First Chapter of The Book That Maybe I Will Finally Write: Performing Personae

HULLO, pigeons!
It’s PeaceBang here, or Winter Hag, as I like to call myself at this point in the season. I have itchy eyelids and my fingernails are all grown out and talon-like (for me), and I may lure some little children into my gingerbread house and fatten them up so I can EAT THEM.

Aside from that, business as usual. But I am finally working on a book based on this blog, at the persistent urging of many friends but one in particular, and it seems that this sermon that I gave last September might be exactly how I want to frame my first chapter.

I hope you get something out of it. I feel like I have been saying and yelling and singing this song for a very long time and now it’s time to put all those writings and ideas and research together for an actual lasting tome.

Kiss of Lenten peace, PB

Performing Personae
Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein
September 16, 2015

This sermon was given to the Massachusetts Bay District Chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association at their Ingathering Meeting at First Parish in Belmont, MA.

It’s the Jewish High Holy Days, so it seems like a good time to tell this story again. I’m sure you know it:

A rabbi rushes into his sanctuary of his synagogue in a fit of religious frenzy and falls to his knees before the Torah ark, beating his chest and crying, “I’m nobody! I’m nobody!” The cantor of the synagogue is impressed by this example of spiritual humility and joins the rabbi on his knees. “I’m nobody, I’m nobody!” The shamus, the custodian, watches from the corner and can’t restrain himself, either. He joins the other two on his knees, calling out, “I’m nobody! I’m nobody!” So then the rabbi nudges the cantor with his elbow and points over at the custodian. And he says, “Look who thinks he’s nobody!” (Chassid Traditional, from Soul Food: Stories to Nourish the Spirit and the Heart, Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman, p. 228)
I assume we’re laughing because we know this could be a UU minister and a music director or DRE.
Ego burn!

So this is a story about how we clergy – we very important nobodies – internalized and daily perform the humble pie ministerial archetype, and why it’s time to consider how much harm it has done, and is doing. Where it comes from, and why have we not actively and intentionally revised it.

We have been trained – both intentionally in seminary classes and internships and in more subtle, cultural ways – to cultivate religious leadership personae based on humility, meekness, servanthood, egolessness, and accommodation to the authority of God/our congregations/our boards – it depends on your theology and context. None of this is organic or accidental. It’s right there in the Scriptures, in Paul, when he lays out the fruits of the spirit to the Galatian community: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity.

These are the qualities that, traditionally — if you’re getting God right — you are going to manifest in your bearing and being.

That list has never been examined or revised by any generation of clergy that I know of.
Unitarians and Universalists have gone into Scripture and analyzed, contextualized, reformed and jettisoned everything else in the gospels, but gentleness, modesty, self-control, chastity as evidence that God is with a person?
Nope.
So let me ask, Dr. Phil style:
How’s that working for you?
…For all of us?

So there we go through history, “forward through the ages in unbroken line,” right? And we this morning in Belmont, at the FIRST PARISH, New Englanders are even more direct heirs of a clergy persona that has developed over centuries and crystallized in a very specific archetypes in 19th century New England Unitarianism.

White, male, WASP emotional culture.

The Puritans started it all here – they developed the Congregational Way that we live by here yet today – and the churches now had the power to choose their own ministers. Yay! Now you don’t get some idiot nephew of the bishop inflicted on you! You can call your own holy man.
Of course, those first practitioners of Congregational polity in these parts were deeply devoted to relentless self-examination, by which they hoped to discern glimpses of their elect status. They already felt certain that God wanted them to claim this land and make it Christian – a very convenient belief that undergirded the subsequent genocide of indigenous people – but they lived in a state of perpetual anxiety about the state of their eternal soul. You had to give testimony of a conversion experience in order to be a member of the church, so our religious great-great-great-great grandfathers and mothers got good not only at soul searching and journaling about their findings, but at neurotically examining each other for outward signs of inward regeneration.

If you looked and acted like you were among the elect, maybe you actually were.
You’re smart people. I don’t have to spell out for you how this winds up playing out for those individuals these folks call to be their ministers. Pulpit committees, pre-cursors to today’s search committees:

Let’s get the guy who may authentically be good, kind, gentle, meek, chaste, and patient – or let’s go with the guy who is really good at performing that archetype.

