258 candles-days 36-31

In the same way religious liberals decry that all faiths have their share of fundamentalist thinking and actions, so we must celebrate that all faiths also have a deeply progressive strain that often runs counter to that. These Pakistani clerics deserve to be recognized as pioneers.

“BEER, AND THANK YOU”

 

A Sermon Delivered to the Unitarian Society of

Menomonie, WI, March 23, 2914

 

I want to start out this morning talking about a death that affects me profoundly and maybe surprisingly. The Reverend Fred Phelps, Sr., of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, died Wednesday night about midnight.

            I don’t know what the weather was like that evening in Topeka when he died, and I don’t want to make light of his death, but I wondered if this man, a member of what the BBC had once chillingly called the most hated family in the United States, had chosen such a cold, harsh, desolate time to depart this life, as if a reminder of the desolate theology and God he served.

            I’m not about to write a eulogy for Fred Phelps but I do want to remind you of some wisdom from John Donne. In his Meditation number 27 he famously writes, "No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind..." The quote has become so ubiquitous as to have lost much of its original impact. But it manages to retain an impact and a truth beyond its simplicity.

I don’t eulogize him but I mourn Fred Phelps. I also mourn the death of ideas and cultures and languages, of whole populations of insects and birds and mammals and fish wiped out before we ever had an opportunity to know of them, of civil discourse and sitting silently before answering and owning up to what one has said. But I mourn Fred Phelps a little differently than those because he was are a part of my experience of the world and I think I'd be the worse for not having known about him.

Unlike Phelps, and I presume unlike you, I have little room in my theology for hatred. Not of groups of people and, I hope, not of individuals. I continue to work on my intense, let’s call it disfavor, of Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney, but for all other people I like to think I am, at worst, ambivalent. In my theology, god is everything that makes up our experience, including the way we treat one another, the thoughts we have and act on, the toast we have for breakfast and selecting the bread and toasting and smothering it with butter as well as where the bread and the toaster parts and the cows and grass and water that make up the butter came from. This idea that god is a verb, simply is the way everyone and everything behaves, is something I picked up from born-again writer Anne Lamott. But it didn't originate with her. It was probably Jewish mysticism as exemplified in the Kabbalah that came up with the idea. In the contemporary world this is called pantheism, which posits that the divine itself composes all that is the universe, and thus that God, if that’s the name we use for it, is not separate from reality but is what constitutes it. As a result, Fred Phelps, his church, his hatred and his obsession, are as much an expression of God as Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Physicists have calculated that exactly the same amount of matter resides in the universe today as did moments after the Big Bang, and if that is the case then nothing ever goes away, it simply changes form. Fred Phelps qua Fred Phelps is on his way to becoming another series of atoms in another form. (Whether the new form acheives sentience, as in reincarnation, is another matter.) What I’ve wanted to find since his death is a cartoon memorializing him by showing Jesus explaining to him, "Look, it says right there in Mark, I hate figs!" because I think that would be a funny way to eulogize him.

But as Adam Weinstein in an excellent essay on the website Gawker points out, Phelps and his Westboro family, despite whatever else we might say about them, are at least consistent in their reading of the Bible. He identifies them correctly, and the term is not meant to be pejorative—Unitarian Universalism also grew from these roots—as Primitive Baptists. The “primitive” label would be more contemporarily termed “original;” that is, these are Baptists who, in early Nineteenth Century America, refused to allow modernizing influences to water down God’s message and authority. As Weinstein notes, doing so would have made no difference anyway, since they believed in predestination, which said God already had or had not chosen you for admittance to eternal life.

Weinstein does such a good job of enumerating the Calvinist idea of what the Bible teaches, what I learned in seminary by the acronym “TULIP,” that I’m going to quote him in full.

·         The total depravity of man. This one is everything: Human beings' default mode is damnation (thanks, Adam and Eve). We are not merely headed for damnation, though: We are depraved, alienated from God and goodness and unable to return to goodness by yourselves. In short, humans without salvation are all irredeemably terrible. Does that sound bleak? Well, that's the way it is, according to Calvinists.

·         Unconditional election. This is the predestination thing. God in His omniscience and in his mercy will save some of you. He already knows whom He will save, and he's not doing it because you're nice or funny or pretty, but because He can. Deal with it.

·         Limited atonement. Jesus died to save some people. But not all people. Just the ones God has elected. You can't atone for you sins, and maybe Jesus can't, either, because at the end of the day, maybe God heard your prayers and Jesus', and said "Yeeeeeeeeeeah no."

·         Irresistible grace. How do you know if God has saved you? Oh, you'll know. Because he'll touch you with grace, and you won't be able to refuse. No matter what a dirty philandering murderous gay Episcopalian you may be, God might save you, and you will heed His call, because that's how He rolls.

·         Perseverance of the saints. Once you go saved, you never go back. Here's the thing about an omniscient God: If He's elected you for salvation, you're getting saved, even if you keep being a dirty philandering murderous gay Episcopalian. That's just how grace works. No takebacks!

 

Weinstein concludes “There's a God who saves some people and screws the rest over for eternity, and there's nothing you can really do about it. If there were, He wouldn't be God, and you wouldn't be a depraved, terrible not-God quivering mass of id urges…As the old Presbyterian joke goes (Presbyterians still take the Calvinist points quite seriously): ‘God has answered your prayers. The answer is no.’”

