Is Unitarianism Necessary?

September 17, 1967
Plainfield

Is Unitarianism Necessary?

Necessary to whom, or for what?

Any Unitarian Universalist minister probably has more bad moments with that question than most of you. Therefore in accepting a suggestion to speak on the subject, you should recognize that although I, too, ask myself, "Is Unitarianism necessary"? sometimes despondently. Yet, sooner or later, whether justified or not, I experience a renewal of confidence that the values and the ideas behind the institution are the very reason why the institution may seem at times to falter or lose its power to inspire. Ideas move faster than institutions, inevitably. If the church organization and effort seemed always to be excellent, it could mean that there had been a drying up of ideas, that a static rather than dynamic state prevailed.

Why did the question arise? As many of you know, at the meeting to which I referred in my sermon last week, a feeling of impotence and irritation gathered because the 150 Unitarians present could not readily discover tasks within their power to do which might have a positive effect on problems in our troubled cities. It was said of the distinguished intellectual scholar, Henry James, that "he was a generation removed from the odors of the shop." (quoted by Lionel Trilling, THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION, p. 13) Those who see insufficient Unitarian impact on the bristly issues of the day may feel we are a generation removed from nitty-gritty realities.

There was a cartoon in the "New Yorker," some months ago, (12/10/66): Two shipwrecked men were clinging desperately to a timber in a vast and desolate ocean waste. One is saying to the other, “Oh, I don’t agree. We have many things to be thankful for; the natural buoyancy of wood for example.” There are those who feel that Unitarian justifications for being are somewhat limited; that today our efforts are not effective.

Is Unitarianism necessary? Obviously to most persons it is not necessary because our numbers represent only the tiniest fraction of the total population. Even among those congregating among us, the word "necessary" does not always fit. For many it is convenient or helpful, for others, the least harmful of religions they have known. The varying degrees of attachment are for different reasons also, as the Goals Committee’s Report demonstrates: "intellectual stimulation, fellowship, celebrating common values, group worship, personal reflection, music-aesthetic satisfactions, motivation to serve others." Most of us would reflect a combination in unlike measure of all or some of these motives. In most basic ways, we Unitarians and Universalists are not different from other people. We are confronted by the mysteries of the origin and destiny of man; we meet the serious problems and artistic experiences of living. What we feel and what we believe about these encounterings of life; how we understand and how we interpret; what we will to do in our human activity – all these represent one's religion, no matter how one may divide or not divide the divine and the human in words and worship, no matter how one may ponder such distinctions called “spiritual” and “ethical.”

Is Unitarianism necessary? In spite of occasional pessimism my answer is "yes." Both the institution and the ideas are needed by us and many others. I won't recite again the reasons persons are here – reasons of feeling, intellect, teaching, worship, opportunity to serve – but I do not know other institutions where the inquiring mind, the feeling heart and the serving hands gather persons who believe that, free from imposed dogmas, we can build a church all peoples, an advocate for all peoples. Then we can seek the best wisdom and aesthetic creations from all cultures in order to deepen our insights, expand our appreciation of the many-splendored human family and strengthen our grasp on moral essentials.

Of course we have our hang-ups. Institutions, religious or any other kind are cumbersome. To maintain flexibility and continuity requires never-ending attention and imagination. And of course tensions arise in an open society such as ours. The other night, a [religious education] director remarked that the U U A should be named, "the United Church of Crisis."

But I was reflecting how Marshall McLuhan writes books which are widely read as he attempts to prove his thesis that the age of the printed word is over. I have a little of the same feeling when I consider that the question of “is Unitarianism necessary?” arose in the Unitarian institution when 125-175 Unitarians gathered to attempt to confront serious problems. This was not the first time, nor will it be the last when this church and many others will be the scene of confrontations of issues that are both real and immediate. Last week, the minister of one of the larger churches in Plainfield told me that "Liberty St. One Way" was one of the best things done in Plainfield in years. So one may knock the institution, it will deserve it, or point out that distinctive efforts are the product of the very few, and that will usually be a correct observation, but there are positive qualifications to be made to critics as well as the converse.

