[UUPoly-L] The Order of the Flaming Chalice#22007

["Miriam S Pia" <Miriam_S_Pia@hotmail.com>]

The Order of the Flaming Chalice

UU monks & nuns

Story 2: a Vision for Real Life

By Miriam Pia

 

There was great celebration today as the Order of the Flaming Chalice
received an award from the political Left.  "We are honored," the presenter
of the award announced, "to have overcome.  Two hundred years ago, Leftist
politics meant Communism & Socialism rather than Capitalist Democracy.
Nowadays, the truth has been uncovered and established: What began as an odd
ball grass roots so-called Southpaw movement, grew into fully respectable
Leftist politics.  Just as we have converted to sustainable energy, we have
finally converted to a nearly just society not only for racial minorities
but also for the tens of millions of Lefties in our nation, and hundreds of
millions of us around the world.  

 

"Today, we are presenting this award to the Order of the Flaming Chalice for
fully integrating left handed practices into the Order, and not only that
but also cultivating the 'setting apart' time.  

 

"Once again, thank you Order of the Flaming Chalice for your thorough
support of our mass scale social project of equity and integration for
Lefties."  The speaker, a woman in this case handed over a plaque evidently
designed to be ambidextrous.  There was no back to it at all, but two fronts
with handles for whichever side felt right.  

 

The American Leftist Society had sprung up amongst a mixture of support,
indifference and ridicule early in the New Millenium.  In retrospect, the
time was clearly ripe for it, with a high tolerance and general movement
towards integration more the fashion than strong opposition.

 

What few knew was that it's origins and the dawn of the Order of the Flaming
Chalice: the most stable, successful and longest lasting Unitarian
Universalist monastic Order had been founded right about the same time, and
even had a common root.

 

The speaker for the Order of the Flaming Chalice had spent some time the
weeks before trying to decide whether or not to make any mention of this at
the ceremony.  It was true that the work of fully integrating the Lefties
into society inside and outside of the Order had found a place with the
Order and with UUism, just as all civil rights movements and anti-oppression
righteous organizations are apt to do.  However, the speaker had determined
to do a bit of research prior to receiving the award.

 

One nun, a Lefty, having received the award plaque, then stepped aside to
let the Head of the Order speak for them all.  In this case, it was a man.
"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for this.  In an effort to come up
with something to say," the speaker and a few in the crowd chuckled light
heartedly, "I did a bit of history.  As you'll notice sooner or later, I am
myself right handed, but I wouldn't say that was necessarily true
politically.

One of our founders was also one of the first modern Leftists; as most of
you know, it used to have an entirely different meaning.  During the first
hundred years of our Order, we have had three prominent Leftists and a lot
of steady advocates.  In the first decades of our Order we had to establish
a particularly intense, but temporary seclusion for any left handed who came
on retreat.  I mean, we didn't force it at first, but we created leftie
retreats.  Slowly a program was devised that addressed a specific set of
emotional and psychological issues associated with these people's
relationship with a right hand dominant society.  As the integration has
proceeded, thanks largely to the Leftist nonpartisan political movement, we
have adapted what we do in the Order both to integrate our own Lefties but
also because, according to journals dedicated to this subject kept by a
series of monks and nuns, the needs of this subgroup have shifted as society
has progressed.  In honor of this occasion, I found an excerpt that applies.
This was written by a nun who, although prominent in our Order preferred
anonymity.  She was Head of the Order for twenty years, and a member for 50.
Like so many of us, she did not spend her entire life within the monastic
clergy, but a large portion of it.  

 

"We had another great day today.  I had been feeling a bit down recently,
and questioning the importance of this Leftist section of the sanctuary and
seclusion for a while.  During the past year, we have only had five lefties
come through on retreat, and being the only one living predominantly in
these areas of the monastery/abbey for the past ten years has been quite
lonely.  Then, today, our most recent guest who has apparently come back off
and on for the past several years came to me gleefully and full of
gratitude.  He told me that he had taken it all for granted until he went to
a distant foreign land.  He said that the difference was so drastic.that
there had been virtually nothing for left handed people there at all and not
only that but no one ever seemed to mention it at all.  He told me that he
had felt hurt for the first time in his life by this, and that he had grown
a bit sore physically because he kept being forced to use his subdominant
side for practically everything.  He told me that it was as bad as if he had
had to put his good arm in a sling, the entire time.  He spent a month like
that, then, the moment he returned to America he came on retreat and soaked
in the opposite.the Left only side.  Even though it was only the weekend, he
remarked that he felt absolutely refreshed.

 

I was so inspired by what he'd said that I looked into some of the
historical journals, which I am given to doing of some evenings.  I found a
powerful entry from 75 years ago, when the Leftist social movement had only
just begun to gain momentum.  Five monastics signed there names to the
entry, three men and two women.'We have been here for six months now, and
all have confessed that it makes a tremendous difference.  Like peeling back
the layers of an onion, or a flower unfolding itself, our hearts are healing
in places that we had long forgotten had ever been injured because we had
grown so accustomed to the pain and to the suffering.  Now, we have spent so
much time here together that when we attend meetings and meals with the
right handers again we tend to notice the difference in ways that, well, we
used to have no escape from.  It confirms the value of the new bipartisan
Leftist movement.  If only we can save the environment at the same time.  We
hope this new movement takes hold, as having now taken refuge against the
overwhelmingly right handed world, we realize how much all those little
left-handed things and ways have an effect.  The biggest value to those of
us here at the monastery we have all confessed, is that the level of hurt
and of frustrated rage because of being left handed and confronted endlessly
by right handed equipment and situations and expectations while being denied
many of the same fulfillments allotted to our right handed friends,
relatives, citizens, has subsided while here at the abbey.  For this reason
we are especially grateful for those who came before and arranged this
left-handed seclusion method here.'  Once I read that, and saw that man
today, I realized that none of this has been in vain; none of this has been
wasted time."

 

When the speaker stopped, the crowd applauded.  The woman representing the
Leftist society went to the microphone.  "Yes," she cheered, "we have made
great strides forward.  Not one of us could have done all of this alone.  It
took three decades of practice just to get the hang of political organizing
the way right handers have for centuries, but once we got it, we really got
it!  Of course, its still true that most lefties are a minority within their
own families, and so we recognize and attribute a great portion of the
success to those who have sympathized and cooperated with us, just as all
the women have thanked the men who were not opponents of the women's
progressive movements and all the racial minorities thank themselves first
but also those of the white race who were equally opposed to their
oppression."

 

Far away, the President of the UUA, and many other Unitarian Universalists
nation wide went about their business.  They were two generations into
having adjusted to the reality that UUs have this monastic abbey, the Order
of the Flaming Chalice.  Like the symbol itself, they happily accepted it,
and their memories of the Order's creation were real but faint just as so
many UUs know that Unitarianism came from Transylvania, 'just like Dracula,
only not evil'.