Roots Of Belief

February 23, 2001
updated from June 13, 1993

For four years of my life, I was a Unitarian. Two of those years I don’t remember, because it was in infancy until I was two years old. 47 years a Universalist, 39 years a Unitarian Universalist. When my parents moved from Boston to Everett, I was brought up in a Universalist Church. I taught Sunday School when still in high school. At the age of 16, I was Youth Sunday preacher to a large congregation who were most kind to my youthful and brash extravagance of expression. That Universalist Church was not only a shelter when I needed one, it was also a free forum where I could express radical ideas about religion without either being “put down” or leaving the church.

Shakespeare has Berowne say in LOVE’S LABOR’S LOST: “Young blood does not obey an old decree.”

In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, from that one Universalist Church, five young men entered our ministry: Owen Whitman Eames, Wallace Fiske, Frederic Harrison, Robert Sterling and a few years later, yours truly, as one of the so-called second “career” persons. (In the 1930s, one did not have a career. If lucky, one had a job.)

A few years later, while living in Whitman, a southeastern Massachusetts town and a member of a small, struggling Unitarian church, I was encouraged to prepare for the Universalist ministry by two Universalist students from Tufts Theological Seminary, Albert Zeigler and Fred Harrison. Fred was an old friend from Everett school and church days. Al became a life-long friend. I mourned their deaths.

Tufts was established by Universalists, but I went to St. Lawrence, also established by Universalists. I have been twice married – once in pre-consolidation terms to a Universalist, and once to a Unitarian.

How has Unitarian Universalism impacted on my life? What you see and hear is what you get.

But to add to that, one of the major ways that Unitarian Universalism has influenced me is that I learned to wrestle with the large questions of life: Who am I? What can I believe? What must I do? I have not always been on top. My shoulders have been pinned to the mat often enough. But I have tried and still try to deal with the Big Ideas. Even though I am now a Unitarian Universalist, in the following I will use the word Universalist, because as mentioned, most of my life has been in Universalist churches. It is also my way of reminding persons that the neglect of Universalist in many ways ignores (or snubs) half of our heritage. This pisses me off; and is a constant temptation to wave goodbye. But I never claimed to be an unemotional creature.

One of the ways I have learned to deal with the large questions could be condensed in the title of a pamphlet written by my friend, teacher and fellow Universalist minister, the late Angus Hector MacLean, distinguished professor of religious education at St. Lawrence University, “The Method is the Message.”

One of the most frequently asked questions of my life has been, “What do Universalists believe?” The theological origins of Universalism, that all souls would be saved; there was no Hell into which sinners were cast forever – this theological basis did not have much relevance in the 20th century, because most persons did not believe in Hell after death. There were sufficient hells on earths. Most of the mainline churches had stopped preaching fire and brimstone.

So I would answer something like this: Universalists do not believe alike in many ways. We differ. The proper question is: “How do Universalists arrive at their beliefs?” From where I stand, one can assume that a Universalist accepts the body of tested truths accumulated and continuously refined by the historian, the geologist, the astronomer, the physicist, social scientists, and practitioners of other authentic learned professions. The Universalist believes reason to be a guide and validates propositions through experience and experiment. The Universalist places freedom and the worth and dignity of all persons as the highest values. The Universalist still looks with hope on the nature and destiny of the human venture in spite of calamitous and cruel events. Theologies are NOT divine revelations. All theologies are interpretations of human experience. Always there are varying interpretations of human experience.

Sometime in the years 1926-29, my minister, Ulysses S. Milburn, placed in my hands an essay written by John Erskine, then a distinguished professor of literature at Columbia University. I have never entirely forgotten it. The title was “The Obligation to be Intelligent.” With provocative wit he wrote of the need to combine intelligence with other desirable qualities of living, using as a text, Kingsley’s line, “Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever.” Erskine criticized the all-too-common attitude that there is a division between goodness and intelligence. In Erskine’s words, “stupidity is regarded as first cousin to moral conduct and cleverness is the first step into mischief, that reason and Good are not on good terms with each other, that mind and heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced, full mind, starved heart – stout heart, weak head.”

Years later, I found confirmation of Erskine’s thesis. The term “egghead” is not usually intended as a compliment. Adlai Stevenson was so named, not by his supporters, but by his opponents and critics.

Of course the intention of my Universalist minister was to impress on this teen-age rebel that the application of intelligence to religion is necessary. Can a religion for our time be anything but a thoughtful religion? Should not religion make sense? I may not be all that intelligent, but I try. At least I believe I have developed a “nonsense indicator” which works for me much of the time.