Finding Our Place in the World

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It was the third summer of my seminary training, and I was completing the required “Clinical Pastoral Education” by serving as a student chaplain in a women’s prison near Tacoma, Washington.

There were a half-dozen of us seminarians there, each from a different faith tradition; I was the only Unitarian Universalist.

One of our tasks was to take a turn at presenting the weekly worship service for the entire prison each Sunday morning, first for the general prison population in the chapel, and then the same service over at the maximum security unit, although in a much more casual format since they had no actual chapel there. What I remember is simply sitting in a circle with four or five women who chose to attend.

So my Sunday came around, and I decided to focus on the theme of God’s love and forgiveness. I talked about Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant Reformation, and his insistence that God’s grace was available to all of us, no matter what sins we’d committed, and that all we needed to do was to open ourselves to that grace, to recognize it and be grateful.

I told them about the early Universalists, and their idea that God is too loving and merciful to condemn any of us to hell. I likened God to a parent who might get angry or saddened by the behavior of their child, and might even take disciplinary action, but who would never turn their back on their child—would always love that child and welcome him or her home.

My message was one of compassion and hope—a message I was sure would be welcomed by these women who had been cast aside and mostly forgotten by the world beyond the prison walls. So I was stunned when one of the women in maximum security said to me at the end of my homily: “You don’t understand. Here in this place—we don’t deserve forgiveness! We are sinners; we can’t be loved, even by God!”

I wanted these women in the prison, no matter what their crime, to believe the message of universal love. Not that they didn’t need to acknowledge the damage they’d caused—in a couple of cases, with tragic consequences. Nor did I think they shouldn’t be where they were for a period of time—in a couple of cases, maybe even for the remainder of their lives. Some of these women were dangerous.

But I am a Unitarian Universalist. I deeply believed, and still do, that each of them was born worthy, that at their core still is a spark of the Divine—of the Eternal Spirit of Life—of God, and that they are worthy of love. Most of us have not committed the kinds of acts that the women I ministered to that summer had committed. Nevertheless, we all could probably point to things in our past that we regret: people we’ve hurt, poor decisions we’ve made, times we’ve fallen short.

In the Episcopal Church in which I was raised is a Prayer of Confession which says in part, “I have done those things I ought not to have done, and have left undone those things I ought to have done, and there is no health in me.” From time to time, still today, that prayer haunts me, and I have to work hard to remind myself that there is health in me, in spite of all that I’ve done or left undone!

The writer Anne Lamott tells the story of sitting on the beach one day with her young son, both of them appalled as a man violently hit his dog in the ribs with a large stick. Rather than yell at the man to stop, Lamott froze in fear, until another woman nearby began shouting at the man, and then Lamott’s son took up the cause. The man laughed at them and walked away.

Lamott felt both hatred of the man and deep shame at her inability to respond. And then she recalled the words of her Presbyterian minister: “God is an adoptive parent; she chose us all.”

“The mystery of God’s love as I understand it,” writes Lamott, “is that God loves the man who was being mean to his dog just as much as he loves babies; God loves Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons, as much as he loves Desmond Tutu. So of course he loves old ordinary me, even or especially at my most scared and petty and mean and obsessive. Loves me; chooses me.”

And that is indeed the message taught by our Universalist ancestors: That God is so fully loving, and sees us so completely, that God—the Holy Spirit of Life and Love—continually chooses us all, no matter what mistakes we’ve made, no matter what others may say about us. We are enough.

When we view the universe, or God, as keeping score of all our failings, when we ourselves keep score of our failings, or our inadequacies, when we fail to forgive ourselves of our transgressions and shortcomings we become unable to accept and forgive others as well. And then everybody loses.

This truth slapped me in the face years ago when I was trying to forgive my parents for all the angst I felt they’d caused me. I was pretty sure that just about every problem I had could be traced to something one or both of them had said or done. But every time I got close to seeing them in a more forgiving light, there would be this voice inside me suggesting that if I could forgive them, then I’d have to forgive myself for my failures as a parent, and that was just not possible.

In that struggle I came to understand that my challenge wasn’t to forgive my parents. The real, almost insurmountable, challenge facing me was to forgive myself. And I couldn’t do that for a very long time. It literally took me years, and a couple of conversations with my children about it, before I could begin to let go of the guilt and shame I’d carried around for not being the kind of mom I thought I should be. But once I was able to let it go and accept that I had done the best I could at the time, I easily accepted my parents as being the best parents they were able to be—and pretty darn good ones at that!

Once we entertain the possibility that we don’t have to be some idealized version of what it means to be “good,” once we understand that who we are at the core of our being is good enough, then we can allow others to be good enough just as they are. We can see the beauty in them, and forgive them their human frailties.

So much in our world tells us that who we are (never mind what we have done) is unacceptable. It may be the color of our skin or the accent of our words; it may be the size of our body or the number of our years; it may be our gender, or who we love; it may be the abilities of our body, or what we do for a living. Whatever it is, we have all received messages telling us it would be so much better if we could look or be different than how we are. And we have often bought those messages hook, line and sinker.

As I was writing those words, I was suddenly reminded of an old Christian hymn that my ex-husband grew up with, and played for me on the piano when we first became friends in high school. The only words I remembered were those of the title: “Just As I Am.” So I found the piece on the Internet, and it’s actually a lovely hymn that was apparently written by a young woman upon being asked by a stranger if she was a Christian. She told him to mind his own business, but later went back to the man and asked him how to find Jesus. He answered, “Just come as you are.”

One of the verses goes, “Just as I am, tho’ tossed about with many a conflict, many a doubt, fightings and fears within, without, O Lamb of God, I come, I come.” The hymn was used as an altar call in my ex-husband’s childhood church, sung as people made their way forward to be accepted into the “family of Christ.”

Now, the full theology behind this hymn is no longer ours. But its message—that we will be loved and accepted just as we are—is our Universalist message.

It does not matter who or what we are; it does not matter what mistakes we’ve made in the past; it does not matter what size we are, or the color of our skin, or who we love, or whether we are able-bodied, or how much money we earn, or whether we even have a job…the world is ours. It is calling to us to dream our dreams, to imagine the possibilities that await us, to discover our place in the cosmos.