Dimensions of Depth in Unitarian Faith

October 16, 1966
Plainfield

Dimensions of Depth in Unitarian Faith

Because Unitarians hold that answers should be tentative, not dogmatic to the perennial important religious questions, there sometimes prevails the notion that our Unitarian Universalist faith is shallow, not profound, broad, but not deep. In any religion, whether authoritarian or free, shallow beliefs are reflections of individual perception rather than being accurately mirrored in group professions of faith. Unitarian Universalist belief can be shallow or deep depending on the individual who holds it. Such range can be discovered across the entire spectrum of religious organizations anytime and everywhere.

In some faiths, theology is believed to be distinctly separated from philosophy, history, or social science. Some persons would still hold that theology is wisdom based on divine, supernatural revelation while all philosophies and sciences are wise words and methodical classifications limited to human knowledge, naturally achieved.

While we in the Unitarian Universalist societies are not limited by creedal statements, the belief would certainly prevail among us that wisdom and knowledge are human, acquired through the human interweaving of human knowledge, human reason, and human dialogue. Among us, this human emphasis would be just as true of theologies as with other scholarly fields. This attitude can be described as shallow only by those who assert pretentiously or piously that THEIR interpretation of religious experience is supernaturally revealed and divinely sanctioned. But shallow faith can be characteristic of any self-named believer.

In the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, Shakespeare's genial, gluttonous, conniving rogue John Falstaff says, "I myself sometimes, leaving the fear of God on the left hand and hiding my honor in my necessity am fain to shuffle (equivocate) hedge and lurch."

We live in times when there is equivocation and hedging doubt about the values and standards which should prevail both in our solitary moments of reflection and our outward expressions of belief and conduct in society. The modern poet, Theodore Lockhart has lines entitled, "for the preacher," expressing feelings many persons share:

"There is no ground beneath us.
There is nothing on which to stand.
All that is, is flux,
And in the middle flounders man,
Feverishly he beats the air –
The air, the air, the endless air;
Seeking inside him how to stand.
Cursing God; he does not exist!
Praying God: he must exist!
The moon stands watch over long
Deep night.
Out of charred black muck slips a lily’s shoot,
And the life winter hawked with savage gleam,
Foils the clutch and takes new root
And grass long dead comes a muted green."

Of course Unitarian Universalist belief can be shallow. If one wants to ally himself with our faith, he need not be an intense pursuer of deep meaning. If one wishes a religious alliance that can be treated lightly without hypocritical commitment to a creed, he can do so in a Unitarian Universalist society. The individual is on his own. His liberal faith can be simply a rejection of orthodox beliefs,with the religion of an inquiring mind going no deeper than the surface of what religion is and what religion does. One may regret that such triviality occurs sometimes, but it does happen nevertheless.

As the poet indicated, when we dive below the surface, we may not find solid bottom; we almost surely will do some floundering. It is no trivial process whereby the long, dead grass of shallow or rejected faith takes on fresh green and new growth because roots have become abundant with life-giving resources.

Did you see the cartoon in the S.R., (9/17/66), where two unshaven characters are on the park bench and one says to the other, "I’m a rat-race dropout."

Not the least of reasons why life seems a rat-race is that the meaning of human experience becomes elusive; the reasons fade why we should keep laboring for high goals. Many are dropouts from the adventurous search for meaning, and life then seems a rat-race.

But in spite of a considerable amount of expressed bravado and confidence among the ranks of those who profess a more traditional faith, much shallow belief prevails there, too. The recent flap over a theological appraisal by Mr. John Lennon, one of the Beatles, illustrates this neatly. A few weeks ago, John Lennon remarked casually that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. There were cries of outrage from those who responded with instant indignation. But beyond the frequency with which the name of Jesus is invoked by Christian institutions and the undeniable statistic that the hundreds of millions of nominal Christians outnumber even Beatles fans, Jesus' popularity is not great if one is measuring the influence of his life and teachings on the unsolved problems of war, prejudice, poverty and impersonality. [scrawled note: After 1st service: do you know what an English atheist is? Someone who doesn’t believe in John Lennon.]

An English journalist writing about a run-down Christian Church reports that scrawled on the cement-block wall was the sentence, "We love John, Paul, George and Ringo.” Romain Rolland's evaluation, as written into the character of the young Jean Christophe is neither unfair nor uncharacteristic, "Jesus hardly occupied his thoughts at all. It was not that he did not love him: he loved him when he thought of him: but he never thought
of him."

Voluminous writing has been devoted to the "Death of God" theology, but many of the indignant rebuttals by the God-believers have failed to deal with an obvious reality of contemporary experience. As far as handling the difficult problems of life today between and in nations, there seems to be no productive help in either the existence of God or the death or non-existence of God. One's profession about this seems to be a matter important only to individual taste and personal comfort.

