House Rules for our UU Game

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Corinna and Dale Whitaker-Lewis

February 28, 2010

Readings:

Dale: We have two short readings. The first is from William Butler Yeats…

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

Corinna: And this, from the instructions on a box of cards..

Fluxx, a perfectly simple card game for 2-6 players. Simple? Fluxx has but one rule: “Draw 1 card and then play 1 card.” What cards could you play? Well, you could play Time, or War, or perhaps Love. I shall play Chocolate. It is a fine thing to have Chocolate. What’s this? You have played the card “Play 2.” Well, then, play a second card! Don’t you know the rule of Fluxx? It is this: “Draw 1 card and then play 2 cards.” Well, that’s what it is NOW. Perfectly simple. The goal of the game? Oh, I’m terribly sorry. No one has played a Goal card yet. Enter the World of Looney Labs Games.” (Now that’s a fitting name, isn’t it?)

Corinna: Good morning everyone! My name is Corinna Whiteaker-Lewis,

Dale: and I’m Dale Whiteaker-Lewis, and we have been coming to this church for almost 20 years.

Corinna: We have two daughters who delight and challenge us every day, Audrey who you just heard reading the children’s story, she’s 13, and Bridget’s here as well, and she’s 10.

We hope we will live up to Janet’s expectations today –we are very honored she asked us to speak, and also quite a bit daunted! Please forgive our need to read quite a bit of what we will say to you today.

We have reflected much over the years on this church, this congregation, this religion called Unitarian Universalism. Having been raised without a religious tradition, this church is the only one I’ve ever known, so it’s all new to me. We found this church in 1991 because we wanted someone to marry us, but leaving it at just that felt wrong. We needed to make a connection here, and we did – we made good friends and have left sermons feeling recharged for the week ahead.

Dale: I grew up attending an Irish Catholic church in Cedar Falls, Iowa. I didn’t connect strongly with the faith or rituals of my parents, and came to hate being forced to attend. Millions of people have gained purpose and direction from that religion. But, I came away as a teen bitter and—except for my love of a good hymn—feeling like I had escaped something unpleasant. When we started coming here in ’91, I overcame my childhood resentment with a bargain. I would be OK attending church if I: A. Don’t have to dress up –and— B. Don’t have to “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” I could miss a week or two.

Corinna: And for a while, that was all we needed—inspiring sermons, a casual dress code and no truancy policy. But, our family’s participation in the life of this church has also really waxed and waned, waned and waxed over these last 18 years. Some years, we maybe came to service once a month. The old bargain didn’t make our church life meaningful by itself. But seeing that you all accepted our approach made this a safe spiritual environment for us. In the vocabulary of logic, this was a necessary condition of our growth, but not a sufficient one.

Dale: We sometimes fell back on that basic bargain, but over time both our involvement and our unconscious expectations grew. Over the years we have taught in summer camps, chaired the Social Action Committee, helped form an Amnesty International group, served on the Board of Trustees and worked on the church’s computer network. My resentment of religion faded, and we enjoyed most of our church activities.

Without thinking about it, though, our expectations grew: for a cleaner RE wing, for support of our personal causes, for a well-oiled volunteer process, and the like. So, our minimum requirements for church life expanded, but I can’t say that we ever spelled out the new bargains clearly, even to ourselves. At the same time, we often didn’t know what the church and its members expected of us, and so we weren’t always very engaged.

Corinna: Looking back, the inconsistency of our attendance seems strange to me. I guess there were reasons why we didn’t come much some years: newborns, new houses, new jobs. So, while I think an expressed tolerance and acceptance drew us to this place, the absence of a request for commitment kept us from making one. Asking for a commitment would have meant this church would have to know itself, and be able to describe that to us. And then tell us what our role, as church members, would be. Because to ask us to figure out what this place meant to us was waayy too much work, I mean that’s just waayy too many choices.

Does that mean we were lazy? Does that mean we were not good UU material? I mean, this is all about everyone finding their own truths, right? I think it’s a lot to ask someone new to our church to do on their own, though. I mean, it’s just the kind of work you join a church to do together with others–developing relationships and, dare I say, some rules. I am one of those who work better with constraints than without, and I wonder if that doesn’t have something to do with it. I mentioned this to my friend Natalie, and she talked about how some of the most creative costumes she’d ever seen were for the black and white ball in San Francisco.

