How do you explain "Unitarian Universalist spirituality"?

The Membership Committee of the congregation I serve is wrestling with the question of how to explain Unitarian Universalist spirituality to newcomers (and old-timers).  Since I'm unable to attend their retreat this Saturday (since I'll be at our Board's retreat!), I wrote something up for them to consider.  Here's what I said:

I’d start by saying that we are not as unique as we sometimes think and say we are – progressive Christians too, for instance, encourage people to think and explore and search their own lives in coming to understand God.  We are, however, generally more expansive in our encouragement of that search.  Using a video game analogy, ours is more of an “open world” model rather than one that restrictively directs your movement.  I would also note that I do not believe that “spirituality” is about what someone passively “believes” but, instead, how a person actively engages their inner and outer world.

That said, there is a line in the hymn, “We Laugh, We Cry” (#355) which says that we believe, “even to question, truly is an answer.”   An important part of the spiritual grounding of our faith tradition, as I understand it at least, is precisely this encouragement to seek for truth and meaning.  This is not the same as saying, “UUs can believe anything we want.”  That’s way too simplistic.  It is to say, however, that our faith encourages us to challenge ourselves to look into our own lived experience (equally with the insights of religion, science, and the arts) as a source of understanding “the twin realities of being born and having to die” (as the Rev. Forrest Church put it).  This is no small thing.  Ours is, at its best, an active faith that calls on us to examine, to re-examine, and to keep on examining our understanding of the universe and our place in it.  One way to describe the spirituality of Unitarian Universalism is that it calls on us to become comfortable in the discomforting place of not-knowing.

So no, you can’t “believe anything you want.”  In the first place, “belief” is not, for UUs, the core of “spirituality.”  In the second, we are encouraged to actively engage ourselves and the world in a free search for meaning; to then engage with others in open, inquisitive dialog about what they’re discovering in their searching; and to then arrive at our own tentative beliefs.  Unitarian Universalist spirituality truly understand and engaged, ought to lead us to the place so many of our youth model for us during their Coming of Age service – “this is what I believe now, but I know my beliefs will change over time.”

One other aspect of our faith tradition’s spiritual core – it is not enough to engage in this search for truth and meaning.  We then must strive to apply our discoveries to the way we live our lives in the world.

One final, general, observation – this is not, in my experience, the way a lot of UUs understand and experience our faith.  Far too many, it seems to me, come to UUism having already decided on the “answers to life’s big questions,” and have no real interest in looking any further.  We come, many of us and maybe even the majority of us, to have our understandings affirmed rather than challenged; we want our already established biases reinforced instead of re-examined.  In this we are absolutely no different than the majority of other religious traditions we humans have ever create.

So here’re three "elevator speeches" about the spiritual core of Unitarian Universalism:

·    Unitarian Universalism challenges us to hold our beliefs lightly, always ready to let go as we discover new and deeper truths.

·    Unitarian Universalist spirituality is found in the free and ongoing search for truth and meaning, within the context of a community of open-minded seekers.

·     Unitarian Universalist spirituality is an active search for meaning in life as we experience it, which we then strive to put into practice in life as we live it.

I hope it need not be said, but this is, of course, a provisional answer ...

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Can UUs Believe Anything We Want?

This is the text of a sermon (and preparatory remarks) delivered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, May 3rd, 2015.  If you'd like, you can listen to the podcast.



Arthur Rashap's Preparatory Thoughts

“You are out of your mind!” “You are out of your mind!” Think of the times you have said that to others – or someone has said that to you. What did they mean? What did you mean? Probably, that what was said was not rationale. It didn’t make “sense” intellectually to your mind or to the mind of the person who said that to you.

The instructions for doing proper meditation practices these days involve being ‘mindful.’ And, if truly the goal is to let go, to release the involvement with getting lost in what was, with planning for the future – to ‘be here and now’ then wouldn’t a better instruction, a better practice be to be mindless?