But any person who believes that a Unitarian religious society should play only on a single string, make just one emphasis, will find that Unitarianism is not necessary or even palatable for him. We are diverse – not single-stringed – and this can produce vibrations of disharmony as well as pleasing melodies, and a repertoire, not a single tune.

But recognition of our authentic and sincere differences about what a church is and what it should do should not overshadow the necessity of recognizing our unities. The prime unity is our ideas of human personality – that man is worth the efforts to improve his condition, confidence that all persons by definition are beings of innate, irrevocable dignity. This premise is the basis of our freedom principle. Hope for man is a basic value still. I have found the most persisting and persuasive support of this foundation value in the Unitarian Universalist religion. So to me the religion is necessary still.

I hold this value not too naively, I hope. I believe that human nature is not only basically good, but also it has sensitivities and growth possibilities that we yet only sense faintly. But I would not overlook the conflicts and fears men have, nor the evils men do. Deep within our human nature are forces which hold us back from doing the good we could; from being the whole person we might. The poet Edith L. Pierce meditated on the Yang-yin potentials in man after she read about the discovery of what might be the oldest human bone. This bone, millions of years old, was classified as an elbow joint.

The Oldest Bone

Not a skull or jaw or tooth
Tells the last word of prehistoric truth.
A million years before time's previous point
Was hidden a discovered elbow joint.
How hang our questions on this baffling hook?
We can but guess and look.
What did this first bone dare?
To fling a weapon, lift a hand in prayer?
Or did its owner, with clay colors, limn
The shape of beasts that shared the world with him?
What caused his arm to bend?
What did this bone portend?
Search not in lava, rock or stone for stark
Rejoinder to this chalky question mark.
Look to yourself, O Man! Deep underground
The hinge bone has been found.

In our religious traditions we have always given the optimistic answer to the question, what did this bone portend? We need not scorn optimism for it is a product of hope, even though we do well to look at ourselves with astringent criticism as well as persisting hope, Robert Frost with the poet's mastery employed the imaginative metaphor of the Winter which is always overcome by Spring,

“yet all the precedent is on my side.
I know that Winter death has never tried
the Earth but it has failed."

Out of still more ancient roots and tendencies came the humanitarian consciousness of the Old Testament prophets, from many old ideas: the worth attached to all human life in the New Testament, the ancient Greek ideas of political democracy, the Roman insistence on lawful order, there gradually emerged through long centuries the value of the individual as a basic political and religious assumption. Under the influence of the Renaissance and its humanistic delight in man' s creativity and craftsmanship, fortified by the radical idea of the priesthood of all believers as espoused by the Protestant Reformation, thereby bringing the Church into the world, man the individual became delineated in history. In the brashness of this new order, the great navigators explored, charted, circumnavigated the globe (exploiting as they went). The individual entrepreneur developed his business enterprise, accumulated capital, and used it as a tool for expansion, persuaded that this was a natural consequence of the conjugation of all these movements. The artist found patrons who subsidized creativity for its own sake. Nation states succeeded most of the monarchies. Then the great political writers and philosophers, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine ignited revolutions in America and then France. Ever since, the remaining monarchs have become less and less powerful, and more symbols of national union.

All these signs of advance created a strong belief progress. There came to prevail an optimistic assurance that man was climbing the ladder to greater material goods for an ever-increasing percentage of people. A constantly widening political democracy seemed inevitable. In short, "man was going onward and upward forever." These optimistic beliefs and enlightened rational atmosphere were influential in persuading many persons to leave orthodoxies and enroll in the liberal religions, Universalism and Unitarianism. Thousands responded in the early days of our denominations, 150 or more years ago in our country particularly.

