Measuring The Past – Weighing The Future

January 2, 2000
Venice

(re-write of March 21, 1982, Lakeland)

Thirty-nine years ago the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association consolidated, and the Unitarian Universalist Association became a new religious name on the continental scene. Today, I would like to review briefly the values that each brought from an historic past – values which should not be erased – and re-affirm proposals and principles which seem to me essential to justify an on-going religious enterprise which asks for loyalty and support. We are justified if we are useful in service to the human family, courageous, and thoughtful in evaluating the conflicts and stresses in society, and aware of the need to provide situations where we celebrate life together – worship. No religious endeavor is worthy of the commitment it requires unless it serves persons in their needs, challenges society to create both larger liberties and stronger social cohesion, and deepens our human grasp of the importance of the great ideas: the nature of this creating universe, our purpose and destiny on this earth and the “source of human good.”

There were Universalists and Unitarians hundreds of years before the movements were organized on this continent. The associations and denominations were structures to unite congregations and to house and protect ideas which had previously existed as heresies within other religious frameworks.

That all humankind, without exception, was not condemned to everlasting Hell, but was to be saved, was a theological affirmation existing from earliest Christian times. In America, the early Universalist preachers were almost exclusively “Bible Universalists,” many of them self-taught. They rebutted the orthodox claims of Hell and damnation with proof texts from the Old and New Testaments which indicated clearly that many of the Old Testament prophets, and in the New Testament, Jesus, Paul, and others believed that the nature of God was love, and that eternal creating love, by its very nature, prohibited eternal damnation, even for one single human soul. Hosea Ballou, the pioneer Universalist preacher, was riding circuit, place to place, preaching Universalism. He stopped in homes overnight. Somewhere in New England he stopped overnight with a farmer who did not agree with him and they discussed Universalism. The farmer’s son was somewhat of a drunk and when he did not return from town, the farmer was worried. He was afraid his son would go to Hell. “All right,” said Ballou, “We’ll find a place on the path where your son will be coming home. We’ll build a big fire, grab him and throw him into it.” The farmer was shocked, “That’s my son, I love him, I can’t do that.”

“If you, a human and imperfect father, love your son so much you wouldn’t throw him into the fire, how can you possibly believe that God, the perfect father, would do so?”

It is fair to report that the orthodox opponents could find numerous biblical proof texts which seemed to buttress their position that a few souls would be saved by the grace of God. But most souls were destined for eternal punishment in Hell.

This demonstrates one can “prove” almost anything from scriptures. Those who advocate “scientific creationism” using the scriptures as laboratory proof that evolution is erroneous do not seem to recognize that by the same means, scripture, one can “prove” that the earth is flat. So it would seem consistent to me that a believer in “scientific creationism” should, logically, belong to the Flat Earth society.

In Christian beginnings, universal salvation was a doctrine defended by many of the early leaders of the Church. Even when it became a heretical doctrine, some five hundred years after Jesus lived, there were frequent re-assertions of the doctrine of universal salvation by courageous heretics.

In modern Universalism in America, there was Dr. George de Benneville. Influenced by the Universalism of some of the German pietists who were a small but influential wing of the Protestant Reformation, de Benneville was preaching Universalism in Pennsylvania in the 1740s. John Murray, disciple of James Relly, came to America. After the remarkable experiences of the New Jersey landing, he found his ways to New England. Much to his surprise, he found a Universalist group in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1770. We would call it a fellowship today. After a series of dramatic events, he became minister of the first organized society of Universalists in America, The Independent Christian Church.

The movement spread rapidly in New England and Pennsylvania, soon reaching out to gather societies in New York and Ohio. In 1805, Hosea Ballou’s famous TREATISE ON THE ATONEMENT was the theological proposal which made most Universalists unitarian (small u) in their theology years before Unitarianism became an organized movement.

Unitarianism has roots as deep or deeper in the soil of human history. The Hebrew scripture proclaimed a monotheism at least from the time of the ethical prophets, 800 years B.C.E. The New Testament offers no evidence of Trinitarian belief. Belief that God was three was a later development of Christian dogma.

Disbelief in the Trinity became heretical. While monotheism remained the foundation of Jewish and Moslem theology, the Christian Church punished those who deviated from the Trinitarian dogmas.

Nevertheless, Unitarian thought flared again and again. Servetus, most well-known of the anti-Trinitarians of the Reformation period, was burned at the stake by John Calvin in Geneva, but his influence was not destroyed thereby. In the same sixteenth-century, the Socinian or Unitarian movement was organized in Transylvania by Francis David. David, later imprisoned, died in jail, but Unitarianism has persisted in Hungary for more than four hundred years.

Unitarianism in England pre-dated the movement in America by almost a century. Under the leadership of Theophilus Lindsey and Joseph Priestley, organization was made effective in the founding of Essex Hall Chapel in 1774.

In the United States, although there were early Congregational preachers who were Unitarian in thought, specific organization was delayed.

King’s Chapel was the first Anglican (Episcopal) Church in Boston. However, in 1785, the membership elected a liberal minister, James Freeman. Importantly enough, when the Bishop would not approve Freeman and refused to ordain him, the Parish delegated its Senior Warden to ordain Freeman – a radical departure from and rejection of the Anglican/Episcopal practice of ordination by the Bishop through whose laying on of hands on the ordinand maintained the doctrine of apostolic succession.

The American Unitarian Association was formed in 1825. It was not a uniting of churches, but was an individual membership organization. The inspired preaching of William Ellery Charming and the Unitarian influence on the faculty of Harvard Divinity School were important in the founding of the AUA. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, among others, strengthened the intellectual position and increasingly isolated the Unitarian movement from the prevailing orthodoxies.

For more than a hundred years, the Universalists and Unitarians maintained their denominational separateness, each accumulating heroes, heroines, traditions, trusts and institutional habits which were difficult to alter or abandon. Recognizing, however, that their theology and social attitudes were developing along parallel lines, there were overtures toward merger as early as 1865.

Both denominations took pretty much in stride the revolutions in scientific ideas and adjusted theological positions to cohere with modern thought. Darwinian evolution, the higher criticism of the Bible, and Freudian theories of our motives and inwardness all were accepted generally by both denominations and were positions which helped liberals toward a better understanding of human nature in a world of natural and orderly processes.

[CJW note: Mainline religions stopped preaching hellfire & brimstone; reference to a cartoon which depicts a minister giving a sermon in which he declares, “No matter how badly you have sinned, you don’t have to worry about losing your coverage!”]

In the 1950s, deliberations about merger intensified and in progressive steps, studies were undertaken, and various merger proposal voted, which led to the conclusive vote in 1960. The negotiations had been complicated and there was opposition, but the consolidation was overwhelmingly approved by the delegates. At the time, some of us remembered the words of the prophet Amos, “Can two men (sic) walk together except they agree?” Unitarians and Universalists agreed that their religious association was one and to walk together henceforth.

It is important to remember the values of the old which have been preserved in the new:

First, there is the basic theological/philosophical tradition of individual freedom, reason, character, optimism . This right of individual belief is maintained specifically in the purposes and objectives of the UUA: “To strengthen one another in a free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of our religious fellowship.”

Second is the great Reformation affirmation of the priesthood of all believers. We make no division between the clergy and the laity that asserts or implies that the clergyman has a unique, sacred calling. We ministers are trained to carry out the duties and responsibilities of the ordained minister, but we have no wisdom from on high that is denied the person in the pew or chair. The freedom and responsibility of both pulpit and pew have both historical precedent and continuing symbol in our traditions, in the ordination in King’s Chapel of James Freeman by the Senior Warden, a layman and ordination of John Murray by the Gloucester Universalists – laypeople all.

The parallel institutional right of congregational independence was a high value in both Unitarian and Universalist traditions and it has been preserved in the constitutional documents of the UUA.

There are many traditions in our historical past which are points of referral and wise guidance, but the most vital are the freedom of the individual and the independence of the congregation.

What shall we dream and try to make real in the future? The future cannot be precisely determined by the conditions of the present. One of the mysterious, tantalizing, and hopeful features of this dynamic universe is that effects can never be exactly predicted from observable causes. Prediction of things to come is always a venture of chance. I do not happen to believe in crystal balls, tarot cards, or the daily astrological column.

But it seems to me that one of our responsibilities is theological. When one looks back on the “death and Glory” argument which badly split the Universalists in the 19th century, when one considers the agitation and hot debates in the humanism/theism controversy of a few decades ago, as well as other issues on which there was division, one must surely recognize that theological debate is seldom a placid encounter. As one historian has remarked, “there is no rancor like that between theological opponents who fight for the glory of God as if the very devil were in them.”

We do need a theological framework which provides a reasonable enclosure for the revolutionary changes which are occurring in electronic communications, science, politics, economics and government. The UUA has a program, “Building your own theology” which I recommend, if you have not already used it.

But we must be just as wary of establishing a creed as were our forbears. The fact that a religion may be appraised as modern is no warrant whatsoever for an attitude requiring conformity to it, or being arrogant about it. In the historical room of the Universalist Church in Gloucester, there hangs a replica of the original Charter of Compact of that first organized Universalist Church. If you ever visit there, read the whole compact, but particularly notice the 9th article: “whereas the privilege of choosing and professing one’s own religion is inestimable; and in order to maintain that privilege unimpaired, in case any person associated with us should suffer persecution from the undue exercise of power, we do agree and resolve to afford him all legal means of extricating him from difficulty and of enjoying that freedom which is held forth by the Constitution.” The language may be slightly archaic, but the ethic is as imperative today as then.

Universal salvation, among us, has become less a theological proposition for the after-life and more an article of faith for the people living in this world – to affirm, defend, and promote the worth of every human personality and the use of the democratic method in human relationships. This is the additional meaning, The Big Idea, that has been transfused into the grand old theology of the universal salvation of all humankind.

There is no blinking the requirement that our faith must be not only free, but also exacting, for the defense of all souls is no trivial or easy task. It is something we must do together. John Coleman Adams, one of the superior of our 19th century preachers, once said that “our forbears were too jealous of their liberties to cultivate their unities.”