Our topic for exploration today is ‘faith.’ In the Worship Weaver discussions with Rev. Erik, it was pretty hard to get our minds, our thoughts, around defining what faith is. When you walk into this Church, the pamphlet rack is full of brochures relating to the faith of a variety of religions and topics. As Erik will discuss, there is a big difference between what you believe and what you end up taking on faith.

About 11 years ago, I took a year-long course to become an Empowerment Trainer, with the goal to understand how to help guide participants in identifying goals in their lives and processes to achieve such goals – basically looking at the question: “if you could have your life exactly as you want it, what would it look like?” The basic process mirrored nature’s processes in producing a flower or a vegetable – clearing the ground, preparing it, planting the appropriate seed, nurturing it as it grows, removing the weeds, reacting to all those things that come up in the growing process, etc.

Looking back at my notes and to the page that fell open, here are some of the things I wrote:

“The less you do, the more you can accomplish. You need to bring in more of the right brain acknowledging that you still need your left brain to have the information for day-to-day living. The ‘knowing’ we are talking about here is having less of ego/personalization, and allowing other elements to enter and be present. The process is called: ‘getting out of the way.’ To really be empowered or empower another, you come from an implicit faith that the person herself knows the answers – that every human being knows what they need and want.

It is not for the leader, the teacher, the facilitor, the minister to ‘fix’ them. That is the saboteur, the devil in processing. Their function is one of midwifery – to bring into being the answers, the true life that lies within. The facilitator needs to be as empty as possible, while being actively engaged. Meeting the person exactly where they are, showing up to challenge them, to fix them, doesn’t work.

So how to work on our egos? To empty ourselves? To become mindless and take the leap into faith? To begin with, have a spiritual practice, whatever that may be. For a muscle to get strong, it needs exercise and the same goes for spirituality. The goal is to arrive at detached compassion, without this, life you grab you in any way. To become empty requires a lot, to have great courage and dedication.

Rumi wrote: Live at the empty heart of paradox. I will dance cheek to cheek with you there. Reality is a constant juxtaposition. Every system is so fraught with paradox, that you can easily lose your way.

Erik will be exploring this subject in his special way in a minute. Both he and I recently found we have been reading and enjoying the words and approach of a Franciscan Monk named Richard Rohr. He sends out daily meditations that I do recommend to you.

I have edited somewhat the meditation from this past Wednesday which he adopted from two of his books: Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer, and Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality:

"Spiritual Knowing Must Be Balanced by Not-Knowing"  As the Christian church moved from bottom to top, protected and pampered by the Roman Empire, a number of followers of Jesus and some early monks went off to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to keep their freedom and to keep growing in the Spirit. They found the Church's newfound privilege--and the loss of Jesus' core values--unacceptable.  It was in these deserts that a different mind called contemplation was first perfected and taught. They came to see that they could understand spiritual things properly through contemplation alone. The Desert Fathers and Mothers gave birth to what we call the apophatic tradition, knowing by silence, symbols, and not even needing to know with words. It amounted to a deep insight into the nature of faith that was eventually called the "cloud of unknowing" or the balancing of knowing with not needing to know.  Deep acceptance of what has been call “ultimate mystery” is ironically the best way to keep the mind and heart spaces always open and always growing. It really does "work"! Today scientists might call it moving forward by theory and hypothesis. This enables you to be always ready for the next new discovery.  Admittedly, we do need enough knowing to be able to hold our ground. And the offerings at this Church and in other involvements you have - do provide a container and structure in which you can safely acknowledge that you do know a bit, and in fact just enough to hold you until you are ready for a further knowing. In the meantime you happily exist in what some have called docta ignorantia or "learned ignorance." People in this state tend to be very happy and they also make a lot of other people happy. And we are all burdened by "know-it-alls." It is amazing how religion has turned this biblical idea of faith around to mean the exact opposite: into a need and even a right to certain knowing, complete predictability, and perfect assurance about whom God likes and whom God does not like. It seems we think we can have the Infinite Mystery of God in our quite finite pocket.  We know what God is going to say or do next, because we think our particular denomination has it all figured out. In this schema, God is no longer free but must follow our rules and our theology. If God is not infinitely free, we are in trouble, because every time God forgives or shows mercy, God is breaking God's own rules and showing shocking (but merciful) freedom and inconsistency! Perhaps Brother Rohr is suggesting that when it comes to faith, being ‘out of our mind’ is not such a bad thing.

