The Courage for Compassion
Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe
Me.”
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.
~Hafiz, 14th century Sufi poet
“It may be that we have lost sight of our mission. Primarily, the church is not for social or political pronouncements, nor for the fashioning and dissemination of erudite philosophical doctrines. It is for the generation of love. The church is the only institution in society so purposed. We strike at the heart of our very purpose for existence when we neglect that major aim.” ~ Albert Ziegler wrote, 20th century Universalist minister
Beloveds, each morning we are asked to take a moral stand on the side of love. May we find the courage and compassion to love like the sun, to generate love in abundance for a world that sorely needs it.
Each time that I facilitate conversations on systemic oppression and solidarity, I am struck anew at how programed we are to defensiveness and denial. Each time, my challenge is to love, simply love. We are not machines, broken and in need of fixing. We are wounded warriors in the struggle of life and we need, each of us, compassionate love to call us to our whole and holy selves.
May we wake each day with the mission to generate love in this world as humbly and faithfully as the sun generates light. May we trust that we can lean on each other for comfort when the struggle is relentless. May we know in the bones of our bones that we are not alone. May this knowledge give us the courage to shine the light of compassion on everyone. No exceptions.
Moses, Jesus, Paul and Sacred Soundbites
What ‘Ol Abe Saw
Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. as motivator. Their words as marching orders for how to live and what is right to do.
Sounds good. Yet, as he watched the bloody carnage justified on both sides by Christian theology, Abraham Lincoln perhaps said it best:
“I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”
Which side is the Lord’s side? Or is it that God plays for both teams? Or is it that human beings are condemned to action that may or may not be “right” until God (or Satan?) sorts it out?
Cherry-Picking and Sound-Biting
This contrast came home to me during the recent fight over gay marriage in the state of Minnesota, where I live. Progressive religious leaders took a long look at the reign of the religious right in politics and decided to counter it. We took the Christian message of love and inclusion to the statehouse. I knew that we had accomplished the goal when a conservative state senator said, “This is about more than religion.”
The worm had turned. And, indeed, the right to marry is now guaranteed in the state of Minnesota.
Many of my religious sisters and brothers believe that the loving and inclusive message of their faith traditions prevailed. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for loving and inclusion. It’s the message of Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. that bothers me a bit.
Weren’t we progressives cherry-picking and sound-biting as crassly as our conservative opponents?
Where were the real Moses and Jesus and Paul in all this?
Perhaps our hearts were telling us things. Perhaps our sense of right and wrong was talking, on both sides. But these sacred thinkers weren’t saying anything new that the scriptures weren’t telling Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis back in their days of choosing who to slaughter and why based on those old writings.
Using Our Own Little Heads
This gives me pause. Are we really best served as we make decisions in the Twenty-First Century by referring to old texts and deities that pretty clearly don’t do a whole lot of clear talking?
Or might we be better served “using our own little heads”?
That’s a phrase I learned from my fundamentalist Christian mother: “Use your own little head.”
By it, she meant for teenage me to “listen to my raisin’,” another catch phrase, rather than my peers. My mother was cautioning me to use my own head. Further, at least to my future-humanist ears, she was saying that reason, not the religion in my gut, should determine my actions.
Shouldn’t reason, not the religions of our various cultural backgrounds, serve as the arbiter of public discourse and our efforts at realizing a just society?
As a multi-faith leader, I spend a lot of time saying and showing that people of diverse religious faiths can find common ground. I believe in that work.
I’m also convinced that our common evolution as cooperative and rational animals trumps the overlays of religion and culture made since our common trek from the Rift Valley began.
We are rational animals.
After all, which would you prefer as a physician, someone who feels your pain or someone who knows how to stop it? Listening to the heart is a fine thing to do. And, there’s no doubt scriptures make great soundbites.
Listening to our own heads is the hard part.
The Spiritual Practice of Agnosticism
Wolf!
