“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
— Rumi
If you are like me, you have The List. You know, that massive to-do list filled with family obligations, work projects, chores, and writing tasks that need to get done in the day, week, or month.
I love The List. It keeps me on task, helps me stay focused, and prevents any massive panics about deadlines or missed appointments.
On The List this week was “write Patheos post” and yet, when Monday afternoon brought an all-family case of a stomach virus, leaving each of crumpled and desperate, I knew that The List would be thrown out the window this week.
Alas, we have all recovered. And yet, here we are, on Friday afternoon, and I am still digging out and catching up, with no Patheos post written.
Sometimes plans go awry, I suppose, and we just need to roll with it. Instead of scrambling to put together a subpar post, I will simply include the photo above, which I snapped while out walking the dogs yesterday afternoon. The photo is part of the Lenten Spiritual Practice, which consists of daily photo prompts throughout Lent. More photos can be viewed here…http://practicinglent.tumblr.com/. Special thanks to Mr. Barb Greve for this Lenten practice idea, to Kristina Hensley for the design, and to Karen Bellavance-Grace for the Tumblrization.
In the world of super heroes, it’s called an “origin story,” that trauma that led to the super hero being super.
Poor little Bruce Wayne watches helplessly as his parents are murdered. Superman rockets off the planet Krypton, sent away by his father moments before the planet explodes, only to find himself in Kansas where a loving couple adopts him and imbues him with truth, justice, and the American Way. Magneto and Professor X start out as just normal . . . mutants . . . but life experience sends one on to found the good-guy X-Men and the other to . . . electrical evil.
Clearly, the creators of super heroes believe that nurture trumps nature in that long debate between nature and nurture. But the more we know about genetics, the more we have to ask, is that true? Do our genes make us do it, whatever the “it” might be?
Science has been known to give us answers that we are not culturally capable of understanding. The most egregious moment of that in the Twentieth Century was the eugenics movement, that is, the belief that “better babies” could be produced by selective human breeding; and the corollary belief that those born with disabilities and those of races not of Western European origin, were inferior.
Liberal preachers preached it. Liberal people practiced it. It was part-and-parcel of the early birth control movement. And of course it led ultimately to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
It also led, in the US, to immigration laws barring most people not of Western European origin, and the forced-sterilization of thousands of people. Proponents believed they could eradicate mental disorders though eugenics; they believed they could eradicate alcoholism. Forced sterilization for those in mental institutions was a practice upheld by the US Supreme Court. Thousands of poor people were forcibly sterilized. And the practice of requiring sterilization as a pre-condition for receiving welfare checks continued in some states into the 1970s.
Their motto was, “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.”
Fact is, the Nazis got many of their ideas from the United States and used the example of the US to justify their actions to other nations all through the 1930s.
Today, we know this behavior well as the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and some far-out right-wing politicians. But liberals?
I don’t want to in any way justify these beliefs. They are despicable. Yet dismissing these ideas as something from the dark past is a very bad idea. Rather, we should look to that terrible chapter of American history as a cautionary tale. Because, besides being based in the most virulent forms of racism and ableism, political progressives also saw eugenics as good science: the latest in scientific knowledge. That’s the cautionary tale: Eugenics appealed to the very people who were most open to the theory of natural selection.
Why? One reason is that they applied the idea of natural selection—still not well understood by most people in the early Twentieth Century—to an idea most Americans knew very well at the time—the selective breeding of animals. Remember the motto I mentioned: “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.” Nowadays most people who look at the matter know that natural selection can’t be self-selected—the time frame is way too long for human beings to affect, or even comprehend, for that matter. But, most people did not know that at the time.
Here’s how the fatal error occurred: We have cats and dogs and ridable horses because of selective breeding. People figured this out a loooong time ago. My grandparents, who could barely read and write, were experts at selective breeding. Most farmers were.