The defense of the free mind requires a good deal of unity. We should be neither boastful of our knowledge nor extravagant in our claims of virtue. Even as a consolidated association, we are tiny compared with the millions other churches can count. Nevertheless, we need to exert our efforts, the ounces of our weight, toward achieving a world which will consider all persons on earth worthy of salvation here on earth, which will Define salvation in terms of enough to live on as well as freedom to choose a faith to live by.

We live in communities where there is a multiplicity of differing religions, denominations, associations with differing theologies, symbols, sacraments, rituals, traditions. What is most needed for the 21st century is not a unity of faith, as faith is commonly understood, but rather an urgent witness to stimulate and encourage all persons to live up to the ethical demands of their own religions. We do this best by living up to our own. In our own way and in cooperation with others whose faith symbols may differ widely, can deal with issues of human dignity, rights, freedom, hunger, sickness, and the search for the common good.

Little Lamb Who Made Thee

May, 1993
Brooksville

September, 1995
Lakeland

Re-write from 1982

Opening Words:

I am aware that I am speaking to many of you who are at least two generations following mine; I have grandchildren younger than some.

My purpose today is not to proclaim certainties when there are many doubts.

My intention is not to disturb your convictions, for if you have convictions, you can respond.

That which sustains me is not a metaphysical absolute or a religious creed, but the human values and human civility without which we could not gather in peace.

Here we have freedom to inquire into any and all the major and minor ideas and issues of the human enterprise. My purpose is not to impress you with my beliefs or my doubts, but to stimulate you to ask yourself, “what sustains me?”and attempt an answer. If that occurs, my time will have been usefully spent.

William Blake
THE LAMB

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed,
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee.
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

William Blake
THE TIGER

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

May Swenson
THE UNIVERSE
[not yet in public domain]

Phyllis McGinley
TIMES THREE
[not yet in public domain]

Sermon:

William Blake’s two questions, enclosed in his vivid, mystic images, emphasize the dilemma one finds when attempting to deal with the question of a Creator. Blake deals with the creator of the gentle lamb with the answer that the creator incarnated himself as a little child, God becomes child. But Blake with his image of the fearful, savage tiger, he does not answer – leaves only the question. The question: can a good creator who makes the gentle lamb also bring into being the fierce tiger? That poetic economy expresses the quandary, ever-present, when an effort is made to discover what God is, what God does, or even if God exists.

I trust my remarks will show a certain modesty. Although the libraries are abundantly shelved with books on the subject; and sermons from most pulpits, are replete with pronouncements pleadings and persuasions about God, talking about God reminds me of a sentence I once read defining “journalism”: “a profession whose business it is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.” The last line of Phyllis McGinley's poem applies, “God knows which God is the God God recognizes.”

[Crossed out: It is also a “given” in a Unitarian Universalist society that when the minister talks about God, there will be a mix of reactions – the bored (what's he talking about THAT dull stuff for?); the hurt (he’s attacking my cherished belief); the patriotic anger (“this country was founded on God, and he’s trying to shake the foundation”). It may or may not come as a surprise to you, but ministers receive many criticisms as well as some compliments. Which reminds me of a minister’s story about the time he was ordained: An old lady, a family friend, asked him, “Was it your own idea or were you poorly advised?”]

Let’s begin with definitions – “a good dictionary is one of the best lie detectors.”

An atheist denies the existence of any god or gods.

An agnostic holds that it is not possible to acquire with certainty knowledge of whether or not god(s) exist. As originally coined by Thomas Huxley, the word “agnostic” indicated a suspension of judgment about ultimate issues.

A Deist believes that there is a god who created the universe, analogically like a clockmaker who makes a clock, winds it up – and departs. Such a god is not the source of goodness, not a moral being, and has no communication with human beings. Many times referred to, as Jefferson did, the God of Nature.

A Theist usually believes that God is a personal both above and within the Universe and who has moral relations with persons.

A Humanist is even more difficult to define briefly. She/he may be theist, deist, agnostic, or atheist as far as the idea of God is concerned, but holds that the proper focus of religion should be fixed at human life on earth; life here and now. To repeat the familiar and classic definitions of humanism: “man is the measure of all things.” (Protagoras ) – “the proper study of mankind is man” (Pope). In another sense, the Humanist may believe that the only source of human knowledge is from human perception, individual and collective, natural only, never supernatural; that beliefs in god(s) are the product of human culture and heritage, individual and social; that religious beliefs are always relative, never absolute.

Usually, the questions about God can be roughly divided into those who have different answers to such questions, as, is God a human-like Creator dwelling in a supernatural realm? Or is God an impersonal force? Others answer in terms of verbal or artistic symbols which point to the mystery in growth, change, creation, destruction.

There seems to have been a history of change in the idea of God. Long before history was written, human worshiped the gods of the seasons. In autumn, vegetation and foliage withered, fruitfulness was ended. When spring came, the earth revived. The mysterious process of seedtime, growth, and harvest stirred deep religious feelings. The spirits of corn and wild were worshiped as gods, who, through will and whim, sustained humans. The Greeks called the mystery, Adonis; the Babylonians, Tammuz; the Celts and Scots, John Barleycorn – and such are only a few of the names of the dying-rising savior god of vegetation, who was a “hero with a thousand faces,” as Joseph Campbell described in his book of that name.

The belief that God created man in his image is a foundation of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Although most persons are relatively uninformed about the sacred writings of the Jewish and Christian traditions, nearly everyone would know that somewhere in the book of Genesis, there appears the statement that God made man in his (God’s) image. (1/26, “let us make man in our image after our likeness.”) The implications of the plural “our” seem not to bother believers, even though it is a contradiction of “one god.” I go along with those scholars who believe that ages ago, prehistoric, God was both male and female (androgynous); or that, in some cultures, two gods, one male, one female, shared the powers.

In the Western world, our roots are mainly in Indo-European stock of peoples, even though the origins of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are Semitic. Historically, God has been masculine, bearded, with European facial, skin, and hair characteristics, generally. That is what God is, because we are his image, or so it is widely believed. After all, that is the way Michelangelo painted God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Would there be the same picture if we were African, Polynesian, or American Indian, untouched by Western Christian culture? Of course not. More than 2500 years ago, Xenophanes, poet and philosopher of ancient Greece (540-500 BCE) observed the religious scene of his day. He noted that the gods and goddesses of his land were Greeks of beautiful body, possessing the qualities of strength, courage, and intellect which were valued and admired by Greek people. As Xenophanes, long ago, came to know Africans, he discovered that their gods were black of skin. The gods of Asians were cast in Asian mold. So Xenophanes, long ago, came to the conclusion that man creates his gods in man’s image. If our culture had been maternal instead of paternal, woman would have Created God in woman’s image.

As best as we can understand pre-historic peoples, the pressure of survival shaped their gods. The storm threatened, the drought would starve, the flood would drown. But a balance of sunshine and rain provided people with enough food to survive. Little wonder that the powers of nature stirred fear. The gods of sun, rain, thunder, vegetation, water were ritually worshiped with awe and wonder – and sacrifice.

Gods came to be worshiped because of other beginnings. Perhaps one person gave great and heroic service. Within a few generations because of impact and memory, the tribe promoted the hero to god-ship.

When one considers the ancient Hebrew legends and myths, Yahveh may have been a mountain god, originally, perhaps an active volcano. This may be the origin of the reference in the old scripture that the children of Israel were led by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. This would describe with some accuracy an active volcano being used as a distant point of guidance.

Then, gradually, the image of God began to display new attitudes and concerns. From scanty evidence at first, we can trace the growth to an image of God concerned about the poor, the oppressed, the sinful. The ethical prophets, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah Isaiah, proclaimed this image. The image becomes more and more inclusive and all peoples became included in God’s dominion. Everyone must answer for his conduct to this one eternal and universal Yahveh. One scholar (Welch – JEREMIAH) wrote, “the Old Testament prophets are terribly one-idea men. They all believe that Yahveh acts.” If the image of God in your mind is a uniting of creation and high morality, then you owe much of that image to the Jews. That image is their religion.

Centuries later, another Jew, Jesus, was emphatic in attributing additional form and qualities to the image. The image became like one’s father. Jesus lived in a social setting where the father of the family was the law-giver. But a good father was not only a firm ruler, he was also kind and just, who should be loved as well as obeyed. For Jesus the image became warm, strong, and affectionate, “Our Heavenly Father.” One wonders if Jesus had been reared in a maternal rather than a paternal culture he would have prayed to our “heavenly mother.”

Then the Christian church added to the image – rather, the theologians multiplied it. The Lord who was one became three, the Trinity. The person of Jesus as well as the Holy Ghost became part of a three-in-one image. In a cartoon strip which appeared in the Lakeland newspaper, a character referred to the Trinity as “three awesome dudes.”

Although most Christians still pray to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (or Spirit), the idea of God has changed. When tyrant kings were all-powerful, the image of God became that of the monarch. In the ferment of change when there were increasing constitutional liberties and in some countries increasing scientific knowledge of cosmology, biology and psychology, the image became the God “within”, the divine spark in the soul to which persons voluntarily could respond. God, for many, was no longer the arbitrary monarch, but rather, the pervasive Presence in all life.

Then in the late 19th century, theology was hit with a bombshell, with delayed fuses still igniting. Led by Freud and his successors, who analyzed human behavior, it was pointed out that we tend to make gods of our childish wishes that may have been unfulfilled and unforgotten, but repressed. The mixture of fear and love with which with which we reacted at depth to our fathers had been unconsciously projected onto the screen of religious faith – The “Fatherhood of God” strikes deeply within us and echoes those mixed feelings of fear, jealousy, love, and awe. The late Father Thomas Merton, the Cistercian monk who wrote such penetrating meditations, observed, “Our ideas about God tell us more about ourselves than they do about God.”

Then, too, the idea of a good loving God with concern for all his children has always been flush up against the wall of unmerited suffering. Not the evil that persons do to persons. The terrible tragedy in Waco cannot be blamed on any god – but on the madness some religions incite. But there is also the suffering that the forces of Nature inflict upon persons. Just recall the March 13th storm and less recent, but still fresh in our minds, Hurricane Andrew. [CJW note: Tornadoes annihilated 5000 Kobe, Japan, January; Okla. City] There are volcanic eruptions in the Philippines, recently, devastating green fertility to a dead, gray wasteland. How does one fit a good, caring God into such disasters which happen somewhere every month or so. One is reminded of Robert Ingersoll’s statement that if he had been God, he would have made health infectious instead of disease. Or as Shakespeare has Gloucester say to King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night –
What immortal hand or eye dare
frame thy fearful symmetry.”

