Collective Anxiety

October 1, 2015 at 1:39 pm

I once read a book of case studies written by a psychiatrist. Among his many stories, he related one where a large group of school-age students mysteriously collapsed and fell ill when gathered in an auditorium. He described it as a case of mass hysteria, and talked at length about how easy it is in a large group setting for behavior to spread almost virally.

Although the definition and use of the term hysteria has changed significantly since this psychiatrist witnessed the incident, phenomena akin to what he described continue to this day. You only have to enter a college lecture hall before a midterm to experience a milder form of such an occurrence. While I wouldn’t call it mass hysteria (at least not without tongue-in-cheek), the tension and stress builds to exorbitantly palpable levels immediately before an exam. This certainly was the case before taking a neuroscience midterm yesterday, and it recurred between two exams earlier this morning. Yes, midterm season is upon us, and the amount of anxiety among friends and people I’ve spoken to has surged dramatically.

When I say this, I don’t mean to trivialize the experience that many students (myself included) feel before embarking on a major assessment. The mix of anxiety, dread, resignation, and perhaps even a little despair, derive from very genuine and significant concerns. Whether they come from not having studied until the night before, feeling unprepared despite studying, or worrying about the kinds of questions that will appear, these emotions are very, very real indeed. The fact that several dozen or hundreds of students in the same room may feel them at the same time often only amplifies them. Some people can draw energy from these stressful situations, and they can fuel and direct it toward the work that must be done. For many others, though, collective anxiety distracts from finding a steady state of mind, a calm that allows clarity of thought when the clock ticks, a term must come to mind to answer a question, and paragraphs must fill the pages of small, blue booklets.

Anxiety and stress can bring people together, and the saying “misery loves company” bears a lot of truth. Knowing that those who surround us also do not know what lies ahead can provide comfort and support, especially in the few minutes before an exam. Sometimes, however, finding a space to let go of one’s own worries can be comforting as well. This is true in our relationship with the divine and in worship as well, even though both lie in a very different realm from exam-taking. At least I hope they do, in that neither one creates copious amounts of stress and anxiety for us. No one entirely knows who the divine is, but sometimes we encounter it while in worship with a community, or in communion with those around us. The divine may appear in the ringing of the organ, the chanting of hymns, and the collective voice of all those gathered in prayer. But the divine can also appear in a soft whisper, when we are alone in a quiet space. Wherever we greet the divine, I hope that it can bring some comfort with it to face the unknown that lies ahead. May it help us to find calm amid anxiety, clarity among confusion, and peace among the turbulent exams and trials to come.

 

By iquillen | Posted in Ian | Comments (0)

Destination Appreciation

October 1, 2015 at 8:59 am

I have no patience.  In fact I have a count down till the end of the semester and for Graduation on my phone.  I don't like to wait.  I want to be done with school, move on, go to grad school, be done with school, get an appointment and start working.

I am very much apart of the now generation.

But I wonder what I miss in my desire to be done.  So often I find myself rushing from class to class or to other obligations that I forget to appreciate the beauty of this place.

This is my last year in Boston.  I should be savoring it.  I have tried over the last week in particular to take each moment as it comes.  Sometimes that means crying in the rain as I get completely drenched in my walk to class.  Sometimes that means laughing about it later because that is just what New England does.  It is not the first time the rains here have soaked me through, and I am certain it will not be the last.

Those moments I am striving to savor a little better. I am trying to learn to appreciate each moment for what it is as it comes.

We are called to be on a journey with Christ.  If we focus so much on the destination (whatever your perception of what happens after death is) than we forget to appreciate all of the beauty God has given us.  We need to learn to walk looking around us and taking everything in.  There is no destination in service.  It is all about the journey in Christ and with Christ.  Slowly striving for Christ like perfection.  There is no final destination for we have no idea when our lives here on Earth will be over.  Let us just enjoy the journey for as long as it lasts.

In my last year here I have goals, but most importantly I want it to be a year I remember for the random moments, the rainy moments, the spontaneous moments, and even the stressful tear filled moments.  Those moments are all equally apart of this journey, and each one of them should be appreciated.  Amen.