People knew that traits can be affected in a short time among animals, and so they assumed that human genetics could be affected in a short time. And that simply isn’t true—not in animals such as human beings that have long lives, anyway. Fruit flies are a different story. As is the famous case of the tube (subway) mice in London that have evolved in about a century and a half to have grey coats that exactly match the color of paint used on the bottom of the London train tunnels. But people aren’t fruit flies or mice. Scientific ideas often become dangerous when they are applied to culture or human life on a micro-level.
Remember that Charles Darwin knew almost nothing about genetics: Mendel’s work on peas was in existence in Darwin’s lifetime, but Darwin never encountered the studies.
Remember that the structure of DNA was not discovered until 1953, well after the horrors of Nazism. The first draft of the the human genome appeared in 2001.
To that we must add that the overt racist and ableist assumptions in the US at the time made for the perfect environment for the eugenics movement. Racism and ableism permeated US society—from outright segregationist to progressives to just about everybody. Heck, even the Homeopathy Society supported eugenics.
We see the same sort of misapplication of science today: Despite what New Age gurus might claim, people are not lonely because we live in an expanding universe. We can’t walk through walls because there is lots of space between atoms. We don’t vibrate with cosmic vibrations because of String Theory.
And you don’t speed up natural selection through eugenics. The time scales of the two are completely different. All these are the realm of hucksters. And, in the case of eugenics, racists.
Take away: when science appears to support your preconceptions and prejudices, watch out!
No, there isn’t really a super hero who became Spider-Man because he was bitten by an irradiated spider. But here are some things that are real science that we easily forget:
Genetic research has taught us that the entire concept of race is a fiction. A mistake. There are no genetically identifiable races. Homo-Sapiens developed along about 200,000 years ago and some homo-sapiens began leaving Africa something along about 80,000 years ago. Human generations are roughly 25 years, which means that some homo-sapiens left Africa about 3000 generations ago; other homo-sapiens, such as our Somali neighbors, left in this generation. We’re all immigrants out of Africa.
Despite what the racists of the early-Twentieth Century believed, there is no “race” in the homo-sapiens population, only separation by time and cultural difference.
You may have read that President Obama is related to Harry Truman, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Brad Pitt. This is not urban legend. But it doesn’t prove a whole lot either, except that human beings are all related, and that we tend to notice the famous ones and not the infamous or un-famous ones.
Until everyone understands this, we will have not only the egregious lunatics such as the Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, but also the casual cliches that still permeate our culture and destroy the lives of too many people.
Poor little Bruce Wayne. He could have been a man of leisure. Superman might have hung out on Krypton (or at least Kansas). And there’s no telling what nature might have had Magneto and Professor X doing. As for us, we will have to continue wondering and speculating just how much of what we do is up to us and how much is up to our stars . . . and our genes. All will be well, so long as we remember humility in the face of a very large universe.
On a good night these days our Little Bean (aka, Little Night Owl) will unwind herself very, very slowly towards sleep, slowly-but-steadily, mostly on her own. We have always accompanied her as she falls asleep, and it’s neat now to see her, at 1-and-a-half, sometimes able to navigate the journey herself. Keeping her company while she’s unwinding and heading towards sleep has been reminding me lately of the field of music thanatology.
While I was a Chaplain Intern (for a summer) and then year-long Chaplain Resident at a hospital in Portland, Oregon, there was a music thanatologist on the staff. I was so inspired by her warm energy and dedication to her calling — to serve at the bedside of those going through the life-to-death transition, to provide gentle song and presence beyond words and conversation, particularly at that stage when conversation is no longer possible.
I tend to be a wordy person, one who wants to talk through things, so perhaps that’s one reason I find the field of music thanatology so mysteriously meaningful. Music can tune into our cycles of breath and ease our spirits in unmeasureable ways. And the presence of another person in the room is a palpable, energetic dynamic that is perhaps most notable when there is no one else there. I have sat in the rooms of dying people when there was no one else visiting them, and I will never forget the feeling of absence in those rooms, the visceral feeling of alone-ness surrounding some of those people. Not all, certainly — some were peaceful, content in the quiet. But some people ached to have someone else there in the room with them, I could see it in their eyes when I walked in, a sense of relief that there is someone else here now, someone else with me.