Or, as poet May Swenson inquired,
“and what if the universe
is NOT ABOUT us?
Then what?”

[CJW note: Hume quote]

It must also be said, however, if the constant presence of disastrous evils creates a trackless wilderness when seeking a good God, one must also account for goodness – not only the gifts of Nature which have provided a world where we can live, eat, love, mate, and find shelter, but also a world where in spite of evil men and oppressive movements, there are good people, kind women and men, persons who give of themselves so that others may live and grow. Then, too, why are we conscious of anything at all, particularly loving and nurturing?

In recent decades, theologians, philosophers, scientists have been asking, is there a God beyond the god of fertile crops who must be appeased by sacrifice? Beyond the warrior gods? Beyond the gods of our wish projections? Beyond the father in heaven? Beyond the god who manipulated the three-story universe in the age before Copernicus? Is there a God beyond the gods of human thought and imagining? There are attempts: Tillich wrote of God as the “ground of Being” - not A being, but being itself (if you can under-that) – A Tao, a Way from which all beings and things emanate – which cannot be known – has no form or attributes – is unconditioned when all we know is conditioned – is infinite where all we know and can know is finite?

The late Eustace Haydon, who taught history of religions at the University of Chicago, commented, “Scientific philosophers and theologians who cannot still believe in the robust god of Christianity have in the last generation offered us substitutes for Him. They include the Impersonal Absolute, The World Soul, the grand Etre, The Spiritual Nisus of an Evolving Universe, the Unknowable, the Totality of Life, the Life Force, the Common Will, the Determiner of Destiny, a Growing God, a Cosmic Mathematician, the Principle of Concretion, the Utterly Other, the Imagined Synthesis of Ideal Ends, and many more.

But it seems to me that inventing a name, however intriguing, does not demonstrate there is an objective entity behind the name.

Now it may seem rude, but to me all these substitutes for the fading old gods are simply contrived name tags on that which cannot be named; putting labels on mystery which cannot be fathomed; asserting knowledge which cannot be verified and is, thus, speculation.

Where all this strikes you, I cannot guess. But the older I get, in matters metaphysical, the less help I get from theologians, scientists, philosophers. The poets, composers, artists, musicians, dramatists do not inform me of proper theological discourse (I’m glad of that), but I resonate to some of their creative imagery. I will never know all I am, but I feel that in me and in you, are the forces of what we call the Cosmos – gravity, atomic structures, electro-magnetism, positive and negative discharges of electricity, chemical synthesis and re-synthesis, growth, change, creation, destructions. But naming such processes do not fully explain who I am, who you are, who we are.

Sometimes I feel the mood which grasped Francis Thompson, poet-mystic, when he created the “Hound of Heaven.” Do you remember these lines from that poem:

“I dimly guess
what Time in mist confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists awhile unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.”

What the poet described as “the trumpet sounds,” Abraham Maslow called peak experiences. When this happens we have broken through the crust of Self. The interpretations we give these moments differ, not only because of unlike heritage and different experiences of each of us, but also, words are inadequate, for me at least, and I attach no deity-name to the experience. Alfred North Whitehead was more eloquent than most of us when he wrote (quoted by Margaret Isherwood, FAITH WITHOUT DOGMA), “this creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But the creation is a continuing process, and the process itself is the actuality, since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey.”

May I make a personal witness? I have pondered the great mystery for many years. Yes, I am an agnostic. I do not know the answer or even the proper questions. But in my ninth decade on this earth, I am more and more a SEEKING agnostic. It is not fear of death, even though I have lived at least 9/10ths of my life. I do not know that when I die I will meet a totally blank wall or a door opening to some uncharted surprise. Meanwhile, I try to travel with an open mind and a seeking heart. That is the “Triptik” for my journey till the day I die, reminding myself occasionally of the saying by the medieval woman mystic, Julian of Norwich, “all will be well; all will be well; all manner of things will be well.”

The Free Mind

1982
Lakeland

In order to seek the truth, the mind must be free. This summer I visited Monticello, Jefferson’s beloved home. I stood by the iron gates enclosing the cemetery near the tombstone. Chiseled on the stone were the two things he wanted [to be remembered for]: author of the Declaration of Independence, and founder of the University of Virginia. He wanted no mention of his being a 2-term President of the United States, Secretary of State, Ambassador to France, Governor of Virginia.

He wanted to be remembered for his unwavering belief in freedom; freedom requires the free mind. Jefferson, writing to a friend in 1820 concerning his difficult task of establishing the University of Virginia, said, “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left to combat it.” (Malone, SAGE OF MONTICELLO, pp. 17-18)

A few years earlier he had remarked, “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”

That we believe. To maintain the free mind is more difficult than in Jefferson’s day. We face an overload of information plus considerable distraction. We have newspapers, radio, T.V., but still it is difficult to sort fact from fancy, to distinguish between press releases and authentic reporting. The distractions – sports, comedies, commercials. Griping is pointless – if the reading, viewing, listening public demanded more solid reporting at depth they would make that known in unmistakable ways.

No sterner demands are placed on those who value free inquiry. Among the many joys and benefits I have received as a life-long Unitarian Universalist is the exploration of serious ideas and issues to the end that free minds will become, increasingly, informed minds.

A sociologist, Baltzell (PURITAN BOSTON AND QUAKER PHILADELPHIA, p. 247) describes the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the best educated community the world has known before or since – “a thinking community.”

There are many ways in which we fall short, but if we do not relax our vigilance to keep the mind free and inquiry pursued, then we may qualify as a thinking community like our forebears in liberal religion.

Truth

Unitarian Universalists support the free and disciplined search for truth as a foundation of religious fellowship. Pilate asked “What is truth?” Most religions stake claim to all or at least part of the truth. These claims may be based on a holy book, or a divine savior, an infallible church or historic doctrine. But religions do not agree (never have) what the truth is or how we may discover it.

What is truth? How are we to distinguish truth from falsehood? There are guideposts. Protagoras of ancient Greece said in a famous maxim, “Man is the measure of all things.” I believe he meant that in all choices involving truth or falsehood, we have no guides but ourselves and our shared human experience past and present. Even if one may be convinced that the source of ideas is divinely super-natural, invariably these ideas are mediated through someone’s human experience, human expression, and human interpretation. Our values are human and must be. Our scales are human systems, inevitably.

There are tests and measures of truth:

What do we observe? Scientific measurements are accurate enough that they can be deemed precise. The readings on scales, dials, test tubes, and tools enable us to say this is so, or this is not so.

In another dimension of life, where no scientific instruments apply, we can observe relatedness. There is a moral or ethical relatedness. It is good to love and bad to hate. That is a truth we can observe in our own lives, the lives of those around us, and history confirms it.

Truth should be coherent. Does it cohere with what is real? There should be no unexplainable contradictions between two propositions, both of which are believed to be true.

We also affirm that truth is to be known. New truths constantly emerge. New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth. Of course that means that what we believe today may tomorrow prove to be untrue or a partial truth. Because of the incomplete nature of any claim to truth, we may have to alter our premises and conclusions. But the possibility of error should not dismay us. Someone remarked, “Last week I saw a wonderful man who had not made a mistake in 4000 years. He was a mummy in a glass case in a museum.”

Jesus: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

DeRougement: “Ye shall seek the truth and the quest shall make you free.”

Universality

If service is the test of religion, then the measures of creed and doctrine become secondary. There are many cultures, many religions, each with sacred books and holy men and women; each with ritual celebrations that may seem strange and bizarre to the outsider.

The visible forms of religion are like fashions in clothing or styles in architecture. There are differences between north and south, near-East and far-East, Latin and Greek, Anglican and non-conformist, conservative and liberal.

Moslem children, squatting in the shade, monotonously chant the verses of the Koran until their teacher is sure that the sacred words are indelibly etched into their memories. This is religion.

Holy men wash their scrawny bodies in the water of the Ganges as they witness the eclipse of the sun. To them this is a cosmic struggle between supernatural beings. This is religion.

In Vatican Square thousands of devout Catholics gather to receive the blessing of the bishop they believe to be the Vicar of Christ. Millions of their fellow Roman Catholics believe it their duty to witness a miracle weekly: the miracle of the Mass. This is religion.

Quakers gather in rooms where bare furnishings are a sharp contrast to the ornaments and artistic splendor of the Cathedral or the Mosque. In Quaker worship, no priest chants a ritual, no host is given to the faithful, but this too is religion.

The American Indian stomps rhythmically in a ritual corn dance in Southwest United States. In the south-eastern mountains of our land, religions persons of Anglo-Saxon inheritance believe literally those words in the Gospel of Mark, (16/18), “They shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” So they handle rattlesnakes and drink poison in religious ecstasy.

These unlike expressions of religion are not true for me. But, when true for them, I have no quarrel, no wish to proselytize. The peoples of the earth are one human family. From a theological standpoint there are no damned; no special number saved.

The differing ceremonies deserve respect even when there is no acquiescence in belief. Never in history has any one religion been able to claim all the good people. Never have all the bad people been numbered in any one religion.

By whatever path another seeks the highest value or one’s God, he/she merits respect due the worth and dignity which is the birthright of every human under any sky and in every hall of worship.

All human beings deserve the right and privilege to choose their own path to the truth. All humankind are worth saving here on earth, no matter which gods, if any, they choose to worship.

Service

There is more needed than the search for truth and the free mind. The test of religion is service of human needs. Again, let me quote Jefferson. Writing to John Adams in the latter years of both of their lives, Jefferson mentioned that he considered his religion a private affair and that anyone who wanted to know about it must find evidence in the life he lived, saying “If that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which regulated it cannot be a bad one.”

However one may describe one’s religious doctrine or rituals, the test of that religion is service.

Two instances stimulated by the Good Samaritan parable – which tells us nothing about his religious beliefs or the beliefs of the wounded traveler.

