Video Show and Tell: The Parable of the Demonic Feline

My husband delivered an incredible sermon this Sunday at a church in Santa Fe called The Celebration. For several years now, he has been writing and delivering lay sermons at either the Unitarian Universalist church in Santa Fe or in the one in Los Alamos to which we belong, but this is the first time he has spoken outside a UU group. A woman who heard his his last sermon in Santa Fe invited him to come and speak and The Celebration, and so he wrote for them The Parable of the Demonic Feline, which I think is the finest piece of writing he has ever done.

My husband is a brilliant speaker, and I promise that this is worth watching. It shouldn't really matter very much what your religious beliefs are–or aren't–in terms of your appreciation because it isn't about religion at all. He is just talking about being human and what he learned about about the state of being human from the cat who wouldn't stop yowling like a demon from Hell.

My Husband is Saving the World with Faith in Ambiguity

Updated 1/16: I included the YouTube of his sermon below, so now you can actually watch it.

Despite being very annoying, and having a strange sense of humor, my husband sometimes does cool things.

One cool thing he is doing is delivering this sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe today.

He has written a lot of very good sermons, all of which can be found on his blog, All Things Reasonable, but this one is the best so far.

It is the best both because of his amazing development as a writer, which I can't say enough about, and because he is so right about what he is saying.

We live in a world where everyone thinks they know a bunch of things that they actually don't know. And so we fight with our spouses and kids. And so we go to war. And so our political system is broken. We don't know how to separate what we know from what we believe.

What might be possible if we could do this one, critical thing?

THAT is what life feels like when you are a misfit.

I seem to have a new, totally free built in fibromyalgia alarm clock that wakes me up at 6 AM, despite the fact that I am on vacation. It uses nausea, burning muscle pain and the overwhelming urge to stretch instead of a buzzer.

Photo by Paul Downey

So I write. Because God gave me fibromyalgia so I would write. Or because he's an asshole. Or because he doesn't exist and, infuriatingly I have fibromyalgia for no reason. One of those. But this morning I woke up and looked at all the Reverb writing prompts that I have missed, or that are coming, and realized I can't write on any of them because I'm a misfit.

One is asking if my life was a board game, what it would be like. I just can't answer that without sounding like an asshole, so I won't. I have no specific memory of, or interest in, my favorite Christmas gifts, given or received, and you will NOT want to read my post on whether or not I am a romantic person or "more non-traditional." All of my responses to these posts will serve only to prove that something is terribly wrong with me.

Do you know how you feel when you are excited to be around people with a common interest and you're all getting warmed up to share about what you really think? Imagine this scene:
You are about to meet with a group of these other people, almost all of the same gender as yourself, to discuss and engage in the thing that you do that is closest to your heart-whatever that is. Acting. Gardening. Calligraphy. Whatever. Maybe it's something you don't get to share about a lot with other people because you don't happen to have many friends with that common interest. So, sharing your thoughts and your work here is going to be a blast. You arrive at the event in question slightly late, after the discussion has already just begun and slip quietly into a seat. You're so excited, having been looking forward to this as if it is the answer to some question you didn't even know to ask. This is going to be great.

And it begins with a get-to-know-you exercise. Someone addresses the room, "What is most important to you in life?" The first participant, an attractively dressed woman, quickly raises her hand and confidently says "Dental floss!" Everyone else nods in enthusiastic agreement.

Well, THAT is what life feels like when you are a misfit. You are always smiling and nodding while people talk about their personal (and strangely abusive sounding) relationship with Jesus and their deep love of nail polish and romantic comedies while you are wondering how quickly you can find a way to be in another room without being rude.

This is why I am married to Mike Adams. He shares my inability to make small talk. The two of us together are the worst possible couple to have at a light social hour and the best two people to ruffle the feathers of a committee of church members on any subject. Our social interactions go like this:

Normal Person:  (sweetly) "So how are you guys? How have you been?"

Me: "Well, at long last, I finally learned that I suffer from fibromyalgia so I've been exploring and writing on the nature of pain and how it defines our sense of self. Going through this illness and the process of trying to get a diagnosis and the effect that it's all had on my social ties; it's allowing me to reflect on the whole idea of compassion and see where it is that we stop practicing compassion, and the tremendous cost of that......Oh, and how are you?"

NP: "Fine....I guess. I've been...skiing. Tara, have you seen Dr. Dung? She's a great Oriental Medicine doctor?..."

Mike: "I think that what Tara's pointing to is the larger societal cost of our lack of compassion, by contrast to who we say we are. For instance, here at church, we begin every service with the statement, 'Whoever you are, wherever you are on your life's journey, you are welcome here.' But then, do we really live that? Are we actively welcoming people of different theological perspectives? People of limited means?"

NP: "Sounds...interesting. I think I left my....

Mike: "This country passed a law called 'No Child Left Behind' and yet we are leaving children behind all over the place. People in this country, on Indian reservations and other places as well, live in abject, third-world poverty. Why is this acceptable to us?"

NP: "It isn't."

Mike: "It IS."

And so on. This is why we have to be Unitarians. Sorry about blowing off the writing prompts.

My Husband is Saving the World Through Non-Violent Communication

While I am blogging about what a psycho I am and how my head hurts and whether or not I can manage to get through the day without a major fuck-up of some kind, my husband is writing letters to mayors, in order to change the world through non-violent communication.

But I am still a much better cook. So there.

Apparently, we are now going to have the 1960s again because they were so much fun the first time, and some of us were pissed that we missed out.

Anyway, it turns out I am NOT imagining it and police are ACTUALLY "using teargas, flash bang grenades and rubber bullets against unarmed and peacefully assembled Occupy Oakland (Wall Street) protesters", to quote my husband.

If I have to live through this, I think I should also get to see Jimi Hindrix live at Woodstock.

Holy Shit.

P.S. Read his letter.

This photo seems to have been taken during the riots which followed the Rodney King verdict. I have not been able to find the name of the photographer.