In a somewhat startlingly similar way that I’m surprised not to have noticed anyone else talking about, perhaps because it might seem morbid or ominous to some, babies and small children seem to me to be as unreceptive to conversation at their bedsides as the dying are. There is no rationalizing with a one-year-old about it being “bedtime,” or “past bedtime,” not really. I try anyway; I gently say to our Little Bean over-and-over again, some afternoons at naptime or evenings at bedtime: “it’s time for sleeping, sweetie.” I know that she hears me, and I also know that she has to unwind in her way, at her pace, roaming about the room for a bit, playing with her familiar toys, interacting with me a bit, having a book read to her, a song sung. Sometimes she wants a little more to eat, a little bit of water to drink. Gradually the distance that she is perambulating gets smaller and smaller, and then she is just sitting on her bed with her stuffed animals and her soft scarves. She may need to cry some. She might turn the light off on her own or want it left on. Then she’ll lie down and stare up at the ceiling or the shadows on the wall, and then, finally, she’ll close her eyes, and I’ll hear her breathing shift and deepen.
In all these subtle ways, there are parallels to the dying process that I notice. At the bedside of the dying, just as at my child’s bedside, it is a delicate art, keeping company without overstepping into her space. The transition happens on its own schedule, unrelated to whatever time might be glaring at me from the digital clock. I remind myself that my being there, physically in the room, matters enormously, on any number of conscious and unconscious levels.
One of the things I learned from the Music Thanatologist in Portland was to start out singing a song at one tempo and then, ever-so-gradually, slow it down. That can help relax the listener, help her to slow down her breath as well. I do this with our Little Bean almost every night and sometimes for her afternoon nap as well. Easing into sleep. Helping her learn to slow herself down.
There is a lot of time to stare at the walls and ponder things while keeping someone company at their bedside. This living, it’s all about savoring our days while acknowledging the inevitability of our dying, right? There is a common saying in the hospital chaplaincy world that “people die how they live” and I think about that sometimes. May all our transitions into sleep be gentle rehearsals for our dying, however it may happen, some long distant day far from now. And may we all practice being present with each other and with ourselves, as genuinely and tenderly as we can, each day and night until then. Wishing you good sleep. Peace.
I wish I could talk to my Great-Aunt Marie about the movie Twelve Years a Slave, but regrettably “Neenie” died when I was three. This spinster librarian from Detroit did, however, leave a legacy—a self-published book of family history. Written in 1957, this book documented my family’s years in Missouri in the 1800’s.
My parents ridiculed these books; giant unopened boxes of them filled our attic. When my father died, I finally brought one home and began to read it. To my shock, the very first line of the preface, written by Aunt Marie in 1957, tells me my ancestors “left a Virginia country environment where they were relieved of the drudgeries of workaday life by the labor of slaves…they were members of a society in which excellence in manners, morals, and religion were prerequisites.” In 1821, when Missouri became a slave state and offered land at $1.25 an acre, my ancestors migrated there.
I had always imagined these Missouri pioneer ancestors living in a house kind of like Little House on the Prairie. Never did I envision Ma and Pa and the kids with slaves out back, ‘relieving them of the drudgeries of workaday life.’ No one ever talked about our family history as slave-owners.
Aunt Marie says in her preface that the family letters, “too numerous to include, have been incorporated into dialogue. The conversations are necessarily fictitious, but the events are authentic. The story is a family diary with eighteen dramatic scenes.” In other words, old letters have been turned into the equivalent of bad 1957 church skits.
Each of these ‘dramatic scenes’ is scripted, with stage directions and settings written by Aunt Marie herself. These descriptions are the primary reason I wish that Aunt Marie and I could have watched and talked about Twelve Years a Slave together.
Here are a few of the lines Aunt Marie included to ‘set the stage’ for various scenes:
“Smiling blacks bear platters of food to the tables, while strains from banjo and guitar are heard from the rear.”
“Black folks … cluster around the well and weave in and out of the buildings, working, laughing, loafing.”