RevWik's Reflections:
I’m sure that some of what Arthur just said would be very difficult for the average – or, at least, the stereotypical – Unitarian Universalist.  And I’m not talking about the explicit “God talk.”  “Cloud of Unknowing?”  “Balancing knowing with not needing to know?”  “Learned ignorance?”  Oh, we Unitarian Universalists – again, at least the stereotype of us Unitarian Universalist – really don’t do all that well with not knowing, not understanding, not at least trying to know and understand.  The search for truth and meaning and all that.

We are – historically, generally speaking – rationalists.  Many of us, if not most of us, believe most firmly, most strongly, in what we can see, hear, taste, and touch.  We like facts.  Hard facts.  [Like this pulpit here – solid.  Real.]  In this year’s Wednesday Wonderings group we’ve been reading our way through a book written in the late 1940s by the Universalist preacher Clinton Lee Scott, which he adapted from radio addresses he’d given.  The book’s title is Religion Can Make Sense – and his fundamental stance is that Universalism is a religion that “makes sense,” that is attuned to the world as it is, and by this he means the world as it is revealed to us by science and not as described in myth.

Yet today, because of science, we know that the “hard fact” of this real and solid pulpit is, in fact, not so hard at all.  What we perceive – see, hear, touch – to be solid is actually a swirling mass of energy with far more empty space in it than matter.  And the same is true of us.  We, too, are a concentration of energy, given solid form by perception, nothing more.  Science tells us that we live in a universe in which particles pop into and out of existence on a quantum foam, and where Schrödinger’s cat can be both alive and dead simultaneously.  What we perceive as empty space all around us is filled with molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide.  And there are light waves, infrared waves, radio waves, and as Richard Feynman said, all of these are really real.

So what do you believe – that this pulpit is solid and that this hand is solid and that each is distinct from the other, or that when I put this constellation of energy (my hand) on this swirling pool of energy (the pulpit) the distinctions between the two blur?  Do you believe that you are distinct, individuated, independent, or that you and I and all that is are dynamically and fundamentally interdependent, made of the very same stuff?

A Buddhist teacher once told me that the waves of the ocean each think themselves separate and unique, yet the ocean knows that there is nothing but ocean. What do you believe?

And I ask that both as something for you to ponder, and as a rhetorical device to lead us into the question I want us to explore this morning:  “Can a Unitarian Universalist believe anything she or he wants to?”  This is something that’s often said of us, you know.  “Unitarian Universalists … well … they can believe anything they want.”  We even say it of ourselves sometimes.  “One of the great things about being a UU is that you can believe anything you want!”  And it’s true to the extent that there is no Higher Authority dictating what we must believe in order to be a UU.  There is no creed or dogma to which we must assent to belong.

This, then, hardly seems like a topic worthy of our examination.  The answer is obvious!  Of course!  Of course a UU is free to believe whatever she or he wants to believe!

And yet …

And yet someone will usually come up with the retort, “But what about a member of the modern Nazi party, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan, or the Westboro Baptist Church?  Could they believe what they believe and still be welcome here?” 

Now that is precisely the kind of conundrum that, as the Oracle said to Neo, will really “bake your noodle.”  On the one hand, people in our faith tradition are freed from the necessity of believing any particular thing, yet it does seem as though we’re not open to just any thing a person might believe.  Where do we draw that line?  How do we draw that line?

How about someone who believes in shamanic journeying?  Of life after death?  Or multiple lives?  Or channeled teaching?  Would people with these beliefs be welcomed here?

How about that Jesus is not just a great guy who had some good ideas but was, in fact, a manifestation of God and that he not just was but still is?  Or that God is real?  Or that there is no such thing as that to which the word “God” is meant to point?

I can tell you from my direct experience that there are UUs, there are members of TJMC, who hold each one of these beliefs.  And I know of folks who think them extremely odd for doing so.  Can you believe anything you want to here?

