Oxymoron of the Day - the Atheist Minister

Say what??

Jane Esbensen tells a story from the mid-1990s, when she worked as a chaplain at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, Minn. An elderly woman on her deathbed asked for Communion. Esbensen, who at the time was unable to perform this sacrament, brought in another chaplain who could.

The other chaplain blessed the Communion wafer and held it out for the woman, who "looked at me with troubled eyes." Esbensen, knowing the woman could hardly swallow, asked if it was too big; she nodded. The chaplain broke the wafer in half, then again, putting a quarter wafer on the woman's tongue.

"She was crying," recalls Esbensen. "It was very moving. And then she pulled me down and whispered in my ear, 'Will that get me all the way there?'"

Esbensen found this heartbreaking, "just a travesty," that the woman's lifetime of religion had left her with such a crimped view. "I said to her, 'This is not a ticket to heaven. If there's a God, he has seen what a good and kind and loving person you are.'"

If?

Yep. Esbensen, 53, who was ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister in 1996 and recently became head of a Madison congregation, does not believe in God or life after death. She calls herself a "humanist atheist." She thinks belief in deity has arguably done more to hurt than help the world.

"People who do not believe in God are actually kinder, gentler people," she says. A personal belief in God, for instance, was not needed for Esbensen to comfort the dying woman in Minnesota, to "say what she needed to hear."

I used to insure several Unitarian Universalist groups in San Diego County. In the past I would describe them as believing in just about anything, but now I guess I can also say they believe in nothing.