It wasn’t until I saw and reflected on Twelve Years a Slave and the history of cinematography about slavery that I realized where Aunt Marie’s images came from. They sprang, in technicolor, from her Hollywood-influenced mind. Hollywood has presented dozens of films with images just like the ones Aunt Marie described, showing slavery as a time when blacks smiled and laughed and loafed.
Now, thankfully, Hollywood offers a version of history more grounded in fact. Twelve Years a Slave takes its viewers into slavery, not through the eyes of the slave-owners, but through the eyes of Simon Northup, a freed black man from New York, stolen and enslaved. The film shows slavery as mundane, daily, ceaseless, violence and terror. Some African-Americans I know don’t want to see it, or loathed it. But as a white person, who doesn’t experience the daily relentlessness of racism, the physical intensity of the movie was transformative. Leaving the movie felt like stepping out of a virtual reality booth.
I suspect Aunt Marie would not want to have any of it. Her preferred view seemed to be that owning other human beings didn’t make a dent in one’s ‘excellence in manners, morals, and religion.’ Nor did ceasing to own other human beings involve any sense of repentance. As one ancestor wrote:
“I’m not going to let old John Brown or any confounded abolitionist steal my blacks… I shall free them myself. Freeing my servants will not be a financial loss to me. Most of the negroes I have were inherited. In return for their labor, I have given them food, shelter, clothing, medical care…and security in old age.”
When I utter judgment upon my ancestors, some white folks get upset with me for “imposing 21st century values” on 18th or 19th century people. Do we really have to talk about this? they all but groan.
I guess the primary reason I’m most grateful to Twelve Years a Slave is that it is a kind of family intervention. I was born in the latter part of the 21st century. Silences and lies about my family history were handed to me as intact and unbroken as the four sherbet dishes my mother gave me, which made the journey with my ancestors from Virginia to Missouri. If Aunt Marie, writing in 1957, had come to believe that owning other people was wrong, she never mentioned it. My liberal parents –civil rights activists–never saw reason to talk to us kids about this part of our family history. Like many white people, my siblings prefer not to talk about it now.
Though viciously brutal, the film’s truth-speaking is a relief. Finally! Because when do Americans, or families, sit down with each other and say, “Wow, that was us! We did that! What meaning should we make of that? How did we benefit? How were we hurt? How do we heal our nation? How should we live our lives now?”
Twelve Years A Slave may or may not win Oscars Sunday night. But its real value is in changed and enriched lives: lives of people like me who have new ways to talk about and challenge what Adrienne Rich called “the lies, secrets, and silences” which shroud our national and family and cinematic histories. If there were a category for “Most Necessary,” this would be, hands down, my choice for best picture.
stars will stop
gelling—the
hydrogen and
helium gone.
Someday, each
star will call it
a day & go to bits.
Someday the day
will be as dark as
night, the hydrogen,
the helium snuffed.
Someday, in, oh, say,
ten billion billion years,
time will eddy & stop.
Someday deep will
call to deep with
nothing here at all.
Someday here will be
empty like there,
in, oh, say ten billion
billion years . . .
So off we go to
corral the OK.
Off we go to
fish for the net.
Off we go, a link
in the unchained.
Off we go to someday.
Apparently it is all the rage these days for state legislatures to introduce “religious freedom” bills that would allow people to refuse to do business with someone if it would go against their sincerely held religious beliefs. Clearly we are to understand these bills as a means for people who disapprove of same-sex weddings to not have to provide services for those weddings. On the one hand, this seems like not such a big deal. Who really wants an appalled photographer or caterer harshing the vibe at your wedding? Why should people have to participate in something that they disapprove of? Would I be willing to serve canapés at a dog fighting ring or a KKK rally?
But the proposed laws don’t state that no one should have to provide services that run counter to their conscience. They don’t suggest that it would be appropriate to refuse to do business with BP because you’re still mad about their massive oil spill from a criminally flawed deep water drill, or that we as a society get it if you don’t want to take photographs for the catalog of a clothing company complicit in the abuse of Bangladeshi workers. No, these bills are about religious freedom.