We are still performing it today. The repression and level of conformity it requires to develop and maintain this persona within us and among us is not only unproductive, it is soul-destroying — and perhaps worst of all – it plays right into the dominant culture’s hopes and expectations that the clergy will continue to be easily manipulated milquetoasts who can be invited to speak on ceremonial occasions, provide a symbolic presence when important policy decisions are being made, and smiled at to their collars but smirked at as irrelevant boobs behind the hands of those who hold real power in this nation.

Do you understand how convenient it is to the empire to have a clergy population who is tethered to Biblical archetype established by a sexually neurotic first century Jewish convert named Paul and reinscribed in this country during the Victorian era?
And, by the way, yes. 19th century Unitarianism — which established the emotional culture in our movement that lasts to this very day — was deeply, uncritically devoted to the Pauline formula for the personality demonstrated by the authentically religious.
You want to know who exemplified that archetype?
William Ellery Channing.
Henry Ware, Jr.

The two most influential architects of Unitarianism, and apparently the real deal when it came to the fruits of the spirit. I love them both and have no complaint with them. My concern is for us, today, for the ways we think that because we have been doing all this work on diversity, we are truly welcoming. How could we possibly be authentically welcoming when we haven’t even made room for a diversity of personality and emotional styles within our own collegial fellowship? Radical welcome begins within. People who have been expected and trained – intentionally or more subtly– to internalize and perform ancient archetypes are dangerous.
Where are ministers putting our real selves, the multiplicity of our beings?

The wildness, the artistic, the eccentric, the sexy, the passionate, the irreverent, the powerfully charismatic, untamed aspects of ourselves?

Do you know what I know?

I know that clergy today live in terror of getting caught being themselves.

What I love is watching how social media is outing our entire professional cohort slowly but surely. It’s fantastic. It’s an extraordinary psychodrama.

You think those privacy settings are securely in place, but despite your best efforts, a member of your congregation sees you use an obscenity on Facebook, or express disgust with some frustration at church (but hopefully not using any names or details – there are professional boundaries that should always be respected).
They live in fear of getting caught being themselves.

It’s got to stop. We must move from privacy and secrecy to discretion. Discretion means that you don’t broadcast your edgier aspects, but neither do you hide them, repress them, and live in terror of having them discovered.

There is another implication to this liberation of ministerial persona, and it means that the cult of ministerial personality established by our fetishistic, overwrought, exhausting search and call process needs to die. Unitarian Universalists don’t have a shared God-concept or a shared God-mediating figure such as Jesus. We know this. However, what we have not fully acknowledged is that into this vacuum, ministers have for too long been installed in congregations to provide an archetypal understudy to the absent God. Congregations don’t reflect on the attributes of God nearly as much as they obsess about the attributes of their ministers.

We’ve all experienced it.

The clergy performance of holiness based on first century concepts has lasted too long, with devastating consequences for those of us called to do this work and to serve in the ministry:
Broken marriages. Loneliness and isolation. Sexual acting out and misconduct. Addictions. Corrosive competitiveness and insecurity, checking around us and behind us to see who’s higher on the holiness meter for the day. Competitively earnest Facebooking, tone policing, desperate, tap-dancing martyrdom. Saccharine humblebragging.

Emily Dickinson, who often applied her genius to a literary lampooning of repressive New England culture authored perhaps the most famous poem about the joy of rejecting social performance:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

We are each of us a somebody – we are ministers, and as humble and holy as we wish to seem, that status comes with power and responsibility. It is time to step into the role with unapologetic authenticity even if we are the ones who prove that God doesn’t always call saintly types to the ministry! Who are we kidding, those of us not to the Channing manner [sic] born? We were called to the work and ordained to it as we are, seen and recognized and nurtured and supported along the way by others who were, and are, mature enough to see through our performances of holiness to the deep and demanding vocation that is the burning ember in each of us.
I pray as we labor to lead and love religious community into a vibrant and relevant future that we will clear the detritus of the ages off that ember and let it burn.