with Rev. Clay Nelson

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Clay Nelson © 6June 2021

In 1964 I lived in a small town near the top of the Rockies, 60 miles from a town of any size. It was the year I got my learner’s permit to drive. Like most males of that age I took every opportunity to practise driving our new car, our third, but our first with an AM radio. As it was in the top 10 on the charts, I frequently heard Dylan’s new hit, warning that, “The times they are a-changin’”. Even at 15that seemed obvious. It had been only six months since JFK was assassinated. As a country we were still grieving. But whether we were ready or not for more change, 1964 was to be momentous. The Beatles kicked off the year, invading in February. The closest I got to them was watching them on the Ed Sullivan show. Besides, I wasn’t impressed, and thought the Fab Four were just a flash-in-the-pan fad. Little did I suspect I would have in my music library all of their albums by the time I was wondering who would still need me at 64. Nor did I suspect that my next birthday would be celebrated living in LA going to a high school six times larger than my previous one.

with Rev. Clay Nelson

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Clay Nelson © 30 May 2021

To be a Unitarian Universalist is to have a sense of humour, even about ourselves.  There are so many jokes about us.   Garrison Keeler, of course, teased us constantly.  The comedian, Lenny Bruce, said this about us: “I know my humour is outrageous when it makes the Unitarians so mad they burn a question mark on my front lawn.”    Somerset Maugham in his classic “Of Human Bondage” said “A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn’t quite know what.”  On a M.A.S.H. episode the character, Col. Sherman Potter, said:  “The General answers his own phone. Must be a Unitarian.”

Then there are the UU bumper stickers; there is lots of folk wisdom condensed into bumper stickers, by the way.  One I saw said:   “Honk If You’re Not Sure”.  Another says:  “We have questions for all your answers.”

with Rev. Clay Nelson

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Clay Nelson © 23 May 2021

We have just heard Polonius’ collection of proverbs as advice to his son Laertes, who is off to university in Paris. It contains one of Shakespeare’s most oft quoted lines in valedictory speeches, blogs, music and films, “To thine own self be true.”

Third Lightning Round (Multiple choice:-
What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? 

1. Be yourself?
2. Don’t change who you are?
3. Follow your own convictions?
4. Don’t lie to yourself?
5. All of the above?
6. None of the above?
7. It depends?

I wager that the correct answer is 7. It depends to some extent upon the meaning of “self,” the meaning of “true,” and perhaps even the meaning of “meaning.”

with Rachel Mackintosh

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Rachel Mackintosh © 16 May 2021

The pandemic is a great rupture. Those who seek hastily to sew up the rupture and return to pre-pandemic normal are seeking to preserve a world where wealth is funnelled to the already wealthy at alarming rates, while millions upon millions pay.

The alternatives to a return to normal are political. It is a cliché that politics is the art of the possible. We are at a moment in the arc of history where what once was politically impossible is possible. We can now perform the art of the impossible. It will take all of us.

with Rev. Clay Nelson

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Clay Nelson © 9 May 2021

My first academic assignment in seminary is still very much a part of my memory. The reason is that it made me wonder if I was cut out for this new path I was taking. I was to write an essay on Rudolph Otto’s work The Idea of the holy. Otto, an early 20^th century German theologian, argued that the holy was to be addressed with fear and trembling, which he called awe. I know I was a neophyte theologian but I did not get his conclusions. They did get clearer years later when George W Bush attacked Iraq with “Shock and Awe”. That was definitely an Old Testament kind of holy. But anger, vengeance, oppression, and indiscriminate genocide do not instil me with awe. Ever since then, I have wrestled with the idea of the holy.

with Rev. Clay Nelson

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Clay Nelson © 2 May 2021

One of the more influential, life-shaping memories I store in my dishevelled filing cabinet of a brain, is reading King Lear when I was 16. It may have been my first in-depth encounter with the Bard of Avon. While I can give a basic outline of Shakespeare’s tragic play, it is not the story itself that haunts me, but one particular interchange between Lear and his Fool. The Fool tells him, “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”

with Rev. Clay Nelson

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Clay Nelson © 11 April 2021

The Sankofa Bird

Sankofa comes from the Twi language of Ghana in West Africa. A common English translation is “go back and get it.” The sankofa bird is an example of adinkra. Adinkra symbols make up a highly symbolic language—similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics. They are common among the Akan people of Ghana, and have made their way into the wider African diaspora. The symbols express complex thoughts and proverbs. The sankofa bird’s head faces backward as it attempts to catch its lost egg in its mouth. Its feet face forward. One translation is, “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have lost,” or “that which was taken.” Learn your past so that it may guide your actions in the present for the purpose of shaping the future. Another translation: “remember the past to protect the future.”

Whether it is a story about Rip Van Winkle or A Wrinkle in Time, sentient and self-aware beings cannot escape their enchantment with time. It wasn’t only Unitarian Charles Dickens who used time travel as a device to offer Scrooge redemption by visits to his Christmas’ past, present and future. Time like threads woven into the warp and weft of our lives connects us and all that followed the big bang. Tracing those threads as we seek to know where they lead has been a human endeavour since the ancient past.