            Let’s not allow ourselves a moment of triumphalism, saying, “Well, that’s what’s wrong with those fundamentalists, they see the world entirely in terms of black and white, right and wrong, them and everyone else.” Because the truth is, as easy as that may seem to us to make the path through worldliness it actually makes being Christ-like (as they might say) the more difficult. Because the Bible and their tradition tell them in no uncertain terms that you can’t just live quietly with this determination. You must proclaim it, no matter who it hurts, no matter what discomfort it is to you, no matter what the consequences might be. God demands no less than complete obeisance from you and God says, quite specifically in Mark 16:15-6: “And [Jesus] said to [his disciples, ie, everyone who would be a Christian], ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned.’” From the perspective of Fred Phelps and other Original Baptists what’s wrong with everyone else, including most self-proclaimed Christians, is that they won’t do that. In our arrogance we refuse to accept God knows what is right and has told us very explicitly what our responsibilities are and it is their responsibility to point that out. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists and other sects that grew out from that root, they are meant to be prophets, not telling what will happen in the future but what must happen as a consequence of disobedience.

The abolition movement, the temperance movement, the social gospel and social justice movements, the civil rights movement—all of these came about as a result of the efforts and influence of the Original Baptists, also known as Hardshells. Should we thank Fred Phelps or his clan from Westboro? Not even I would go that far. Some things should remain beyond the pale of human interaction and public displays of hatred should be among them. But we should recognize that there is great complexity in people no less than there is in life. From the 1950s until he was disbarred, Fred Phelps was an active and effective lawyer on behalf mostly of black clients, winning settlements against institutional racist practices and police abuse. In the late 80s he was given several awards by the groups Blacks in Government and the NAACP.  Indeed, no man is an island. Neither is anyone just a single attribute.

I mourn the death of Fred Phelps, then, as a fellow part of god, for the good he did in his life, for his role as a man, as a lover, as a father, and as a leader. It's sad that his legacy will be a rank hatred of people and ideas his theology couldn't prepare him to accept, and it's sad that for some people that will be reason to, if not celebrate, then dismiss his death. But life, like everything else we do, has consequences, and this is his.

            We justifiably cherish, as Americans, as members of different generations, as UUs, and as members of this congregation, our sense of social justice, of what needs to be done and undone. In the aggregate, we have had tremendous influence on the world, sometimes for ill, mostly for good. As individuals, many of us have worked in support of causes ranging from opposition to war to women’s choices to raising the minimum wage to helping the homeless and improving conditions for the mentally ill and people in poverty. Perhaps when we die the media is unlikely to cover efforts we made to change the world. But it is unlikely we will be referred to as having belonged to the most hated family in the country or as having left a legacy of angry and exclusive theology.

There is a song by a writer named Bill Callahan called, appropriately, “The Sing.” He describes having a day when he’s surrounded by people but says only two things to anyone. Now before I tell you what those two things are, I want you to think about what such a day is like. A day in which you say only two, at most two, things to people. I’m not talking about talking to people outside your immediate family or your significant other. Such a thing as that is lonely enough, I know. I’m not talking either about only wanting to say two things to people—we all have days like that, when we want no or nearly no contact with others and huddle into ourselves, keeping mum. I’m talking about days when there is almost nothing to say and nearly no one to say it to. But for a moment think about leaving your house and going through your day as you do normally and in that span of time saying only two things to anyone. That’s a lonely experience and while I’ve been lonely in my time, I don’t think I have ever been that lonely.

 

            Here are the lyrics to “The Sing.”

Drinking while sleeping strangers
Unknowingly keep me company
In the hotel bar

Looking out a window that isn't there
Looking at the carpet and the chairs

Well the only words I said today are "beer" and "thank you"
Beer, thank you
Beer, thank you
Beer

Giving praise in a quiet way
Like a church
Like a church
Like a church that’s far away

I've got limitations like Marvin Gaye
Mortal joy is that way

Outside a train sings its whale song
To a long, long train long, long gone
Then silence comes back alone
High as scaffolding

'Til the wind finds something to ping
When the pinging things finds the wind
We're all looking for a body
Or a means to make one sing.

Callahan conjures with the two things he says to someone a homey situation. He gets up and goes about his day and at a bar, maybe where he’s staying, maybe one he knows, he says “beer” and “thank you.” We’re left to imagine the conversation on the bartender’s side. Maybe he’s asked “what do you want?” or gives him a nod while wiping down the bar in front of him. And Callahan answers with a specific, non-specific request: “beer.” Not Budweiser or Miller Lite or even a further question, “what do you have?” which is the question I always ask. But a single word which, in its vagueness, says it doesn’t matter what the bar carries or what brand he’s given, he just wants a single taste in his mouth: “beer.”

            He’s been defeated. He’s drinking in a bar where people sleep at the tables. I’ve been in those bars. The TV’s on, not for the game or information or even entertainment, but for the company. What you’re drinking isn’t so important as the act of drinking. He looks out a window he only imagines, and at the floor and the empty chairs. He faces his limitations which are probably considerable, and he hears a train that wails in its loneliness, and even the silence with which it’s answered is alone.