The Good Samaritan acted as a nurse and the important matter was the care of the stricken man, not his religion. I’m reminded of two other nurses.

One was Florence Nightingale, a Unitarian. She was not particularly popular, but as her biographer, Woodham Smith, wrote, that in the course of the wretched Crimean War, two figures became transformed:

“Never again would the British soldier be ranked as a drunken brute, the scum of the earth. He was now a symbol of courage, loyalty, and endurance, not a disgrace, but a source of pride. Florence Nightingale taught officers to treat the soldiers as Christian men. Never again would the picture of a nurse on the battlefield be a tipsy, promiscuous harridan. Miss Nightingale had stamped the profession of nursing with her own image.”

Florence Nightingale feared she had been a failure, but the lady with the lamp brought about a revolution. She passed the test with high grades.

Another nurse was Clara Barton, a Universalist founder of the American Red Cross.

A New York Times book reviewer remarked, “Hell hath no future like a woman with an idea.” Clara Barton’s battlefield nursing in the Civil War, her determination to ease suffering and to alleviate the hardships caused by disaster need no re-telling this year. The long story of the struggles of the beginnings of the International Red Cross, and the American Red Cross, the wide range of its activities today ....

Clara Barton has been dead 65 years, yet her name is still honored. On the fields of her family homestead, near the lovely little Universalist church where she and her family worshiped, the Association of Universalist Women established the camps for diabetic children (now carried on by the UUWF). Years ago, children with diabetes did not have the years of life given to them that most of us have. Dr. Joslin’s case studies demonstrate that from 1897 to 1914, children nine years of age and under lived an average of fifteen months when they became afflicted with diabetes. Now, because of insulin, because of the regular program of balanced food, exercise, and testing which children learned at Clara Barton and Ellio Joslin Camps, and other camps all over the world which have been modeled on the successful example at Clara Barton birthplace, this life expectancy has been prolonged by twenty-fold. Each year sees a lengthening of precious time to the diabetic. This is the test of religion.

Countless persons, many of you, meet the test of religion by a helping hand in ways that will never be known. Also, we can play a part in the test of religion by our support of the UUSC or numerous other human need agencies which can perform service organizationally which we cannot achieve individually.

In 1917 the Universalist convention adopted a Declaration of social principles still pertinent: “While in no wise minimizing the responsibility of the individual for his own life, we denounce as superstition the teaching that men are led into sin by inherent depravity and by devils of an unseen world; but we hold it to be self-evident that mankind is led into sin by evil surroundings, by the evils of unjust social and economic conditions.... We conclude also that democracy is not only an inherent right, but also a divinely imposed duty. We find that none of us liveth or dieth to himself, and that true men and women should consider nothing foreign to them which is common to humanity.”

Service is the test of religion.

A Reminiscence of Cliches

1979 (but filed under 1982)
Lakeland

I am not sure [whether] I have coined an original collective noun in such a title. There is something about the collective noun which increases my delight with language:

an exultation of larks
a covey of quail
a pride of lions
a flight of eagles
a herd of cattle
a fleet of ships

A “reminiscence of cliches” has occurred to me during past few months when I have reflected from time to time that 1979 is the 50th anniversary of my graduation from high school.

When I was a high school student, one of the weekly routine events was the Monday morning assembly. All students of the upper three classes would walk wearily into the auditorium for 55 minutes of unsurprise. I use “unsurprise” because almost always the assembly program consisted of the vice-principal introducing a local or visiting clergyman who would consume most of the period exhorting us. Sometimes, but not always, the speech would be preceded by a musical selection rendered (I use the word advisedly) by our less-than-superior high school orchestra. I said we would wearily walk because we could count on those preachers to tell us to be good and have purpose. The striking and authentic differences of religious belief were usually smoothed over with a few superficial sentences. Then the speaker, with resonant voice and dramatic gestures, would tell us a story which, almost always, the previous week’s speaker had told. Sometimes we hadn’t heard the same story for two weeks. Politely, but painfully, we would listen to the morals and manners of the stone-masons and the cathedral, the boys and the hermit, and the sailors and the Amazon.

In order that you may share something of the ennui we felt so many years ago, let me regale you with three of these tales (although I have another reason than just to decorate our service with old chestnuts).

During the Middle Ages, when many European communities devoted centuries of labor to building the great Gothic cathedrals, a clerk approached three stone-masons separately, asking each the same question, “What are you doing here?”

The first stone mason answered, “I work from dawn to dusk so that I may buy bread to keep alive, and wine to help me forget how miserable life is.”

The second responded, “I work to provide my wife and children food to eat and a hut to live in.”

The third stone mason asserted, “I am building a cathedral.”

Then the speaker would elaborate considerably, each supplying different trimmings on the theme that life can be good, better, or best. It is good to be alone, even if one’s goals are but food and drink. It is better to think of others – one’s family and its needs. It is best when one not only has these values, but also a great cause for which to work – a cathedral to be built, a purpose beyond self and family.

That story was re-treaded, again, and again, and again.

In a mountain cave that overlooked a village on a plain lived an aged hermit, who was reputed to be the wisest of men. The villagers believed that the hermit could always give the right answer to any question.

A group of boys, knowing the reputation of the hermit, determined to ask a question to which the hermit would not be able to give the right answer. So they conspired among themselves: “We will catch a tiny bird. One of us will hold it cupped in his hands and concealed from view. Then we will ask the hermit, “tell us, wise man, whether what is in his hands is alive or dead?” The boys figured that if the hermit said “it is dead,” the boy would open his hands and the bird would fly away. If the hermit answered, “it is alive,” quickly the hands would squeeze, crushing the life from the bird, thus showing the hermit that his answer was wrong, that there was not life, but death.

So they caught a little bird and climbed the mountain. When the hermit greeted them, they pointed to the little boy with the bird concealed in his cupped hands and chorused, “Tell us, o seer, is it living or dead?” The wise hermit looked at their clever smiles and anticipatory glee; then after a long pause said to the boy who held the bird, “the answer is in your hands.”

Not only was this a well-worn story, trotted out in assemblies and young people’s meetings, but also years later when I arrived at theological school and went to chapel for preaching class, the student preaching concluded with the story of the boys, the bird, and the hermit.

And, God help me, I have used the story, although I make a tentative promise never to do so again.

Then there is that chestnut about the Amazon River, the mouth of which is so vast that it cannot be distinguished from the ocean.

A group of sailors whose ship had gone down in a storm had for many days been drifting in a life boat. Because drinking water had long since been consumed, the weakened survivors would soon die from thirst.

Then a vessel was sighted. Shirts were waived on the end of oars; they were seen and the vessel changed course to reach the lifeboat.

As soon as they were in earshot, the thirsty sailors shouted “help, help, we die from thirst!” And the captain shouted, “put down your buckets where you are.” They did and were wonderfully surprised to find the water fresh and sweet, for this was not the salt ocean, but the Amazon River. They had no need to suffer if they had just put down their buckets where they were.

This story was usually the prelude to the advice that we students did not need to travel thousands of miles to find new worlds to conquer, but could find rewards and satisfactions right where we were in our city, our school, our street.

I have other reminiscences of cliches – aged chestnuts which have a mellow patina - “The drunken tourist in the monastery,” or “the carpenter who fooled his boss.” But enough is enough. Too many chestnuts create digestion problems.

The illustration, captivating or corny, to make moral or theological points, is as old as the first preacher and predictably present in every sermon. Without illustration, poem, parable, anecdote, few speakers would have the resources to chew away at a topic for more than 10 minutes and keep their audience at all.

I’ll illustrate my point about illustrations with an illustration. One of the stories that circulates about the reputation of NYC (“Fun City”) is that a newcomer was advised that if he should happen to be in trouble he should yell “fire,” not “help.” A call for help could be ignored, but people flock to a fire in Fun City. Sometimes sermons too are better when making points by [misdirection].

Now this is not a short course in homiletics. If it were, you could say, “You need it, preacher – we don’t.”

But looking back, my “reminiscence of cliches,” stories stale and hackneyed, I became aware that these were all I recalled about those speeches. The stories remained; the abstract contents forgotten.

These old chestnuts had something in common which has, for me, increased in meaning through all these years. Cathedral builders and shipwrecked sailors, boys and hermit, were stories or parables centered in the human condition. Work, bread, survival, meaning, and responsibility – what can I believe about life? Why must I pursue clues to the meaning of existence? Because I am human, what must I do?

I have a clipping in my Halloween file. Answering the doorbell, the owner was greeted “trick or treat” by a little girl, beautifully costumed, but unmasked. As the child opened her paper sack to stow away the treat, her mask was seen in the bag. “Why don’t you wear it?” In a tiny voice, hardly bigger than she and with a trace of whimper, the tot confided, “I’m scared of it.”

Is that a parable of the human condition? We’re frightened by the masks we wear.

To me, there has always been zest in Unitarian Universalist religion – in the exhilaration which comes when one discards old belief patterns which usually were resented as well as disbelieved. But one of the burdens of a religion of search is that when as one learns more about the human condition, one becomes aware of its fantastic inconsistencies. Is it not amazing, if not appalling, that two types of large expenditures cause little controversy – the billions spent to make more efficient and deadlier weapons and the millions for medical research? Is there not a huge inconsistency? Is it because we are too much like the first two stone masons? Is it because we fail to put down our buckets where we are? Is it because we fail to be aware that the power of life and death is in our hands?

I don’t know how boring I have been with this reminiscence of cliches. But worn cliches or fresh creation, both the look backward and the forward vision provide past evidence and future prediction that none of us fully lives unless, frequently enough, he/she confronts honestly the nature of self, “Who am I?” and the nature of obligation within the human enterprise, “What must I do?” Cliches become stale, but without such identity and engagement, life itself will be stale and worn rather than fresh, energetic, and laced with hope.

Addendum

[Editor’s note: the following was to be inserted immediately prior to last paragraph, but it does seem to be a distinct line of thought]

Long ago, I clipped a poem by Victor Howe (Christian Science Monitor), “Lesson in Aerodynamics”:

“Wedging their way by wing, they are compelled
To learn the element they navigate,
To study air until they know it cold,
To gauge its power to the feather-weight.

“The air that both resists and sustains,
Gives discipline, demands economy,
Ensures they sign the sky with elegance
Form follows function as the wild geese fly.”