Let’s step back for a moment and try to clear something up.  A lot of people conflate the ideas of belief, on the one hand, and faith, on the other.  A lot of people use the words interchangeably, as if they were synonyms.  “What is your faith?”  “I believe in God.”  “How strong is your faith?”  “I believe, I believe, I believe …”

The trouble is … they’re not the same thing.  Look at it this way: belief is an intellectual proposition, it’s something that you think; faith, on the other hand, is something that you do.  Faith is living in the world as if you believed what you say you believe.  Let me say that again:  faith is living in the world as if you believed what you say you believe.

There are people who say that they believe in God and that God will never give you more than you can handle, yet when things get rough they act as though there’s no way they could ever possibly handle all that’s come their way.  There are people who say that they believe people are fundamentally good, yet who feel more than a little anxious and, so, cross the street when the see a stranger coming toward them.  Belief is easy.  Faith is hard.

And it’s hard, at least in part, because our minds are smart enough to know that accidents can happen.  We know that we could be wrong about that thing we believe, whatever it is.  I had a philosophy professor who said that a philosopher can only say that she knows something when she is absolutely certain.  How often does that happen?  I mean not a doubt in the world, absolutely no possibility that you’re wrong, 100% solid? How often does that happen?    As a friend of mine used to say a lot, “you could always get hit by a bus on the way home.”

And so our protective little egos – which think that it’s their job to protect us from, I don’t know, death or, maybe even worse, looking foolish – our protective little egos throw up a dust storm of doubt just as we’re about to take that leap of faith.  And so we come to a screeching halt and find ourselves poised precariously at the peak of a precipice, and our sneaky little ego says, “I told you so.”  “You may not have faith,” it says to us a little later, “but at least you can content yourself with all the good things you believe.”

Putting your beliefs into practice.  Trusting your beliefs.  Living in the world as if you believed what you say you believe.  That, my friends, is faith.  And we’ve been told time and time again that faith can move mountains.

So how do we bypass our all-too rational egos so that we might take that leap?  Richard Rohr, in that passage Arthur read earlier, spoke of a kind of knowing that makes use of “silence, symbols, and not even needing to know with words.”  That’s a start.  Going even further, Arthur himself talked about how our being “out of our mind” might not be such a bad thing.  When I was writing my first book – Teacher, Guide, Companion – Mary Benard, the incredible editor I was blessed to have been working with, had a whole lot of suggestions for me of things I really ought to change.  She was usually right.  But I held my ground on one sentence, because I thought that poetry should trump grammar:

“… you must be willing to loose your mind [she’d wanted me to change that to “lose”], to loosen the vice grip of the sensible and rational in order to allow the imaginative and intuitive ways of knowing to come to bear.”

That “vice grip of the sensible and the rational” is what gets in the way for so many of us when we try to live into our faith.  Yet that’s exactly what we need to do.  Because faith trumps belief every time – it’s not our beliefs that matter, it’s the way we live our lives; it’s not what we think that counts most, it’s what we do.

During our newcomer orientations I often say that one of the things that makes Unitarian Universalism unique is that our first question isn’t, “what do you believe?”  Instead, we ask “what kind of world do you want to live in?”  We ask, “how do you – or how do you want to – live your life?”  In other words, we ask about your faith.

And it is our faith that brings us together – our faith that this is a beautiful world, and that all things that live on or in it are deserving of respect; our faith that love is strong and that we should reach out to others, ever widening the circle of inclusion; our faith in hope, that no matter how much to the contrary things might seem, there is always a way.

Can a UU believe anything she wants?  Of course, because to us the question of belief is merely interesting – a chance to get to know one another better and, perhaps, see the world through a different lens.  The real question, what matters to us most, the “so what” of all this is the vision of the world all these differing beliefs point us toward, and the ways we put our oh so lovely beliefs into action. 

None of us will do this perfectly.  I know I sure can’t.  Yet if none of us can then we each don’t have to worry so much whenever we, ourselves, get stuck on the edge, unable to leap.  And that’s why places like TJMC exist – so that we can help each other; and remind each other; and reach out to one another; and support, and celebrate, and encourage one another.  Be there for one another.