But the second thing he says is much more specific. We imagine the bartender has set a glass down and Callahan says “thank you.” The bartender has given him what he asked for and now he’s thanked him. Is it possible that everything we can ever say to anyone can be reduced to those two phrases? Beer. Thank you. I mean, telling others what we want and then, after they’ve given it to us, thanking them. As Callahan says, “giving praise in a quiet way.”

            Well, if we’re not particular, that might work. But what if we are more particular? What if, in fact, what we want isn’t something as simple to supply as milk or a book or beer but something a lot of us lack? What if the something is correction of a social injustice? I’m not certain Reverend Martin Luther King’s requests could be reduced to “justice” or “equality.”      More importantly, perhaps, is the “thank you” that follows. Perhaps, had he lived to see his requests granted by the United States, King would have said “thank you,” but if so it was only out of his innate politeness. I’m not certain it was the majority’s ability to grant that request. After all, equality and justice aren’t really options on some menu society places before us. They are, per the first of our Seven Principles, a part of the inherent dignity granted every human being. And rounding out the seventh is the suggestion that such dignity is accorded every member of the interconnected web of being.

            But I am not Martin Luther King, Jr., much as it pains me to admit. Perhaps none of us is. Perhaps a Reverend King only appears every millennium while Fred Phelps’ are born daily. Perhaps in our attempts to make an impact on the world, our attempts to inculcate justice, to make amends for injustice, to encourage peace or equality or to just get everyone to live together a little more easily, we are sending out, like that train, our whale song to something or someone who’s long, long gone. And we’re answered with silence that itself is alone.

            But that isn’t all there is. Somewhere, our song touches something or someone. Something we don’t recognize, someone we don’t know. We all have at least one story—and without knowing it we’ve probably got a lot more—of people we find out we’ve touched gently, gracefully, with our lives that we hadn’t even known about. We all have stories about others who’ve touched us without knowing, why assume that’s only a one-way street? That we’re only the recipients and not the givers? The pinging thing finds the wind. It may never come back to us but that doesn’t matter. It goes on. “We're all looking for a body, or a means to make one sing.” We may never see the result, the body, of what we do, of our efforts, of the sacrifices we make. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that we touch one another, somehow, somewhere. And the chord we touch in one another is what makes each of us sing.

 

god is fred phelps

"No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind..."

This quote, from John Donne's Meditation 27, has become so ubiquitous to have lost much of its impact. But like many phrases and concepts of the Christian Bible, it manages to retain an impact and a truth beyond its simplicity.

 

I mourn Fred Phelps as I mourned Adam and Nancy Lanza and Lou Reed and my friends and children I've never met and my mother and my pets and animals that were only with me a short time. I mourn equally the death of ideas and cultures and languages, of whole populations of insects and birds and mammals and fish wiped out before we ever had an opportunity to know of them, of civil discourse and sitting silently before answering and owning up to what one has said. But I mourn Fred Phelps and the others differently than those because they are a part of my experience of the world and I think I'd be the worse for not having known them.

 

In my theology, god (small "g" for the same reason we don't capitalize "People") is everything that makes up our experience, including the way we treat one another, the thoughts we have and act on, the toast we have for breakfast and selecting the bread and toasting and smothering it with butter as well as where the bread and the toaster parts and the cows and grass and water that make up the butter came from. This idea that god is a verb, simply is the way everyone and everything behaves, is something I picked up from born-again writer Anne Lamott. But it didn't originate with her. It was probably Jewish mysticism as exemplified in the Kabbalah that came up with the idea. In the contemporary world this is called pantheism, and I'm comfortable being called a pantheist.

 

Physicists have calculated that exactly the same amount of matter resides in the universe today as did moments after the Big Bang, and if that is the case then nothing ever goes away, it simply changes form. Fred Phelps qua Fred Phelps is on his way to becoming another series of atoms in another form. (Whether the new form acheives sentience, as in reincarnation, is another matter.) I have looked in vain for a cartoon memorializing his death by showing Jesus explaining to him, "Look, it says right there in Mark, I hate figs!" because I think that would be a funny way to eulogize him. But as Adam Weinstein points out, Phelps and his Westboro family, despite whatever else we might say about them, are at least consistent in their reading of the Bible (and I ought to mention my unique thrill at seeing the theological Calvinist acronym TULIP used on the Gawker website). Christians, Calvinists, Evangelicals, and Fundamentalists might not like to claim him, but the truth is the Westboro Church has as much right to claim themselves part of the fold as anyone else.

 

I mourn the death of Fred Phelps, then, as a fellow part of god, for the good he did in his life, for his role as a man, as a lover, as a father, and as a leader. It's sad that his legacy will be a rank hatred of people and ideas his theology couldn't prepare him to accept, and it's sad that for some people that will be reason to, if not celebrate, then dismiss his death. But life, like everything else we do, has consequences, and this is his.

resistible revolution?