By cbjones8 | Posted in Courtney | Comments (0)

Wandering at Walden

October 1, 2015 at 12:37 am

This past weekend I had the privilege of joining the UU student group from Northeastern University on a Saturday retreat to Walden Pond. We spent the day meandering around the pond, sometimes silent, sometimes talking. We stood in front of the rock piles where Thoreau had lived. As many visitors before us had, we attempted to stack the stones near the cabin site into perfectly balanced towers. And we spent some time in reflection.

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           At one point we sat down in the cool shade of the trees overlooking the water and ate our lunch. Then as we finished we each pulled out a book or a journal and spent some time in silence. Our leader broke that silence with a quote from Thoreau. It read, “Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? ” 

            Hearing this quote, I thought a lot about Thoreau’s life. I thought about how he felt like he was paying into an unjust system; that was funding an unjust war. I thought about how for him, he was not content to obey the laws anymore, and so he made his transgression against the laws by leaving the whole system behind to spend a couple years in a cabin. So that instead of feeling guilt and disgust in his complacency and support of the unjust system, he could write in his journals and look out on the most beautiful pond I’ve ever seen.

The pond was perfect, and the sun shone warm, and the sky was so blue and so close. But I was deeply troubled by his words: shall we transgress them [the unjust systems] at once? As if leaving the system was really feasible for anyone other than those not oppressed by it? As if meaningful change could be made from a rocking chair in the forest? As if one person’s silence really upends the system?

We waded in the tepid waters, squishing our toes in the sand. I saw herons glide above the water stocking their prey. And I felt an incredible peacefulness. It was so beautiful and I let myself really reflect and recharge. As I sat with my back against an oak tree, I wondered how much more beautiful the world would be if every person got to spend a perfect end-of-summer day here, enjoying the earth?

I think it’s a fun mental experiment to think about what it would be like to rebel against society and go off to live in a cabin in the woods. But I have to believe that abandoning the problems of a system is not the way to solve them. Stopping for a moment to rest and reflect, can be cathartic. But if we spend too much time ignoring the problems, abandoning the problems, we are just as complacent as if we did not see them in the first place.

I reveled in the serenity of Walden Pond, but it is not a place for living long term. It’s a place for pausing. A place to chew on challenging words. A place for washing away worries in warm waters and balancing boulders. But at the end of the day it’s a place for leaving. Because the problems of the world are real, and they won’t be fixed from the peaceful shores of the pond.

By jdingus | Posted in Jaimie | Comments (0)

Finding Home

September 30, 2015 at 7:01 pm

At vespers on Sunday, a student—a freshman student—joined Jess and I and the Dean for our lectio divina service. Although Jess and I knew that she was interested in vespers—she had tried to come last week but accidentally found herself in the middle of Catholic mass—we were still thrilled to see her. We tried to play it cool, not wanting to scare her off, and were encouraged when she said she would try to return this coming week for dinner church.

As I celebrated the fact that someone who had never worked at the chapel before had come to a vespers service, I also thought back to what it was like for me as a freshman, plopped down in the middle of a strange campus, three thousand miles from home, where I didn’t know anyone, and where I had decided to spend the next four years. I arrived on campus on Wednesday for orientation in which I was bombarded by faces and email addresses and information that slipped out of my head as quickly as it came in. It was a whirlwind of trying to absorb information and unpacking suitcases and figuring out what was happening and meeting roommates. On Saturday, my parents and my brother said goodbye and there was a surreal sense of finality as they left me in my dorm room. Although I was excited and ready for a new adventure to begin, I also wondered if I would be able to make it the 112 days before I would see them again.

On Sunday, still feeling a little lost, I made my way to the chapel. Slipping into one of the wooden pews in the third row I looked around the unfamiliar space, feeling conspicuous and out of place and far from home. When the choir began to sing, I listened in awe, transfixed by the pealing of the voices reverberating against the thick stone walls. But it wasn’t until the first hymn began that I felt an uncoiling in the pit of my stomach and all the uncertainty and worry and out-of-placeness drained away. I felt my body relax into the pew and I absorbed the sounds and words and spirit of the morning. When we spoke together in the collect, I again felt a welling up of belonging deep inside my soul. The words were simple and I wouldn’t be able to tell you what they said but it was a familiar ritual and allowed me to release my worries and doubts to God. Even though I had only been in the city for five days and I still didn’t really know anyone, in the singing of familiar hymns and the collective offering of prayers, surrounded by a community of faith, I was home.