So please, own and honor your beliefs – whatever they are and however … odd … they might seem to me or to anyone else.  And then, with me, with us, try to put them into practice.  The world doesn’t need more believers but, rather, more people of faith.  May we, at least some of the time, be those people.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Free and Responsible

These are the sermonic explorations from the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, VA on July 15, 2012.

If you'd like to hear the podcast, click here.

Pam Phillips’ Explorations:

Have you ever had a hard time explaining what it is to be a Unitarian Universalist? I have.   When I’ve struggled to explain UU-ism to others, I often turn to the Seven Principles, especially the one that says we affirm and promote “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” The principles have been a touchstone for me, particularly since being a mentor to Coming of Age youth. Helping youth learn about our faith by completing activities in a notebook organized by the principles has strengthened my appreciation of them.  A few years ago, we also got to hear stories exploring the seven principles during Star Studio Sundays. Heck, all you have to do is look in the front of our hymnals to find the Seven Principles.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found that the wording for the principles and sources of Unitarian Universalism were up for a vote at the General Assembly in Salt Lake City back in 2009. A vote to change the principles--how was that possible? What would they do with the coming of age notebooks, the pamphlets, the hymnal?

As it happened, the changes were voted down and the wording remains, but this revelation got me started on learning more about the history of our faith. This morning, I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned. It turns out that those principles and sources are not a permanent fixture in our churches and were never meant to be. In fact, the vote in 2009 was long overdue.

Let me go back to the beginning, which was 1960, the year before the consolidation of the two denominations. At that time, creating and agreeing on six principles was a painstaking process because the Unitarians and Universalists had very different ideas about what they should say.  The original of what is now our fourth principle about the “free and responsible search” was then the first principle and stated that “the members of the Unitarian Universalist Association, dedicated to the principles of a free faith, unite in seeking to strengthen one another in a free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of our religious fellowship.”

Notice the difference in wording. It went from “free and disciplined” to “free and responsible.” It’s that word responsible that I want to focus on today. What does it mean to be responsible, particularly when paired with freedom? I’m going to go out on a grammatical limb here and suggest that responsible can be understood as “able to respond.” I know this is not what you’ll find in a dictionary. There it says “accountable,” but indulge me, please.

If ours is to be a search that is responsible—as in able to respond—what might that mean? Well, in the late 1970’s, being able to respond as a movement included responding to the changing attitudes toward women and religion. Warren Ross, a UU historian, explains how the UUA responded in an article in the UU World.  He writes:  “Granted, two other emerging understandings also helped make the existing Principles seem inadequate—first, that traditions other than the Judeo-Christian are important to our heritage; second, that our relation to the environment is one of our primary religious concerns. But the main impetus for change did come from the UU Women's Federation (UUWF).” 

The UUWF spearheaded an effort to revise the sexist language in the principles which you heard in our opening words. The initial draft was objected to by a group of ministers because it left out any reference to our Christian roots; one of those ministers was our former interim minister and current member Reverend Kim Beach. The ministers asked for open dialogue and a committee to study the situation. Kim Beach called for a set of Principles “with religious integrity, intellectual coherence, and literary quality."

As it happens, another minister who served TJMC, Rev. Walter Royal Jones, headed the special committee which went through a years-long process. This included sending out questionnaires, crafting a draft based on congregations’ feedback, creating a separate section that lifts up the “living traditions we share” in addition to the Judeo-Christian, holding small group discussions of the draft at the 1982 GA, submitting a new version based on that feedback for more discussion and debate at the congregational and then denominational level, and finally presenting the principles and sources which were approved at the 1984 and then the 1985 General Assemblies. Whew, that sounds like a UU process, doesn’t it?

