreement with his tradition and didn’t challenge it.  He is familiar with Matthew Fox’s themes and work on Creation Spirituality, including the book, Original Blessing.  He isn’t sure how well Fox addresses the reality of sin and evil in the world.  They talked about the goodness of Creation in seminary, but human flaws are inescapable.  He appreciates Fox’s emphasis since Christians have bent over backward to talk about evil vs. the good in Creation

For some aspects of religion, where there is mystery, he feels there are no precise answers for everything.  Life after death is an open question.  It is OK, if we don’t know the answers absolutely.  There is a lot of room for a healthy dose of wonderment, questioning, and agnosticism.  We don’t have to have all the answers.  He doesn’t question the reality of God, but questions a lot of traditional views, especially fundamentalist views.

The heart of the central Christian faith and Lutheranism are the concepts of God and Grace.  In the early 19^th century, if you talked about universal salvation, you might have been considered heretics, but not so much today.  It is now more accepted to say that people who don’t believe the Christian doctrine are not necessarily excluded from God’s grace, which abounds beyond the realm of the Christian faith.

Late nineteenth century founders of Augustana institutions, Rev/Dr. Olof Olsson, based at Bethany Church and College in Lindsborg, Kansas, and Professor Lars Paul Esbjorn, based at Augustana College and seminary in northern Illinois, were ahead of the game.  They were eager to be more open to other traditions than Lutheran and talked about universal salvation, which opened things up to accept others than Christians.  Until the 1930’s, however, the faculty at the Augustana seminary taught very orthodox Lutheranism, so pastors until then were pretty much ingrained that way.  When Conrad Bergendoff became the Dean, there was a big uproar in the early 1930’s about new seminary faculty who started teaching Biblical criticism, form and historical criticism, which opened people up to other kinds of thinking, including ecumenical.  Professor Nathan Söderblom taught about world religions at Uppsala University, Sweden, and was a leader in interfaith phenomenology.  Byron Swanson, Dave’s brother in law, did his dissertation on the influence of Söderblom and Bergendoff on the Augustana church.  The basic theme was that though sympathetic to the confessional stance of the Lutheran church, the Augustana Synod became open to ecumenism through the influence of Bergendoff, who was influenced by Söderblom.

Rev. Dave served as a campus minister at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, from1956-63.  He helped merge an Augustana congregation with a United Lutheran Church (German background Synod) in Santa Barbara, California, where he served from 1963-1968, and worked in campus ministry at the University at Santa Barbara.  Walter Capps, a member of the Religious Studies faculty at USB, and his wife, Lois, were active members of Dave’s congregation in Santa Barbara.  Dave baptized their children and they were good  friends. 

Then he moved to Oakland, where he served as pastor at First Lutheran Church from 1968 to 1986.  Dave has been very much involved in ecumenical affairs.  He was on the executive committee of the Northern California Ecumenical Council while in Oakland, for over a decade.  He was on the Lutheran-Roman Catholic-Episcopal committee for the observance of the 450^th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession.  He was one of the early people of Lutheran background to be involved in ecumenical associations. 

The father of his wife, Kathleen, was Rev. Karl Segerhammar, who had been president of the Southwest Synod of the Augustana Lutheran Church, before it merged with the LCA.  As president of the synod, he had also been very involved in ecumenical affairs in Southern California and was on an interfaith council there.

Even while in Santa Barbara, during Vatican II, Dave was invited to the Franciscan School of Theology, which has since moved to Berkeley, on Euclid near the Graduate Theological Union (GTU).  They were eager to talk to people of other traditions.  He has had a lot of contact with Franciscans.  In Santa Barbara, they came to Sunday worship, curious to know about Lutherans. 

In Tempe, Arizona, there had been a religions conference at the university in 1956.  At that time there were no religious studies departments at universities.  Dave taught a course on the Apostle Paul as an elective there every semester.

Matthew Fox was at the College of Marin for awhile and was invited to speak at a pastoral conference in Oakland while his institute was still in Chicago during the time before the ELCA merger.  Dave sat near him at mealtime.  Fox mentioned he was trying to find a new location for his spirituality center.  Rev. Dave said, “Why don’t you look into the College of Holy Names,” which was right up the hill from his church.  Later of course that is where Fox moved his institute.  Dave and his wife, Kathleen attended some activities there and the institute used the hall at First Lutheran for some events.