I think this is part of why I was so excited on Sunday to see another undergraduate student who was just being introduced to the chapel. For me, the chapel has been a place of solace and comfort, it has challenged, uplifted, and enlightened me, it has nourished me weekly both physically and spiritually, it has been my community and my family. Just as the chapel is located at the heart of campus, it has been the heart of my time here and I pray that it can be such a place for others. I know that this student may find her community elsewhere on campus, but I’m so glad that she found us and that we have the opportunity to be that community for her, the place where she can sink into the wood of the pews and know that she’s home.

By kmshultz | Posted in Kasey | Comments (0)

Covenanting, not Creed

September 23, 2015 at 11:32 pm

I was talking with a UU friend about our elevator speeches recently. These are the 15-second sound bites that you could spout off if you wanted to explain our religion to someone in an elevator. Part of our coming of age process as UUs is reading multiple elevator speeches from other people and then coming up with one for our selves. I feel like especially in my tradition where we often spend too much time deciding what we are not, having a practice of intentional identity writing is really powerful. So my friend asked me what mine was, and I responded with roughly this statement:

Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religious tradition that came out of Christianity but now focuses more on the covenant we make with one another and the world than on a specific creed about God. We value highest honoring the worth of all people and working together to build a more just and loving world.

Obviously Unitarian Universalism is so much more than those two sentences, but that is the Spark Notes version I use. After hearing a UU minister friend use the word covenant in their elevator speech I have started consistently including it in mine. Making covenants are a sacred and spiritually grounding practice and it is the underpinning of my faith. We teach our children at a young age how to lead a covenant making process by modeling that in our religious education classes, and covenanting is a sacred ritual in youth and young adult spaces. I had been missing this spiritual act until we made one in choir this last week.

We sat together in a circle with flip chart paper and markers while one person led the covenanting. We offered up practices and ways of being that would help our group be more loving and more affective. When we covenant, we set expectations and aspirations for how we will be as a community together. We will respect each other’s time. We will help each other learn and improve. We will contribute to the community. We set goals for our communities knowing that in our humanity we won’t always meet those goals. And so we covenant as well to hold each other accountable and hold each other lovingly when expectations aren’t met. As Unitarian Universalists even when we know that sometimes we will fall short our practice, our spiritual action, is to make promises to each other and to the world. Let us hold others and ourselves with love and forgiveness as we work to live deeper into our covenants.

By jdingus | Posted in Jaimie | Comments (0)

Fluctuating Boundaries

September 23, 2015 at 6:09 pm

Almost every Tuesday evening, a small group of students gather in the basement of Marsh Chapel for International Student Fellowship (ISF). The group of us gathered would prepare an international dish together and share the meal afterward. When I helped run ISF last year, most of the time this group was small; only a few people were generally able to come each week. Some of them were international students, but anyone who came was always welcome.

There is something very comforting about cooking and sharing food with other people. The act of preparing food, talking while eating it, and cleaning up afterwards carries a certain kind of closeness, one that connects the individuals who do all of these things. I experienced this sensation again at last night's International Student Fellowship. One of the graduate international students who regularly comes made steamed Chinese food with a few other international students who soon joined us in the small but cozy kitchen.

After several people had arrived, some began speaking to each other in Mandarin. As they spoke to each other and to us, they would switch back and forth between Mandarin and English. I had studied some Mandarin during my last year of high school, so I could pick out a few words here and there. For the most part, though, I couldn't understand what was being spoken, yet I felt very close to the language all the same. Somehow, the conversation seemed both familiar and unfamiliar to me at the same time.