The Aesop fable about the boy who cried wolf has long been viewed as a cautionary tale about lying. The boy knowingly cried “wolf!” merely to disturb the villagers. The boy eventually pays the price in dead sheep when the villagers stop responding.
There is another and more dangerous way of crying wolf, however: continually calling “wolf!” because there might be one but there might not.
In this way of crying wolf, the boy is expressing his fears—his own psychodrama. He may even be utterly convinced that a wolf is threatening and nearby. He may even be imagining what a wolf attack might look like. Still, despite the boy’s true alarm, there is no wolf, and the villagers are wasting their time running to help the boy. Wasting time that would be better taken with other ventures.
It’s Not About Not Deciding
As an agnostic, I’m very aware that we agnostics are often seen as fence-sitters—the tepid ones choosing neither hot nor cold. Why can’t we just buck up and admit that we’re atheists? Or why can’t we admit that we have a soft spot for one god or another? Why can’t we just cry wolf or shut up?
Contrary to the cliche, agnosticism isn’t about not deciding. It’s about honestly facing what we know about knowing itself. It is, as the Victorian biologist, T.H. Huxley, who coined the term, said, “not a creed but a method.” (Athiesm is a creed because it is a belief, like theism.)
Agnosticism is a method that is, I believe, a spiritual practice like Christian Centering Prayer or Buddhist meditation.
When Huxley first used the word in print in 1889, he contrasted his confidence in human knowledge with that of the convinced believers. He said,
They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis”—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.
So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant.
Knowing and Thinking We Know
Gnostic in Greek means “knowledge.” In the Western world we know the term best from the early Christian movement called Gnosticism, which claimed esoteric knowledge of the workings of the universe. Such knowledge, Huxley pointed out, can be neither proven nor disproven. The Gnostics claimed to have “solved the problem of existence.” Huxley, however, wasn’t so sure of their untestable opinions. (Neither, it might be mentioned, was the Church so sure of their solution.)
In other words, Gnosticism wasn’t about knowing, it was about belief. Agnosticism is about how and what we know.
Boiled down to its simplest formulation, the way of agnosticism according to Huxley is: “do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”
No matter how convinced you are that the wolf is near, don’t cry wolf until you see one.
This is not fence-sitting or vacillation. It is, rather, a commitment to the active search for what we can know. In this way it is much like the spiritual practice of via negativa, a method of removing those things that are not “god” in order to discover god.
Huxley, however, saw his method as a positive rather than negative path. He wrote:
. . . Agnosticism is not properly described as a “negative” creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. That is what agnosticism asserts and, in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism. (“Agnosticism and Christianity”)
It’s About the Questions
Huxley made it very clear that scientific materialists don’t have the answers either. No one does. All of us find ourselves improvising with as much information as we can scramble together—as have all people for all of human history. Agnostics are committed, however, to the common human project of learning more and more. Of knowing what is actually here, not what we only imagine. This commitment requires us to have active minds engaged in continual searching.
As psychologist Ellen J. Langer puts it in her book Mindfulness, “Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness means the continual creation of new ones.”
The method of agnosticism is a way of being mindful. A way of being in the present moment and making that moment an open and creative matrix.
Agnosticism is a commitment to only crying “wolf!” when such a cry will do real good.
Because it is the Faithful Thing To Do
{Editor’s Note: Due to technical difficulties, this post, originally scheduled for August 19th, was delayed – posting now!}
I spent two weeks out of state, mostly away from the internet, TV, and newspapers – enjoying some much needed study leave. Returning to the news of the world on Thursday, August 14th was, I confess, quite an incredibly jarring experience.
The depth and the breadth of the systemic racism in Ferguson, Missouri revealed both in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager and the assault on the protesters demanding accountability for his murder at the hands of the law, the ongoing deaths in Gaza even in the midst of cease-fires, the President’s announcement that we are reentering Iraq, increasing violent deaths in the Ukraine, Syria, Honduras… and at home, the second weekend of August was an especially bloody one in New Orleans, as six shootings across the city left five people dead and wounded 11 human beings, including a 2 year old, a 4 year old and a 13 year old…
Dear Ones, today my heart is broken and I am trying to do the faithful work of making sure that it is broken open, to make room for more and more love.