But it is of lesser importance to us whether or not most persons of traditional faiths maintain profound levels in their religious beliefs. It is of more importance to each of us here to seek dimensions of depth in our own Unitarian Universalist interpretation of what religion is and what religions should motivate us to do.

In these times of international peril and national tension, there is a persisting strain as the ancient and abiding human failings of anger, greed and misunderstanding are supplied with intolerable weapons for their indulgence. Within our 1100 or more religious societies and in any given single society, the range of beliefs is considerable, not only about the ideas of religion but also the theories of applying religion to life. Amid that diversity are there ways that one can come to terms with himself in deeper dimensions of religion.

Although there is no authoritarian creed, holy book, or divine man to pronounce the word of faith for us, there are guidelines even in an unstructured faith whereby we can measure the vertical as well as the horizontal. We can seek understanding; we can appraise; we can transcend.

We can understand:
If we but realized it more fully than we do, we would discover more depth by rejoicing in and using more the wealth of knowledge and ideas available to us through our appreciation of universality. Because we have given no doctrinal mortgage to any unchangeable doctrine in Christianity or any other particular faith, we are free to understand the knowledge of many disciplines, free to appreciate the testimonies of many faiths.

If we except the ever-changing dynamisms of science, our understanding will be increased the more rapidly because we are not limited by a theology which has prescribed the nature of our universe. The whole range of discovery in the physical and social sciences provide clues to the origin of the universe and the nature and destiny of man.

One illustration out of hundreds possible: There is renewed theorizing and research about the nature of the cosmology of the Universe of which we are a part. The three-story Universe believed in by those who wrote the Bible and formed the doctrines of Christianity has been discarded for centuries. Even though our instruments measure galaxies and see back into time, as light reaches us which originated billions of light years ago, "cosmology, the science of the Universe is in the state electricity was in when Franklin was flying his kite," according to Robert Cowen, a science editor. To over-simplify some of the newer theories of the astronomer Fred Hoyle, there is some probability that the Universe was never created but always renews itself by the internal forces of its being; that the Universe had no Creator but is always creating. To come to terms with such an hypothesis, even if only in our feelings, is to deepen the dimensions not only of mystery but of religious insight. Dr. John Bahcall, a cosmologist at California Institute of Technology comments, "there's much more in the Universe than in anybody's cosmology. There'll be a lot more in everybody's cosmology when we have a lot more facts than we have today."

We can seek to understand people by attempting to learn more about the forces that create individual and group behavior; learn more about the kind of effort which will heal rather than aggravate the more destructive feelings and behavior. We are burdened by no denominational dogmas about man's depravity; we are handicapped by no theological decrees which assert the superiority of any variety of human being; we are not tied to the pronouncements of any State. We are free to understand what social scientists are learning about human behavior. We have the power to receive such findings carelessly and trivially; or we can take such knowledge seriously as an important tool to help dig deeper in our understanding of the nature of man and man' s options for his own destiny.

One thing more: because we reject the notion that anyone's religion has THE TRUTH, we are free to understand the religious search and discovery of others whose faith tradition had different origins and unlike development.

Several years ago I clipped a news story of a disastrous volcanic eruption on the island of Bali, killing more than 150 islanders and burying some villages in lava. The account went on to tell how the Balinese people believed that the gods were angry "because the people failed to ask permission to hold a special festival in the famed Temple of Besakih. Superstitious, you may conclude, but not entirely different from the theology of Job's friends or any other Western theology which implicitly or explicitly holds that natural disasters are punishments for what is named "sin."

Our individual faith can be deepened if each comes to terms with this widespread notion that individuals are punished by natural disasters. One can reject such a theology – certainly I reject it – but one can attempt to come to terms with an underlying supposition even though expressed in superstitious terms: That is a feeling for the oneness and the interrelatedness of all that is in our experience, the nonhuman natural as well as the human. The superstition might just be an overclouded pointer to some concept that is both intellectually valid and rewarding in meaning.

We need to understand that while the Christmas season is soon upon us, that hallowed and expensive though the celebration will be in Christian lands, in India "there are six hundred million people who believe Xmas to be a fantasy." [That was a line from ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER.] We should be singularly able to understand that one’s religious dogma may be some one else's fantasy. But such awareness does not diminish the opportunity to understand more about the great feelings of celebration when the seasons swing on their quarterly pivots.

In Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, when Christian runs to seek eternal life, two neighbors seek to bring him back – one is Obstinate; the other Pliable.

