REsources for Living
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Unitarian Universalists tend to be pretty upbeat about human nature. We remind ourselves of each person’s “inherent worth and dignity,” and rather than baptizing babies (to cleanse them of original sin), we welcome young ones with rituals that affirm that we’re delighted to have them exactly as they are. In the 1800s Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke declared five defining points of Unitarianism that famously included “the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.” To hear the UU version of humanity, you might think that all of us, like Mary Poppins, are “practically perfect in every way.”
There’s much to be said for this optimism about human beings, but it does have a downside. What if you don’t feel practically perfect? What if you don’t feel anywhere in the same zip code as perfect? What if you look in the mirror and see flaws and failings, disabilities and damages? Some versions of religion say that we are forgiven and made perfect by God or Jesus, but UUs tend to expect people to go ahead and perfect themselves.
So what happens when you just don’t think you can even get on the road toward perfect? What if you’ve come to the conclusion that some things about yourself are not only broken, they’re almost certainly going to stay broken? Does Unitarian Universalism have nothing to offer those of us whose hearts or bodies or sprits feel broken beyond mending?
Well, maybe what we can offer is another way of looking at brokenness. Perhaps you’ve heard this story, in one of its many versions:
An elderly woman had to haul water to her home from the stream down the hill. Every day she would take up two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole, which she carried across her neck. But one of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfectly whole. So each time the woman trudged up the hill from the stream to her house the perfect pot delivered a full portion of water, but the cracked pot arrived only half full.
For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and felt miserable that it could only do half of what it had been created to do. Finally, after what it perceived to be bitter failure, the dripping pot spoke to the woman one day by the stream.
“I am so sorry that I have failed you all this time, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.” The old woman smiled, “Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side? Every day as we walk up the hill the water that dribbles through your crack nourishes the wildflowers along the way. Perhaps you are flawed as a water jug, but you are a perfect watering can, and because of you I am able to enjoy all these beautiful flowers on my daily walk to and from the stream.”
In other words, perhaps what we all need to be is not flawless, but rather carried by a love that recognizes how our flaws can be part of a larger wholeness. Our Universalist heritage guides us toward an understanding of God as a kind of Love that can find the wholeness in our cracked selves. Our humanist heritage points us toward an understanding of community as a place where we create a wholeness that is greater than any one member of the group. And through all our different theologies we carry a belief that our differences are gifts, not failings. Francis David said back in the 1500s that “We need not think alike to love alike.” Modern day UUs are likely to add that we also need not look alike, sound alike, have the same abilities or the same backgrounds in order to love alike.
A quote from Albert Einstein has been making its way around Facebook lately: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” A fish trying to climb a tree looks pretty darn broken, and a squirrel in the ocean doesn’t look so hot either. Our society can be quick to tell people with disabilities, or the elderly, or children, or immigrants or gay or lesbian folks, or people with mental or physical illnesses, or people living in poverty or in prison that they are “less than,” that they are not fully whole, fully human.
But the gift of the Beloved Community is to see each person for the genius they are, for the wholeness that they are. What we have to offer as Unitarian Universalists is neither the ability to become flawless nor the ability to cure others of their flaws. What we have instead, at least in our best moments, is the holy capacity to appreciate the field of flowers that all of us cracked pots have created. n
- REsources for Living - December 1, 2020
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- REsources for Living - November 1, 2020
