Trail Blazers and Covenant Keepers
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As a little girl I ran away from home at least twice every summer, hurling myself out of the house with outrage at childhood oppressions like being left out by my brother and his friends or facing bad sportsmanship during a T-ball game. I’d hastily make a bologna and cheese sandwich, pack a napkin, a baseball and whatever book I was reading, and charge out of the house, full of nine-year-old indignation. My little sister Julie panicked and cried by the front door. I was Never Going Back. Ever.
The problem was I never knew where to go. My little world extended only a few blocks in any direction. Narnia’s secret wardrobe was hidden in a house a world away. The wrinkle in time I dreamed about was equally unreachable, tucked away in the book I loved. Those places weren’t fiction to me. I could have told you all about the path Bilbo had taken from the Shire to Rivendell, but going out my own front door in those steamy Midwestern summers, I didn’t know where to go, much less how to get there.
All I could think to do was run away. When I was a girl, leaving was journey enough to ease my anger and disappointment, and my longing.
Twenty-five years later, when I first walked into a Unitarian Universalist church, I was propelled, like so many others, by longing for a richer, more meaningful life. I had heard that within UUism I might chart my own spiritual course and find my own way on my journey. This promise of freedom appealed to my spiritual pride and isolated independence. I had no way of knowing then what I do now, that the most profound gift of our faith has been not having to chart my own course. Unitarian Universalism has given me a path laid down and blazed by others.
On the treeless granite ledges of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, trail keepers have built stone cairns every ten feet on trails crossing the stark landscape so that hikers can crawl to safety during the area’s notoriously dangerous winter weather. In Spain, wayside crosses mark pilgrim paths. Painted white triangles guide hikers across the long Appalachian Trail. In the dense forests of Eastern Europe, colored stripes signal direction and terrain. In every time and culture, using the tools and materials of the day, trailblazers have marked paths through untraveled territory, leaving behind blazes to signal the way for those who follow.
Every journey (even an anger-fueled childhood escape) begins with a single step. But often times starting is the easy part. Even when we know the horizon we are moving toward, it sure helps to know how to get there. Spiritual journeys, too. As Unitarian Universalists, we may take that first step on our own, but we don’t have to find the way by ourselves. Our ancestors have cut a path and posted blazes on the trail. Their wilderness may have been different, but their hearts were not. We can still find the blazes they left for us, shining and flickering along the path.
The path our ancestors laid for us is covenant.
Covenant is the collection of sacred promises we make to ourselves, to the Holy, and to each other on the journey of a faithful life. It is the explicit declaration of our deepest intentions. As powerful as those promises are, our ancestors knew that covenant is more than a thing, more than a noun. They knew that covenant is also a verb—the process of making, practicing, failing at and re-making those promises.
Our ancestors teach us that religious life thrives at the intersection of self, community and Spirit, and that the beauty and fullness of faithful lives emerge everywhere these dimensions meet and walk together. Covenant is the path along which meaning is discovered, practiced and shared. The rich landscape of covenant helps us understand how to discover, how to practice, and how to share.
If we each walk alone, charting our own course every which way, it is not possible to be religious people. We may be able to practice spirituality by ourselves, but it is by walking with others in service of our highest aspirations that personal spirituality transmutes into religious community. Religion—our religion—requires that we walk with others.
Our trailblazing ancestors teach us that covenant is the way we claim and are claimed by our faith and by the holy. Claiming and being claimed is the heart of covenant. It is the activating impulse that connects our personal commitments in community, drawing individuals together with Spirit to co-create a world of love and justice.
As Unitarian Universalists, we choose to walk together not on command but because we are called to walk a certain path, and because we answer that call. Covenant is both the call and the answer. This is our tradition and our birthright as Unitarian Universalists.
When I first came stumbling into Unitarian Universalism from the spiritual wilderness, I had not yet learned how desperate I was for a well-trodden path. I had no frame of reference for how much the old songs and liturgies could teach me. Covenant was just a flat, vaguely menacing Old Testament word. I did not yet know to look for the blazes our ancestors had lovingly left for me to follow.
As Unitarians and Universalists and Unitarian Universalists, the collective “we” have walked a long path. We have allowed our beliefs to change over the long years according to conscience and science and revelation. We have managed to stay together even as the core Christian story receded into one among many wisdom stories. Our people have integrated the rationality of science, the intuition of Transcendentalism and the ethics of humanism.
Together, we have worked theological miracles. We have managed to stay connected as communities of faith through radical changes in our collective beliefs. Covenant—the shared commitment to and practice of religious community—is how we have stayed together.
And yet, we are a people of competing commitments. The freedom of belief which has helped us remain flexible in light of new revelation and experience has also weakened our binding ties. We value interconnection but are cautious about asking much of each other. As individuals and groups we want to belong, but are reluctant to be claimed. This tension between freedom and connection is also our birthright.
Our collective anxiety about this tension, and the resulting deification of individual conscience, have squashed the rich dimensionality of covenant until it has become synonymous with a vague sense of commitment to a vague set of principles. We have abstractified covenant into spiritual cohabitation, where simply being on a journey together seems to be enough. Covenant lives on as a metaphor for interconnection in our movement, but it is a bird grounded with a broken wing.
The call to covenant is there at the heart of our faith, an echo from our shared past. We sense that deep interconnection, we preach it, and we rely on it. But covenant is more than impulse and echo. It must be activated intentionally for the full power of liberal religion—and a liberal religious life—to be revealed.
The forces of dissolution and disconnection are strong. Our people come to Unitarian Universalism to help navigate and withstand all that alienates us from meaning and connection. Putting covenant back at the center of community life could give us a powerful way to claim and be claimed by community and by all that is holy.
I am always getting lost in the woods. Every time I wander from a path that is literally beaten into the ground by previous feet, I lose my way. This hurts my pride. I’m not a wandering-around sort of person in my “real life.” I need those trails and the trail markers along the way. I know this from getting lost. I also know this from church.
Sometimes we are the trailblazers breaking new ground for people to follow. Sometimes we are the desperate, lost hiker crawling on hands and knees to the next guiding cairn. May we also be the faithful people who learn together how to see the blazes on the path. May we call each other back when we lose our way along the journey. And may we open ourselves up to claiming and being claimed by covenant as we go.
- Trail Blazers and Covenant Keepers - November 1, 2015