…
In my time away, I finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s portrait of doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer. Dr. Farmer is an extraordinary human being who has spent much of his life both among the most profoundly poor people in the world and in the halls of ‘the Brigham’ and Harvard in Boston. Haiti is where the organization he founded, Partners in Health, did its first work and where it still maintains its flagship project, the hospital called Zanmi Lasante, (Haitian Creole for Partners in Health).
As the book concludes, author Tracy Kidder “notes Farmer’s fondness for a particular phrase: “the long defeat.” At one point he quotes Dr. Farmer:
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. . . . You know, people from our background — like you, like most Partners In Health-ers, like me — we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”
Commenting on Kidder’s work, Professor Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College wrote:
“It seems to me that this philosophy of history, if we may call it that, is the ideal one for anyone who has exceptionally difficult, frustrating, even agonizing, but nevertheless vitally important work to do. For such people, the expectation of victory can be a terrible thing — it can raise hopes in (relatively) good times only to shatter them when the inevitable downturn comes. Conversely, the one who fights the long defeat can be all the more thankful for victories, even small ones, precisely because (as St. Augustine said about ecstatic religious experiences) he or she does not expect them and is prepared to live without them….”
Now I have been recently described as ruthlessly optimistic –and while I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that description — it did highlight for me the need to be explicit about our call to do the work of justice. Friends, we do not work for justice because we know that we are going to win. We work for justice because it is the ethical thing to do, the loving thing to do, the merciful, compassionate, and faithful thing to do.
If and when you feel overwhelmed by all the healing that must be done, by the sheer volume of injustice present in any one news cycle – I invite you to breathe in and breathe out. Remember that you are not alone. We who have only begun to imagine justice and mercy, let us not give up if we are comfortably devastated and can afford to despair. Let us be in solidarity with those whom the dominant culture treats as losers, let us join in the fighting the long defeat with love, compassion, courage and peace that passes understanding.
Together we bend the long arc of the universe toward justice that we may not live to see, but which we must struggle for because it is the faithful thing to do.
{PS – There is a gathering in New Orleans planned for September 26-28, 2014 for those wanting to live missional, justice-making lives and who are looking for a beloved community to connect with on the journey. Learn more here https://www.facebook.com/LifeOnFireTribe and here http://lifeonfirenola2014.wordpress.com/ }
Spiritual but not Superstitious (Mystical Without the Mumbling)
“Spirituality” is emotion. Sometimes the spiritual emotion springs from a consciously adopted attitude toward the world we see around us. Sometimes it hits us unexpectedly. A “spiritual experience” can be anything from the warm-fuzzy feeling we get singing a song we love to the inexpressible “mystical” experience of feeling one with all that is.
Both great feelings. But not mysterious. Psychologist Daniel Khaneman in his groundbreaking book Thinking, Fast and Slow outlines how the head/heart and body/soul distinction actually functions. Fast thinking, which Khaneman calls System One, is our fight or flight selves. The visceral reaction. Slow thinking, System Two, is our reason and problem-solving abilities. We don’t think about System One. System Two takes discipline.
As we learn more about these systems, we see more clearly what techniques and technologies best trigger responses. For example, when the rhythm of the music reaches about 120 beats per minute—the average heart rate for mild exertion—we feel like dancin’.
For my money the most insightful writer on the subject of spirituality and mysticism is Jiddu Krishnamurti. Born into British-occupied India, a young Krishnamurti was taken under the wing of the Theosophists and trained in that mystical tradition. The Theosophists thought Krishnamurti would be the great “World Teacher” that they predicted would come to earth.
Krishnamurti eventually renounced Theosophy but did indeed become a great teacher, a synthesizer of spiritual and religious thinking from all over the world.