With the expansion of science and technology, when steam, and later other power, drove tools mechanically, there seemed to be no limitations to the promise of material abundance, no boundaries to the spread of political democracy and no dampening of the spiritual assurance of mankind, at least on the part of the rising, increasing middle class. Man was too good to be damned, said the Unitarians. Heaven was to be realized on earth. And the Universalists had argued persuasively that there was no Hell afterwards. Truly man was to have dominion over all things under the sun. I know of no one more naive, even pathetic example of the unrealistic optimism that prevailed than to speak of Andrew Carnegie and the Foundation for International Peace he established. When
j setting up this Foundation in 1910, he wondered what role the Foundation could play after it had succeeded in abolishing war. He left it to the judgment of the Trustees to decide what evil they would tackle next with what was left of the $10 million with which he endowed them. (see Bertram Wolfe, MARXISM, footnote, p. 4)

But amazing discoveries of science, the fantastic technical and engineering accomplishments, the refinements of democratic political thought and the rationality of liberal religion did not bring the Kingdom of God upon Earth. No candid appraisal of the condition of man should ignore the deficiencies that exist between theory and practice. We are impossibly naive if we disregard the blight creeping on the growth potential of man.

The refinements of political thought, combined with the massive injustices of war and punitive peace treaties, gave birth to Fascism, Nazism, and Communism as well as democracy. The democracies have never faced up to the logical consequences in the social order for the superb humanitarian ideals explicit and implicit in the great documents of democracy.

Yet in the face of formidable and massive problems, hope for man must be basic, not just in spite of our troubles but because of our troubles. This is not said complacently. No Aladdin’s Lamp exists to rub for miracle solutions. Furthermore, we are not going to do the impossible. But we would be dense indeed if we did not recognize that the limits of the possible shift constantly. Great expectations are trail blazes to better fulfillments. A specific example:

After successful experiments with animals in learning situations, it has recently been disclosed that finer hopes raise the level of achievement. When teachers have higher horizons of hope for children, the children tend to rise to meet these expectations. (See NYT 8/8/67)

“A random sample of 1st and 2nd graders at a South S.F. elementary school [were] predicted [to] make dramatic gains, [and did], while the rest of the student body [was not and] did not. Only the teachers and not the pupils or parents had been told of the predictions....”

The researcher (Prof. Rosenthal) believes that his tests provide important evidence supporting the common thesis that many children, particularly minority group children turn out dull because their teachers expect them to be dull.... When children are expected to do well, when they know that teachers have great expectations for them, their levels of achievement rise.

The full study will be published next Spring, fittingly called, "Pygmalion in the Classroom." If hopeful teachers are a positive, uplifting force in classrooms, then the expectations everyone of us has about the person he meets will be a positive force. The hopes we have for every person will be reflected in the thoughts we have, the words we say, the way we act. I like Bobby Burns’ lines in "The Cotters’ Saturday Night",

"They chant their artless notes in simple guise,
They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim."

Hope is the tuner of hearts. I back away from almost all of the theology of the most famous of the Church Fathers, Augustine, and Aquinas, but I say amen to their belief that hope was a principal of moral action. Long centuries before Christianity, Euripides wrote "the hope of life returns with the sun," and we too should have great expectations.

The Unitarian Universalists, whatever else we may disagree about, have a hopeful view of man. Everything I have discovered about human experience testifies that hope is necessary. We are not alone in such dreams of a Kingdom of God on Earth, or if you will, a Commonwealth of Man, but we are among those who, if we put our hearts and heads to the task will find that our hopes make a difference in us as well as others. In the great age of the navigators and explorers, Bartholomew Diaz, commanding a Portuguese fleet, sighted the South African cape. The storms were so severe that Diaz named the lands' end [Cabo] Tormentoso – Cape of Storms. But Diaz successfully navigated around the Cape and found he had discovered a new route to the spice markets of the Indies. When the fleet returned to Portugal, King John insisted that the way to the Indies must be named not Cape of Storms, but Cape of Good Hope. Neither Diaz nor King John were persons we would elect to any office today, but the principle of hope is as true now as then.

We can and will argue, debate, alter by-laws of the institutions of Unitarian Universalism. But when we are one in hope for humans in this wonderful but precarious adventure on our home planet, Earth, we are united in that which is required for you and me and everyone else – hope.