If you are a Unitarian Universalist, this book can help speak your faith.
Posted at 5:04 AM, Dec. 4, 2005
A CHOSEN FAITH-PREFACE AND CHAPTER 1,2 EXCERTS
Preface
MY HUSBAND, JERRY, and I discovered the Unitarian Universalist church in Westport, Connecticut, in the winter of 1960. We liked the people. We liked the Sunday morning worship in the Saugatuck School auditorium. We liked the potluck suppers. We loved the minister, Arnold Westwood. Even three-year-old Douglass liked the place. It seemed like a perfect fit. Sounds easy, you say. But it wasn’t. Signing the membership book in a Unitarian church was scary beyond belief for me even to contemplate. How would I tell my parents I was rejecting the faith of my forefathers? (Yes, forefathers! Remember, this was 1960.) I don’t just mean my Jewish grandfathers Louis Taft and Harry Zuckerman, who had emigrated from the Ukraine in the late nineteenth century. I mean those other forefathers: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. How would I tell my aunts and uncles and cousins? How would I tell my in-laws? How would I tell our friends, particularly those in the Temple Israel community in our town? And what would I tell them? Who had a vocabulary in the early sixties to express the stifling bonds of patriarchy I felt in the synagogue? How could I express feelings of exclusion and put-down I later came to know as feminist? How to explain how good that simple English language liturgy and those guilt-free, uplifting sermons felt in the ears and, increasingly, in the heart? Emerson and Channing and Parker were names mentioned in courses I’d taken in American cultural history at Vassar. But join a church? (In my family, if you went to a church, you were a Christian. Many still don’t believe me when I tell them that, while some Unitarian Universalists are Christians, many others claim other commitments and traditions.) Leave the family? Deal with Dad’s wrath, Mom’s tears, and my brother’s bewilderment? Was I crazy? Yes, it was scary. And it took me six and a half years to sign that book. By that time, I was teaching in the Sunday School, serving on committees, canvassing for the pledge drive, and reveling in the beautiful contemporary building we had built on Lyons Plains Road. But even then, all those years later, I still couldn’t articulate this newfound faith of mine. The journey to articulation would take much longer than I could ever have imagined. To be truthful, it continues to this day. Most of us who are active Unitarian Universalists don’t know anything close to "enough" about our faith. We often don’t understand where the Unitarian Universalist Association came from and, as a result, we cannot have a vision of where we might go. We struggle to speak our Unitarian Universalism to each other and, particularly, to the interfaith world beyond the walls of our societies. We get frustrated trying to explain the theological underpinnings of our social witness to ourselves or to the people with whom we share that witness. We are hampered by our ignorance. We are fettered by our lack of theological education. How could people who value learning so much find themselves knowing so little? A Chosen Faith has helped change that. I delight to see that Unitarian Universalists are moving into the interfaith world, forging and joining coalitions to fight for the rights of others, to engage the radical religious right in the political arena, to stand for and seek ways to institutionalize antiracism. We do this work because our religious faith demands it of us. We do this work with others because we recognize that we are too small to do it effectively by ourselves. We do this work because we want people to know
that Unitarian Universalists prefer to fight against the world’s oppressions with other people of faith. If you are a Unitarian Universalist, this book can help speak your faith. I promise that you will find it an exhilarating experience. When you stumble, go back and read it again. It is so very important that a weary and cynical world know more about our healing message and our unabashed liberal religious spirit. We can all be the message carriers. And this, my sisters and brothers, will be good. If you are not (or not yet) a Unitarian Universalist, you will learn more about who we are, and why we are, from these pages. And you may even learn more about yourself and your own religious journey. Enjoy, enjoy!