This book has been a challenge to read. Not because I disagree with its theology, although sometimes I do, or because it is written amateurishly, although sometimes it is, or because sometimes I want to hurl it against the wall, although sometimes I would. It's a challenge for all those reasons, plus Shane Claiborne's occasional lapses into the unbelievable--a page after he tells us he was a student at Wheaton while "they still had that pesky no-dancing rule" he describes himself as having "multicolored hair and...ripped jeans and a Rage Against the Machine shirt sporting a black American flag with the words 'Evil Empire'"--after which he manages to pull out something as honest as this:

We hang out with kids and help them with homework in our living room, and jump in open fire hydrants on hot summer days. We share food with folks who need it...Folks drop in all day to say hi, have a safe place to cry, or get some water or a blanket. Sometimes we turn people away, or play Rock, Paper, Scissors to see who answers the door on tired days. We run a community store out of our house. We call it the Gathering, and neighbors can come in and fill a grocery bag with clothes for a dollar or find a couch, a bed, or a refrigerator. Sometimes people donate beautiful things for us to share with our neighbors; other times they donate their used toothbrushes.

We reclaim abandoned lots and make gardens amid the concrete wreckage around us. We plant flowers inside old TV screens and computer monitors on our roof. We see our friends waste away from drug addiction, and on a good day, someone is set free. We see police scare people, and on a good day, we find an officer who will play wiffleball with his billy club...[We] mourn the two people who died in this property...We try to make ugly things beautiful and to make murals. Instead of violence, we learn imagination and sharing. We share life with our neighbors and try to take care of each other. We hang out in the streets. We get fined for distributing food. We go to jail for sleeping under the stars. [My emphases]

This is part of Claiborne's recitation of "an average day" at Simple Way, the community house he's a part of in Philadelphia. The book is full of passages like this. He describes miracles to which he's been witness and then he recounts spending the summer in Calcutta working in Khalighat. He recounts one night when he and some friends sent a demon in the form of a little old grandmotherly type skittering from them in shrieking horror by humming "an old worship tune." Then he describes the patient, gentle, "careful" way he dresses a leper's wounds in Khalighat, and is rewarded with  "Namaste." Of course he has to add that he whispers back, "Jesus."

Perhaps you see why this book troubles me. It's the mix of the true--the tired days when they turn people away, the friends dying, the used toothbrushes--with the stuff in there because the book is published by Zondervan--the miracles, the shrieking demons, whispering Jesus' name. I am having a great deal of difficulty from page to page determining whether to toss the book far away from me or to keep reading.

What is probably most troubling to me is that I suspect this is Claiborne being true to himself, this mix of the worst stereotypes and heartfelt experience. It is a self-image mirrored by both the photos inside the back covers where he is presented as a willowy, do-ragged, barefoot, geeky white boy and on the Simple Way's website where the simple community is composed of Boards of Directors and Chairs and Controllers and Claiborne even has an assistant. It leads me to uncharitably point out that Jesus didn't have an Executive Director. But to be fair Jesus wasn't operating a 501(c)3 either.

what might save u(u)s

 “What Might Save Us”

            A moment first about my background which has a lot to do with the direction my suggestions would take our movement.  I spent the last years of the 1980s homeless, partly by choice—I could have returned to my parents’ home at any time, and sometimes did when things were really tough, but preferred to live on the road and for a short while on the streets—and during that period I noticed two important things concerning religion.

            The first was that the people who were kindest and most willing to be with me, besides other homeless people, were adherents of fringe religions.  Christian fundamentalists, Hare Krishna members, Santerians, followers of Sri Chinmoy and G.I. Gurdjieff, Buddhists, and people who never told me what their religion was beyond helping other people, often fed and clothed and housed me, rarely asking for anything more than my attention in return.  They lived their spirituality as a daily practice and when they worshipped they made a joyful noise and moved a lot and then had a huge meal afterward.  They rarely missed the opportunity to eattogether.  I never asked but each one probably would have described him or herself as a minister or priest in the faith, living it out by action rather than by sermonizing.

            Secondly, nearly all of them were working poor.  Most of them rented apartments or trailers or property, and the few who did own their own home tended to farm (as nearly all the Santerians did) or owned it in common (as the Hare Krishnas and Gurdjieffians did).  The individuals with the least to spare often shared food and clothes and sometimes money with me.  I am aware that as a white man I am presumed less dangerous than others, but I am also an able-bodied white man in good condition, and while some people asked for work in return for what they gave me—a quid pro quo I offered—most simply helped me out with no thought of recompense, and if I mentioned it would say, “Help the next person you see.”

            One large reason for the dramatic drop in Universalism’s numbers, and in the numbers of Unitarian Universalistsin the recent past, has to do with greater acceptance by other, more mainstreamdenominations of the bulwark we built our movement around.  While it isn’t a platform of most denominations, ask anyone attending any mainstream (and many evangelical) church services if the people they know or children in other parts of the world or victims of terrorism or famine or natural disasters will be saved and the answer, especially as the question becomes more specific, will be “yes.”  This has been called the reason for the failure of Universalism but it may in fact be its greatest success. 