One of Krishnamurti’s gifts was a keen BS detector. Therefore, when Krishnamurti talks about spirituality and mysticism, I listen.
His key insight goes like this: “It is only when you listen without the idea, without thought, that you are directly in contact.”
Listening without preconception; without judgment; without the interference of ego; listening in order to hear, to experience—right now, with as little of the usual interference as possible. Unmediated experience. This listening pushes System Two down into System One.
This sort of listening requires presence in the moment. It requires us to be in the place of the breath and that mental space that is at once maximum concentration and maximum surrender. This experience may be achieved by various techniques, from mediation to fasting to merely looking up at the stars.
From the Centering Prayer of Christianity to Buddhist zazen to the various yogas, human beings have developed techniques for getting to this space. Since these techniques are designed to dampen System Two and trigger System One, they feel visceral, spiritual.
Woo Without the Woo Woo
“Mysticism” is a technique aimed at achieving a “mystical experience.” Again, this experience is a feature of brain function and has little to do with specific religious or philosophical practices, except insofar as all religions aim for the experience and have techniques for achieving it.
Some traditions are overt about it—Sufism, for example. Shamanistic practice. Transcendentalism.
Take, for instance this passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
The transcendental experience is being awake in the here and now.
It’s All About the Flow
Since spiritual and mystical experiences are a feature of brain chemistry, not specific religions, atheists and agnostics have no particular reason to poo-poo the idea. As a matter of fact, mystical experience doesn’t need a religious component at all, as demonstrated by the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who introduced the notion of “flow” experience. Csikszentmihalyi found “flow” in experiences as diverse as sports and video gaming. He lists the elements likely to bring on flow experiences:
1. intense and focused concentration on the present moment
2. merging of action and awareness
3. a loss of reflective self-consciousness
4. a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
5. a distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time
is altered
6. experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as
autotelic experience
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
A flow experience sounds like a “mystical” experience, doesn’t it? Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Sounds “spiritual.”
There’s nothing mysterious about mystical experience. You can put yourself in the way of the flow experience by following very simple (and secular!) procedures.
The Extraordinary Is All About the Ordinary
I’m a writer. I’ve been writing for years. I learned early-on that if I was going to get writing done, I had to do it every day. As part of my daily routine. So, I get up early every morning, make coffee, and sit down to write. And write. And write. Writing is my spiritual practice.
Sometimes, everything clicks and I go into the flow experience. The mystical experience. Sometimes not.
Since I was trained in writing by Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, I took up Buddhist meditation as a daily practice too. This was part of the “mindfulness” that the writers who became Buddhists in the 1950s thought contributed to honest and deep writing. They passed that on to me.
Over the years, I have discovered that meditation and writing have the same effect: They bring my mind into the present moment. Remember Thoreau’s words:
I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment.
When we are not living in the present moment, we are living in memory or fantasy. We are out of touch with what is. We are kicked back and using System Two. And we are a long way from a spiritual experience!
There’s nothing mysterious about the mystical. Spirituality is a feeling. We don’t have to buy what particular religions are selling to access these feelings. It’s all in our heads.
Reps of God: Christian Triumphalism and the DIY Future of Unitarian Universalism
LITE
The future of Unitarian Universalism does not lie in Christianity Lite any more than the future of Anheuser-Busch lies in Bud Light.
Oh, wait: Anheuser-Busch doesn’t have a future: it was bought out . . . by a European corporation that makes tasty beer.
In our consumerist religious landscape, the mainstream Christian denominations are scrambling to survive. I don’t doubt that they will do a fine job of brewing the new Christianity. A much better job than can Unitarian Universalism, except in very specific locations and boutiques.
Yes, as in beer, so in religion: the future for a small movement such as Unitarian Universalism lies not with Lite but with Hevy. The Godzilla of brewers, InBev, and the Presbyterians and United Church of Christ, and United Methodists et alia will do a fine job with the Lite. I think the future of Unitarian Universalism lies in micro-breweries. Boutique congregations, each with a recipe of their own.