So what does this history lesson have to do with us? For one, I love the process the UUA took to make major decisions about how they wanted to define themselves back in the 80’s. They were responsible, that is, able to respond—to women who objected to the patriarchal language of the principles, to Christians who objected to being marginalized, to others who found inspiration in non-Judeo Christian traditions. The process was “grass roots” in the sense that congregations were asked to provide input and that small groups hammered out language at General Assembly. It may have taken time, but the results would prove to be lasting. In fact, they’ve lasted longer than intended. The UUA by-laws, of which the Principles and Purposes are Article II, state that they are to be reconsidered every fifteen years.  They are not meant to be written in stone, but to be ever able to respond to our changing understandings of the world and our relation to it.

And yet. You knew that was coming, didn’t you? And yet, when I was confronted with voting on whether to affirm new language for our principles and purposes in 2009, I didn’t know anything about it. Our congregation hadn’t participated at all in the Commission on Appraisal’s four-year process of seeking input, nor had we discussed their final wording.  That’s one of the reasons you hear me talking about General Assembly and the resolutions they pass. I want us to be as involved in defining Unitarian Universalism as other congregations have been and as influential as many of our professional clergy have and continue to be.  Most of what I knew about being a Unitarian Universalist first came from being a member of this congregation, but I am grateful for all that I have learned since attending other churches and both district and national meetings. It has enriched my understanding and my devotion to this faith.

Which brings me to my own free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Yes, I love that my search is free—free from the limiting dogma and orthodoxy of my previous churches—and responsible--able to respond to my ever-changing and expanding understanding of the world and my place in it. My search brings me here to church, but it also takes me to reading book and exploring new spiritual practices, and yes, to General Assemblies. Sometimes my search makes me realize that I’ve been wrong. Take that vote three years ago in Salt Lake City on the Principles and Purposes. I voted no. I won’t go into all the reasons I voted no, but at least part of it was my reaction to changing those words that I have come to rely on when explaining Unitarian Universalism to someone. Considering how much I value being able to respond, perhaps it was not the most responsible thing to do.

Erik Wikstrom’s Explorations:

I know that you’ve heard it before.  You may have even said it yourself.  (Although I won’t make you admit it if you have!)  “One of the coolest things about Unitarian Universalism is that you can believe whatever you want!!!!!”  (Right?)

So many people – both within and beyond our ranks – truly believe that because we eschew creeds and dogmas, because we don’t tell one another what to think, that here you are free to believe whatever you want to.

Well . . . I don’t believe that.  In fact, I think it’d be fair to say that I’ve spent my career combating this myth.  (Again, both within and beyond our ranks.)  I fight it for three reasons:

First, because it’s just not true and I affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and not innuendo or misunderstanding.

Second, because when outsiders hear this they find it a source of ridicule and an excuse to dismiss the Grand Experiment we’re engaged with . . . because there are a whole lot of people believing a whole lot of ridiculous things out there and if within our faith you can believe whatever you want . . . ?  Not a pretty picture. 

I did my internship at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Concord, Massachusetts, and at the top of their steeple they have, not a cross, but a weathervane.    My mentor, Gary Smith, used to say that this was for too many people an all too apt symbol for our movement, because they believed that UUs don’t really stand for anything but go wherever the prevailing winds are blowing.  (Or, maybe, the countervailing winds.)

The third reason, though, that I want to debunk the myth that UUs are free to believe whatever we want to is, I think, the most important – because it’s an idea that’s damaging and dangerous.

Friends, I’m going to let you in on a little secret:  the search for truth and meaning matters.  It’s important.

It’s important because in our tradition we refuse to impose a meaning on one another – and on ourselves.  Refuse to accept an external mandate from On High about the meaning of life (except, perhaps, from Monty Python), yet meaning matters none the less.  We are pattern-sensing, meaning-making creatures.  (There’s a wonderful passage in a Kurt Vonnegut novel in which the main character confronts God about the meaning of life.  “What is the ultimate purpose of life?” he asks.  And God answers, “Must life have an ultimate purpose?”  “Of course!” the human replies.  “Then your purpose is to find the purpose.”  I paraphrase, but it should come as no surprise that Vonnegut was a UU.)

The search for truth and meaning is important, for instance, to the activists among us, who are in such danger of burning themselves out if they aren’t able to articulate – and, therefore, to draw strength from – the reason they do what they do.  What is the purpose, the meaning, of their crusade?  Without a clear answer to that one wears oneself out over time.  There’s virtually no way to avoid it.