I believe the form of one’s religion may follow the way one functions in this human condition which is ours, and which we share, as time, relentless measure of our living, ticks its eventually conclusive rhythm.

Recognizing that every age is an age of transition, I believe the years approaching will register even more sweeping changes, changes not far ahead.

I was struck with a sense of identity when re-reading the words of Marius in Victor Hugo’s LES MISERABLES: “To be between religions, one which you have not yet abandoned, and another which you have not yet adopted, is insupportable, and twilight is pleasant only to bat-like souls.”

Similarly, we may feel unrest, uncertainty, anxiety, and consequently, an over-eagerness to settle for comfort rather than continue the search for an adequate religion of one’s own. But if there is one certainty I cherish, it is that the search for an adequate personal religion is more necessary than ever, for we need confidence in principles to behave with courage and wisdom in this difficult 1979 and perhaps a more perilous 1980. Think of the insight of the poet (“Lesson in Aerodynamics”) who recognized that air both resists and sustains. So our human condition with its fears and hopes, its joy and grief, its mystery and assurances – all these are the resistances and sustenances for the transition of religious belief or ethical action from that which was and is, to that which should be. It is the human condition which resists and sustains.

Unitarian Universalism And The Sense Of The Sacred

Undated (Filed under 1982)
Location Unknown (Probably Lakeland)

The Sense of the Sacred is this month’s emphasis as we deal with the heritage and principles of Unitarian Universalist religion. Sacraments and the sacred have been an ineradicable part of most religions of the human family. Both sacred and sacrament derive from the Latin “sacere” - to make holy.

Obviously Unitarian Universalism is hardly a ritualistic religion in any usual sense. Our plain services do not commemorate the Lord’s Supper although there are some – but not many – who continue the tradition. Baptism of infants is seldom a ritual, and then with no doctrinal meaning. We do not believe children are born carrying original sin – therefore there is no sin to wash away. When we have a service dedicating a child, it is for the purpose of welcoming the child to our religious community, to express our love and support to the parents who are responsible for rearing that child in decency and dignity and cultivating those values and customs which will tend to make that child a growing person, happy in himself or herself, as well as a productive addition to the human family.

In looking at the sacred and the sacraments, particularly as found in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we must be aware of a reality: one person’s sacrament is another’s superstition. Looked at from historical or psychological perspectives, a sacrament, or a sense of the sacred, is quite different from that of a believer, who whole-heartedly [and] with a sense of awe, participates in the sacrament. [CJW note: Roszak: “To study is not to be, to appreciate is not to belong.”]

In his PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION, Erwin Goodenough (p. 144) illustrates this when he wrote, “Many years ago, a physician, member or sect which puts extreme emphasis on immersion in baptism, said to me of the rite, ‘It was a business proposition. I knew when I stood on one side of the baptismal pool that I was damned to hell, but that, if I went down in to the water and was baptized, I would be saved in heaven. It was a business proposition; I went in.’” Dr. Goodenough went on, “Theologians rarely use such unvarnished language to describe a sacrament as having efficacy, but the doctor’s words express exactly the function and appeal of sacraments and symbols. I once repeated the story of the doctor’s baptism to a Catholic priest with whom I happened to ride on a train. He chuckled at it, waved his hand deprecatingly, and said, ‘Superstition, superstition,’ and then added, ‘But I know exactly how he felt.’”

When checking the definitions of the word sacrament, I immediately decided not to dwell on definition #6, “the oath of allegiance taken by a Roman soldier.” But others:

1)religious acts or ceremonies which are visible means by which divine grace is sought.
2)memory, sign, seal, or symbol of religious experience or profession.
3)mystery – a thing secret or of secret meaning.

Ambrose Bierce (an iconoclastic skeptic with a slashing and irreverent wit) defines sacrament in THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY:

sacrament: n. A solemn religious ceremony to which several degrees of authority and significance are attached. Rome has seven sacraments, but the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford only two, and these of inferior sanctity. Some of the smaller sects have no sacraments at all – for which mean economy they will indubitably be damned.

sacred: adj. Dedicated to some religious purpose; having a divine character; inspiring solemn thoughts and emotions; as, the Dalai Lama of Tibet; the Moogum of M’bwango; the temple of apes in Ceylon; the Cow in India; the Crocodile, the Cat, and the Onion of ancient Egypt; the Mufti of Moosh; the hair of the dog that bit Noah, etc.

It is not necessary to tell how large a place the sacred has occupied in religions pre-historic and historic. Frazer’s classic GOLDEN BOUGH is replete with examples of the sacred, the practice of sacraments, the force of taboos. The Druid priest who with a golden sickle cut the mistletoe from the oak at mid-winter solstice was dealing with the sacred. [CJW note: the grove of oak trees was sacred.]

“Sacred cow” has become vernacular in our language – but the cow is sacred to believing Hindus. For many tribal cultures, the time of puberty for boys and girls was a sacred time requiring trying, secret rituals, and disciplines.

The sense of the sacred penetrates our Judeo-Christian heritage. Today is among the closing days of the Jewish observation of Hanukkah, which commemorates the Jewish nation’s successful struggle against Antiochus IV, who tried to impose Greek ways and customs on the Jews. Led by Mattathias, an elderly priest, and later by his son Judah the Maccabee, bands of Jewish guerrilla fighters fought valiantly and successfully. In the early winter of 165 B.C.E., Judah Maccabeus led his warriors into Jerusalem. First, he sought to cleanse the Temple which had been profaned by Antiochus and his Greek/Syrian soldiers. A single undefiled cruse of oil was found. It alone was used. Jewish tradition has it that this single flask provided enough oil to burn not for one, but for eight days.

Ever since, the Jews have celebrated that victory and the miraculous oil. For eight days there is celebration and gift-giving. Candles are lit, one the first night, two the second – until finally eight are kindled on the last night.

Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover are the holy days in the Jewish tradition.

When considering the Christian part of our tradition there is a wide difference between the two main dimensions in Christianity:

The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches observe seven sacraments (or mysteries, as they are sometimes called): baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist (or Holy Communion), penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and marriage.

The Protestant churches observe the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Communion). On the whole, Protestants believe that only two sacraments were instituted by Jesus in the New Testament. With their view of the Bible as the Word of God, they see no authority for more than these two sacraments.

The belief about the Lord’s Supper differs between Roman Catholics and Protestants. In the Eucharist of the Roman Catholic, the bread and wine are the real body and blood of Christ offered daily in every Roman Catholic church to God for the sins of mankind.

In the Protestant view, the Lord’s Supper is a remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus, a re-reading of the story of the Last Supper. The bread and wine or bread and water are symbolic – tokens of their Savior.

Unitarians and Universalists are offshoots of this tradition. Although observing Communion as a remembrance of Jesus has largely faded away, I still remember as a boy growing up in Unitarian Universalist churches how communion was observed on Maundy Thursday – but the occasion became less and less a re-enactment of the Last Supper and increasingly was a remembering of service not only for the life and teachings of Jesus but also other human saviors, ancient and modern; and a time to remember specifically those persons of the church who had died during the year. It was a service of memory and hope. But from the time I was able to think about it, I never perceived it as a sacrament in the way that I sensed that Protestants and Catholics experienced the Lord’s Supper or the Eucharist as sacred.

Have we Unitarian Universalists no sense of the sacred? In terms of historic rituals that evoke awe? No. Do we have worship formulas to put us in a direct connection with God? Not that I know of.

In the mid 19th century, Brook Farm in Massachusetts was a rather short-lived communal experiment largely composed of Unitarian transcendentalists. They scorned rituals. One Sunday some of them arrived at the [West Roxbury Unitarian Church] with their lunch baskets. After the service (and to the shock of the staid church members), they marched to [the] platform (or altar) and proceeded to have their picnic there. I believe they were making the point that no place or time is any holier or more sacred than any other.

In varying degrees and usually under less traumatic circumstances, this represents a prevailing attitude among Unitarian Universalists. Are we missing something vital? Perhaps. In an article in VOGUE (I read an extended review), novelist Francine DuPlessix Gray said, “I belonged to that last generation which could blindly believe that salvation lies in an accelerated rationalization and secularization of society, in the hastened improvement of scientific method ... our expressions of joy, sorrow, hope, and particularly our need to honor some form of transcendence will always seek ritual channels if our psychic balance is to survive.”

There is a civilizing force in ritual. Take heed of the great Jewish proverb which says “Today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish. By your fidelity to the historic female need to safeguard the past, you will ... preserve the quality of quality.”

Does she speak to us, who, perhaps have relied too much on rational discourse and attempts at logical thinking? Yes, and this has been recognized as we seek to touch our emotions as well as our minds. We have no set of historic sacraments either of Judaism or Christianity. When our minds cannot accept what another’s sacrament proclaims as eternal truth, we can observe respectfully or attempt to appreciate, but we cannot feel the profundity of those who have unquestioning faith. [CJW note: “to appreciate is not to belong.”]

However, as many of you know, we do seek the enduring – our celebrating Thanksgiving as gratitude for the harvest of the fields through sharing fruit, bread, nuts, cider, in common worship.

We celebrate the Winter Solstice, not as primary Christian worship, but seek its deeper roots in the lengthening of the light, the rebirth of hope, the holding high of the idea that every night a child is born is a holy night. [CJW note: We celebrate the best yearnings of the human family.] We try to develop a ritual for Earth Day – recognizing our utter dependence on, and our persisting obligation to, the Holy Earth.

We do not always do these rituals excellently, but the continuing effort will be there.

However, beyond all that, I would suggest to you that confining sacraments, the sacred, [and] the sense of the Holy only to rituals within any religious institution is to miss the mark. Paul Tillich, alluding to the endless symbolism in religions, wrote, “Nothing is prevented from becoming a sacred thing.” One’s sense of the sacred may dawn like the morning sun unexpectedly, in various times, places, and human relationship[s]: an introspective moment in solitude, or the experience of both finitude and eternity as the crashing surf of the eternal sea registers on our consciousness and plumbs the unconscious; or most of all, the full acknowledgment that primacy of persons in one’s scale of values and actions gives a sense of the sacred that is unsurpassed.