Denise Taft Davidoff Moderator, Unitarian Universalist Association
Chapter One
Awakening
Forrest Church Small as is our whole system compared with the infinitude of creation, brief as is our life compared with the cycles of time, we are so tethered to all by the beautiful dependencies of law, that not only the sparrow’s fall is felt to the outermost bound, but the vibrations set in motion by the words that we utter reach through all space and the tremor is felt through all time. – Maria Mitchell, nineteenth-century Unitarian and astronomer I can believe a miracle because I can raise my own arm. I can believe a miracle because I can remember. I can believe it because I can speak and be understood by you. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Unitarian minister and essayist MY FIRST SIGNIFICANT religious experience took place when I was about ten years old. As I look back on it, I recognize that in form this experience was typically Unitarian Universalist. I was reading a book. Perhaps more surprisingly, that book was the Bible. I had already read bits and pieces of the Bible before. Having attended Presbyterian Sunday school, I was acquainted in broad outline with its principal characters and plot. Admittedly, the coloring book approach to the Bible was the one I knew best. Lots of sheep, as I remember, and men wearing bathrobes. The little I might have gained from this narrow approach was further limited by my appalling lack of artistic talent. I knew enough not to color Jesus blue, but had a terrible time keeping the sky out of his face. In any event, my early endeavors in religion merited me a small red, not a large gold, star. It was not until my father presented me with my own Bible, all words and no pictures, that things began to change. The Bible my father gave me was a very peculiar one. It was the Jefferson Bible, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. As I later learned, near the end of his first term in the White House, Thomas Jefferson abstracted from the four Gospels his own version of Jesus’ life and teachings. Carefully excising all miracles, most of the narrative, and any of Jesus’ words that offended his "enlightened" sensibilities, Jefferson pieced together a little volume containing what he believed were the essential teachings of Jesus. It opens with Mary already great with child-no mention is made of any extraordinary circumstances surrounding the conception. It closes with an account of Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and burial. The final words in Jefferson’s Bible are these: "There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed." What an extraordinary revelation for a ten-year-old boy, a boy who knew how the story was supposed to turn out. The resurrection was missing. This story, the tale of God’s son preaching salvation and proclaiming the advent of the Realm of God, ended in the ordinary all-too-human way: Having for a brief time lived, even having loved and served so well and memorably, the hero died. This realization is the first of many awakenings that have shaped my understanding of what
religion means: Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. Knowing we are going to die not only places an acknowledged limit upon our lives, it also gives a special intensity and poignancy to the time we are given to live and love. The fact that death is inevitable gives meaning to our love, for the more we love the more we risk losing. Love’s power comes in part from the courage required to give ourselves to that which is not ours to keep: our spouses, children, parents, dear and cherished friends, even life itself. It also comes from the faith required to sustain that courage, the faith that life, howsoever limited and mysterious, contains within its margins, often at their very edges, a meaning that is redemptive. With Jesus, resurrection or no resurrection, that was demonstrably the case: He lived in such a way that his life proved to be worth dying for. And yet, from the Apostles’ Creed, embraced as doctrine throughout much of Christendom, one would have little way of knowing this. Here is what the Apostles’ Creed has to say concerning Jesus: I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, descended to hell, on the third day rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, whence He will come to judge the living and the dead. What does this creed affirm about Jesus’ life and teachings? Not one thing. It states merely that he was born in an unusual way and died in an unusual way, telling us nothing about the fact that Jesus lived in an unusual way. This is what is important about Jesus. Not that he existed before he was born; was implanted in a virgin’s womb; visited hell after he died; and then returned to be resurrected and reign in heaven. These are dogmatic propositions of faith. They can be confirmed by faith alone, and a mighty leap of faith at that, for they stand in direct contradiction to nature’s laws. One question often asked of Unitarian Universalists is, Are you Christian? Our faith does have Christian roots, many of us gather in churches (others prefer the terms congregation, society, or fellowship), and some of our members call themselves Christians. But whatever we call ourselves (Christian, Jew, theist, agnostic, humanist, atheist), most of us would agree that the important thing about Jesus is not his supposed miraculous birth or the claim that he was resurrected from death, but rather how he lived. The power of his love, the penetrating simplicity of his teachings, and the force of his example of service on behalf of the disenfranchised and downtrodden are what is crucial. The Apostles’ Creed and other such statements of dogmatic theology entirely miss this point. They seem to suggest "if you believe in Jesus, you can live forever," not, "if you believe as Jesus, you can live well." Of course, I am a heretic. The word hairesis in Greek means choice; a heretic is one who is able to choose. Its root stems from the Greek verb hairein, to take. Faced with the mystery of life and death, each act of faith is a gamble. We all risk choices before the unknown. Pascal popularized the notion of the wager with respect to religion. He argued that one could gamble on there being an afterlife or not. Admittedly, raised in a Christian culture, he remained convinced that the odds were with him. But even if they were not, it was a good bet. After all, if he was wrong, he lost nothing. After he died, if his life was extinguished it would make no