That isn’t to suggest we need to simplify our message or terminology.  I am an elitist of the first order from way back.  At my first UU service at Mahtomedi many years ago, I heard the words “eschatological” and “Jungian” spoken by then-minister Krista Wolf and said to myself, “I’m home!”  But in his book Letting Go, Roy Phillips writes about the divide between religion and religious education as uneasiness, as lacking a center.  It “hurts religion to associate with the kind of education that functions primarily as a way of adding to a person’s accumulating stock of information and concepts.  Religion gets to be a matter of ideas about religion rather than the living of religion.”[1]  This is probably where Unitarian Universalists sin greatest and most often, and probably the aspect we are least willing to change.  We tend to be lifelong learners and often mistake worship for an opportunity to learn something new rather than to celebrate something, even if it’s our own community.  Even I’m put off by the number of services I’ve attended (and that I’ve written) that are better described as public lectures than as sermons.  Many ministers, myself included, pad our sermons with minutia.  At least a part of this is the imposed need, following our Puritan past and our more recent attempts at being a G.I. Bill spirituality, for twenty minute sermons that seek to integrate “the humanities and religion with pragmatic debates about politics, social issues, and psychology…Unitarian [Universalism] offer[s] the opportunity to join a high-achievement, thinking elite.”[2]

Much of this is a response to the general settling over the fifty years since merger.  Given the decline in Universalism prior to the merger, the lesson we learned was that the focus ought to be more on the mind than on the heart.  The Unitarians definitely won the day in terms of their primarily intellectual view both of liberal religion and of worship.  And while “Religion for Smart People” is an accurate description of Unitarian Universalism, that slogan wouldn’t gain many adherents.  Again, that’s not to say our faith can’t be smart or that we can’t talk smartly about it.  But maybe we’re going about the conversation wrong.

A related issue probably responsible for our damnation by other denominations as a perpetually suburban congregation is our discomfort talking about money.  It is a very middle class attitude, this idea that everyone is giving his fair share and so to ask for more is to overtax her.  This is reflected in our centralization of governance, both local and national—some might argue it’s a repudiation of our polity history—for which a portion of a congregation’s tithes should go to pay for national and regional resources.  This is not a bad thing.  Too many small congregations find it too easy to see themselves as alone in a vast sea of hostility.  But a result of centralization is that we require many steps for ordination, including the results of tests of emotional fitness which come at considerable cost, culminating in two very expensive trips to either one end or the other of the continent for interviews that could, in this digital age, be as easily done by Skype.  There is a need for gatekeepers—in a movement about which others say derisively that it’ll accept anyone, it’s necessary that its representatives present consistent competence—but the costs for gatekeeping are passed onto the potential minister.  Add to this that many congregations who are willing to sponsor a potential minister during the required one year parish residency pay no or minimal compensation.  True, there is financial help for students in the form of grants and loans, but even after successful completion of the hoops a would-be UU minister must pass through there is no guarantee of full-time oreven part-time employment.  In fact, with the closing down of many congregations and the reversion of others to being lay-led because of finances, there is no guarantee of employment at all.  Can we seriously wonder at the scarcity of working class clergy in Unitarian Universalism?

What would I suggest in its place?  If I were devising a new movement intended to appeal to as many people as possible there are important aspects of Unitarian Universalism I would be sure to keep.  We pride ourselves on being an inclusive rather than an exclusive faith.  Particularly today, when many seekers look outside the traditionalspiritualities their parents brought them up on (or didn’t), a religion can be more often than not a place to land and settle for a few seasons than for life.  It’s been said that working people today are likely to have three or four careers over their lives rather than the single one their parents had.  There is no reason not to move across denominations, spiritualities, and practices so a seeker can find what she seeks.  We see it as a failure when people leave our congregations but that may be the new epitome of success.

            I would keep trained clergy and I would continue to train them in social justice issues in addition to (and maybe with greater emphasis on) theology.  As the large number of our clergy involved in the successful Minnesota same-sexmarriage legislation and nationwide ecological and immigration issues suggests, we are making tremendous strides in spreading our message.  We are a felt presence at rallies and protests and public celebrations and mourning.  In 2005 I attended Camp Wellstone in Madison, WI, and I remember the lesson brought to us by a Lutheran minister at one workshop:  Bring clergy with you and make sure they’re seen.  It’s a major reason I decided to become ordained.  Our visibility shouldn’t change. 

What is our message?  Do we have core beliefs that can be summed up in as lovely and compact a manner as the lawyer responding to Jesus’ question in Luke 10:27?  I think we do.  It can be summed up as “Love all life as if it were your own.”  This reflects many of the pre-merger beliefs that leaned heavily on Christian interpretation—some would argue persuasively it predates interpretation and goes straight to the heart of Christian religious sentiment itself. But can that be separated from any other liberal religious faith?  Can it be used to differentiate UUs from progressive Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Ba’hais, Secular Humanists, or anyone else?  Perhaps not.  But that may not be a problem.

            To be sure, there are problems.  To echo Reverend Egbert Brown, “I [am] surprised, disappointed, disillusioned as I [face]…that the failure or success of a religious venture [is] based on the number of members enrolled and the amount of dollars collected.”[3]  Congregations live anddie by whether they can collect enough to put on programs and hire a minister or, if unable to do so, to hire enough speakers to attract people to visit, then remain, then contribute in order to upgrade the process.  This isn’t just in our movement, of course; all faiths are experiencing this to some extent.  But in our case one rationale is that we suffer worse partly because of our smaller footprint and partly because, except for congregations in New England, we rarely benefitted from the past social expectation that members of a community would attend and contribute to a church.  It’s true we aren’t flush at the national level either, and not at many congregations, even among the larger ones.  But as Brown also argued, what is needed is “a religion of the present and the practical profoundly concerned with this world.”[4]  In seeking this we need to decide where to focus our efforts, whether it’s more important to have many small lay-led congregations or a few large, minister-led congregations.  We can have both but eventually one will drown while the other will barely keep its head above water (reinforcing the complaint against us, that we’re an elitist faith attractive to only a few metropolitans). 