Dave’s wife, Kathleen, had worked in public education and was principal of a school in Piedmont.  She also served on Lutheran national executive council meetings.  She was encouraged to apply for a position with the National Council of Churches, on regional and local ecumenism, got the job and they moved to New York, where Dave did supply preaching, until a position opened up at Seafarers International House.  This organization has a guest house in Manhattan where Seafarers and anyone can stay for  reasonable rates.  He was Director of House Operations and House Chaplain there.  It was the old Augustana Seaman’s mission, started in 1873, and before that, the first Swedish Lutheran immigrant house.  Pastor Hurty was the last Augustana pastor that served there and has been on the North American Maritime Association (NAMA) board for many years. 

He retired in 1996 and they moved back to Oakland in 2002.  Kathleen is still involved with the National Association for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Staff, under the National Council of Churches.  They both attended the Parliament of World Religions in Spain this summer.  They were very impressed with Karen Armstrong, a British woman who wrote Battle for God, and History of God, which address issues of the relationship between Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Rev. Hurty was on the board of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary when Rev. Bill Lesher was president.  He has also been part of the United Religions Initiative, which has an office San Francisco.  He has been less involved with interfaith than ecumenical issues.  The interfaith movement has become more compelling for Lutherans within the last 10 to 15 years.  Most ecumenical councils have changed their focus to interfaith.