So I call bullshit. Your religion sets boundaries on how you live your life. It may tell you that it is wrong to be in a relationship with a person of the same sex, or to eat pork or to eat beef or to touch a woman who is menstruating. It may tell you that you should wear special underwear or a special hat or to wash your hands and feet before you pray. And no one has the right to interfere with your choices around any of those or a hundred or a thousand more ways of expressing your sincere religious beliefs.
But we don’t need any extra laws to say that. We have one already, called the First Amendment. Got it covered. So then the question is whether we need laws to protect you from in any way condoning other people doing things that are counter to your religious beliefs. Let me give you the short answer. No.
If you are Catholic and you disapprove of birth control, that means you shouldn’t use it. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have to comply with an insurance mandate to cover it for other people. How other people prevent pregnancy is not part of your religious practice. If your religion forbids your eating pork, or mixing milk and meat, don’t do it. But your religion doesn’t forbid you from taking pictures of people eating cheeseburgers with bacon. If you don’t think gay people should get married, then don’t marry a person of your gender. Who you bake a cake for is not part of your religious practice. Your religious beliefs apply to you, and if your God is going to judge you for standing by while other people live out their own religious lives, then your God needs to get a grip.
Of course, the reality of these laws has nothing to do with freedom of religious practice. Their function is merely to serve as a way for people who are losing a legal and cultural battle to try to exert control over something that has already escaped them. It is a place to put all the rage over losing the privilege of being able to assume that the way they see the world is the way everyone sees it. And everyone is entitled to their own rage, as well as their own religious beliefs. But like religious beliefs, no one is entitled to impose their rage on someone else. That’s the law.
Al “Carnival Time” Johnson sings “it’s Carnival Time and everybody’s havin’ fun…”
The twitter feed, the facebook, the news cycle all make it very clear that not everyone is having fun… but this weekend (until Ash Wednesday), I will put my twitter feed down, my facebook and the news away, and I will spend time with the people of my city dancing on the streets in handmade costumes with bands that have been practicing all year. Beloveds, we are going to have some fun.
Carnival time in New Orleans is complex, with a twisted history of racism, classism, sexism — AND it is an opportunity for the utter subversion of the oppressive status quo. It is a time when strangers become friends, generosity is the word of the day, and hope for a new day is lived out in the prefigurative politics of a communal celebration.
See y’all after the Mardi Gras.
I had a great time visiting New York City this past weekend. A couple years ago, I would not have expected to enjoy “The City” ever again.
You see, I called New York home for five years. And by the time we prepared to move out of the city, I was pretty overwhelmed by that amazing, infuriating, beautiful, exhausting island.
For the first four years we lived there, I tamped down my frustration, my fear, my overwhelm. But When we made the decision to move out of the city…oooh, it just came flowing out of me.
Rage at people who pushed me on the subway.
Tears.
Yes, Manhattan made me cry.
But we had just decided to move. We weren’t actually moving for another eight months, so I had to do something. I started a list on Facebook. I called it: “Things to like – or even love – about New York City.”
My first item was the evergreen boughs packed around the sidewalk trees on 17th street in the winter. Number 41 was a favorite: I was grateful for the MTA guy on my morning commute at the 14th Street M15 select service bus stop. He was there the entire year I took that bus. Rain, sleet, snow, hundred degree heat. He was so kind – even in the midst of a mass of rather grumpy commuters. He always said “Good Morning.”
The list helped. It made my last year in New York possible, pleasant even. Friends added to it and helped me see the city in ways I simply could not before I started the list. Searching for tiny things that gave me joy became a spiritual practice. Being grateful gave me new way of seeing the world around me.If you live in New York, perhaps you, too, have noticed that the sidewalk at LaGuardia airport sparkles.
A few months after I started my New York City gratitude list, I was called to the Emergency Room of the hospital where I served as a chaplain. I found the patient who had requested a pastorin an isolation room, protecting either him or the rest of us from germs. I donned a mask and entered. He was delighted to see me. I was, to be honest, more than a little nervous.