This sensation may bear some relation to my upbringing. My mother would often take my sisters and me out to dim sum for lunch on Sunday afternoons. Incidentally, I would consider a lot of the food at ISF to be kinds of dim sum. If you are unfamiliar with it, dim sum is a kind of food served in small dishes. You order several of them at a table, and then you share small pieces of food with each other. It's a very social way of eating and sharing food, one which is associated with southern regions of China, where Cantonese is highly prevalent. At home and at lunch, my mother would teach us short phrases in Cantonese and words for the different kinds of food. I still remember them now, despite the fact that I can't speak Cantonese or Mandarin fluently. I asked some of the students what they called certain foods, and I told them some of the equivalent names in Cantonese. The names sounded very different, and yet they still felt close and connected somehow.

Language and culture are hardly static entities. They grow, change, evolve, and intersect over time, and in that intersection they form boundaries that fluctuate. Sometimes, these boundaries are almost impossible to cross. This can happen, for instance, if you travel to a different country and know nothing about the language at first. But occasionally, the boundaries meet and blur, creating an environment that is neither entirely in one culture nor entirely in another. I think I experienced this environment in ISF this past week. The mix of languages, dialects, and food created both a sense of closeness with the students who came and a distance at the same time. I'm not exactly sure what to call this ambiguity, this fluctuation and melding of cultural boundaries. But I do know that with it there was a warmth, a comfort, and a familiarity in the hospitality that these students showed to each other in preparing the food, and to the rest of us in the sharing of the meal. That is something I am glad to have taken part in.

By iquillen | Posted in Ian | Comments (0)

This I Believe

September 23, 2015 at 7:55 am

In my conversation with Soren last week, we talked about what I believe in—the core fundamental aspects of my faith, the things that matter to me. I’ve been thinking about it since then and it is so much easier for me to name the things I don’t believe; I can frame my faith in terms of what other people believe and how that differs from my own beliefs, but it’s hard to construct my faith on my own terms. So I want to compile a working list of what I believe, my own personal credo.

First, I believe that people are inherently good. But also that we make mistakes—we make mistakes a LOT. I believe that God’s love for us is so vibrant and pure that it wipes all those mistakes away. I believe that all people are connected to each other and that we need to honor that connection by taking care of and respecting each other. I believe in the baptism of rain on a fall day and the communion of food shared with friends. I believe that science and religion complement each other, that God speaks into our silences and blooms into our empty spaces, and that the Holy Spirit lives in music and mountains, hugs and rivers, laughter and tears. I believe that worship requires a community and community requires forgiveness and forgiveness requires grace. I believe that God takes many forms and that the times when we think God has abandoned us are the times when God is suffering right alongside us. I believe that love is the greatest and most important commandment and that if we don’t love each other, the other rules and commandments have no meaning. I believe that doubt is the strongest form of faith and that vocation is God’s call to use our passions to address the world’s needs. I believe that prayer is a conversation, worship is a relationship and scripture is a promise.

Above all, I believe that God loves, a love that is freely given, a love that we can never avoid or escape or ignore—a love that changes us, a love that frees us. A love that makes us believe.

By kmshultz | Posted in Kasey | Comments (1)

Sharing our Gifts

September 17, 2015 at 10:27 am

This week at Sanctuary, I got the privilege of welcoming and getting to know a first time participant in our community. She just moved to Boston for college and is still getting used to the whole transition, but found her to way to Sanctuary. To say she fell in love immediately would be an understatement! She is so excited about our community, itching to contribute, and just filled up with Sanctuary love.

We talked a lot after the service, and I just kept seeing myself in her experience. I remember exactly how blown away I was by my first Sanctuary. I remember the tears, the laughter and the sense of immediate belonging. I remember feeling like the divine had never felt so close and so part of me. And I remember feeling even before the service had even ended that I was ready to commit my whole heart, and as much time as I could give to this place. And over the past two years I really have.

As someone now fully established in this community, watching a new person light up and feel this instant connection to my community is just incredible. It has really illuminated the commitment I have to enthusiastic welcome as part of my ministry. I think if I believe in a community that I’m apart of, regardless of my position within it, it is my imperative to bring in new people. More than just bringing people through the door though, I think I need to help people find ways to share their gifts with the community. This awesome new person said, “I love how it's so easy to get involved, unlike a regular church where sometimes it can feel a little intimidating.” I understand that feeling and I don’t want any of the communities that I care about to feel intimidating for new people.