The greatest religious prophets have always known this. The person of Jesus is the foundation of Christian sacraments. But unless I sadly misread the New Testament literature, the celebrating of formal rituals meant little or nothing to him. Consider what he said in Matthew (5/23 ff; Phillips) “so that if you are offering your gift at the altar, you should remember that your brother has something against you, you must leave your gift before the altar and go away. Make your peace with your brother first, then come and offer your gift.”

Was he not saying “what makes the sacred sacred is one’s relationship to fellow men and women” ?

After the Gotama Buddha’s religious experience under the Bo-tree, he left all that he had to teach by example and precept the primary task of alleviating human suffering. That was his sense of the sacred.

Or consider Amos, the earliest of the prophets of social justice. Rituals as rituals were an abomination to him (5/21): “I hate, I despise your feasts and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me your burnt-offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

Thus, the sense of the sacred cannot be confined to a ritual or a place, even though celebrations of joyous and poignant human experiences can be observed in a church, fellowship, temple, or shrine. But ... as Tillich wrote, when there is confusion between the symbols and that to which they point – that is idolatry. To worship the symbol alone, no matter how holy it is proclaimed, is to be profane.

We will differ in our experiences of the holy, the sacred, but there is no need to be fearful or angry at our differences as long as we have some sense of the holiness of all existence and the sacredness of persons.

I like what Theodore Roszak wrote (PERSON/PLANET, p. 167):

“We meet as strangers, each carrying a mystery within us. I cannot say who you are; I may never know you completely. But I trust that you are a person in your own right, possessed of a beauty and value that are the world’s richest resources. So I make this promise to you: I will impose no identities on you, but will invite you to become yourself, without shame or fear. I will defend your right to find an authentic vocation. For as long as your search takes, you have my loyalty.”

Religion and Community

January 17, 1982
Lakeland

Two weeks ago I spoke of the inevitable tension that exists between individuality and dependence. Last week in his illuminating talk, Harold searched out the way to health – our inner selves provide the signposts, directing us to accept ourselves, to esteem ourselves, to project self-worth, not self-hatred. The poet said that which we project onto others comes back to our own. Today, I would have you consider that the balance between individuality and necessary dependence on social institutions is the healthy community. This is the Yang and Yin of the good life.

Free, unfettered individuality can be unhealthy. There is an old Hasidic tale where a pious man dies after a lifetime of losing interest in the people and life about him, all for the sake of God. A day or two after he reached Paradise, they threw him out. He could not understand or enjoy anything of what was going on (see CONTEXT, 3/1/81).

Or from the Christian tradition of the 4th century Simeon Stylites. He, allegedly for the sake of penitence and the glory of God, lived 37 years on top of a pillar. He became encrusted with filth and vermin, occasionally sending letters which were regarded as authoritative. “Kings and emperors crouched at the feet of the pillar, cherishing, as if precious pearls, ‘the worms that dropped from his body.’” (THE EVOLUTION OF MONASTICISM, p. 41ff). For his uncompromising, self-torturing individual piety, the Church called him a saint. Frankly I think he was a nut as well as a stunning example of perverted individuality.

In our times, Clarence Darrow, the nonconformist lawyer, defender of radical and unpopular causes, was possessed of considerable personal vanity and egotism. When asked by Lincoln Steffens how he (Darrow) was getting along with his wife, Ruby, Darrow answered, “Fine, because Ruby and me, we both love Darrow.”

But just as there can be distorted individuality, so can there be sick communities. The history of dictatorships, monarchies, monopolies, oppressive regimes of many varieties provides ample evidence.

The historian Hugh Thomas (HISTORY OF THE WORLD, p. 461), compared a concert by the Emperor Nero “to a public speech in the days of Stalin. ‘No one was allowed to leave the theatre,’ wrote Suetonius, ‘during the emperor’s recitals, however pressing the reason, and the gates were kept barred. We read of women in the audience giving birth, and of men being so bored from the music that they shammed dead and were carried away for burial.’” Solzhenitsyn tells of a speech made by Stalin at which all the hearers are afraid to be the first to stop clapping. All looked around despairingly and clapped on, sweat standing out on their foreheads, exhaustion stealing over them.

Is it not also true (see HUMAN SCALE, p. 278) that “the larger the meeting, each person has smaller influence on it – fewer opportunities for participation and response except for a few, who for a variety of reasons, good and bad, exert a more dominating influence.”

Then, too, it is a commonplace that there is more violence, abuse, crimes of passion among relatives, that is, the family community.

Healthy community is achieved by a delicate balance between order and anarchy, between detachment and unquestioning loyalty.

There is dramatic illustration in the movie, REDS, which tells the intertwining stories of the hectic romance between Louise Bryant, the writer, and John Reed, the radical journalist, who became a thorough believer in the Bolshevik Revolution. The actor playing the role of Max Eastman, the radical editor, tells Louise that the difference between the couple is that for her the revolution is to be observed; for Reed it is a religion.

In that context, “religion” meant obedience without question. After some hesitancy, Reed went along; allowed his speeches and writings to be altered to conform to the party line. In his famed book, TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, Reed wrote, “I have seen the future and it works.” He might have asked himself, “it works, how? By what means?”

The healthy community, family, religious national strives to achieve that delicate balance between freedom, community responsibility; between uninvolved detachment and blind loyalty; between cold reason and hot passion. The late Sam Levenson, wise, humorous writer and lecturer, once said, “You can’t sit at two weddings as the same time with one fanny.” [CJW note: Yet that is the posture we must seek.]

In the Torah (Deuteronomy 12), there is an ancient illustrative tale. As a prelude to the children of Israel occupying the land of Canaan, there is imposed upon the people a lengthy list of ordinances and laws to govern behavior, diet, ritual practice, human relations. According to the legend, when the people were nomads in the land of Moab, “each man did what was right in his own eyes.” However, in a new land, with large problems to be dealt with, hostile foes to be encountered, a more complex series of ordinances was instituted. It was a modified framework for the relationship of the individual and the community in a strikingly different social situation.

There is some analogy in that old story to the present-day Unitarian Universalist community. Conrad Wright of the Harvard faculty and historian of our Unitarian Universalist movement in his paper, “Individualism in Historical Perspective” discusses Jefferson and Emerson, in particular.

Jefferson was an outstanding example of those who believe religion to be a private affair. “I inquire after no man’s religious opinion and trouble none with mine.” As Wright pointed out, “... there was nothing in Jefferson’s understanding of religion that required people to form religious communities or explain by they persistently seek religious fellowship – nothing derived from the laws of human nature, let alone any commandment from God. ... for Jefferson, religion remains a private possession, because there was nothing in his understanding of it that suggests that religious fellowship has any value, or that there is anything in human nature that needs religious community.” (p. 5)

Emerson differs from Jefferson philosophically. For Emerson a full reliance on reason is a mistake. For Emerson, the intuition, the sense of the soul being an integral part of a greater whole, the Oversoul that is to be in touch with what is real. He contrasted the church, the religious community, with the soul. For him, “the life of the soul lived in all its fullness makes the Church unnecessary. (p. 7)

“The individual is the world,” wrote Emerson (p. 8). Without doubt, this individualism, this privatization of religion has marked our religious heritage.

Wright points out how social and economic conditions of Emerson’s time encouraged and stimulated the individual impulse. The frontiers of this continent were almost unlimited, there was bright opportunity for the confident individual, the optimistic individual, the individual who believed his efforts would bring abundant personal return and gain. This ebullience and individual pride – arrogance, really – is splendidly illustrated by a joke told 150 years or so ago by Fields, a Boston publisher, one of the many individuals who were part of the Flowering of New England as an intellectual, religious, literary peak that was compared to the great classical period of ancient Athens.

There was a Boston man who read Shakespeare late in life, was enthused and found Shakespeare’s poetry, wisdom, insights into human character far beyond expectations. Paying tribute to Shakespeare, or so he thought, [he opined,] “There are not twenty men in Boston who could have written these plays.”

But gone are the frontier opportunities that sparked and nurtured such confidence and the belief in unlimited growth under the leadership of reasonable persons. We believe in the progress of mankind onward and upward forever. Today such unfettered optimism seems strikingly naïve.

Conrad Wright makes a generalization (p. 14) that many of us will find disagreeable. Yet it is a formidable proposition: “Individualism thrives as one moves from a steady state into the period of growth; and that individualism becomes dysfunctional as limits to growth come into play. When one moves from an era of abundance to the threat of scarcity, individualism can no longer be the guiding principle in social relationships. ... If some sort of civilized existence is to survive, the individualism of the phase of growth will become vestigial. That a new doctrine of individualism may emerge, relevant to the new situation, is of course a possibility. But it will not be the Lockean, Jeffersonian, Emersonian kind.”

Wright suggests that given the situations, he outlines some suggestions for the Unitarian Universalist religious communities:

1)The religious community will require both commitment and discipline.
2)Rediscover worship as a corporate act ... one in which the liturgical preferences held individually by the members of the group can never be wholly accommodated.
3)Individualism is a critical principle [that] must be re-examined when the locus of constructive power has gone elsewhere.

Rather than criticizing or affirming those suggestions abstractly, today, I choose to hold before you more specific ways to achieve healthy community.

We can share our stories. Our lives are hectic and calendar-consumed and other cultures have wisdom to share. The Kalahari Bushmen, living in a difficult environment, worked 1 to 3 days a week for food. The rest of the time they spent talking and visiting relatives. Community was more important than luxury.

We can share our lives more than we do. A Christian chaplain assigned to Africa conducted a funeral service. The funeral service lasted for several hours and was attended by almost 1000 people. He writes, “noticing bedrolls, cots, mattresses, and blankets scattered around.” He inquired and found that “it is the tradition (there) when news of a death comes, for friends and relatives to stay overnight, sleeping about the compound on the ground, many staying for as long as a week after the funeral as an expression of solidarity with the family.”

The writer continues with other examples of this strong community spent among Africans. He says, “Africans know they belong to each other; they believe that life is not whole unless it is connected to the community, even in death.”

We cannot import such customs; they are not ours. Yet that sharing and solidarity are authentic expressions of religion in community.

