The Wednesday Brown Bag Aug 29

Bring your brown bag lunch to the Common Room at noon, Wednesday Aug 29. It's a chance to disuss, really, anything that's on your mind. Our "default" topics for Aug 29 are two short articles from the Summer 2012 issue of the UUWorld (pp. 20-21 and 50-51).

Next week (Sep 5), the "default" topic will start in on the new, Fall 2012, issue. (We'll start with the "Obama's Odyssey" feature article.)

For this week (Aug 29), the first article is "Sermon Bingo" by Cheryl Gardner (see here).

Gardner asks us:

If you could fill a bingo card with likely words for a Unitarian Universalist sermon, what might they be? This question is important to me, because I’ve been in churches where the words I heard were not meaningful to me and did not move me. Here are words I would put on my bingo card if we were playing “sermon bingo” in a UU church on a Sunday morning: justice, equality, acceptance, gay, straight, spirit, compassion, celebrate, life, death, wonder, question, welcome, dignity, mystery, diversity.

On the one hand, Gardner acknowledges, treating worship as a bingo game is problematic:
"It’s rude to the speaker, it draws attention away from what is actually being said, and it is an in-joke shared by a few listeners."

However, she suggests that the exercise would help us become "aware of language and its functions in a new way."

You might make up a bingo card and fill it with the words commonly heard during worship which, for you, have become trite, powerless, and fail to move you. Then "worship bingo" would be an exercise in cynicism and separation.

You might, alternatively, make up a bingo card filled with words that do resonate with you, that touch your heart, that move you. What would those words be? In such a case, Gardner suggests,

"Maybe the filled card, when you read it aloud, sounds a lot like prayer."

What Gardner is ultimately getting at are these questions:

Are the key words we hear in the discourse we listen to meaningless or meaningful to us? Do we hear the same language again and again until the words lose their ability to reach us? Are the words simply catchphrases meant to mark us as belonging to a group?

As you reflect on the religious discourses of which you are a part -- including the sermons you hear at UUFG, and the ways you and others around you express your faith -- what is your answer to these questions?

One UU minister, Rev. Scott Prinster, commented on Gardner's article:

Are we seriously encouraging people to listen to worship services in this way? Our pathological irreverence is not charming or attractive -- it treats our worship life like a product offered by a service provider that we consume if it pleases us, and mock if it doesn't. This does not encourage me to put my heart out there on Sunday mornings, folks.

On the other hand, another UU minister, Rev. Diane Miller, commented:

The cards can be generated on line with free programs. For our intergenerational Fathers Day service I made cards for the children based on what I planned to say in my sermon. Adults joined in. It was lots of fun. I should have highlighted the words in my sermon text because I tend to extemporize, and left out some key words. But several people called out Bingo toward the end of the sermon.

What are your reactions to these comments?

* * *
The second article is "Weighty Lessons," by Ellen Brenner (see here).

Brenner discusses anti-fat bias and our reaction to the "obesity epidemic." She notes that:

"As for the concept that a person could in fact be healthy and fit while still carrying enough weight to qualify as “fat” by popular measures, the reaction I get is usually one of disbelief—even though there are studies to support that assertion."

Qualifying as "fat" might be unhealthy -- and it might not be. Our reactivity against fat can be deadlier than obesity -- as illustrated by deaths from lap-band surgery. ("Lap-band surgery" puts a laparoscopic inflatable silicone gastric band around the top portion of the stomach to treat obesity by reducing the amount of food consumed. See picture.)

Brenner finds that:

- We cling to BMI (Body-mass index) as a measure health. However, the BMI "has been largely discredited as a reliable indicator of healthy weight."

- Difficulty in keeping off weight is biochemical. In a recent study:

"The researchers tracked levels of weight-regulating hormones in a group of test-subject dieters. They discovered that dieting caused these hormones to shoot up to levels evidently evolved to pack on and hold onto calories in the event of famine. Worse, these hormones stayed at those levels for over a year after the diet’s end. In other words, that irrational, eat-everything-not-nailed-down hunger that would wipe out even my proudest weight loss achievements isn’t in my head. It’s totally biochemical."

Relatedly, I happened to see this graphic on Facebook this morning. The pictures show us what various percentages of body fat can look like -- but they tell us nothing about health. The women in the last two pictures may well be considerably healthier than the women in the first five.


How should Unitarian Universalist faith respond to the issue of prejudice against people seen as "fat"?