What Must I Do to Be Saved?

Many years have passed, but the memories remain vivid. The visiting evangelist would end his sermon, I knew, as soon as he offered the “invitation.” The invitation was to come forward to the front of the church and be “saved.”

The closing hymn was usually “Just As I Am.” Sometimes we’d sing it through several times, as long as the evangelist and the regular minister, standing at the front of the church, were convinced that there were still people who needed to come forward to the altar. To this day I can still sing all four verses from memory.

Being “saved” in this setting meant that you stood before the church, acknowledged that God-through Jesus’ life and death-had redeemed you from your sins, that you would henceforth live as good and clean a life as you could, that you were ready to become a member of the congregation, and that you would be baptized the next time the ceremony was held. Sometimes it got pretty emotional with people crying about their lost state and about how joyful they were to be redeemed from it. After the service nearly everyone else present came forward to offer greetings and support. This could get pretty emotional too, with hugs and tears.

As I kid I watched all this with a mixture of awe and fascination, along with an edge of discomfort, wondering just how many more rounds of “Just As I Am” we were going to sing. My own “route to salvation” was a comparatively sedate one at age 11. I had a few talks about what it meant to “follow Jesus” with our rather calm and mild-mannered minister who, at the close of a regular Sunday service shortly thereafter, introduced me to the congregation saying I was a “candidate for baptism” and a new member of the church. That was pretty much it, which was fine with me. Even at age 11 my innate reserve was taking hold. I certainly wanted to be saved, but I preferred having it done with as little emotional fanfare as possible.

These scenes are from the late 1950s. Cut now to the mid 1970s, which was a very “in-between” time for me. I was somewhere between liberal Christianity and religious humanism; and between the American Baptist ministry and the Unitarian Universalist ministry. I was also quite taken at that time with the humanistic psychology movement, especially the work of Carl Rogers and Fritz Perls. I spent parts of a couple of summers in the San Francisco area being trained in Gestalt therapy as fashioned by Dr. Perls.

More vivid memories: Fifteen people or so sitting on the floor of a thickly carpeted room with a lot of pillows scattered around. People take turns in the “hot seat” in the center of the circle. They talk about personal matters they want to change, and what it is they see about themselves that is blocking them from their real, true, expressive selves. Painful events may be recalled; desires for greater self-acceptance and personal peace are voiced. Sometimes it gets very emotional, as the facilitator draws the “hot seat” occupants further and further out-or into-themselves. After some measure of catharsis has been achieved, the other group members move in to offer emotional support and affirmation by way of “group hugs.” Even while being a part of this scene I’m also thinking, “Haven’t I been here before?” Haven’t I’ve seen this same dynamic at work before, just with radically different language and faith assumptions? Yes, here too I’m seeing people facing the broken parts of their lives and reaching for some deeper means of personal reconciliation and levels of meaning. It seemed as if it were Baptist revival time again.

I remember after one such session, taking a long, late-night walk up and down San Francisco’s hilly streets and thinking to myself, “I guess humanists, in their own way, want to be saved as much as anybody else.” My participation in those workshops during those Bay Area summers was very valuable to me. I faced some personal issues I’d long ignored and made some telling career decisions as well, one being to leave the Baptist ministry and become a Unitarian Universalist minister. Those experiences also let me know that my basically reserved nature was still intact. I had no more need nor desire to sob my guts out in a room full of humanists than I did in a church full of Baptists!

My sermon title comes from a biblical passage I heard quoted during those revival times about as often I heard “Just As I Am” sung. It’s a legend recounted in the Gospel of John, in which an erudite and learned gentleman named Nicodemus pays a call on Jesus, in the manner of a seeker approaching a guru, and asks, “What must I do to be saved?” Jesus gives a rather cryptic answer, “You must be born again.” From there the evangelist would take off on his own interpretation of what “born again” meant. More often than not he ‘d do it in such a narrow and damnation-threatening way that only a few short years later-during my college days-I dismissed the whole passage. Ironically, it wasn’t until I became a humanist, beginning with my introduction to humanistic psychology, that I decided Nicodemus was actually asking the fundamental human question and Jesus was offering a basically correct answer.