We can share our lives in stories. The Rabbinic tradition is a splendid example. Some have said, “Ask a Rabbi a question, and he will not answer it; he will tell you a story.”

Truth and insight are contained in parable or metaphor. I like this Rabbinic story about the choice of site for the first temple:

“Time before time, when the world was young, two brothers shared a field and a mill, each night dividing evenly the grain they had ground together during the day. One brother lived alone; the other had a wife and a large family. Now, the single brother thought to himself one day, ‘It isn’t really fair that we divide the grain evenly. I have only myself to care for, but my brother has children to feed.’ So each night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother’s granary to see that he was never without. But the married brother said to himself one day, ‘It isn’t really fair that we divide the grain evenly, because I have children to provide for me in my old age, but my brother has no one. What will he do when he’s old?’ So every night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother’s granary. As a result, both of them always found their supply of grain mysteriously replenished each morning.

“Then one night they met each other halfway between their two houses, suddenly realized what had been happening, and embraced each other in love. The legend is that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, ‘This is a holy place – a place of love – and here it is that my temple shall be built.’ And so it was. The First Temple is said to have been constructed on that very site. The holy place, where God is made known to his people, is the place where human beings discover each other in love. The absolute is known in the personal.”

Religion and community spirit? I have tried to balance the tension between the individual and the community. Sociologists have studies the subject and I could have quarried out their abstractions – primary and secondary relationships, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, etc. But the essence of community is not only the ways we develop free and open religious organization, but also, and at a level deeper than abstractions, how we share our stories; how we share our lives; our common efforts, our dreams, our disappointments, our hopes.

There is the focused place where the great temples are built – great not in soaring architecture, although that is sometimes the case, but great in the quality of relationship: self – others, self-esteem – respect for others.

Nuclear Freeze – Hopes, Doubts, Convictions

October 17, 1982
Lakeland

My purpose today is to emphasize my belief that the accumulation of nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of all living beings on this planet, either by accident or malicious design. I am glad that our General Assembly in June declared support for a “mutually verifiable, bi-lateral nuclear freeze as the first stage of world-wide, balanced, general disarmament.”

Many of you are aware that convictions about nuclear freeze are not new. Some of us, months ago, signed petitions and wrote letters urging such action. But the trickle can become a stream and the stream a strong river to an ocean of peace if convictions are strengthened and made known, again and again and again.

Observing a nova (an exploding star), a scientist remarked, “there goes another planet where they found out how to do it.” The late Aldous Huxley (Bio, p. 455), commenting on the prospects for peace with nuclear weapons overhead like the sword of Damocles, hanging by a thread, said the great powers were like delinquent boys of 14 with the physical power of God.

We are horrified and rightly so when a person or persons poisons Tylenol capsules and eight persons die. Tylenol is removed from the shelves to prevent further victims. Why are we not as deeply concerned when a fool, criminal, or lunatic persons or group could push the buttons causing the death of everyone through a nuclear blast, radiation sickness, and the many plagues which would follow? Why do we let nuclear weapons remain on the active shelves?

There are hopes. There is a rising consciousness of nuclear peril. The nuclear freeze movement is gathering political momentum. [CJW notes: 693 resolutions passed by state, city, and town meetings, resolutions urging an end to use and development of nuclear ....]. On November 2, eight states (CA, AZ, OR, ND, MT, MI, RI, NJ), the District of Columbia, and Chicago will vote on nuclear freeze initiatives. There are additional straws in the wind, not only religious organizations, but also Common Cause, the American Public Health Association, the National Education Association, the United Auto Workers, and others, support a freeze, as well as may members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat. [CJW note: Sen. Cranston: “The American people are far ahead of their leaders in demanding an end to the nuclear arms race.”]

In addition, there is pressure from abroad, particularly from our ally, the United Kingdom. The Church of England, this summer, urged Britain “to unilaterally abandon nuclear weapons ... the UK should cancel the Trident middle order and phase out Polaris missiles and submarines.” The London Times front-paged a report of the Pentagon document, drawn up on orders of President Reagan and presented to the National Security Council, [that stated] “the U.S. could win a protracted nuclear war with the Soviet Union.” The Manchester Guardian said of this and [another] Pentagon report, “They are crazy. No one who draws up these documents can have the slightest imagination of what nuclear war would be like. They are stupid extrapolations from the Battle of Waterloo, in which at the end of a hard day’s pounding, the two sides survey the ground and decide whether to carry on.” All through Europe, the peace movement is strong with its roots in the everyday women and men who are conscious, more than governments are aware, that any use of nuclear weapons has an inevitable fatal conclusion for the human family.

Another hopeful sign was the awarding this week of the Nobel Peace prize to Alva Myrdal of Sweden and Alfonso Garcia Robles of Mexico. Both have been strong advocates of nuclear disarmament. Norwegian foreign minister Svenn Stray said the Nobel selection was “a handshake to peace opinion that has been growing, especially in the Western world.” Each made a statement that may not be pleasing to our policy makers. Mrs. Myrdal reiterated criticism of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, saying, “Every step they have taken since the beginning of the 1960s has been unnecessary.” Mr. Robles criticized the U.S., saying it “bears the greatest responsibility for the deadlock in efforts to negotiate a total ban on nuclear testing.” (Ledger, 10/14).

Yes, there are reasons to hope that there will be sufficient citizen pressure to secure a freeze on nuclear weapons followed by successive steps of disarmament.

But in all candor, there are doubts. Jefferson once used the phrase, “the wolf by the ears.” If one has the wolf by the ears, one can’t let go, or the wolf will go for the jugular. Yet one can’t hang on to the wolf’s ears forever. Jefferson was referring to his dilemma about slavery. On principle, he detested the institution of slavery, but he and his class were dependent on slavery for economic survival, personal comfort and civil order. Of course, the wolf got loose – our Civil War with its terrible price of blood and its long-lasting heritage of hate, ignorance, and social conflict.

Similarly, our government and the USSR have the nuclear wolf by the ears – [each] seemingly can’t let go, but can’t hang on forever. Unless the peoples’ pursuit of peace succeeds, the wolf will be loose.

The nuclear freeze movement has been gaining strength in numbers, but can enough people be convinced? Doubts exist. Faced with too much horror, too many terrible fears, a process of psychic numbing seems to set in. Remember the story of the ancient king who executed the messengers who brought him bad news? Have you ever felt, or said, “If it’s bad news, don’t tell me, I can’t take it.”

Dr. Helen Caldicott, in the article from which I read, also said, “America’s leaders also practice psychic numbing. During the SALT hearings, they talked about how many bombs the Russians have and how many more we need to counter them. They sound like nine-year-old boys, a little like my younger son.

“I called the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and asked, ‘Why hasn’t anybody testified about the medical consequences of thermonuclear war?’

“They said, ‘The Senators don’t like to hear that sort of thing, it makes them feel uncomfortable.’”

This has a likeness to not wanting to think of or talk about our own death. Those are thoughts we do run away from, even though every one of us has an appointment in Samarra.

T.S. Eliot wrote in BURNT NORTON, “humankind cannot bear much reality.” But unless we do confront the reality of what nuclear war means, we won’t have the moral energy to maintain a position of disarmament.

I have doubts, too, about how many will persist in the face of name-calling that has already begun. President Reagan has started the labeling process, saying “some who want the weakening of America were manipulating honest people and sincere people.” There’s no substance to that charge, but it does raise the question of who is manipulating whom. Did you see the cartoon where the “Great Communicator” is invoking the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy, pointing to peace advocates, saying, “Now ask them if they have ever been, and why they are now, communist pinko subversives.” Can freeze advocates persist in the face of that slander which is sure to continue?

Then, too, I know that when advocating a nuclear freeze, always the statement is made, “You can’t trust the Russians.” True – they can’t trust us either. Ample reasons for both cases can be made. As Sidney Lens wrote in an article for The Nation (9/11/82), “There is one overriding issue on which the interests (of Washington and Moscow) converge – survival of the human species. Whether we do or do not trust the Kremlin leadership, the U.S. cannot continue to exist as a nation (nor can the Soviet Union, nor can any other nation) unless it joins with the rest of the world to eliminate the threat of nuclear incineration.”

From these remarks you may conclude that I believe in a nuclear freeze now.

In spite of what you may hear from the Oval Office or the Pentagon, the USSR does not have nuclear superiority. There may be equality, but we have superiorities in certain ways. When asked, no U.S. military authority was willing to swap our weapons and technologies for the Soviet’s (which tells us something).

Verifiable testing procedures now exist – satellites, sensors, particularly each side is agreeable to on-the-spot inspection.

A verifiable nuclear freeze is a necessity and it is practical. If you share that conviction, let your public officials know – or if you did write them a few months ago – write or call again, as I will. They will know it is an issue we have not forgotten.

Instead of weakening, a nuclear freeze will strengthen our country, morally, politically, and technically. To do that we must not be awe-struck with pronouncements from the Oval Office or the shiny Pentagon medals and uniforms. The historian Arnold Toynbee, in his essay on “The Death of Sovereignty”, wrote, “Far from being divine, states are nothing but man-made public utilities. They are as unsuitable as gas-works and water-works for being made into objects of worship and into focuses of emotion.”

Now I respect, even revere, our Constitution, but any given person or party in power is as subject to criticism and protest as is a rise in the cost of utilities.

One thing more, I personally take a more advanced position than verifiable nuclear freeze. I believe that the U.S. should not only freeze nuclear weapons unilaterally but begin now – unilateral disarmament ... beginning perhaps with our land-based ICBMs. Now, is he nuts, you may ask. Or, more politely, Don Quixote rides again.

This is not the bubble-headed notion you may immediately surmise.

Geo. Kennan, p. 101-102
[CJW note, Institute for Advanced Studies, “Cease This Madness”, diplomat]

Now, if one is a rational person, and I hope I am one at times, if 20% of our present nuclear capability is enough to wipe out the Soviet cities and their people, why do we need to build such an overkill? The balance of the 1.28 trillion dollar war budget in the next 5 years could be turned to housing, food, human care, providing initiatives for the poor, hungry, and sick in other parts of the world (or, if you will, balance the budget). Is there a better way to begin to turn swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, and that we will learn war no more?