When I was a student at ICCS, at the end of the year, I borrowed some Lutheran hymnals from Pastor Hurty’s church nearby and led some hymns which I thought related to Creation Spirituality, for some of my classmates.  One of the Hurtys’ sons is director of the choir at Augustana College and I sang under his leadership at the Augustana Heritage Association (AHA) Gathering choir when they met at that college four years ago.

~~~

Karen was also a roommate and religious major while I was in college, and like me, was part of Scandinavian Club and Campus Church.  She went to a Missouri Synod school through 8^th grade while growing up in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.  After college, she worked as a lay Lutheran minister in Minnesota, and lived at the A.R.C. Retreat Center for awhile.  They talked about Matthew Fox then and about him being silenced.  She got one of his books and didn’t read it all.  She remembers the Via Negative, Positiva., etc.  However, at that time, she was dead set on experiencing her own spirituality, not reading about it. 

Her spirituality is eclectic and evolving.  She now lives in San Diego, goes to a Unitarian church, and is married to a Humanist.  Because of her background in spirituality, her children are an amalgamation and go to the Unitarian Church, however, she doesn’t find much sense of spirituality there.  It is very reason oriented.  When she has gone through self help groups, and practiced breathing techniques, a lot of emotional things came up and she thought that might be what Fundamentalists and Pentecostals go through when they have a spiritual experience.  For her it was named as psychological.  She sees reason as an important psychological component in faith that doesn’t always trust.

She has been working on old baggage from her upbringing because of the anti-sexual and stoic era her parents came from and the brand of Lutheranism that she grew up in which was very rigid.  The German Lutheran Church was more rigid than what her parents were used to.  Both her parents were Swedish Lutheran, but they went to a Missouri Synod Church.

She felt since Kindergarten that something was wrong and irrational with what she was being taught.  The whole question of original sin baffled her in Kindergarten.  The whole explanation that we are sinful and that we die because of Adam and Eve, floored her.  The idea that she was responsible for someone else’s sin and is destined to the same fate made her very sad.  Her parents didn’t know how to comfort her.  She’d lay at night in bed thinking about this.  She was only able to resolve it by learning to just accept things the way they are, though that was depressing, until she got to college where there was religious dialogue. 

In the Unitarian Church you don’t have to be right or wrong, but they follow the learnings of science and if they can’t accept something, they reason things out.  Morality issues are based on nature and science.  They are not a dictate from God or religion.

Unitarians talk about the golden rule, being kind to each other.  They talk about being  stewards of  and taking care of the Earth.  They don’t have a creed.  Everyone is encouraged to develop a personal philosophy of life.  No person can tell us what to believe, which would be like Pap, a type of baby food given to settle you and shut you up. 

Unitarians are tolerant of religious ideas of others.  Truth is not absolute and changes over time.  Everyone should seek truth and has an equal claim to life, liberty and justice.  They believe in the Democratic process.  Ideas should be open to criticism and good works are the natural product of a good faith.  In the first chapter of A Hundred Questions that Non-Unitarians Ask, there is a poem:

Come return to your place in the pews
And hear our heretical views:
You were not born in sin
So lift up your chin,
You have only your dogma to lose.

~~By Leonard Mason, a Unitarian Universalist minister

Karen feels the Unitarian Church is good for her two children.  They don’t have to suffer a mythology that keeps them in a childlike state.  However, she would like to have a more spiritual experience.  She likes the nature base and peaceful attitude.  They don’t have to convert or conquer anyone or the devil.  Looking at ourselves as fully human and animals as worthy of respect is a kind of Humanism.  We accept ourselves without arrogance.  We are living in this cycle of life and need to pay attention to nature and flowers.  The children garden; have an environmental task force; learn about sex; stick with their peer group; talk about spiritual and political issues; and have coming of age ceremonies which are rituals that mirror nature’s cycles.

At Karen’s sister’s Missouri Synod church, she can’t share communion.  They have the right answer and the correct view.  Her sister fears that Karen is going to hell.  Karen feels her sister is part of a large conservative element of Southern California.

With the Unitarian Church, Karen participates in some fun rituals, such as at the solstices, when they celebrate different myths.  In these rituals they make analogies to life and paradigms.  She never totally buys into them.  They are not absolute, but metaphors about life.

Before Unitarianism, she learned about Paganism.  At college, in a class on Feminist Theology, she was introduced to Wiccans.  When she came to California she went to some rituals but was turned off.  They played dungeons and dragons and that they were in the Medieval era.  They truly believed their faith.  Someone played the Stag (male deer).  That suspended reality too much for her. 

Also, she as a good Lutheran didn’t like the gluttonous pleasure principle.  It just turned her off.  A lot of them were overweight.  There wasn’t an ethical component.  They weren’t going out into the global society.  The rule was to be good to others.  God wants us to pleasure each other.  Her husband thought she was prudish. 

She took a tantric workshop and preferred Eastern paganism to the Western orientation she had experienced.  The marriage of sexual and spiritual was more real than what she encountered in Western Paganism where they were play acting.  She feels there is a lot of crossing of boundaries in the New Age movement.

She does appreciate the quite magic techniques taught by Starhawk, where you sit and stare at a candle, work on your inner self and how you relate to others.  Her discipline and exercises are more authentic. 

She has also enjoyed Sufi dancing.  You connect with others by singing, while gazing positively at others as you pass them in a circle.  The belief is that as you send out positive energy, you will lift the spirits of the world.  You will change the energy.  She doesn’t feel she engages in enough spiritual practice to connect with people.

The intellectual part is important to, to find something to grasp and belong to.  She was a religion major in college and wanted some underpinnings for what she believes that makes sense, that works and feels right.  She is still searching somewhat for that.

Some or her experiences, she doesn’t know how to integrate into the Unitarian church.  When she has been around a lot of psychics, she got into her own meditation and grew to believe from experience with them that some ancestors and other spirits were protecting and advising her, because she felt protection during bad times.

Her mother once told her that she had an imaginary friend when she was two years old.  She has thought about that since then while searching in California and tries to be aware of spirit relatives around her.  She hasn’t felt she could quite speak to them.  It has been beyond her ability to tap in and relate to.

She has always wanted to have a mystical experience.  While at A.R.C., and before that, she read about Christian mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, which interested her.  The ideas and inclusive female imagery which were not purely Christian or about Christ, but mystical, drew her in.  However, she doesn’t feel she has had a mystical experience of the divine up close.  She now believes you have to bring it into the world.

Karen has traveled a bit around the world.  She went to Sweden and looked at churches and the architecture, which had a lot of beauty.  She has had great experiences going near Mosques, visiting Hindu temples in India and Malaysia, to Vishnu and Shiva.  She has always felt very anthropological, not super spiritual.  She understands people better from traveling and feels more unity as a result.  She never felt anyone was intolerant except some boys at a Mosque who threw fruit at her. 

She also went to where they thought Buddha gave his first sermon and felt a charge of wonderful energy where they showed that they would walk underground and nuns and monks would come up around the Stupas, which were pointed shrines.  She felt very much at home, but hadn’t felt that way at the Hindu temples.

One thing that has helped her with spirituality, is understanding the intellectual and anthropological side.  She taught religious education for kids on Sundays last year.  They studied a lot of neat religious holidays and gave kids a perspective of how to celebrate in cultures different from their own family traditions.  They also had fun learning about famous people who had been commemorated, such as the person who founded the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Susan B. Anthony. 

Karen took an African drumming class last year.  Also, the musical director at school, has drum sessions.  She brings conga and tubano drums and the kids have drums too.  In some sessions, time feels as if it is suspended when everyone is in rhythm together.

It is important for Karen to serve others.  When she taught music for her children’s school, she felt like she was of service.  She needs a spiritual orientation that is connected to service.  She doesn’t have time to do a lot of things she would like, though she does serve children daily as a grade school teacher.