The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica |
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From Our Minister |
Featured Articles - August, 2008"Garbo Speaks*"
[Rob Briner] In 1993, where were you living and working and what prompted you to seek a settled ministry with a congregation? [Judith Meyer] In 1993 I was still working as the vice president for programs of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I had been there [Boston] for six years. Prior to that I had been a settled minister in a congregation in Concord, New Hampshire, and prior to that I was an assistant minister to a congregation in New Jersey. So I had equal amounts of experience in management in the nonprofit setting, as I guess I would describe the UUA job, and parish ministry. And I was part of the administration that was coming to an end in 1993 [William Schulz, president 1985–1993]. We all had ample notice to plan our lives accordingly because generally a new administration comes in and hires new executive staff. That was the expectation, anyway. And so I had a couple of years, really all of those years, to think about, “When I’m done doing this, what will I do next?” In 1991 I had a short sabbatical leave time that I chose to take trying out parish ministry again, and I became what was then known as a minister-on-loan, to a congregation in southern California, at what was then the Palm Springs Fellowship. I spent two months in Palm Springs working with this congregation that didn’t have a minister, and discovering two things: that yes, indeed, I wanted to go back into parish ministry and that I loved Southern California. So two years later when the time came to start searching for a congregation I decided that I wanted to make a big move out of New England and was considering a number of different locations, not just Southern California, but the Santa Monica church happened to be located here, so that was of special interest to me. I just knew that I wanted to take a leave from New England. I had spent so much time there and I was at that stage in my life where I could have stayed there forever. People kind of do that; they institutionalize themselves. In Unitarian Universalist settings, between the UUA and the churches and Harvard, there’s always something you can do. And you can stay there forever and work and have all the same friends you’ve had since you were 21 and never really leave. And I just decided that before I settled in to do that, I should see more of the Unitarian Universalist world out there. So that’s what drove the decision. I thought, “If I really don’t like living in California I can always go back to Boston in a couple of years.” I never seriously considered [doing] that once I moved here, but that was how I allowed myself to make the break and make the move. How have you described life in California to friends and family in other parts of the country? [Laughter] You know that building on Main Street that has the transvestite doll sculpture on it [the hobo ballerina]? I went to look at a condo in that building at one point and I remember having this thought that if I sent a picture back east of my new home in California they would probably send the deprogrammers out to get me because people would be so shocked. In 1993, when you were invited to visit by the search committee, what did you think about the possibility of becoming the new settled minister at UUCCSM after a long-tenured ministry? Was it intimidating or daunt - ing, or did it just seem like a great opportunity? I’d had the experience of working in another congregation where there had been a long-tenured minister who was then the minister emeritus while I was the settled minister, in Concord, New Hampshire. And it was such a positive experience for me, to have him be part of the church and have him to talk to and his library and his thoughts and his friendship, that I brought with me a positive anticipation of what it would be like to be in a congregation with a longtenured minister a part of my world. [He had served the Concord congregation] not as long as Ernie, but he had been there probably for 20 years or more. Ernie’s experience of serving a church for 35 years is absolutely unique in Unitarian Universalist contemporary ministry. Nobody else has done that, so that was a unique aspect of the situation and I knew that I would have to understand and appreciate that. But here’s how I assessed it at the time: I wanted to be in a church that had a healthy relationship with their minister and I could see that that was true here. Ernie is loved and respected as he should be, and he’s served the church with a tremendous amount of integrity and grace and intelligence, and I thought it could only be good to follow such a good ministry. It’s good to follow a good ministry. It’s hard to follow a problematic ministry. So even though Ernie’s life here was very extended, what I remember saying to the church at the time was that I saw Ernie’s presence as one of the strengths of the congregation — to be drawn on and appreciated and honored for the time he spent here. And I’ve never had a reason to change my feelings about that. What were your first impressions of the congregation and Los Angeles? I think this probably has to do with the entertainment industry influence. It’s the most extroverted congregation I’ve served, in the sense that people were always popping up out of their seats to say something or do something or perform in some way. People are very talented. There’s a lot of creative energy, and then again there’s also the influence of the aerospace industry and the engineering mentality, which is very different but also has made a distinct imprint on the congregation. There’s a lot of intelligence here because of the local employment. That’s true, but that’s true of UU congregations everywhere. But they tend to be more academic in other places. This one struck me as being more freewheeling. There are more people who are new to California, new to Los Angeles, new to Unitarian Universalism. There isn’t that sense of three, four, five generations weighing in on the congregation the way there is in New England. In the past 15 years there have been approximately 600 members of our congregation. Have these people made a difference in your ministry? That’s a very difficult question to answer. The answer is yes, of course, and some people have made a