Life of Pi

I just finished with The Life of Pi, a novel by Yann Martel. I highly recommend this novel to all UU's and others that take the time to read a blog about my spirituality. In fact, the first I heard of this novel was from Wednesday night vespers at UUCA.

The main character, Piscine Molitor Patel or Pi for short, was raised Hindu, decides to become a Christian and a Muslim. "I just want to love God," says the teenager who gathers joys from the various perspectives of spirituality. His family runs a Zoo in India, but decides to move to Canada. The boat sinks and he has to survive for 227 days on a rescue boat with a zebra, a 450-pound Bengali tiger by the name of Richard Parker, a hyena, orangutan, various insects and other pestilence. After a a few days, only Pi and Richard parker remain.

The allegories abound as Pi spends several hundred days at sea. Richard Parker represents the animal in all of us, and Pi must come to terms with this new relationship. The issue of reality and faith are also covered very well.

“I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: ‘White, white! L-L-Love! My God!’–and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostics, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, ‘Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,’ and, to the very end, lack the imagination and miss the better story."

More events happen along those themes, but I'll try not to ruin the story, since it's such a fun read. Also math geeks might see the significance of Pi being at sea for 227 days. For everyone else, pi = 22/7.

Overall, it was a great story that I am sure any UU will enjoy. Read it before the movie comes out.

Community

Tonight I went to a planning meeting for the June 10th service at UUCA which will be hosted by the 20/30s group. The theme we will be using is Community and Welcome. It was a neat brainstorming sessions where we each expounded on our opinions and perspective of community. We each told stories about our experiences, but we moved on to try to define what community means. Here's what we arrived at:

Community is a group of people with some common goals working together to move towards a goal or goals that also share external characteristics that allows members to feel comfortable and welcome.

We didn't really write all this down during the session, but is what I took from the meeting to summarize our wandering thoughts on the matter. Now we have to take that meaning and rap a service around it. Being as the 20/30s group is a newer generation, we want to ensure we relay the concept that community no longer requires that people be near one another. That we can find community on the Internet as well as at a UU congregation.

I got tasked with finding music for this service. If anyone out there can help out a Gnu UU, it would be much appreciated.

PS. I checked out two books from the UUCA library to read over the weekend as I head to Texas for a family wedding. A Faith for All Seasons by William R. Murry and The Premise and the Promise by Warren R. Ross. They seemed like two books to really get me acclimated to UU-ism.