            We are also too beholden to our Christian roots in our method of worship.  We meet on Sunday mornings, a time that is convenient for an increasingly diminishing population, and focus our service on the homily or sermon, putting its message at the center.  I love writing and delivering sermons and I think I do a good job of it, but fewer and fewer people are eager to sit for a twenty minute lecture even if followed by an opportunity to respond.  They can read and comment online.  Perhaps services should have an adjunct in which visitors can listen to a recorded weekly message while our actual time together in body is taken up with singing, dancing, conversing, arguing (we love arguing; we will never lose our fondness for arguing), and eating.  Such services don’t rely on a consistent day or place to meet. 

            Perhaps the time for Unitarian Universalism is past, not as an idea or a way of thinking, but for our existence as a separate movement.  Perhaps what we ought not to do is continue as an independent faith just like all the other faiths that, with one or two, admittedly, sometimes major differences, believe much the same thing we do.  Perhaps what we ought to do is join with like-minded progressive religions into one large, multi-churched, multi-service faith whose pastors are flexible enough to minister to multiple spiritual needs.  Such a denomination would look like nothing we have seen before.  But such a denomination could answer needs we have never had before. 

---

[1] Phillips, Roy.  Letting Go:  Transforming Congregations for Ministry.  Alban Institute.  1999:  80.

[2] Buehrens, John.  Universalists and Unitarians in America:  A People’s History.  Kindle ebook. 2011:  Loc 2368.

[3] Morrison-Reed, Mark.  Black Pioneers in a White Denomination.  Skinner House Books.  1994:  51.

[4] Morrison-Reed, Mark.  Black Pioneers in a White Denomination.  Skinner House Books.  1994:  84.

a congregation of one

"Every man will have a creed of his own," wrote [Needham, Massachusetts] pastor Stephen Palmer..."I have mine, but have no right to impose it upon others, nor have others any right to impose theirs upon me...He who thinks he has no more light to receive, has seen but little; and he who is not open to conviction is in bondage to himself."

--from Universalists and Unitarians in America:  A People's History by John Buehrens

This idea, if not this quote, opened up an intense discussion in a small group forum during our UU polity class last week.  We had assembled to discuss whether our principles and purposes are a contemporary help or a hindrance.  Early on the question "why don't we have a creed?" came up and from there the better question, "are we afraid of a creed?", was spoken.

The answer to the first question is suggested in Palmer's quote:  Unitarian Universalists as a group don't have a creed because we aren't free to impose our own convictions on others and they aren't free to impose theirs on us.  The distinction between agreeing with a conviction and insisting on it being the way people ought to behave is a fine one that seems lost on so many who would insist on the US being a Christian nation.  I agree with a number of Christian convictions--treating others as we'd like to be treated and obeying god (as I conceive god to be) are only two examples--but I don't identify as a Christian because I don't accept a supernatural force outside existence.  (Besides which, there is the issue of "which" Christianity some people are arguing for.  In terms of sheer numbers, Protestants are the predominant Christians.  But "Protestants" are a huge umbrella term, incorporating everyone from the Latter Day Saints to the United Church of Christ.  If we are talking just a single denomination, the US is far and away a Roman Catholic nation.)

The answer to the second question, according to many UUs, is "no."  But I think it's "yes," although maybe "afraid" isn't quite the right word.  We have these terrifically anodyne Principles which are and read like they are written by committee and fulfill a lot of functions.  They give us something to point to when asked "what do you believe" and something to rally around when we sense our rights as citizens of faith are threatened.  But to paraphrase Walter Royal Jones' famous question, No one asks to have the Purposes and Principles read to him on his deathbed.  They're a package of words most of us can agree to, but a Mission Statement will itself never be included as a prophetic source.

He "who is not open to conviction is in bondage to himself," Palmer writes, and insofar as his earlier point, that individuals need a personal creed, he is right.  The problem lies in that my personal creed may countermand yours and neither one of us really wants that.  None of us would, or should, want to belong to a congregation consisting of one--one person, one thought, one mission--and despite claims that are made in its favor, and the beauty sometimes of its language, that is precisely what a creed does:  Reduce a congregation to one.  Yes, we are "afraid" of a creed--if by fear we mean a wariness brought on by history and experience--but it may be good to be so afraid.

the strawberry of memory

That's my friend Rich's voice on the soundtrack of this video.  He died earlier this week, a 37 year old victim of heart attack.  The story of the monk and the strawberry, while it has a lot of history behind it, particularly for Buddhists, also has tremendous import for me.  Decades ago, while still taking myself seriously as a bhikku in training, I determined I'd live my life by its lessons.  It held at least equal resonance for Rich.

This is a video he produced for an arts project at the seminary we attended together and I'd seen it twice, once as he prepared it and again in a class on Zen we took.  He is--was, I have to remind myself--an odd person even among the denizens of my congregations.  He had, even by my standards, an interesting life:  born (and, I think, baptized) a Mormon, converter to Unitarian Universalism, converter to fundamental Christianity, converter to Buddhism, graduate of Liberty University.  Volunteer in the military, veteran of the Bosnian Conflict and the First Iraq War.  Chaplain in training.  World traveler.  Learner of Japanese.  His first marriage ended very badly and bitterly and it was in chewing over the bitterness and learning to accept the hot taste of it that we bonded.  His second marriage to a Japanese woman five years his senior he met at a Buddhism conference.ended with his death. They were married a month.