tremendous difference in the way I’ve seen the world or given me an opportunity to minister to them in a moment that was a tremendous privilege. But I give a great deal of thought to how I talk about people. When I write about people in a sermon I carefully vet that story from a lot of different angles so as not to exploit a relationship or knowledge of a person, or betray a confidence. This question comes up in a way that I’m not sure I know how to answer for that reason. Has my life been changed by my contact with all those people coming through the doors? Absolutely. Absolutely. What’s your fondest memory of something that happened at UUCCSM in the past 15 years? That might be an unfair question because there have been many happy memories. [After a long pause] In my mind I was trying to create some categories to talk about that would be of interest. Being a minister I’m part of so many high points in people’s lives. High points are my daily life. Someone’s wedding, the once-in-a-lifetime fulfillment of finding a life partner, or great celebrations and welcoming children. There’ve been so many of those and their meaning hasn’t diminished for me, but when they’re lumped together it’s more the fact that I’ve been able to do that than there is any single one. But something that might be of interest to people is that one of the things I like to do best is conduct memorial services, and that probably memorials are the most memorable rite of passage. And that I’ve found [memorials] to be probably the most satisfying peak experiences that I’ve had as a minister may seem strange, but I think a lot of ministers feel that way. I don’t think I’m alone. It helps people move on and survive when there’s a wonderful memorial service. Because it’s a point of departure on to the next phase; you feel better after attending a good memorial service. Yes, I think it is that, and that also from my experience being able to look at an hour of time and think about how do you say something about someone’s life? How do you express it? What do you do, what music, what words, what poetry, what eulogy do you write — these choices make it an incredible experience. I probably remember memorial services I’ve conducted much better than any wedding, for example, for that reason. Do you think people are busier than they were 15 years ago and 10 years ago? Yes, it seems to be getting worse. People are fiendishly busy. And it does have an impact on what people can bring to and take from the experience of being part of a congregation. More and more I think that people are able to set aside Sunday morning — an hour on Sunday morning — for their life as a part of the congregation, but are much less available to be part of the church at other times of the week. And the church has become more and more reliant on paid staff and on getting things done in other ways because the pool of volunteers is not the way it used to be. Would you and your husband, David, like to stay permanently in Santa Monica, or have you talked about someday maybe moving elsewhere? We talk about what it would be like to live in other places but we haven’t found a place we like better than Santa Monica. I think that’s what happens to everybody. It certainly happens to all the ministers who come here, doesn’t it? We both love Honolulu, and have conversations about what it would be like to live there. And we always travel and ask wherever we go, “Would we like to retire here?” but we always come back to Santa Monica and say, “It’s best here.” A couple of months ago you recommended a book to me about a minister who left her ministry and she and her husband bought a farm. Can you imagine a rural lifestyle in the future or are you an urban person? [Laughter] There’s no way that David Denton is ever going to do any yard work anywhere. You’ve been involved in the planning for new church facilities and a Capital Campaign going back almost a decade. What story do you have to tell about what church members want, will pay — delays, serendipity, and the fact that you’re retiring before the building plan will be completed? That’s a really important question that I’ve given a lot of thought to — my ministry and its relationship to the building program over more than a decade. Because I can remember, in 1995 and ’96 when the membership was growing, an interest in reviving — and after the [January 1994] earthquake which opened up the space there [on the 17th Street lot], we saw there was an opportunity to do something. We began talking about what it would mean to have some kind of capital campaign towards a building program in 1996, I remember, talking about that with some of the church leaders. There was a lot of time taken ramping up to understanding what the building program would be, what it would mean to have a capital campaign and so on. So that by 1998 and 1999 when we were really getting started with visioning and all the rest of it, we already had several years of anticipation. I thought it would take five years, and I was on that timetable for a while. Thinking that it would be one of the things I would do while I was here. The church really needed this work to be done. I was happy to take it on in terms of being the minister at a church during a building program — focusing my energies accordingly. And then it started taking a lot longer than five years. There was the serendipity of the opportunity to buy the property next door. The fact that there were significant improvements that could be made on each successive plan, even though each successive plan represented a tremendous investment of leadership time, money, hope, and vision each time we set about to invest in a new one. At some point I realized that I needed to detach my understanding of my ministry from the progress of the building program. That that was going to be a kind of discipline I was going to have to apply to myself or I would go crazy waiting for it to be over. And I also could see, as my life circumstances changed and we were working on a decade of this building program, that I was not going to get to the Promised Land with everybody else and I had to accept that. The fact remains that the congregation has worked really hard through what has turned out to be a tremendous challenge, and I think we just didn’t realize — couldn’t have realized — how hard it would be to make this happen. So it’s through nobody’s fault whatsoever that it’s taken