Hevy
Keeping the church doors open after the Boomers are dead is the question. I’m not trying to be a controversialist. Like many ministers, I’m betting millions of dollars of other people’s money on a way to keep the church doors open into the future.
How?
A new book by Thomas Moore points to a possible way. In A Religion of One’s Own: A guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World, Moore makes a strong case for do-it-yourself (DIY) religion.
Aren’t Unitarian Universalist congregations uniquely suited to facilitate DIY?
We do well to draw a sharp line between the subjectivity of religious experience and the objectivity of a congregational, corporate life together. Where I get my personal religious jolt is up to me—Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, paganism, pantheism, atheism, all of the above . . . Up to me. DIY. Where I find my meaning is up to me.
Where I go for my religious, corporate, home is up to us.
For those who will be following Moore’s advice on DIY religion, one of the best homes is a Unitarian Universalist congregation . . . If . . . we can awaken to how big the tent must be.
This is the wisdom of the idea of covenant embedded so deeply in Unitarian tradition. “We need not think alike to live alike,” is the sentiment, even if no one famous ever actually said it.
Treating others as we would have them treat us—or, better, treating others as they would wish to be treated—isn’t so easy. The challenge is subjective: how the heck do we know how someone wishes to be treated?
Well, there is that thing called compassion.
In the Unitarian Universalist tradition we say that everyone has “inherent worth and dignity.” I would propose that this is how we treat our neighbor (and fellow congregants): as if that person has inherent worth and dignity. Then, we may go a step further and learn what that worthy and dignified person wants and needs.
But . . . What if I know better? I mean, really—what if I know darn well that I know better than my neighbor what my neighbor needs?
Party Foul! What you or me or anyone knows is always and only our subjectivity. Where you get your religious jolt. How you do your DIY religion.
You don’t know about your neighbor in the pew until you ask.
Furthermore, words matter. For example, for many people the word “family” does not have a warm and fuzzy feel to it. We do well to use care when we call a congregation a family.
And, no, “Amazing Grace” did not “save a wretch like me.” The apparatus that produced “Amazing Grace” enslaved my forebears for generations. And Jesus? His incarnation as “the body of Christ” in the church has been cruel to many of us. Not warm and fuzzy at all.
That’s two for instances. There are more . . . . More instances of oppression and exclusion.
Monarchy, Malarky
Unitarian minister John Dietrich, the founder of religious humanism, believed that a democratic society would create a democratic religion. After all, evidence suggests that religions reproduce in their structures and theologies the political and social structures in which they develop.
To see this, we only need go so far as a comparison of Judaism and Christianity. As anyone familiar with the Hebrew book of Judges or 1 Samuel knows, the ancient Hebrew tribes were highly suspicious of monarchy. Hebrew tradition reveals that mistrust, even though the Hebrews flirted with monarchy in the time of King David and the subsequent temple at Jerusalem. (Speaking of disasters!)
Christianity, the child of Judaism, early fell in thrall to the structures and attitudes of the Roman empire. The bowing and hierarchy that is so much a part of European monarchy and much of Christian worship is foreign to the Jewish tradition. And it feels less and less OK to many of us living in liberal democracies.
John Dietrich, and other humanists of the 1930s, thought that the monarchical model of the Christian tradition would disappear in the democratic age.
And it has, to a great extent. If it hadn’t, there wouldn’t be any DIY religion.
The only religion that will ever make sense to you—when you’re not going along to get along—is that one that you have arrived at by choice, in your own thoughts and your own integrity.
Religious experience is subjective. Personal. Forcing it on others is a party foul and a Golden Rule violation.
The Short Shelf Life of European Christianity
Reflect on this: of the people in the United States today, how many had Christianity forced upon their forebears?
Answer: Nearly everyone who lived outside of the Mediterranean basin in the 300-500s CE.
Reflect on this: how many of those who became Christian outside of the Mediterranean basin had a choice in the matter?