As we spoke, I learned that this man was HIV positive, that his HIV had developed into AIDS,and that He had come in that day because his pneumonia had reoccurred. He had cancer too, but he didn’t want treatment. He did not even want to know how much of his body was affected. He felt alright, he said. He was homeless and mostly estranged from his family. He needed some new clothes and wondered if I could help. He spoke quickly, frenetically. I wasn’t sure what would come next.
And then he taught me a priceless lesson. He wanted to read something to me, (I don’t even remember now what it was) and he reached into a tattered pocket to pull out a piece of paper.
After he’d retrieved a broken pair of glasses from a different pocket, he paused, closed his eyes and said: “Thank You, God, for the ability to read.”
Thank you, God, for the ability to read.
His prayer made me reexamine the gift that many of us receive in early elementary school and then proceed to take for granted for the rest of our lives. The man in the ER, with so much to be angry, frustrated, despairing about, with a simple prayer of gratitude, had opened my eyes.
The rest of that day the power of that simple thank you washed over me:
Thank you for the ability to walk, to express myself.
Thank you for being able to open this door for someone.
Thank you, God, for the ability to read.
What before was ordinary, with a reminder, became glorious.
I am trying to remember the power of that pause these days. It is a hard time for many of the people we love. I am learning that gratefulness is not always easy, but always lifts the heart and, it is always as simple as a Thank You For…
For what are you grateful today?
“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
In college, we had this mantra among our swim team: hard core. As the phrase might imply, to be hard core meant maintaining physical and emotional strength in spite of pain and setbacks – whether it was enduring the grueling three-hour long training sessions, withstanding the mental challenges involved with competing at the collegiate level, or surviving the social dramas and angst of college life. Hard core was a compliment in the highest regard, synonymous with strength, resilience, competence, confidence, and independence. To be hard core was to be respected and admired.
And so, for many reasons, I was hard back then (though probably not as hard core as I would have liked to be). I saw things in black and white. Questions had one “right” answer. Success (and, consequently, happiness) had a path that must be followed without deviation. There was little room for doubts, mistakes or uncertainty, and almost no room for acceptance, tolerance, and patience.
And, although being hard core as an athlete may have been helpful, I have found that it isn’t all that valuable to me as a person.
Being hard just doesn’t make much sense to me anymore.
I am learning that life isn’t a series of Either/Or conclusions, but a multitude of Both/And possibilities. It is possible to be soft and strong, to be vulnerable and confident, to be patient and resilient. It is possible to swim around in the doubts without drowning; to say “I don’t know” without being unintelligent; to say “I’m sorry” without being weak; to change my mind without being erratic and unreliable; to be generous without being abused; and to be merciful without being manipulated.
So these days I’m taking a softer focus. I’m looking for beauty in the complexities and differences, appreciating our multi-hued world instead of straining to create a monochromatic one. I’m enjoying the mysteries and unknowns, becoming more comfortable with the questions that have no easy answers. I’m saying “I don’t know” and “I’m sorry” more often and more sincerely. And, impatient as I am, I’m even trying to find joy in the waiting.
The thing is, in many ways, it is easier to be hard. It is easier to see things in black and white, to look for absolutes, and to live in an either/or world. It is challenging and confusing living in the softer world, where few things are fixed and certain and there are infinite shades of gray, along with reds and oranges and purples and pinks. It can be terrifying to live with an overflowing heart without a hard protective shell.
And, in many ways, it is hard work to stay soft. Idealist thoughts of perfection must fly out the window, along with regrets and should-have-been’s. The soft focus is more permeable, letting in the bad with the good and heightening emotional sensitivities. It can be clumsy and awkward walking on shaky soft ground. There are missteps, stumbles, and falls. There are wrong turns and false starts.
Fortunately, with this softer way, the falls are cushioned and it is easier to get back up, to turn around, to try again.
