Not all happy things in today's list, but things that have been feeding thought...

At The Windy Pixel, Annie Elmer posts about a art installation by Felix Gonzalez-Torres called "Perpetual Life." Her intro is brilliant: "This has always been my favorite exhibit at the Art Institute -- which shouldn't be surprising because it's shiny, colorful, and involves candy. But once you learn the meaning behind the exhibit, it will break your heart."

Sometimes a Sewing Machine Is Not the Answer, an article by Martha Thompson in the Spring/Summer 2010 UUSC newsletter

Attended a presentation on "Daily Life in Palestine" by the Rev. Kimberly Meinecke, a Lutheran pastor who lived for three months in Bethlehem as a volunteer for EAPPI

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Last week, one of the speakers at the annual Unitarian Universalist General Assembly was Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress. He spoke, among other things, about scarcity and abundance.

One of the other speakers was the Rev. Peter Morales, the president of the Association, at the Sunday morning worship service. I later told another friend that, being the perennial skeptic, I'm not sure how deeply I buy into his statistics (it'd be interesting to see how the questions in the study were phrased -- among other things, I confide different things to different people -- and at different points in their lives, so I have no freaking idea how I would rate among someone trying to quantify my friendships) -- but all that said, I still think his ultimate message is worth hearing. This is the part that made people sit up in their pews, including me:

Twenty-five years ago a major study of interpersonal relationships was published in the American Sociological Review, the leading journal of sociology. Five years ago the study was repeated in order to measure the changes that had taken place in a generation. The results were so stunning they made the New York Times and Washington Post.

One of the key questions in the study asks participants how many people they know with whom they feel they can confide personal information. This is a measure of intimacy, of how many people a person knows well enough to share deeply personal information. Respondents could give an answer from zero to 10 or more. In 1985, the answer given most often (the "modal" answer for any statisticians out there) was three. About a quarter of the people answered three. In 2004, the answer given most often was zero. Zero.

It gets worse. The number of people who said they had no one in whom they could confide personal information went from 10 percent in 1985 (that is pretty terrible in an of itself) to 25 percent in 2004. This is a stunning change in the space of a generation.

The number of people who answered "one" was almost as high. So just under half of all Americans know either no one or only one person with whom they can share personal information. If the answer is one, that person is almost always a life partner.

What this means is that only half of all Americans have a close relationship outside their household.

We experience transcendence by loving and being loved. You and I are profoundly relational creatures. We are hard wired to need one another.

We need love like we need food, water and air. And we are the loneliest, the least loved, the most alienated people who have ever lived on earth. If our movement is to be relevant to the spiritual hunger of our time, then we must respond to this deep human longing for relationship.

So, how are we doing at responding to this need, to feeding the spiritually hungry and housing the religiously homeless?

Truth is, we could do better, and we must do better.

Sometimes we get too focused on our friends and people who are already members and forget to be warmly hospitable to visitors. And if you are from this area and visiting us today, I urge you to attend one of our congregations here in the Twin Cities. We have some wonderful congregations here.

After a generation of very slow growth, we are now very slowly losing members. In the northeast, where we have our roots, we are in steady decline. The number of children in our Sunday morning RE programs has declined in the last decade.

It drives me crazy and it breaks my heart.

It breaks my heart because it is like watching hundreds of thousands of people slowly starve to death while our storehouses are full.

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I had a conversation last year with a famous expert on organizational change. He made a comment that keeps haunting me. He said that when an organization fails it is almost never its problems that kill it. What kills it is its past success. What he meant was that problems tend to be technical and solvable. But people will hang on to past, to old ways of doing things, even when they are no longer relevant because the past is connected with their identity, and this holding on to the past kills the organization. What are we hanging on to that no longer serves us?

We need to remind ourselves that our heroes and heroines were always people who could let go, who saw new possibilities and who were bold. The best way to honor our past is to be like them -- to push for change, to forge a vision of the future, to make trouble.

[Transcript of the full sermon and service at uua.org]