difference whether he had believed in an afterlife or not. But if he was right, it was golden, everlasting bliss. Who would be fool enough not to risk a wager where you could lose nothing if you were wrong, but could gain eternal life if you were right? I am one such fool. I simply cannot accept Pascal’s wager. Faith may be a gamble in face of the unknown, but religion is not a game. We do not play it, we live it. I have no idea what will happen to me when I die, but I know that I will die. And I know that the choices I make in this life affect the way I live. It is in this crucible, mysterious and uncertain, that my religion must be forged. As Unitarian Universalists, we are free to choose our beliefs. This is evident from our first source: "Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life." Of course, being free, we are responsible for what we make of that freedom. Freedom may be our forge, but responsibility remains the anvil on which our faith is pounded out and turned to use. With this one caution, the main difference between a faith drawn from direct experience and one founded on revelation lies only in the source of our beliefs, not in their respective transformational or redemptive power. When we employ our freedom responsibly, directly experiencing the transcending mystery and wonder of the creation, our spirits are renewed and we become open to the forces that create and uphold life. The difference between a Unitarian Universalist approach to religion and that of traditional Christianity (our culture’s most familiar benchmark) is graphically demonstrated in an exchange of letters between D. H. Lawrence, the famous British novelist, and his mother’s pastor. When Lawrence was a young man, he exchanged letters with the Reverend Robert Reid. Reid served the Congregational church of Eastwood, where Lawrence worshiped as a boy. When Lawrence left home for school, Mrs. Lawrence, worrying about the state of her son’s soul, prevailed upon her pastor to send Lawrence a selection of his sermons. The author’s response to one of these survives. Apparently, it was a sermon on the necessity of conversion for salvation. Lawrence answered: I believe that one is converted when first one hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling one’s hitherto unconscious self. I believe one is born first unto oneself—for the happy developing of oneself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and the pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering maturity; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitude of brothers [and sisters]. Then, it appears to me, one gradually formulates one’s religion, be it what it may. A person has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one’s religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification. Lawrence was not a Unitarian. Nevertheless, here, in the lost yet easily reconstructed sermon of Mr. Reid and in D. H. Lawrence’s response, the distinction between a Unitarian Universalist approach to religion and that of a more orthodox believer is made clear. Reid represents the traditional view. By his reading, religion is a body of specific teachings and practices, won by a leap of faith and secured by strict adherence to the truth as it is revealed or taught. In most Christian churches this means accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, the Bible as the unique revelation of God’s word, and the sacraments as the unique communication of God’s presence. Beyond this, there are specific requirements inherent to each of the various denominations. One group may affirm the central importance of adult baptism, or Saturday worship, another the primacy of presbyters, or bishops, or the pope. These basic requirements are so common that people outside as well as within such churches tend to accept the traditional definition of religion: a subscription to some fixed combination of doctrine and practice. In his response to Reid’s sermon, D. H. Lawrence opens a clearer, wider, and more expansive window on the subject. For him, religion has little to do with a body of beliefs or practices; it represents a gradual process of awakening to the depths and possibilities of life itself. When Lawrence and Reid use the word conversion, they mean very different things. Reid thinks of it as "casting off the old self and putting on the new." But for Lawrence, conversion means awakening: opening our eyes, looking out with new wonder upon the creation, becoming not someone other than ourselves, but more fully ourselves. Through direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder, he was moved to "a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life." If religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die, Unitarian Universalism might best be described as a life-affirming rather than death-defying faith. Yet to affirm life, we must also face death, and struggle to make sense of both. When we are born, we perceive everything around us as an extension of ourselves. From our first breath and well before, the life force that animates and sustains us is a given. We take life for granted. Others are responsible for our being alive and remaining so—our being nourished, clothed, and sheltered. Only over time, as we grow through the pains of separation and ego development and find ourselves having to compete for affection, do we begin to awaken to the complexities of the human condition. These struggles are not easy; life is difficult. Our first temptation is to rebel against this fact, begrudging all of life’s limitations, especially death as its inevitability steals into our consciousness. Offering religious security blankets and heavenly insurance policies, many faiths base their considerable appeal on a denial of death. They reduce this life to