A SEGMENTED LIFE

Roughly divided by occupation and place, but united by my actual presence and activities, these are the stages of my life.

Jefferson High School in Portland, OR

Northwestern University in Evanston, IL

Theatre Department

Blackfeet Reservation in Montana

Multnomah County Animal Control in Portland

U of Chicago Div School in Chicago

Meadville/Lombard Theological School, same place

CPE in Rockford, IL

Internship in Hartford, CO

Montana UU ministry

Helena, Great Falls, Missoula, Bozeman

Kirkland Unitarian Universalist Church, Kirkland, WA

Saskatoon Unitarian Congregation, Saskatchewan

Blackfeet Reservation at Heart Butte

City of Portland Bureau of Buildings

Retirement in Valier, Montana

Almost no one knows anything about my life except in the segments they lived with me. Therefore, they just guess that either my life when they haven’t known me didn’t exist or that it was like it was when they knew me. This could not be more counter to fact. I’ve had a number of total breaks, not unusual in our times.

Not only did people not know me when I wasn’t with them, they never knew I was anyplace else or what it was like. The “nice” middle-class Enlightenment people have no idea what it is to inspect slum housing and the people who hang on there. In turn, those living in run-down ranches where they can barely make enough to eat, have no real picture of what Kirkland professionals live like. For those who are harassed by cops, there is no way they can think of animal control as anything but dog cops. For high income people with fancy dogs, animal control is totally unnecessary, distasteful. And what the hell is ministry anyway?

A minister tasked with a memorial service called to ask me to say something on video. I don’t have video. I don’t have voice mail. I write. She wanted to interview me over the telephone. Seriously. All unaware of the implications of a telephone interview recorded only on her end and edited to suit her purposes. In spite of daily news. I mean, email is already a risk.

My ministry — which is how I knew the deceased person — ended thirty years ago in Canada, which is now excluded from the UUA, has lost the two anchor elderly ministers (one on each end of the country), and is led by an American Black man, a classmate so absorbed in his own crusades that he barely remembers me. I don’t think he knew the person being memorialized. I don’t think either of them ever read my book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” or any of my blogs.

The UUA and CUC have both acquired the same sub-category from the larger culture. These twin denominations are open, shifting with the times, and overlapping with liberal issues so much that politics become near-religious principles, esp. when they shade into “progressive.” A difference is that in Canada it is not stigmatized to be communist or anarchist. But they have their own “back East” oligarchic cabal, just like the US.

The sub-group I am assumed to occupy is that of women who came into the ministry as a “second” career. I was forty in seminary. Many female ministers have a script that says: woman finds her powers, is resisted by the old white men in who control everything but breaks the barriers by sheer willpower and righteousness, and then takes over. Aaaauuugh.

I was encouraged by my UU male minister (though his second wife thought I was dreadfully wanting, especially in my wardrobe). I was the same age as my UU professors and better educated in some cases (Not the U of C profs). Everybody had only the most romantic notions of indigenous people. There were few of us UU seminarians. We did not socialize or bond or whatever. Our class didn’t even sleep around.

My Montana ministry was made possible by two male district execs who loved the prairie and believed me when I said I could live in a van on $1,000 a month. When I was a little desperate about “what van”? a man came to my rescue through his newly acquired inheritance. He did not ask for sex. (Canadian men who suggested they help me wanted sex in return. I think they thought it was the American way.) My benefactor was only a little lonesome and wanted me to eat brunch with him now and then. Deal.

I didn’t realize for a while that the Unitarian ethos was simply the Enlightenment and that the Enlightenment is withering, out-of-date. The new ideas are beyond post-modern, out beyond structuralism and post-structuralism, into a realm of thought never imagined before. Some call it “metamodernism.” It pulls “embodiment” (emotion) back into thought that was considered heresy when I was at the Div School. It also ignores the division between science and the humanities. The thought style still needs a decent name and better definition. The average dog-catcher or housing-inspector, will not worry about it. English teachers and rez dwellers might.

The internet and its platforms is another illustration of categories gone amok. I’m 82, ordained, living on the east slope of the Rockies, writing risky stuff, and white. The silo-computers send me recipes, knitting patterns, Christian bric-a-brac and arthritis cures. They can’t figure out whether I’m right wing or left wing. They can’t decide whether I’ll be upset if they send me porn, but then they don’t know what porn really is anyway. It has moved from the erotic to the scatological, from the bosom to the butt. Maybe the new porn is simple restraint.

It doesn’t work anymore to force everyone into categories in the way the 19th century scientists tried to sort the world. That strategy has backed off to advertising and elections. Now we know about DNA, the epigenome, the proteome, the zillions of hitchhikers in our bodies, and we discover that the four-molecule double spiral pattern is shared by every living thing we know about and that bits move from one body to another, even float free in the ocean. Complex and co-extensive as people are, we now realize we are pushed hard against the environment. They don’t teach this in seminary. A very few politicians get it. Scientists know.

Now the groups I “belong to” in the sense of a shared sense of existence are accessed only through the internet or books. The nearest community college is an hour’s drive away and since it is tribal, their concerns are not mine. I’m relatively intolerant of denominations, though I only know the Christian ones, maybe a few Jewish groups. They are sclerotic, in heart-failure. They hoard and blame, hang on to the issue of “God” though the concept has dissolved.

But I believe in the importance of affinity groups who can act together and support each other. The only way that people can survive in the hardest circumstances, like the arctic or the desert or war, is by belonging to a cooperating group. The strongest affinity is socioeconomic but boundaries are always problematic. I suggest Class X is where I belong, but I could not write out a list of people I know in it. Certainly no one in my extended family would be included, much less my former colleagues.

But if I were to blunder, to say the wrong thing about the wrong people, innocent though it might be, there are people waiting for scraps I drop so as to turn them into weapons against people I care about.. They are unmoved by the principles of metamodernism. I’ll hang on, just to see what happens next.