Multiple choices tend to stymie me, and I don’t think I am alone in this. Dr. Barry Schwartz, in his book, “The Paradox of Choice, Why More Is Less” argues that too many choices can erode our psychological well being. He cites a study where shoppers will buy more jam when offered fewer varieties. He argues that after thousands of years working towards the simplification of providing for the necessities of life, the trend is reversing back to foraging behavior, as we are forced to sift for ourselves through more and more options in every aspect of life. I know that after shopping exclusively at little Wheatsville for a while, entering an HEB can feel like climbing Mt. Everest.

Dale: Fast forward to February of 2006, when our minister delivered the only sermon we’ve ever walked out of, about the responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. The experience helped reveal hidden assumptions and expectations we had. And, understanding those new expectations matters more to us now than what was said, or how it made us feel. We had made new bargains and had new, necessary conditions for our church life. We had strong expectations that weren’t being met, about what other church members believed or would accept.

I have been an alcoholic in recovery for nearly my whole adult life—I spent my 20^th birthday in rehab. The lessons of sobriety have shaped my whole life, including church. I have been taught that, when I have resentments, it helps to look relentlessly at my own part in the matter. This serves two main purposes, first to take the focus off the offender, since I’m never going to change them. Second, it helps me see where—to quote recovery literature—I’ve made decisions based on self which later put me in a position to be hurt.

Corinna: After 2006 and through the dismissal to this year, we have thought a lot about our role in the hardship we now face together. In the example of the 9/11 sermon, Dale and I found we had developed unspoken assumptions about how others must support us, about the type of sanctuary you were required to maintain for us here. We had built the walls of our sanctuary well inside the walls of the church, and left a lot that we didn’t like outside those walls. We both feel now that for our church to heal, we must come to see not just a part of the church as our sanctuary, but the whole church body. Not doing so sets us up for disillusionment.

For example, if you are very in touch with the music program, or the RE program, or the Forum program, and that changes suddenly and drasticly, will you still find peace of mind and sanctuary here? We were convinced that we personally needed to expand our concept of sanctuary, but we weren’t sure how to accomplish that. So, we were both relieved and excited when Janet started emphasizing covenant, especially developing something like a “covenant of right relation”. It seemed to provide an opportunity for us to look at our relationship to the church as a whole.

Dale: To us, it seems like creating a good covenant is a lot like deciding on how to play certain games among friends. Preparing to play a game might start with months of training for a marathon, or a casual invitation to play cards. Just so, our activities at church might be well-planned or impulsive. In each case, though, a lot about what happens and how we experience it depends on the rules of the game. The rules might all be agreed and well-known ahead of time, as with the marathon. Or, they might be last-minute, the way kids often make up new rules for each backyard game. More likely, there are some of each: “standard” rules and “house” rules.

Standard rules to tell us things like which of the 100’s of card games we’re playing with that same old deck. And House rules to fit the game to the players or circumstance. Maybe we have younger or inexperienced players that need a break, or less than the usual time to play, or maybe we just think our rules will be more fun, just as we might spice up an old recipe. If we don’t agree on some rules, though, can we even play a game together? Or, are we just in the same place at the same time? Think of that tense feeling we all know from childhood, when a player tries to change the rules to his or her favor in the middle of the game.

Corinna: Our family has always enjoyed playing games together. In BK times, before kids, we had a lot of fun playing the video game Myst with our friends Karen and Michael, Rod and Carol. We also had way too much fun with a free CD of Boggle that we got off a box of Cheerios. (Geeks that we are.) The girls started out on these cooperative board games where no one actually loses. Harvest Time! Let’s all help each other bring in our crops! But there’s one thing we always do, and that’s set up some house rules. Do-overs might be allowed. You can start your turn before amassing 30 points. Sometimes there are very strict time limits on (some player’s) turns! Or, you can have all the time you want.

Dale: Amazingly, as you heard in the reading, you don’t need to know the goal to start playing the card game Fluxx! The goal comes in somewhere along the way, and often changes. What makes it playable is that people sit down together and agree on a single rule, just to start with. People walked in the door of this church. It’s reasonable for a person to first experience this sanctuary and our services when they start coming here. But it’s a church,we are the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, so we don’t think of this place as a lecture hall. It is a sacred space, for inspiration, for meditation, for transformation. And much of that transformation happens in the relationships between each other, as a people sitting here together, sharing life.