But if the Christian Scriptures don’t resonate all that well with some of you, try approaching this idea of salvation in a more contemporary vein. In The Road Less Traveled, the author and psychiatrist, Dr. M. Scott Peck writes: “We all have a sick self and a healthy self. No matter how neurotic or (even) psychotic we may be, even if we seem to be totally fearful and completely rigid, there is still a part of us, however small, that wants to grow… [that] is attracted to the new and the unknown, and that is willing to do the work and take the risks involved in spiritual evolution. And no matter how seemingly healthy and evolved we are there is still a part of us, however small, that clings to the familiar, [is] fearful of any change or effort [and] desires comfort at any cost and the absence of pain at any price.” Peck continues, “In this one respect we human beings are all equal. Within each and every one of us there are two selves, one sick and one healthy-the life urge and the death urge, if you will. Each of us represents the whole of the human race…”

When Peck describes moving from the sick self to the healthy self, he is referring to a contemporary, psychologically based version of salvation. Stripped of its baggage, the term salvation essentially means deliverance from one state or condition into another-from a less-than-healthy or broken state to a more healthy and holistic one. In traditional terms, salvation is the deliverance from a sinful or fallen state into a redeemed or “saved” one. Most religions, including the Judaic and Christian ones, have as part of their story or mythology an account of human beings living in a perfect state; in a state of complete oneness with themselves, with Life, with Creation, with God-however understood. Then something happens to rupture or pollute the relationship. In the Garden of Eden myth it’s Adam and Eve being expelled from paradise after disobeying God. The goal of religion, therefore, is to restore that broken relationship to wholeness again-if not in this life then in the next. How this goal is attained depends upon the religion itself: Accept Jesus Christ as your Savior; follow the Buddhist path to Enlightenment; work; observe certain laws, practices, and rituals; follow the Twelve Steps, and the like.

Dr. Carl Jung had an interesting interpretation of myths about a fall from grace or oneness, and the subsequent desire for restoration. He maintained that they all ultimately originate in a universal human longing to return to the womb. The various Edens we tell stories about are drawn from our collective memory of the pre-birth condition when we lived in an unbroken state of immediacy with our entire universe (i.e., the body of our mother). The fall from grace was birth, or the breaking of that perfect relationship. The quest to be “saved,” is really the quest to recover that seeming state of perfection or grace. What this Jungian angle-and I generally accept it-tells me is that feeling a degree of alienation from ourselves and dissonance with our larger world is simply a consequence of our being born. In some individuals this alienation and dissonance is more pronounced than in others, but it’s a rare person indeed who always lives in complete congruence and harmony with his or her world. I doubt such a person exists. From this perspective, the term “original sin” even makes sense. Stripped of all its guilt-inducing overlays, the term “sin” means separation. This, I dare say, is a state we’ ve all experienced to greater or lesser degrees. We do not always feel, maybe we don’t even usually feel, completely congruent with ourselves. We, each and all, on occasion, experience alienation from ourselves and others. We know there are unhealed parts of our lives, and we know we live in a terribly broken world.

While the notion of “original sin” could make sense if seen in this light, the reason it doesn’t is that certain theologians took the idea of original sin and, well, from our point of view, went bonkers with it. John Calvin, one of the principal leaders and theorists of the Protestant Reformation wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Faith: “Original sin appears to be a heredity depravity, diffused through all parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to divine wrath… infants themselves, as they bring their condemnation into the world, are rendered obnoxious to punishment by their own sinfulness…” and so on. Calvin took this universal condition of our completely human feelings of incompleteness and occasional self-alienation and transformed it into something for which we all deserved nothing less than eternal punishment by God-unless, that is, God “elected” to save a few of us. Now enter the Unitarians and the Universalists. They countered the concept of Calvinist depravity with what they called “salvation by character.” It was the Unitarians and the Universalists who believed that we have the resources within ourselves, the strength of character, that is, to deliver ourselves-at least to some extent in this life-from alienation and brokenness. The 19th century Unitarians and Universalists usually kept this idea of salvation by character within a liberal Christian framework. They held Jesus up as the model, as someone sent by God, who showed what it meant to live out one’s life on the strength of one’s character. I think the idea of salvation by character is one still worthy of regard for us today. It’s a very positive expression of human potential and human possibility. It’s an affirmation that we carry within ourselves the wellsprings of courage and hope that allow us to be re-born any number of times during our time on earth.