Did the British? Did the Irish or Welsh? Did the Germans or Norwegians or Poles or Swedes or Swiss or . . . ?
Nope. Most of the population in Europe had no choice. The choice was made for them by the ruling elites.
How about the Africans brought forcibly into the Western Hemisphere?
Nope.
The native peoples of the Western Hemisphere?
Nope. No choice.
For millions upon millions of people, Christianity was not a choice. Should we wonder then that so many of their children abandon an imposed religion as soon as secular governments and social expectations allow?
For most of us living in the Western Hemisphere, Christianity is an overlay, not a deep tradition. A Mediterranean imposition, not a value system that matches the flora and fauna and mores that most of us were born into.
Malcolm X taught this, but his words have not been heeded.
Pagans in the UU movement have been pointing this out for some time. In my congregation, the Jews, Hindus, pagans, and Muslims and atheists and others and more cry out . . . when will we be free?
When will we build that land, that inclusive place that is actually inclusive, the includes not just Christians but others?
Despite Liberation Theology, the Social Gospel, and the Emergent Church, Christian ritual and theology is the theology and ritual of oppression for many of us.
Yes, those lively spirituals subvert the dominant paradigm and reveal the ugly truth of oppression. But isn’t it time we sing a new freedom song? Isn’t it time we subvert the most dominant of paradigms—Christianity itself?
And then there is the inclusion of Christians too.
Think hevy. Think micro-brew. And DIY.
What if Unitarian Universalist congregations were actually, truly, a big tent where all are welcome, not just the Christians? Not just the humanists?
Can I have an “ameen”?
Some of us will not worship any prophet or any god, no matter what the cost. Where might we find a home?
How about a really big tent for the future?
Photo credit: The copyright on this image is owned by Simon Johnston and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
House on Fire: Church Attendance in the US
There it is, yet another study indicating that the number of American Christians who attend churches regularly has dropped yet again. (see link below) Currently the number of those who attend church once a month or more has dropped to something on the order of eighteen percent, less than half of the number who claim to have attended church within the past month.
Pastors themselves report that roughly half of the members on their congregational rolls show up only on holidays, if then.
If current trends continue, by 2050 the number of Americans attending church at least once a month will be something on the order of ten percent.
The new studies, by separating the facts from the fiction of attendance, show that attendance numbers in the US track closely with the downward trend in church attendance in Europe.
The difference lies in the percentage of the population who claim to be Christian. In Europe, more of those who don’t attend church also drop the identification as Christian (Europeans also tell the truth about their church attendance). In the US, this is not as of yet the case.
Why don’t most Christians go to church? There are many and sundry reasons, but I suspect most of them boil down to one essential: most American Christians no longer find church compelling. Churches are not providing what people need.
Yes, the building is on fire.
Bread and Circuses and Beyond
What do the people want and need? The usual answer—bread and circuses—is partially true. The greatest loss in attendance has occurred in congregations of between 100-299 members. Since the median size of a US congregation is 125, this is bad news for those average or below.
Larger congregations provide more in the way of bread and circuses.
Younger people, however, are asking for more than a good show. Many say they hanker for a “deeper relationship with Jesus.” If I’m reading between the lines correctly, this is, at least in part, a dismissal of the liturgical styles that have been practiced—more or less unchanged—for years.
Indeed, nearly twenty-five percent of the people who attend church anywhere near regularly meet in some permutation of a small group. Let’s read that as “I need connection.”
Beyond this, many congregations are reaching out into the communities where they find themselves. Apparently many people today find that a “deeper relationship with Jesus” has to do with healing their local communities. This “walking the walk” is a sea change in American religious practice.
Christianity and Beyond
All this said, I am the minister of an overtly and predominantly humanist congregation. Some of the people who gather in my congregation seek a deeper relationship with Jesus, but most think that’s about as likely as a deeper relationship with Albert Einstein. The people who come to my congregation are largely post-Christian.