In a week my seminary will hold a memorial for his memory.  We are very good at memorials, fitting for people whose primary purpose, no matter what we tell ourselves, is to comfort the dying and the surviving.  I am trying not to mourn Rich's death but merely, as I think he would express it, to accept it.  He was a good man who got on my nerves at times--he talked too much at times, pressed his presence on people at times, made too much of his Buddhism at times, refused to observe his own faults at times--but do we know anyone (besides ourselves) who don't get on our nerves at times?  That, as much as dying, is a part of life.

The story of the monk and his strawberry doesn't mention anyone acknowledging the monk's death.  But like the rest of us monks need a community; a monk may live a solitary life but one isn't a monk by oneself.   That's what distinguishes her from a hermit.  Someone notices the monk's absence.  Someone has a moment of silence or a brief word for his life and death. Someone recollects the monk's life.  This reflection may be the sweet part of someone's life, the strawberry plucked, not by the monk but by the monk's survivors, enjoyed in contemplation.

If I could play the guitar or sing I would play this for Rich.  But as I can't do either I'll go to the original.

the secret

Liberal religion needs working-class realism.  Despite the black church's reputation for other-worldliness, it has met the needs of the present.  Child care, food and shelter, funerary matters, the cause of civil rights, and voter registration are all concerns to which the black church has responded...The situation of blacks in America has always served to make political freedom a pressing issue...

However, the primary function of the church is as a "temple," not as a "forum."  Whatever transpires needs to happen in the context of a worshiping community.  It is there that people bear witness to and celebrate their roots in Universal life.  It is in this time and space set apart that people recognize an intimacy with the world that pervades life at all times.  Here the elements of spirituality in religion draw us beyond the intellect to the felt connection with a personal God.  It was in this relationship that the slave found dignity, for it cut across all distinctions and touched one's essential humanness...[This] experience of connectedness is the essential spiritual element in religion.  This connection and consequent human dignity are inherent in life, and this inherent dignity...bestows forgiveness on the vulnerable individual who inevitably fails in an achievement-oriented society...[and] it destroys the walls of isolation around those who feel that dignity can only rest upon personal achievement.

--from Black Pioneers in a White Denomination by Mark D. Morrison-Reed

So many of us in liberal religions are looking, some might say desperately looking (and none moreso than those of us coming out of liberal seminaries), for what it is that can hope to help us reignite the spark of our congregations.  For decades, the conservative churches and the fundamentalists seemed to have the answer:  Greater personal responsibility and greater personal blame that came from a greater sense that God had imposed a certain order on humanity which, due to those religions' unwillingness to read modern changes into that order, as well as that order's own inherently self-contradictory nature, made people simultaneously blessed and sinful (Martin Luther called them "simul iustus et peccator"), self-celebratory and self-condemning, and the collection baskets ranneth over.  That has all changed.  The fundamentalists don't have the secret.  There may simply not be a secret but a constantly moving target that alights here and then there.  The late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries seemed to be liberal religion's turn, and then it was the conservative's.

Maybe what we're all missing is a sense of the best of both worlds.  Morrison-Reed makes much (not without cause) at places in his book of the tendency of Unitarian Universalism to privilege intellectual argument over what he refers to here as an experience of connection that in more conservative circles "is marked by an ecstatic event."  It is certainly true, as the old joke goes, that if the road in the afterlife is forked with a sign pointing "This way to Heaven; this way to arguing about Heaven," all the UUs will be tramping the latter way.  But it's also true, as Nas puts it, that "life is good, no matter what, life is good."

What does each of us need to know?  That we are valued and that our lives have significance.  We struggle to acquire that same sense of somebodiness that the slaves desired. But they knew that activity could not achieve this feeling.  It had to be a gift.  Yet as a gift, it undercuts activity, revealing that the source of value is Being itself...[It] is on this level that one senses or knows the ultimate connectedness of existence.  To truly value oneself is to value that which undergirds life...[and] this shatters all illusions of isolation.  One begins to experience the suffering of others as if it were one's own, and to act to alleviate it.

This experience of others can talk us off the bridge, even when we put ourselves there, loves art, cooks and enjoys good food, educates, puts others at ease, tells one another "salaam," and reminds us everything's good, everything's fine.

We listen so deeply to the stories of others that we begin to know their pain.  To open ourselves to that which we know will be painful is an act of strength.  And having done this we can act with...commitment and...conviction...

To quote the great and sainted Lou Reed, "Life's good, but not fair at all."  It's the unfairness that one day convinces us there's no reason to even bother getting out of bed, and the next day forces us up because something has to be done.

How do we reignite the fire under congregations?  Nobody knows.  Perhaps we are looking for something that doesn't exist.  Perhaps we're looking for something the best of liberal (and conservative) religion already has in abundance:  The willingness to listen to others and share their pain.  Not to wring our hands and identify our guilt in their pain because that will always be there--there will never be an end to the involvement of those of us who are privileged, however you want to define privilege, in the pain of others.  But we can acknowledge our role in their stories.  Mia McKenziei, in a recent blogpost I have really enjoyed (inasmuch as someone can enjoy having his blindness pointed out), echoes Morrison-Reed's definition and reminds us we can make some things better.