And it matters to everyone when bad things happen to us or those we love.  The most natural response to a tragedy or a fright is to ask, “Why?”  Why me?  Why them?  What did we do to deserve this?  Why did this have to happen?  And I’m here to tell you this morning, the way we answer those questions matters a lot.

The pioneering religious educator Sophia Lyon Fahs once wrote something that I think should be emblazed on the walls of each of our congregations.  (At least it’s enshrined in the back of our hymnals.)

Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.

Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.

Some beliefs are like shadows, clouding children's days with fears of unknown calamities.

Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.

Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.

Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one's own direction.

Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.

Some beliefs weaken a person's selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.

Other beliefs nurture self-confidence and ignite the feeling of personal worth.

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.

Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.

It matters what we believe.  (That’s #657 if you want to read it to yourself again sometime.)  It matters what we believe.

Let me give you one example.  And this is a little bit risky because I’ll bet that some of you really believe this.  Well, lots of people believe that “everything happens for a reason.”  Yet let me show you what I, at least, think happens when you hold this belief and consider it part of the “truth and meaning” that you’ve found:

If everything happens for a reason, then when something bad happens to you or to someone you know and love you will naturally begin to search for the reason.  (We are, after all, pattern-sensing and meaning-making creatures.)  In and of itself this may not necessarily be a bad thing, yet when you believe that “everything happens for a reason” you are likely to find a reason like this:

This happened to teach me – or the other person – a lesson.

This happened because I – or the other person – wasn’t grounded enough, or loving enough, or open enough, or trusting enough, or something enough.

Let’s just stop at those two for a moment.  Let’s just stop and listen to the undercurrent of those “reasons.”  (And you can’t see it, but in my manuscript I’ve got quotation marks around the word “reasons.”)  Beneath these supposed “reasons” there is a steady drone tone – it’s your fault, it’s your fault, it’s your fault, it’s your fault.

Do you really want to say that to a little child with cancer, or to that child’s parents?  (It’s your fault, it’s your fault . . .)  Do you really want to say that to someone who’s just suffering through the death of a loved one?  (It’s your fault, you weren’t open enough to love, it’s your fault . . .)  Do we really want to say that to the survivors of a deadly mudslide in a rural village in a remote part of India who are burying their children?  (It’s your fault, you needed to learn a lesson about letting go, it’s your fault . . .)  Is that the kind of world we live in?

Now . . . I do believe that there are lessons to be learned in the things that happen to us.  I think that everything – even the most terrible – can teach us something.  Yet I don’t believe that these things happen to us so that we can learn these lessons.  I believe, instead, that because these things have happened we have the opportunity to learn a lesson.  I think that that difference is important.  It matters what we believe.

And so, I think, it’s important to declare that we Unitarian Universalists are not encouraged to believe whatever we want.  What we affirm is a free and responsible search for truth and meaning!  As Pam noted earlier, another meaning of “responsible” is “accountable,” and that phrase used to read “. . . a free and disciplined search . . .”

We are encouraged to search – freely, widely – yet to be responsible in our searching:  to test our discoveries with the peer-review of community, if you will; to listen to the discoveries others are making and to continually reassess our own in context of these others’; to keep searching so that our beliefs do not become “rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.”  To examine the beliefs we discover within the framework of the beliefs our human family has been discovering throughout its history and across its cultures.  Free and responsible.

Here’s one last reason I think that our free and responsible search for truth and meaning is so important, and why we need constantly to remind ourselves that we’re not free to merely believe whatever we want to.  (And I know I said I had three reasons . . . consider this a freebie.)

In 1968 my father, Wik Wikstrom, wrote a study for the Conference Board titled Managing By – and with – Objectives.  After reviewing the literature in the field known as “management by objectives” he noticed two common concepts.  First, and I’m quoting him here, “the clearer the idea one has of what it is one is trying to accomplish, the greater the chances of accomplishing it.”  The second idea he found was, and again these are his words, “progress can only be measured in terms of what one is trying to make progress toward.”