Truth is a running stream, not a locked-in pool. When we fail to reconstruct the truth on the occasion of new discoveries of the mind, or in creating new combinations of accruing human experience, then we are captured by old Obstinate. We can deepen our faith by renewal of allegiance to the authority of truth, known or to be known.

The comparable peril is that we shall confuse an open mind with a vacant one. Then, as in Bunyan's allegory, Pliable robs us of conviction.

Therefore we must not rest with understanding, we must appraise that which is offered for our yeas or nays.

Our faith is deepened when we estimate the worth of the important options before us. Disaster is created by gullible mentalities as well as obstinate ones. The irrationality of a mob, the shallow minds which change direction with each breeze of different influence, no matter how palpably false, destroy dimensions of depth in one's religious faith. Emerson said, best, "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

We will deepen faith by measuring events and claims with an appraising mind – free minds, but tough minds; not only wide-ranging in gathering facts but also focusing on evaluations of truth and falsehood. As John Erskine commented so many years ago, we have an "obligation to be intelligent" because the world of human experience needs the continuing surgery of the inquiring mind steadily cutting away the soft decay which can accumulate when the right questions are not asked; when authentic issues are not appraised.

In recent years there has been an astonishing increase in communication between divisions of the Christian Church, the ecumenical movement it is called, or "dialogue." Obviously we are called upon for only limited participation because we do not share even the somewhat uncertain assumptions of faith which have brought together for conversations the large branches of Christianity. We can be sympathetic to the movement, learn from it. The principles of appraisal suggested by church historian, E.L. Allen are stimulating:

“The convinced Protestant (we would substitute Unitarian Universalist) coming to a better knowledge of Roman Catholicism or Greek orthodoxy finds himself taking four attitudes toward it.

a) He discovers in it the truth he already holds, so that this extreme unity is already present.

b) He finds in it that which he must reject as error. To this extent conflict must continue, but it can be qualified by charity.

c) He finds in it that which appeals to him as new truth, some idea or practice hitherto strange to him which convinces him as something he must learn and make his own.

d) He finds in it that which he can neither accept as truth nor dismiss as error. He realizes its spiritual value for others but it does not speak to his condition. He must respect it, but he cannot make it his own.”

In an age where our religion carries with it an obligation to defend intelligence against vague, confused positions, we will deepen our faith by reasonable, courageous appraisal. In a time where it seems increasingly difficult to maintain one's personhood because we are fair game for "persuasion" and manipulation, the dimensions of personal religion will be less shallow when we measure as well as listen.

A third dimension is needed. Not simply understanding, not alone appraisal, but transcendence is necessary.

The capacity to transcend is not some occult gift of faith. The capacity to transcend is the ability to get beyond self. The capacity to transcend is keeping faithful to splendid loyalties. This is a difficult dimension to maintain because loyalty to a cause beyond self is perhaps the hardest test of our ease-seeking, anxiety-resistant egos. The need for a goal beyond self may have been why Voltaire commented that if “God didn't exist we would have to invent him.” But no particular theistic position is required and none is necessarily dismissed. One must have respect for self, otherwise even worthwhile efforts produce only self-misery. One must have goals beyond self for if these do not call us to fine duties, then the self becomes a perishing Narcissus.

In his poem, "Re-appraisal," Stanton A. Coblentz may have captured the point:

"If from some ultimate observation post
We could review our lives on earth, and see
The selves we were, and what we strove to be,
And all the goals and gods we used to toast,
What, from that pinnacle, would sparkle most?
Riches, I think would seem a broken key
To a door that faded; pride a wind-stripped tree
And fame a mist along a midnight coast.

Only those blocks, I hold, by which we build –
One with a brush or spade, one with a pen,
One with a deed of love, one with a song,
One with a steeple – show a life fulfilled,
And from a peak beyond the paths of men
May shine like stars above the murky throng,"

In his book, THE SEARCH FOR PURPOSE, which is encouraging for the human venture, Arthur E. Morgan likened a person's life to an ocean vessel: “The direction in which the ship will travel is determined by the navigator, using the steering wheel and rudder. The actual motion of the vessel is determined by the power plant and its fuel. Without a power plant the the vessel would only drift; with a power plant, but without a rudder, it would only go in circles, or would zigzag with changing winds and currents."

Arthur Morgan’s metaphor its suggestive – if the capacity to understand is the vessel, and the capacity to appraise, the power plant, the capacity to transcend, to get beyond self is the rudder which enables one to follow the best course.

The deep dimensions of religion – life’s finer experiences, if you will, come to us when we are convinced that religion can be both intelligent and useful; both intellectually honest and ethically inspiring; both reasonable and calling forth our reverence as we seek to know, courageously to appraise and determined fix our course on goals beyond self.