I believe that all people have worth and dignity, but more than that, they have gifts and talents that I need and our communities need to be more whole. My responsibility then, and I think everyone’s responsibility is to give of ourselves and help others find ways to give. In all that giving we become the people and communities that the world needs.

By jdingus | Posted in Jaimie | Comments (0)

Passionate feelings

September 17, 2015 at 8:16 am

I was asked this week about the single thing that I am most passionate about in life.  I was flabbergasted.  I literally had no idea.  I knew coming up with an answer would take some serious thinking, meditation, and discernment time.

I am passionate about many different things; living wages, fair trade, preventing Sexual Assault, Student communities, faith communities...just to name a few.

I had never before considered what was the most important of these all, or rather the theme that runs through them.

The thing that I am most passionate about in life is just that.  The preservation of life, and by extension, the preservation of quality of life.  This is most importantly to all of humanity, but I also have a soft spot in my heart for all of God's non-human creatures.  They deserve quality life also.

I discovered that everything I do is rooted in this idea.  Suddenly it seemed silly that I had not been able to consider this sooner.

In ministry so much of what is needed is the preservation of quality of life.  Teaching and guiding people that God gives us all we need.  We are cherished, loved, forgiven, and redeemed children of the Most High Creator of the Universe.  In my own life that has been an incredible force.  Knowing that has allowed me to live in a joy like no other.  In my life, if I can share that joy,  if I can show someone how God can give them a new perspective, and a better quality of life, then that would fulfill my passions and my calling.

Amen.

By cbjones8 | Posted in Courtney | Comments (0)

Saved by Grace

September 16, 2015 at 6:14 pm

Heaven and hell. These two concepts have been represented in a myriad of ways and there are many opinions on both—who gets in, if either of them really exist at all, what they’re like, what the Bible says about them, and the list goes on. I have no way of knowing the answer to any of these questions, but I’ve always been hesitant to accept the idea that there’s a place where God sends ‘bad’ people to be tortured for eternity. As a Lutheran, I believe that we are saved through grace—we don’t have to do anything to be saved; it is a free gift of God. Through this logic, there’s nothing separating me from anyone else on earth in God’s eyes. It doesn’t matter what we believe—we are all swept up in this crazy gift of grace.

I can’t see God turning people away, no matter what they’ve done. The whole point of Jesus dying on the cross was that through his sacrifice, our sins are washed away. As much as we would like to think that murderers and thieves and rapists will be damned for all eternity, the reality is that they are forgiven too. That’s so hard for me to wrap my mind around. ‘Really, God? You’re forgiving them?’ But then I am reminded that I too am forgiven, I too am saved by grace, and that God is the only one that has the authority to judge.

It would be so easy if there was some sort of hell so that we could reassure ourselves that all those people who have done horrible things will be condemned for all eternity. But then where do you draw the line? We’ve all made mistakes, messed up, caused harm to others. How do you decide which ‘sins’ are worthy of damnation and which ones aren’t so bad? Or do you simply condemn all sins? No. I can’t believe in a hell like that because I can’t believe in a God that would sit in judgment like that.

I suppose if I believe in any version of hell, it would be the notion of hell as separation from God. But I don’t think God sorts all of humanity into two groups where one group gets to go to heaven and hang out with God for eternity while the other group has to go sit in the corner. If anything, I think people are the ones who choose the separation—in other words ‘hell’ is self-inflicted. Because I believe in a God who loves to the point of heartbreak. There is nothing we can do that would make God turn her back on us and when we turn our backs on God, she is still there, waiting outside our window, because it’s hell for her too. God is like a grandmother who will show up every year on our birthday with a gift and a card; even when we refuse to speak to her, even when we refuse to see her, she will never stop telling us that she loves us. Because we are her family—dysfuntional and broken, yes, but never unloved.

By kmshultz | Posted in Kasey | Comments (0)