Hold those thoughts for a moment and listen to this piece, called “Fetish on Fads,” by my colleague David Rankin:

I felt sorry for Jake.  We were friends in seminary—many years ago.  He was now a broken soul.

When he was a college student, he was into existentialism—Camus, Sartre, and Kierkegaard.

When he was a graduate student, he was into world religions—Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism.

When he was a theological student, he was into the new psychology—Fromm, Rogers, and Maslow.

When he was a minister, he was into experimental worship—guitars, folk-songs, and dialogue.

When he was a community organizer, he was into direct action—marches, sit-ins, and rallies.

When he was a welfare recipient, he was into human potential—EST, Rolfing, and holistic medicine.

Jake had discovered all kinds of things—but never the center of himself.  He could not dance in the empty spaces, or listen to the sound of no birds singing.

[He] had discovered all kinds of things—but never the center of himself.  He could not dance in the empty spaces, or listen to the sound of no birds singing.

It’s important to remember, to know, that what we’re trying to accomplish in our search for truth and meaning is not simply some kind of sound byte to lull us back to sleep – we’re looking for the center of ourselves, the center of the universe, the center of Life itself.  And not all beliefs lead there; some even lead us away.

It matters what we believe, and because it matters so much our search must be both free and responsible.  Else we might never learn to “dance in the empty spaces” and “listen to the sound of no birds singing.”

On Faith

In Anthony deMello's book Contact With God he talks about reading an article written by two lay psychologists that looked at the priests and monks they had treated.  They reported that,

"out of the dozens of priests and brothers who came to them for help in their personal problems, only two ever even so much as mentioned the name of God in all their interviews, and only one of these, a lay brother, mentioned [God] as an important factor in his life and his cure.  To all the rest it seemed as though God had no part in their lives."

I know that this would be true of Protestant clergy as well, and believe that it probably would be true of the majority of Christian laity as well -- at least from the liberal and progressive branches and traditions.  (I don't know if it also would be true of Buddhists and Hindus and Jains, but I would surmise that it would.)  We live our lives -- even those who claim to be "religious" or "spiritual" -- except for those times that we've set aside as "religious" or "spiritual" time -- an hour on Sunday, perhaps, and maybe a brief period several days a week for our private practice -- as if we were strict secularists.

Functional atheists is the term that's often used for this phenomenon.  (I was going to write, "condition.")  We function in the world as though we do not believe there is anything beyond ourselves, even when we profess that we do. 

Take a moment to think about what you believe to be true about the way the world works?  About your place in it?  About our relationship to one another and to the cosmos?  About the meaning of life?  About death?  About the "Sacred Something?"

Now ask yourself -- and be courageously honest here -- do you live your life as if you truly believed these things?  Could others tell that these are your beliefs by the way you live your life?  (Mohandas Gandhi frequently said that his life was his message, and Dom Helder Camara is remembered as saying that your life is the only Gospel others will read.)  Are your words and deeds in accord with these beliefs?  If, as the saying goes, these beliefs were suddenly declared against the law, would there be enough evidence against you for a conviction?

This, I was once taught, is the difference between belief and faith.  The distinction was lifted up for me during a seminary course, an introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures.  My professor said that so much is made in the Hebrew Scriptures of people's faith because everyone had belief.  Everyone believed in God (at least some god or goddess or other); everyone believed in prayer; everyone believed in miracles; everyone believed in such things.  So belief was not the issue.

Faith was living as if you believed and that's why it was so special, because not everyone had faith -- then as now.  A person of faith was, and still is, a relatively rare thing.

It is, perhaps, especially difficult today because so much of the language -- the images, the metaphors, the poetry -- of faith has been co-opted and perverted.  It is so easy to be misunderstood.  Even to speak of "God" is to invited confusion, yet not to might in the long run be even worse.  Not to might be the path to the situation the psychologists discovered among the priests and monks -- religious people unable to talk about religion, spiritual people divorced from their own spiritual lives in the world.

We'll continue looking at this -- and explore what might be done about it -- on Friday.

In Gassho,

RevWik