So I’m using a softer focus these days, resolving to keep a softer focus despite any personal or societal pressures to be harder, sharper, tougher.
There is no doubt that I am softer now – softer, in fact, than I ever thought I could be.
And, you know what?
I think that I just might be stronger than ever because of it.
Both. And.
This post originally appeared on the author’s website.
I suppose everybody has a favorite founding document for a religion or a nation. Mine is “Farewell at Delfshaven,” a sermon given by Rev. John Robinson to a group of his Separatist congregation who were taking ship for the Western Hemisphere. Part of the sermon goes like this:
I Charge you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth from my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word.
The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His will our God has revealed to Calvin, they (Lutherans) will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented.
For though they were precious shining lights in their time, yet God has not revealed his whole will to them. And were they now living, they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as they had received.
The way Unitarian Universalists “do church” comes directly from the protestant movements that eventually led to the English Civil War and the decision by some of the radicals that it was perfectly acceptable to God that they supplant the aristocracy and remove their king’s head. . . Radical. It isn’t surprising that the royalty of the day weren’t particularly keen on keeping those sorts around. And perhaps it isn’t surprising that these most protesting of Protestants eventually set up theocracies and felt justified in clearing the land of its native inhabitants.
Yet these radicals—known to us nowadays as Pilgrims, Puritans, and Separatists—were up some positive things as well, such as what we call democracy. And the best of their thought is exemplified by these last words that Rev. Robinson said to members of his congregation as they sailed to England to join another group of dissenters and board the Mayflower.
These parishioners settled in what they called Plymouth, Massachusetts to build what is today a Unitarian Universalist church, which indicates that the beliefs that Rev. Robinson preached, plus about four-hundred years, equals Unitarian Universalism. The deepest beliefs of those religious seekers are the DNA of Unitarian Universalism (for good and ill).
Notice some things about this little sermon: yes, there’s the usual unfortunate bashing of other denominations—in this case Lutherans and Calvinists—but Rev. Robinson was saying two very radical, and I think positive, things.
The first is: “follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ.” This is still an expectation in the Unitarian Universalist movement: we don’t ordain ministers and then think those ministers are somehow levitating or holy. We don’t think our ministers are special—we expect our ministers to walk the walk . . . all the time, but a minister is just like the rest of us folks.
The other radical thing that Rev. Robinson preached is the very core of the tradition: that truth continues to be revealed. Or, more radically, that we human beings continue to find more and more truth, and we must continue to modify our beliefs according to these new truths.
The Separatists did not “do church” as did most of the Christian groups of the time (and still today). Roman Catholicism had developed along the lines of the political systems of the day: emperors, kings, men in charge. Some protestant groups—Lutherans and Anglicans for example—created state religions. These groups saw themselves—dangerously as Rev. Robinson pointed out—as founded on eternal truths. This justified building hierarchies. Top down.
The Separatists, however, believed in the individual discovery (or revelation) of truth. Therefore, they could not accept hierarchy within the congregation. Each member of the congregation was on a separate path toward truth, and as likely as any other member (including clergy) to find it.
As a corollary, the churches the “pilgrims,” and eventually Puritans, set up in Massachusetts were all individual as well. Each congregation discovered truth for itself. This is one reason the Separatist movement eventually fractured into Trinitarian and Unitarian congregations.
Still today, each congregation in the Unitarian Universalist Association is on its own, to choose leaders, to find their own way toward truth. And the “power,” whatever that is, lies within the congregation, not the association of congregations.
Not an ideal way to run a collection of congregations, a “denomination,” of course, but a great way to encourage freedom of conscience and thought.
Yes, the radical protestant movements of Europe were “precious shining lights in their time,” but nowadays, the belief systems they were founded on are for the most part relics of the past, products of minds “who yet saw not all things.” And, as Rev. Robinson said, “This is a misery much to be lamented.” I, for example, as a minister, don’t use the terms “God” or “Christ” at all in my historically humanist congregation. The light has shown my congregation a different path.
That’s the genius of the idea Rev. Robinson preached: truth just keeps on coming.
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As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.