Corinna: I don’t think I was looking for spiritual growth, really, when I started coming here. I was just looking for a group of people who shared my beliefs, so I could feel good and comfortable about having those beliefs. I was tired of being the outsider, the one who isn’t like everyone else. At 6’2”, as a lifelong vegetarian, as a liberal in Texas, I’ve been in the minority often enough. Being different was something I long had turned into a strength and used as a defense mechanism.

It served me well for quite a long time, but ultimately it was an easy out, with no opportunity for change. My spiritual journey now is to be the best person I can be, while contributing to something bigger than myself. Something that is meaningful, uplifting, and a catalyst for good. So, I make a commitment to this community. But to adhere to a commitment you make to other people is hard work, and you have to work at it. It is not easy, but from that hard work comes growth.

Dale: To my mind, the most important rules for a covenant of right relation are the most minimal. What standard of behavior can I, on my worst day, still commit to uphold. If some morning I didn’t have time for breakfast, and I just found out a loved one was ill, and my shoes don’t fit right and my car is acting up and I’m late to church and you stop me in the hall to ask me about a problem with a church computer. Then, what behavior should I tell you to expect of me? That minimum standard of behavior says: if I don’t meet even this, you are right to be concerned for me, and it is OK to be upset with me. You should expect better, and you can and should help me to do better. I may not be pleasantly receptive to your correction, but the heart of the covenant is that, even on those occasions where I miss the mark, I commit to stay engaged while I try to get my behavior back in line.

Corinna: When you are in community with other people, when you’ve shared a covenant on how to behave, the hardest thing is to call someone on not honoring it. The fact that we don’t have a covenant yet makes it even harder, since we don’t even know if we agree on what’s acceptable. I experienced this just recently. I had an exchange with someone here at church that made me feel uncomfortable and maybe even a little bit threatened. This person spoke very judgingly, told me I was wrong, raised her voice, and seemed very irritated and exasperated with me. I remained calm, and restated my point of view, but ultimately did not let this person know how she was making me feel. I then turned around and talked to someone else about had happened!

Fortunately, my confidant gently let me know that my silence only allowed this person to think that the way she treated me was ok. And on top of that, I was developing a negative opinion of this person without giving her any chance to explain herself. So, while I upheld a personal commitment to be polite, I also have the harder job of standing up for that value with someone who may not share it. This is the very difficult part of living honestly with other people, of being in community. But, this experience would have been easier for me if I had known that we both agreed to a covenant, as members of this church, to be caring toward one another.

A covenant of right relation, or some agreed-upon house rules, allows us to leave our suspicions at the door, and have meaningful experiences in an environment that may strain or break our expectations about things that matter to us. Having that commitment to each other about a minimum standard of my own behavior and yours, even helps me tolerate situations where the commitment is breached, because we have a standard to get back to that is a community standard that we can remind each other of. Bringing this out of the realm of the implicit helps expose assumptions we have about “normal” or “acceptable” behavior. And I make the promise here and now, before you all, that I will get up the nerve to speak to this person!

Dale: And, just to give you an idea of how disciplined we were in preparing for this sermon, a very timely article came in yesterday’s UU World magazine. Written by a consultant with the Alban Institute, Dan Hotchkiss, it talks about covenant, mission, and vision. When discussing who the board of a church must serve, he says they must serve, quote, “the congregation’s mission, the covenant the congregation has set its heart to and the piece of the Divine Spirit that belongs to it.” He then goes on to ask and what is the mission? “The great management consultant Peter Drucker wrote that the core product of all social-sector organizations is “a changed human being.” A congregation’s mission is its unique answer to the question, “Whose lives do we intend to change and in what way?” …. Growth, expanding budgets, building programs, and such trappings of success matter only if they reflect positive transformation in the lives of the people touched by the congregation’s work,” unquote.

Corinna: You know, what we have here is such an incredible opportunity. There are not many chances for a group of people to get together and determine for themselves how they want to be with another. Like the children in Roxaboxen found, this is a freedom. But it won’t happen; we can’t be healthy here, unless we are willing to be vulnerable and say that we’re not perfect and would like to change.We must start with ourselves. And then dare to think that we might know what we would like to be, and that with each other’s help and love, we can get there.

Dale: In the meantime, come play some games with us! The Open Minds Covenant Group is hosting an all ages Games Night in Howson Hall this coming Saturday night at 7 p.m. Snacks. Drinks. Surprises. Childcare provided in the nursery (need to RSVP for that), but there will also be supervised games for kids 5ish and up. But you’ll have to follow the rules, and we know you will! We’ll bring Fluxx…