preparation for the next, potentially finer life. I cannot accept their gambit. The price for defeating the presumed enemy is too great. By refusing to accept the dispensation of death as a condition for the gift of birth, life’s intrinsic wonder and promise are diminished. Death is a fairly recent entry in the scheme of evolution. The beginnings of life on this planet were sponsored by single cell organisms, which replicated themselves by division. One generation of beings followed another, each identical to the last. We were immortal, until we became interesting. Without death, life, in its familiar, individuated, and endlessly fascinating permutations and commutations-would simply not exist. On the other hand, our lives are also diminished when we ignore death. For this reason, even as Unitarian Universalists, we need to be "born again." For D. H. Lawrence, to be born again has a very different connotation from that of fundamentalist Christians. It happens when we awaken to the fact that life is not a given-not something to be taken for granted, or transcended after death-but a gift, undeserved and unexpected, holy, awesome, and mysterious. To illustrate this, I have only to repeat Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words of interpretation and praise. Jesus "spoke of miracles," Emerson wrote, "for he felt that [our] life was a miracle, and all that [we do], and he knew that this daily miracle shines as [we divine it]. But the very word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain." In Emerson’s view, there is only one miracle—life itself. Elsewhere he writes: It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. [But to the wise] a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. If Emerson is right, and I believe he is, then to all who would divine its presence, the miracle of life, natural and unalloyed, is made manifest in every living thing. Yes, in Jesus, who indeed was a son of God—even as we each have the potential to be sons and daughters of God—and in his words and deeds, but not uniquely there. As the author of the New Testament book of Hebrews reminds us, "Some have entertained angels unawares." If angels may be defined as the incarnation of the divine in the ordinary, awakening to the miracle of life entails not so much a discovery of the supernatural, but rather a discovery of the super in the natural. Each of us, of course, must assume the responsibility for awakening. Others may be responsible for our being born, but what we make of our lives, how deeply and intensively we live, is our responsibility, and ours alone. Having accepted life as a gift for ourselves, we are then charged to revere the presence of this same gift in others. As long as we take life for granted, our regard for it is cheapened and this affects the way we treat others, even those closest to us. Part of being born again, in a Unitarian Universalist way, lies in waking up to the fact that all of life is a gift. The world does not owe us a living, we owe the world a living, our own. With this in mind, redemption too takes on a different connotation. Think for a moment about the marketplace meaning of redemption. We have a coupon. It is worth almost nothing in and of itself. One tenth of a cent, they say. But when we redeem that coupon, we receive something that does have intrinsic value. The same is true of us. In and of themselves our individual lives may be worth very little, but when redeemed, they are translated into something of immeasurable value. By this interpretation, redemption has little to do with escaping death. Instead, it involves discovering and acting upon life’s hidden yet abundant richness. And should we happen to graduate to another life (a possibility little more remote than that there should be life in the first place) to live well and deeply in this life must surely be the best preparation imaginable for advancing to the next.
As with all theological issues, Unitarian Universalists represent a broad spectrum of views when it comes to life after death (transmigration, resurrection, extinction, immortality). Most of us, however, view death not as something unnatural, but as a natural passage-like birth, one of the hinges upon which life turns. Perhaps a more organic metaphor would serve even better. Barbara Holleroth, a Unitarian Universalist pastoral counselor, writes, "It is sometimes said that we are born as strangers into the world and that we leave it when we die. But in all probability we do not come into the world at all. Rather, we come out of it, in the same way that a leaf comes out of the tree or a baby from its mother’s body. We emerge from deep within its range of possibilities, and when we die we do not so much stop living as take on a different form. So the leaf does not fall out of the world when it leaves the tree. It has a different way and place to be within it." Such insights are awakenings. Awakening is not a moment, but an ongoing process. By remaining open to experiencing the mystery of life anew, we are born again and again. Each time we encounter life’s transcending mystery and are moved to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold us, we awaken. I began awakening some forty years ago when I opened Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and realized that Jesus’ life was not special because he was more than human or other than human. It was special because Jesus fully realized the promise of his humanity. I had no idea then, that Thomas Jefferson had Unitarian leanings. Nor did I have the faintest inkling that I would later become a Unitarian Universalist minister. But I can see now that the seed of this life-affirming faith of ours was planted then in the heart of a ten-year-old boy. I may no longer accept the answers offered to me by my Presbyterian Sunday school teacher. But her questions turned out to be right. Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? How do we attain salvation, that is, spiritual health or wholeness? How can we live a life befitting our promise? How should we face death? And how, when our lives reach their close, can we be sure they will have been worth dying for?