They are, however, part of this change in thinking in the larger society. Humanists are looking for exactly the same thing as those seeking out cutting edge Christian congregations: more connection and more service.
We humanists are able, however, to go a step further, jettisoning the tired language of liturgy altogether. “Benediction” is a very odd word, isn’t it? It’s barely English and it has meaning mostly from its churchy trappings. Many Unitarian Universalist congregations hold to these words, sometimes called the “language of reverence,” tenaciously. The numbers tell us that’s a bad idea.
Why do congregations that are purportedly open the ideas outside Christendom using old Christian language? I suspect it’s because the people who care enough about their congregations to become leaders have a warm and fuzzy connection to such language. They are, in other words, inherently conservative.
But the numbers don’t lie: most Americans, even the Christian ones, don’t find liturgical language compelling enough to put down the newspaper or the joystick long enough to attend church.
People today are looking for connection and service. They want to gather together and heal our broken world. The don’t want the same ‘ol same ‘ol.
The building is burning. Even those who remain Christian are fleeing. And those who wish to explore other paths?
Well, I can send you the address of my church . . .
Circle Round for Freedom
The opposite of liberal religion is not conservative religion. It is fundamentalism – the deep certainty that there is only one truth and only one way of knowing that truth. As a liberal religion, Unitarian Universalism acknowledges a plurality of possibilities; lifts up that the Dominant Culture may dominate – but that it is dominating other cultures, other truths, other experiences of the world. The work of our faith is deeply grounded in this vision of a multiplicity of stories being seen, heard, and respected.
I did not know when I drafted these words, an early Sunday morning handwritten addition to the printed text, that they would be radically embodied that day by events in a congregation I serve as a community minister. In the midst of our prayer and meditation, fundamentalist disruptors began spewing hate and vitriol into our holy, sacred space. http://uptownmessenger.com/2014/07/mayors-office-issues-certificate-recognizing-abortion-protest-group-for-service-to-city/
Beloveds, I have never been prouder of my faith community. The youth led the way in circling the congregation together, forming a ring around the sanctuary and singing sustaining songs. Soon it became clear who was choosing to be beloved community and who was trying to destroy it. Even in this distinction, all were notified that they were welcome to remain in worship if they could do so respectfully. If not, they were respectfully invited out the front door, to protest outside.
The congregation met the challenge of religious terrorism with courage and a commitment to the values of our faith, standing on the side of love without surrendering to hate.
Now is the time to stand together, beloveds. Now is the time to remember that we are not alone and that we are called forward to live lives of radical hospitality grounded in courage and compassion.
Whatever your faith tradition, I invite you to stand with Unitarian Universalists and other liberal religions besieged by hate-filled rhetoric that can trip so easily from violent words to violent deeds. Stand with us against those who would destroy the concept of religious freedom, those who invade and desecrate sacred worship space, who terrorize children and adults with their malice.
Stand with us on the side of love.
Love is the Boss of Me
Recently an organizer asked for a meeting and I went to pull out my phone to check my calendar. “My calendar is the boss of me,” I joked. She looked at me oddly, but said nothing. And in that nothing I heard the strangeness, the madness of what I had just said.
I am not sure what she was thinking, but here is what I have been thinking since that awkward moment. A calendar serves as the representation of and reminder about the commitments I have made for and with my life energy, with my love. Just as a glance at your checkbook or credit card statement can give you insight into where you commit your financial energy, a calendar can be a window of insight into life values.
What a calendar probably should not be, and should not be thought of as, is the boss. Just as my checkbook and my credit card – while requiring true mindfulness – should not be the boss of me. I do not serve as a minister in the name of a calendar or a bank account. Those are important tools for sustaining my ministry, no doubt. They cannot be the source of my call.
I serve in the name of love. Love for the world that is and the world that can be. Love for the wonder of creation and respect of destruction. Love for a faith community that meets us where we are and doesn’t leave us there. Love for you. Love for me.
It is easy in the days of overloaded calendars and underloaded bank accounts to forget. And it absolutely matters that we remember.