For a dozen years we have watched as the mainstream media has ignored the deaths of so many brown children, day after year after decade. I mean, they were ignoring the deaths of Black children all over the world, including here, way before that, but we didn’t have to see them ignoring it so blatantly every morning and afternoon and evening and night on TV (that 24-hour news cycle is a bitch; they have time for everything except our stories). Also, before the internet, and specifically before bloggers, the killing of black children by police officers had much less chance of even being known about outside of the community in which it happened. So, you know, you could at least feign ignorance. But now we know how often these things are happening...Why don’t our children get to be children? Why don’t they ever get to be innocent?...The only way to stop this is for you to stop ignoring our lives and our deaths and our stories. For you to put the names and faces of those Black and brown children in your news and on your Facebook pages. It is not enough for you to say, when confronted, that you care. You need to act like it. 

Perhaps the secret is this:  Treat everyone as if he or she is your child, your parent, or your sibling.  It should be simple but of course as with so much else it seems not to be.  Making it happen is reason enough to get anyone out of bed.

we are not sofas

Unlike the biblical literalists, who protected the separate spheres by citing the damage that Eve had caused by crossing the line in the Garden of Eden, the Unitarians [of the mid-19th century] argued that God's plan was written into the world he created.  "Woman was formed to obey"...and it was her duty to minister to the needs of her family at home.  The publication of Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture in 1847 elevated this line of defense by canonizing domestic religion.  It established the home as the "seat of religion," where mothers, anointed as priestesses, tended worshipful families at table and hearth and filled the young souls with the spirit of Christ.  As a charming vignette of the moral growth that began at home in a mother's arms, this iconography helped the liberals compete with the evangelical brothers, whose instant act of conversion has a proven appeal with the masses.  But beyond this, by setting the home apart as the "church of childhood" and woman's preserve, it reinforced the division of precincts known as the doctrine of separate spheres, strengthening men's authority in the larger church outside.

--from No Silent Witness:  The Eliot Parsonage Women and Their Unitarian World by Cynthia Grant Tucker

I'm uncertain it's possible to find anything good to say about the attitude the above describes.  That this was the predominant attitude of men, even religiously liberal men, is something we all grew up knowing, and for many of us our rejection of it may have been our first rebellion.

But that the attitude persists and, in some quarters, is actually seen itself as rebellion against the liberality of contemporary society, should be a cause for alarm and concern.  The world has always been too complex to divide it into spheres, as if each kept neatly to itself--rather than spheres the world is better described as being composed of huge, misshapen, permeable layers of responsibility, influence, and authority.  No one person can have such a field all to him or herself; everything bubbles up or drips down or slides from side to side as days pass, and to pretend that nothing within it changes--like authority, like influence, like responsibility--is to pretend our existence has been Scotch-guarded, if not since Creation, then at least since the 1950s.  

Not only is life too complex for that.  We are too complex for that.

out of the flames, endlessly crackling: a unitarian hero

where this book really comes to life is in its descriptions of books--the manuscripts and early editions and incunabula (what a wonderful word!) and fakes and the tracking down of old titles and their provenance.  which only makes sense.  the goldstones are bibliomanes and at their best writing about other bibliomanics.  their thumbnail of what the book business was like in the 17th century is pretty indicative too of modern rare book selling.  I've read two of their previous books--used & rare and slightly chipped--both of which were focused on the oddities of bookcollecting and those were wonderful.  they try something a little different here--tracing a single author, the spanish author michael servetus, from his influences to the influences he had on others and the fate of his books, which were supposed to be destroyed but as we discover thrillingly nearly at the end of the book, "[john] calvin [who had ordered the burning at the stake of servetus along with all his manuscripts and copies of his books] after ordering every copy...hunted down and destroyed, after threatening anyone who harbored a copy with the same fate as that of its author, could not bring himself to destroy his own copy [of servetus' most heretical work]."  this is a satisfying coda to an author's life and death.

but the book doesn't entirely satisfy.  the goldstones are on solid ground when, say, tracking down  provenance (their section "the trail" detailing the assumed trajectory surviving copies of servetus' last work took in order to end up in various national and private libraries), but less so when trying to explain philosophic concepts or theological arguments.  and their views of calvin and the holy roman emperors, all of which are the villains to servetus' scholarly hero, are tellingly simplistic:  they operate primarily out of a basis for attaining and holding onto power, as if their beliefs and theologies are beholden to that and not the other way around.  the reason john calvin remains a potent religious force to this day is because of his genius for combining scripture and human needs in the service to providing the religious discipline most people acknowledge they need.  he remains influential because his strict dogma answers a god-sized hole in people, not despite it.

aside from this and a few other caveats--among them one that has nothing to do with the goldstones but my kindle version of the book often substitutes symbols for numbers when it's obvious there's meant to be a date noted (so it looks like the authors are cursing someone) and sometimes nonsensical numbers appear (for instance, in describing the devastation of the 30 years war, this appears:  "no statistic is more chilling than this: there were 11 million people living in germany in 1618...;by 1648...only 13 million were left."  what?)--the book is serviceable in delineating a seldom-known precursor to unitarianism as well as providing a sketchbook explanation of what unitarianism is and its expansion from the council of nicea to 19th century america.