Chapter Two
Experience John A. Buehrens (Note: This excerpt contains only the final four pages of this chapter.) The difference between the two sides of our denominational family was once summarized by a minister who knew both Universalist and Unitarian congregations. Thomas Starr King grew up a Massachusetts Universalist, then became the pastor of the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco as the Civil War was beginning. He is credited for "saving California for the Union," and the Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley is named for him. "The Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them," said Starr King, "whereas the Unitarians believe they are too good to be damned!" And indeed our Universalist heritage continues to challenge the Unitarian tendency to be "fit but few." We are challenged to reach out to all sorts and conditions of people, to be open to the individual character of all human religious experience. A friend of mine once wrote a historical novel set in the American West of the nineteenth century. In it, a young man is asked about religion. "I ain’t got no experience," he replies. What he means, of course, is that he has not converted; he has not confessed his sinful nature, given his heart to Jesus, or come forward at a revival meeting. But as the story develops, he (along with the country) grows and changes, and his reply becomes more and more ironic. The point is we all have experience, but our experience may not always fit conventional or expected religious patterns. "I’m not religious," people sometimes claim. "Then tell me about your experience," I say in return. We may not be conventionally pious, but we all experience life, and there are religious dimensions to explore within that experience. Emerson knew this. After having lost his father at the age of nine and suffering the death of his five-year-old son, he wrote "Experience," the most sad but most profound essay he ever wrote. "We wake," he said, "and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight." As hinted at in this brief passage and demonstrated throughout his life and writings, Emerson’s response to the mystery of life and presence of death was, if not conventionally, profoundly religious. Based not on revelation, but on his own difficult experiences, Emerson discovered within himself and yet transcending him, something deeper and higher than his grief. He discovered it not on a ladder to heaven, but on earthly stairs, representing a sense of indebtedness to those who have preceded us and of obligation to those who will come after we are gone. Yet the renewal, the affirmation, the wonder at being alive, can only come in the present, while we have time to be amazed and grateful. I make the same point to those who tell me, "I don’t believe in God." "Tell me about the God that you don’t believe in," I often reply. "The chances are that I don’t believe in ‘Him’ either." I believe, as Dag Hammarskjold did, that "God does not die on the day when we cease to believein a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason." Similarly, Emerson said, "It is not what we believe, but the universal impulse to believe . . . that is the principal fact." Through our own direct experience we too may , discover a profound sense of wonder about the gift of life and be led to gratitude, renewal of the spirit, and ; openness to the forces that create and uphold life. "Belief is many things," said one of our modern leaders, A. Powell Davies, "and so is disbelief. But religion is something that happens to you when you open your mind to truth, your conscience to justice, and your heart to love." In Unitarian Universalist congregations we do not try to make one another fit a given pattern of experience. But we do discover together that there are religious dimensions in all our varied human experience. For us, religious experience is direct and personal. It may be joyous—a transformative moment of awakening like being present at a child’s birth. Or it may be as painful as the birth itself or as wrenching as grief. Sometimes it takes something very close to our own death, or the death of someone we love, to break through our usual defenses and remind us what a gift it is to be alive and to be able to love. Part of all authentic experience is deeply inward—beginning to trust what Channing called "the power of God within." But often it is dependent upon the agency of others whose insight, courage, or love helps expand our idea of what human life can be. This is why Unitarian Universalists choose to gather in religious communities, where other individuals and, yes, a whole tradition, help us to keep heart and conscience and mind receptive. In our churches and fellowships we are constantly invited to "accept the Universe," to emphasize "practical religion," to give the world "not hell, but hope and courage." I discovered this way to wonder and spiritual renewal nearly a quarter century ago, and shall always be grateful. Not only is my religion grounded in my own direct experience, but it is also sustained by the experience of others. Like Judith Sargent Murray, I may not "descend with celebrity to posterity," but I do hope to make the world a bit better for those who come after me. With her and with Emerson, you and I share this human experience: we are on the stairs.
