Free and Responsible
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Free and responsible.
I would venture to say that freedom is the most cherished religious value for Unitarian Universalists. We cannot abide the suffocation we feel in our souls when someone else dictates to us what to believe, what to think about the important questions, or even where to look to find the answers.
What interests me, though, is how UUs sometimes mistake freedom of religion for freedom from religion. They come in the door all sweaty and frantic having fled an oppressive religious past and they collapse into our pews and say “Phew, that’s over. I reject this and this and this and that and that other thing, and the whole scene I just came from. It all makes my skin crawl and thank Buddha or Krishna I’m here with the Unitarians where I don’t have to believe anything!”
But that’s not true. It’s not accurate, and it’s no way to build a religious community or to construct a healthy individual spirituality. Rejecting religious doctrines that offend our spirit is just the beginning, just Part One of the faith journey. Part Two is seeking to understand more of those doctrines and our relationship to them so that we can heal, let it go, and move on with a peaceful heart. Only when we explore religious language and ideas that previously upset or wounded us can we eventually develop the freedom either to reclaim them or let them go.
We grow. We mature. And in the next part of our faith journey, we find what we can affirm, what we do believe.
UUs engage in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, which means that we take responsibility for our relationship with religious ideas, not expecting to be spared any mention of them. Sometimes folks need to be reminded that Unitarian Universalism, for all its freedom, is a religious tradition. It amazes me how many otherwise rational people expect UU congregations to be religion-free zones. They are having none of that. They want intellectual stimulation and a good “talk”—some congregations won’t even call it a sermon—and they break out in hives over anything that reminds them of that “traditional churchy stuff.”
I understand. I was once very angry at religion. I grew up the daughter of a very angry Jewish father who bore the profound wound of anti-Semitism. We never spoke of all the Weinstein aunts and uncles and cousins who had been murdered by Hitler. But I knew they had been, and I was victimized myself by anti-Semites in my own peer group. On the school bus I was called a Christ-killer and other names too hateful to repeat here, and I was beaten up on the playground in elementary school. I had a swastika drawn on my locker twice in high school. Even some teachers sneered at my name and asked me “What are you doing here today?” on the Jewish high holy days.
My father’s family disapproved of my mother because she wasn’t Jewish, and my mother’s family returned the favor by disapproving of my father because he was a Jew. That’s why they were married in the Unitarian church. We went to a Unitarian Universalist church on Sundays sporadically throughout my childhood and at pre-school age I was dedicated at the UU congregation in Westport, Connecticut. But, I kid you not, I had no idea that Unitarian Universalism was a valid religion of its own until I went to seminary.
Why would we belong to a religion? In my household, religion was either divisive or derisive. Neither of my parents believed in God and my grandparents’ Orthodox Russian faith was regarded by all of us as a sentimental, superstitious hangover from the old country, not something intellectual people could respect.
Therefore, my free and responsible search for truth and meaning didn’t concern itself with religion at all at first, but with philosophy, literature and the arts. I am convinced it could have gone on that way for the rest of my life with no deficit to my moral or ethical development—except that I had this wound, you see.
I scorned religion and religious people without knowing much at all about either, and for the longest time I tightened up whenever anyone said God. If they said Jesus or Christ, my visceral reaction was even worse. I came to a point where I didn’t want to live the rest of my life like that. I wanted to be healed of this burning hostility I had about religion, and especially Christianity. My father had died when I was in high school and I had too much pain. I think I was just desperate to unload some of it.
When I look back on the serious religious search that I began in college, it seems to me now that I started out the way someone newly diagnosed with cancer sets out researching everything they can about that cancer so they can live with it, and survive it. I started with the word “God” itself, determined to understand this damned thing, and felt just so angry, so much anger. I was enraged for a good three or four years about the damaging God of Western culture, the God Rev. Carlton Pearson calls “the monster God.”
But I kept fighting, and seeking to understand, to claim something of the God-idea for my own self, for my own heart, for my own life. I was wrestling a blessing out of this thing. There was no curriculum that I knew of for what I wanted to learn and to unlearn, so I made it up as I went along. I took religion classes in school and struggled through them. Nothing clicked. From what I could see, organized religions were all a long, violent nightmare pitting nations against nations, culture against culture, brothers against sisters.
Then I was befriended and mentored by a Hasidic rabbi and his family on campus. This representative of an orthodox sect of Judaism introduced me to the joy of studying Torah. He gave me permission to explore my Jewish identity and to come to terms with the fact that I did not feel religiously Jewish. I will be forever grateful to him.
Then maybe five or six years later, a terribly embarrassing thing happened. Jesus got ahold of me. Like when someone’s enraged and ranting and you just wrap your arms around them from behind and hold them—that’s how Jesus got hold of me.
It happened like a secret romance through years of private study. It really happened when I fearfully accepted an invitation to the open communion table at a meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship. Everything went Technicolor for me that day, like when Dorothy gets over the rainbow, and I had found my religion. And after I became a Christian, many other religions looked beautiful to me, too. I worked for understanding and I received healing.
I kept my religious beliefs a secret for a long time, because in my experience Unitarian Universalists had such bitter disdain for Christians I didn’t want to be considered a heretic by the heretics! How marginalized can you get? My experience with Unitarian Universalists was that everyone was happy to have you search, but you weren’t actually supposed to get anywhere specific.
Not a year goes by that I am not asked by half a dozen UUs why I am still here as a Christian—and not nicely, either. I joke, “This is where my free and responsible search for truth and meaning has led me. If it upsets you, imagine how I felt!” It is because I so well remember my own anger and disgust for Christianity that I am very careful not to speak of it too often—to treat my own religious faith with a light touch. This is, as you can imagine, intensely challenging at times. Sometimes it has been painful, knowing that I am not welcome to speak with passion about my spiritual path. I am now committed to working toward a Unitarian Universalism where all of us are welcome—even encouraged—to speak with passion about our religious and spiritual lives.
I recognize that many of us are still hurting from the abuses of a conservative Christian past, or are offended by the vile behaviors of so-called Christians in public life in America. I share that offense, of course. But I continue to be embarrassed by the number of Unitarian Universalists who seem willfully ignorant of the significant progressive Christian population in America. Our terminal uniqueness and Christianphobia keeps us isolated, and limits opportunities for coalition-building. I am glad to see that attitude changing, but it is not happening fast enough.
For one thing, I wish that UUs would stop conflating Theism with Christianity and remember that God is a universal concept used by almost all religious traditions. I also wish UUs would remember that the Bible is a Jewish document as well as a Christian one.
For me, a free and responsible search for truth and meaning has to have a touch of almost desperate longing to it, or else we risk being dabblers, dilettantes and tourists, stopping by one philosophy after another and taking what we like and avoiding the inevitably troubling or demanding aspects of each one. We flirt with—or step over the bounds of —cultural appropriation and intellectual dishonesty when we do.
In our search for truth and meaning, the aim is to reach a place of confident, peaceful understanding, and appreciation of our own and others’ sources of most profound theological and philosophical meaning. We know we have gotten somewhere when our guts don’t churn when a trigger word comes up in worship, when we have spiritual practices that sustain us, whether grounded in theism or non-theism, transcendence or immanence or both. We know we have come to a good resting spot (if never a finish line) on our search for truth and meaning when we can engage in the spiritual practice of being in community with generous spirits and be of genuine support for those who are in that community with us.
- Free and Responsible - May 1, 2018
- From Your Guest Minister - March 1, 2017
- Whatever You Decide Is Perfect - May 17, 2012
