Play with your food!

Here is the Swamp Monster of Council Grove Reservoir that we discovered at the southern PSD camp planning weekend in July. I grew up going to this camp with UUC churches, and the site is very dear to my heart. Sadly, it is just not big enough for the rockin camp that we are planning for Summer of 2009. Be there!

Benevolent Neighbors to the North, eh

That is what I always call Canadians, and I recently had the chance to spend some time up North and enjoy a break from the 105+ heat of Kansas and send text messages home whining about the cold at night. No one had any sympathy for me dealing with the downright chilly weather near Honeywood, Ontario while they were having people die from the heat, but I was camping (insert whiney tone). I went up north to Unicamp, owned by the Canadian UU Council, for Concentric, the annual business meeting of C*UUYAN. What is C*UUYAN you are asking? Well, it is a practically unheard of organization of 18 to 35 year-old UU's rather like YRUU is for youth. Concentric is the annual business meeting at which the steering committee for C*UUYAN and the people who run the conferences are elected. The letters stand for Continental Unitarian Universalist Young Adult Network and I have no idea why there is an asterisk in there.

Elections were short this year since before they happened the current steering committee decided to re-assess its vision and goals and canceled Concentric and its partner conference for YA's - OPUS. OPUS (yes, always in all caps) is the spiritual retreat for YA's and C*UUYAN serves the entire continent as does YRUU. What has become painfully obvious to most people witnessing the progressively deteriorating network is that C*UUYAN has outlived its purpose. Let me explain... C*UUYAN members (any young adult is by default a member; no joining is necessary) claim that the purpose of their organization is to serve young adult UU's who do not find a spiritual home within a brick and mortar congregation. I argue that CYF (Church of the Younger Fellowship) now provides a spiritual home for that population and having existed less than two years is already doing a better job of it that C*UUYAN can. Please don't think of this as an attack on the individuals who love and support C*UUYAN and its events. They are amazing people who drive themselves too hard to try to work within a broken system. I am not sure that restructuring the system will do much good; I just don't think that C*UUYAN needs to exist any longer.

I described it as a very loyal dog who is sick and old and someone keeps shoving food and medicine down its throat while ignoring the healthy dogs and puppies that are hungry nearby. It is hard to put your loyal friend out of its misery, but you owe it to the friend.

The evolution of baseball and heirloom tomatoes

I have been rolling this around in my head for awhile, and the moment has finally come to put it on the screen. Baseball is like tomatoes. Barry Bonds just broke a record and the sports analysts are having a field day arguing about whether or not it "counts." Well, of course it counts, he hit more home runs than Hank Aaron... that is a new record. It counts, but it just doesn't mean the same thing anymore. It is not comparing apples to oranges, but more like comparing heirloom tomatoes to grocery store tomatoes.

Heirloom tomatoes do no travel well. They weren't designed to travel. They were designed to be eaten still warm from the sun, just picked, and delicious alone or maybe a pinch of salt and pepper. Grocery store tomatoes were designed to be placed into trucks and driven halfway across the country or further and get to their destination without being squashed. It doesn't matter that they are pink, bland, and pithy. They are not about flavor, they are about distance.

And ever since the baseball strike, baseball has been more about distance (metaphorically) and less about flavor (more metaphor). It is not the same game that it used to be, and I propose that Unitarian Universalism does not much resemble Unitarianism or Universalism as they were originally developed. I am not saying that this is a bad thing. Grocery store tomatoes serve their purpose, after all. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition is a Living Tradition, growing and evolving, serving different needs for different people. Some people would rather go to Hy Vee and pick up some hothouse toms or hydroponically grown ones, and that is fine. Me? I'd rather pick them from my own vines and sit on my porch slurping them up after wiping the dirt off onto my jeans. It's a religious experience.