Let me quickly pass on to you, then, three things that I think “being saved” means for religious liberals, whether we choose to use the term or not. First, it means coming to know self-acceptance or self-validation. I don’t mean that in a smug or self-satisfied way but rather having the wherewithal to look at, in Peck’s language, both the healthy and the sick parts of ourselves and say “yes” to the whole thing. There is a certain kind of freedom and deliverance to be found in not demanding or even wanting perfection in oneself, of being able to say, “Yeah, there are some parts of me that aren’t altogether complete or whole or healed and that’s OK.” This does not mean that you want to, or will, stay stuck in your brokenness or alienation. It means we move in the direction of our healthy selves by first confronting and acknowledging where we are, and giving ourselves permission to be there. To make that move, and take that journey, is to know a certain kind of human salvation; and each time that journey is made it is a journey of rebirth. It is not always an easy journey. I have to agree with the first three words of Peck’s The Road Less Traveled: “Life is difficult.” I will say that the self-affirmation or salvation of which I speak has its best chance of being realized within a supportive and redeeming community-a community that is committed to affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

A second component of this humanistic salvation is to live with a sense of being a part of something greater than yourself. Personally I’m not much interested in the sort of theist/humanist debate that occasionally crops up. But it seems to me that there is something of a Unitarian Universalist consensus that, above and beyond such debates, is a common affirmation of the presence of a Life Force or Spirit of Life all around and within us, and within which we live and move and have our being. To put it in more personal terms, I feel no need to be in a relationship with a Supreme Being, but I feel the need for relationship nonetheless. My personal health and wholeness is bound up in my feeling of relationship with a larger Whole, the Whole of Life itself, which contains me within it. So a sense of relationship with the Whole of Life is another component of what I call “being saved” from the perspective of a religious humanist.

Finally, religious liberals seeking a humanist salvation must be able to recognize the working-out of a greater purpose that will outlive their own time on earth. They must be able to see that purpose in even the smallest attempt to improve the human condition or in the least effort to bring love and compassion to it. Fred Small, a New England-based folksinger and songwriter who has now entered the UU ministry, has a wonderful song called “Everything Possible.” Its recurring line states, “…the only measure of your words and your deeds will be the love you leave behind when you’re gone.” With these words, Fred makes a contemporary restatement of the old Unitarian principle of salvation by character. What better saving message can we offer to ourselves and our children than the belief that our words and deeds over the course of our lives do matter and will count, and that some measure of the love and compassion and caring we show for one another and for our wider human community and world will indeed outlive us? This in closing: Nearly five years ago a young Unitarian Universalist minister named Dan O’Neal died following a struggle with cancer. A few weeks prior to his death, on Thanksgiving Day, he wrote this short meditation:

“Thanks for this day, a day in my life. Thanks for the stars, the earth. Thanks for the illness… Thanks for death, which makes life so precious and so vibrantly alive. Thanks for it all, No exceptions…”

The Rev. O’Neal was not one to romanticize or sentimentalize death. He would not want any of his colleagues to do so either-and I won’t. But what is offered in these brief words is an affirmation in the face of the cruelty that life can visit upon us. To be able to say of one’s life, “Thanks for it all; no exceptions…” is the mark of a saved life, and of a life that has no doubt known many moments of rebirth.

I hope our UU congregations, however constituted, can be “saving communities” for all who come seeking a greater measure of wholeness in their lives. And may our words and our deeds be a true measure of the love we share with one another and that we leave for all who come after us.