In 1951, Universalist mister Albert Ziegler wrote: “It may be that we have lost sight of our mission. Primarily, the church is not for social or political pronouncements, nor for the fashioning and dissemination of erudite philosophical doctrines. It is for the generation of love. The church is the only institution in society so purposed. We strike at the heart of our very purpose for existence when we neglect that major aim.”
Clearly, it is time for me to remember that love, not a calendar, is the boss of me.
Our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations will be gathering in Providence, Rhode Island beginning June 25th for General Assembly, the annual meeting of UUs from around the world, with the theme “Love Reaches Out,” inviting congregations to reach out beyond their walls and to engage in new ways of sharing faith.
In the free church tradition of Unitarian Universalism, “we do not just go to church, we are the church.” Beloved, this faith is called to live in the name of love. Let us commit ourselves anew to this call. In the immortal words of poet Maya Angelou, “I know for sure that love saves me and that it is here to save us all.”
The Proof’s in the Pudding (or What’s Churchy about Church?)
Imagine
I’m sometimes asked how humanists can have “church” without invoking god. Here’s how I think about it:
Imagine this scenario: When Imhotep in ancient Egypt invoked the great god Ra, he was invoking the human consciousness, not Ra Almighty.
Imagine this: When Zadok, son of Ahitub, entered the holy of holies of Solomon’s brand new temple, perhaps he was talking to the greatest power on this earth—the human imagination.
Imagine this: When the evangelist Billy Graham made his vast alter calls in stadiums across North America, the Christ that thousands flocked to . . . was the human psyche. Whatever you think about powers beyond, imagine this for just a moment.
Entertain the thought for just a moment that every shaman, priest, and prophet who has ever lived . . . has created worship without god because . . . there never has been six or three or one to begin with.
Shared Subjective Reality
But wait! Isn’t there more to the question? Because, even granted the accuracy of my imaginings, didn’t Imhotep and Zadok and Billy Graham each have the advantage of speaking to people who shared a subjective reality?
Didn’t the Egyptians of Imhotep’s time have a mental image of Ra and the Hebrews of Zakok’s time have a notion of Yahweh and the Christians of Billy Graham’s time a common picture of Christ the Lord?
Good question. Did they really? Are people really like that? Or did the priests and preachers have, rather, the apparatus of worship embedded in a particular place and time—Ra’s temple, Yahweh’s temple, or the vast football stadiums of Jesus with great PA systems?
Could it be that what they all had is an apparatus for worship that individual psyches journeyed to . . . . Can we seriously argue that each ancient Egyptian had an identical psychological understanding of Ra? Not likely. But they did have a temple, didn’t they? Doesn’t the very fact of the rabbinic tradition argue that Hebrew worshipers exited Zadok’s services with very different views of ultimate reality? Still, they had that temple, didn’t they?
Weren’t there as many Christs as there were Christians in Billy Graham’s vast alter calls? Yet they came to that structure of power and fame called a stadium or an auditorium, didn’t they? They came to hear Billy.
All Churchy
What’s so churchy about church? The apparatuses of worship change with time, as do the words and the concepts. It is the human mind and human needs for purpose and meaning that remain that same and come to the temple, the stadium, or the storefront church. These are what remain the same. For humanists, that’s as holy as it gets. And that’s fine: the proof is in the pudding. Ra’s pudding doesn’t do much for many of us. But the pudding of gathering together into community is quite tasty.
Just imagine that the point of worship (humanists prefer “assembly”) is calling individuals into community. Imagine that a community created in this way agrees to agree—despite individual understandings—on particular values that sometimes—in the best-case scenario—lead to objective common actions that may be considered moral and ethical (actions better because they spring from a common purpose).
That’s what “worship”—uh, assembling—will or won’t do. Gathering to invoke Ra or any of the deities or no deity at all leads to the same thing. It’s the human mind imbued with meaning and purpose and communal action that matter.
Imagine . . .