this long. I think there’s a lot that will still get done that’s part of this initial momentum. So you’re at peace with the fact that it’s not going to be finished before you retire? Yes. And I think actually it’s been good to go through that effort inside myself because I don’t think it’s healthy for a minister to be attached to anything like that. To have one’s self-esteem caught up with whether the building program finishes or not. That’s not what ministry is; it’s about walking with the people while they’re doing that. Has your religious philosophy evolved or changed over the past 15 years? Yes. And I think everybody’s does. I think I’ve made a complete circle in my theological outlook, starting when I was in Divinity School when I was pretty much an existentialist and atheist. Then I got softened up by being exposed to people who were a lot more expressive about their religious faith and I began to form an idea of mild theism that I could subscribe to and carried that with me through many years — my ministry. I arrived with that here in Santa Monica. I guess you could call it my old theistic point of view. And I find that now I’ve pretty much abandoned that. I guess I would describe myself now more as a religious humanist in that I still believe in the value of religious inquiry and community but I’m certainly more humanistic in my outlook and more existentialist. And I have changed the most in that I think that theology matters less and less all the time. I remember maybe four years ago, in an aside you said, “I was out in the courtyard and someone came to me and asked me to pray for someone, in terms of helping them recover from an illness or injury.”And you said that even though you don’t think that’s what God does — God doesn’t exist to grant wishes in response to prayers — and I thought that’s an interest - ing thing for a minister to say. But that’s part of a general theology we all figure out one way or another. If there is a force in the universe, does that apply to us individually? And if it does, is it a Santa Claus-type force? Or is it something beyond getting things or surviving a disease or injury? For you it was just an aside but it was important to get an insight into your personal beliefs. I remember that too, and I think it’s so interesting about prayer. As a minister when somebody asks me to pray for them I always say yes. I think it would be a tremendously harmful thing to refuse to pray for somebody and to not honor whatever need or desperation out of which that request came. So I say yes, but then I have to think about what did I mean by saying yes? Now what am I going to have to do? So I remind myself that I do not believe in a god who is waiting to listen to my requests, but at the same time we’ve all probably been in that situation where we’ve done that for ourselves. That’s a very human response. And I certainly have. So I think it’s one of those paradoxical situations we all encounter and I’ve encountered a great deal in ministry — I don’t really believe in this but I can also see how sometimes we do anyway. This happens all the time. Have you ever thought about the road, or roads, you didn’t take in your life? I honestly don’t think there’s anything else I could have done in my life. The thing I always think about is how lucky I was to figure out that this is what I could do. I don’t see myself as having been suited to anything else in my time. Times have changed now, but in my time it was absolutely the thing to do and I’ve never really thought about what else I could have done or might have done. What are you planning to do in retirement, including your vocation and avocations? A lot of ideas occur to me of things that I might like to do, but I think the emphasis is more on being than doing — if I can manage that. Some of the things that have come to mind are writing, of course. The other thing I feel pulled to is to provide, as a volunteer, ministry and service to the homeless population in Santa Monica. The work that I’ve done as a volunteer with OPCC [formerly the Ocean Park Community Center], for example, has given me a real sense of what it’s like to minister to that group of people. I hope to learn to cook, and entertain, and enjoy friendships and time with people in a way that I have not been able to as much because so much of my people time is taken up with being a minister; and travel, which there could be a lot of in the future. (I’ve got cookbooks, I just don’t look at them.) Is there anything else you would like to share? Maybe I’ve summed this up in different ways in sermons over the last few weeks, but I would want to say for the record that ministry is a very difficult and challenging profession, in which one has to confront one’s own inadequacies all the time. And yet for me it has been a tremendously satisfying way to spend my time.
And I love the way I’ve been able to be a part of people’s lives. I feel very grateful for my career as a minister and for the privilege that congregations have given me to serve. And I hope our congregation knows that. I think they do. -- Judith Meyer *Taken from the advertising campaign of the 1930 movie “Anna Christie,” in which Greta Garbo’s voice was heard for the first time on film.
Settled Minister Search Committee:
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On July 9 our retiring minister, the Rev.
Judith Meyer, was interviewed for 75 minutes
on videotape by Rob Briner, under the
professional direction of documentary filmmakers
Pamela Briggs and William McDonald. An
edited DVD of the interview — possibly accompanied
by a videotaped interview with the Rev. Ernie
Pipes completed in July 2006 — will hopefully be
available in 2009. Here are some transcribed
excerpts:
I have never stopped feeling really fortunate that
I found my way into ministry and how much of that
has been a product of my whole life. And the strong
feeling I have that for all of us it doesn’t matter what
you’ve gone through or where you’ve been, none of
that experience is wasted in the final reckoning.
And for me in terms of ministry, that is true. Everything,
starting with who I was as a child and who
my parents were and how they chose to raise me
and the people with whom I had contact as a child;
the intellectual interests I had; where I went to college;
who my friends were. Everything has always
been pouring into the work that I do and nothing is
lost. I love that. 