Parable Of The Deck Chairs

September 1982
Lakeland
Port Charlotte
Clearwater

I did not go on a cruise, so the Parable of the Deck Chairs is not how I spent my summer. A couple of weeks ago, a Peanuts cartoon strip (published in 1981) stimulated my remarks today.

http://comics.com/peanuts/1981-03-15/

Charlie Brown is standing at Lucy’s booth, which is marked with the sign “Psychiatric Help – 10¢” Lucy says to Charlie Brown, “Maybe I can put it another way ... life is like a deck chair.” “Like a what?” asks Charlie Brown. Lucy explains, “Have you ever been on a cruise ship? Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun. Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they’ve been. Other people face their chairs forward – they want to see where they’re going. On the cruise ship of life, which way is your deck chair facing?”

Charlie Brown: “I've never been able to get one unfolded.”

The cartoon is an apt description of most of us, is it not? We look back, we look ahead, and there are times in the present when we can’t seem to get our own deck chairs unfolded. Pared down to the essence, one’s religion is one’s understanding of the meaning of life and the attitudes and conduct that develop from that understanding.

Particular religions differ in uncountable ways, rituals, doctrines, and practices. Wisdom from the past is interpreted in unlike ways. Goals for the future are not identical. Sadly enough, when we can’t get the deck chairs unfolded, then we are blocked from the wisdom of the past, have trouble setting goals for the future, and can’t seem to get comfortable in the present.

There is wisdom to be found in looking backward. The cure for the troubled self is found often enough by looking back into one’s personal history. With the help of a skilled counselor, one can bring to light hidden conflicts, fears, angers, frustration. When brought to light, understanding increases and the health of the self improves.

Then there is the enriching, fascinating history of humankind. We sang that fine hymn,

“Bring O Past your honor,
Bring O Time your harvest,
Golden sheaves of hallowed lives
And minds by truth made free.”

As a reader of history, I know there is a harvest of honor in the past and hallowed lives and minds by truth made free.

But history is a record of follies and crimes as well as honor and truth. Wisdom resides in recognizing both the follies and the honor.

The worship of a particular version of history is a common idolatry. Millions take a Bible verse or story and find in it an inerrant guide to present conduct and belief. They cannot accept or do not know that the Bible is a literary collection, the product of many authors in different times, for unlike purposes. To rely wholly on what the Bible says and persist in a determined, unwavering look at a particular segment of the past is to turn one’s back on new light, accumulated learning, and fresh insights.

There’s usually in any gathering nostalgia about the good old days. I clipped this little story: “You’re all in black, Millie. Did your husband die?”

“No, not this one. But he’s been so impossible lately that I went back into mourning for my first husband.”

Well the good old days weren’t so good. In my own memory is a time when I was a delivery boy for a chain grocery store [CJW note: The manager’s speech was a rich Irish brogue, for he had not been long in the country.]

My last delivery every Friday evening was one I didn’t enjoy. After a long week pushing my delivery cart, I would lug a 50 lb. bag of potatoes to the top floor of what we called a three-decker. I carried the bag into a cluttered kitchen, redolent with the odor of unwashed diapers and a smelly oil stove, loud with the crying of babies and children, many more than the cramped quarters could house with any comfort. I never collected – I surmised that my boss paid out of his own pocket to help a fellow immigrant family. Beyond doubt, those potatoes were their principal, and most of the time, only food. There was no ADC, no welfare as we know it, no food stamps. The good old days were not that good.

In addition, when sitting on the deck chair looking backward, one cannot see the whole horizon by focusing on one small arc of the circular sweep.

Historians try to be objective but they are human [and] must be selective. Unavoidably, historians sift through the sieve of their own values and goals. We read that in Japan, there was an effort at revisionist history in order to lighten the stain of that country’s imperialistic aggressions prior to and in World War II.

There are many examples. Reading [about] the American Revolutionary War, one of the hottest sparks that lit the first of rebellion was the Stamp Act, taxation levied by England. “No taxation without representation” was the war cry of colonists. There was violence – the Boston Tea Party – attacks on custom houses, threats on the lives of English officials. We see the protests and rebellion against the Stamp Act as a proud and nation-forming event in our national history.

However, if at the time you were in Parliament as a member of His Majesty’s government, you would have been appalled. Colonies never had representation. The revenue from the Stamp Act could begin to compensate for the British soldiers who defended the colonies in the French and Indian War – at great expense to the Crown. Furthermore, many American colonists had done quite well financially during that war trading with the enemy and smuggling. Furthermore, the M.P. asked, what representation do these colonists give to their slaves and bondservants?

So when looking backward at the wake of the ship, beware of a fixed focus or a blurred lens. But also, unless we know the past, we are fated to repeat its mistakes.

Next, if we are in the deck chair facing forward, we see storm clouds and the white caps of a gathering squall. We also sang Tennyson’s optimistic, idealistic lines to a bright future:

“Yea, we dip into the future,
far as human eye can see
See the vision of the world
and all the wonder that shall be,
Hear the war drum throb no longer
see the battle flags all furled,
In the parliament of man
the federation of the world.”

Idealistic, visionary, and naïve. As some wag noted, “the future isn’t what it used to be.” Those looking into the future now seldom see “all the wonder” that is yet to be.

These are the Biblicists who see all events leading to an Armageddon soon, the second coming of Christ, and examine Bible verses to support that prediction. But the ominous guesses have been made many times before in the Christian centuries and the heavenly armies never arrived. To me, Armageddon is a baffling theological proposition. Why would a parent God, whose nature is Love, destroy all his children except a select few who are “saved?” I can only conclude that attributing such designs to God more often represents a narrow spirit of meanness against those who do not share or support such beliefs.

There are other sad prophecies with a more substantial basis. Nuclear, biological, chemical weapons when used, could bring an abrupt end to human life. That threat is real and present. The prevailing government attitude is that if we build more and more frightful weapons, we will prevent war. This to me is nonsense and a more irrational policy than a fanciful Biblical Armageddon. There will be emphasis on this urgent problem on October 17, when I hope, in the company of millions, we will say, “no more nuclear weapons.”

Also, we are aware of the concern so many have for planet Earth. The exploitation of resources, the toxic waste dumps, the heedless ways that surface and ground water are being contaminated, the acid rain, the potential dangers from nuclear power plants, on and on. As we gaze out on the future, there is the possibility, [which] many predict, [that] we will suffocate in our own wastes and poisons. [CJW insert: Donald Kaplan – likelihood of no future at all. p. 127 – studies – Platt 1969 – Crowe 1969 “conclude that the rate at which mankind is progressing toward planetary extinction is significantly more rapid than the rate at which existing institutions solve problems.”]

There are those who hold a more optimistic view – that developing technology, new energy applications, greater awareness, will avoid a calamitous end to the inhabitants of planet Earth.

I hope so. But I am not greatly heartened when I read a quotation from Justin Dart, multi-millionaire Californian and close personal associate of the President. Dart said, “I’m for preservation. I say we should preserve the redwood, sure, maybe 100 acres of them, to show the kids.” (Los Angeles Times, quoted by Context). Such dismal ignorance of the interrelatedness of the human and natural environment is both astonishing and depressing.

There are other views of the future. I do not know enough to venture predictions. Niels Bohr, Nobel physicist, quoted by Kilpatrick, remarked, “prediction is a very difficult thing when it involves the future.”

But of this I am sure, the future will be guided by how many are able to get deck chairs unfolded in the present.

All of us at various times, perhaps persistently for some, have jammed our fingers getting the deck chair unfolded. That is, we are beset by circumstance, deterred by own own fears and guilts, our reluctance to like ourselves, our hesitations to be responsible, responsive, autonomous persons. Some of us stay in the trap of beliefs which are outmoded or unreal because there is emotional security in not venturing into new experience.

Thomas Jefferson, at the age of 50, finishing his term as Secretary of State, was tired, not well, and longed for the green hills of Monticello and the joys of family, farm, and library. He noted, “The motions of my blood no longer keep time with the tumult of the world.” We share such feelings at times, don’t we all. But Jefferson responded to the demands of his time and went on to a two-term presidency – 8 difficult years before going to his beloved home.

Benjamin Franklin, in many ways the most remarkable of Americans, always seemed to get his deck chair unfolded. The late Catherine Drinker Bowen, a superior writer and biographer, author of studies on John Adams and on Holmes as well as Benjamin Franklin, never completed fully her studies of Franklin (THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA), dictated this from her bed as she was in her last illness:

“Benjamin Franklin was a philosopher, he absolutely knew himself, and without self-guilt or self-righteousness, set about improving himself. What young revolutionary today wants to improve himself? He only wants to improve other people. To seek self-improvement, a man has to believe in life, which means believing in himself. Montaigne said ‘of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to despise our being.’”

To believe in oneself is not to look into a fantasy mirror and expect the message “you are the fairest one of all.” That is not reality. The reality is to see the accurate reflection and either chuckle or cuss, but still maintain oneself and not despise oneself. Andre Gide noted in his journal, “to love the truth is to refuse to let oneself be saddened by it.”

That’s not easy. In the soap opera parody of a couple years back, Mary Hartman’s mother says, “you can always find something in the 6 o’clock news to take your mind off life.”

We are tempted to take our mind off life, because there is pain in meeting it and liking oneself.

If we unfold our deck chairs, there will be pain, whether in our personal struggle for a strong self or in the agonizingly difficult task of amending and re-forming the institutions of government, business, religion, to the end that the peoples of the world may be saved from nuclear blast and poison, maybe saved from destroying the planet, which is our only nurture.

There will be pain. May Sarton, the poet, notes “To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth, isn’t it? Nothing that happens to us, even the most terrible shock, is unusable and everything has somehow to be built into the fabric of the personality, just as food has to be built in.”

Such, it seems to me, is a dimension of a religion for humans. Unitarian Universalism attempts to be that – a human religion. Not the romantic optimism of Tennyson, not the pessimism of a pre-determined Armageddon, but to play one’s part, to make real that which is ideal, the worth of all persons, including you, me, and persons everywhere under whatever sun.

Simone Weil, the French writer, expressed this realistic optimism in a manner which for me is an undergirding value in our religion:

“At the bottom of the heart of every human being from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. In this above all that is sacred in every human being. The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it.” (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 240)