The quickest way to silence a Unitarian Universalist is to ask them to tell you what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. Ours is not a way in religion that lends itself to short, pithy statements about the essentials of our beliefs and practices, although that hasn’t stopped many of us from trying to come up with what is sometimes called an “elevator speech” to share with family and friends, neighbours and colleagues, whether religious or secular. The idea behind an elevator speech is that it’s a focused but comprehensive statement that can be recited between the time one boards an elevator, and the doors close, until the time they open again. The challenge for us is that nobody has yet erected a building tall enough for anyone to be able to adequately describe Unitarian Universalism during an elevator ride unless the elevator gets stuck on its journey – and in that case, nobody really cares to know, anyway. They just want to get off the elevator.
.png)
When we’re asked, “so what do Unitarians believe anyway” – it’s rare for someone to include the Universalist part of our name – we tend to feel awkward, at best, and sometimes even embarrassed. Ask a Lutheran a similar question about their faith and they’ll tell you they believe in salvation by grace and maybe even throw in an anecdote or two about Martin Luther; a Presbyterian may recite the Five Points of Calvinism, which bears the curious acronym TULIP; and a well-schooled Methodist or Nazarene may speak of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral – scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. We just squirm … while trying to call to mind the Seven Principles before remembering there are now eight. And if we’re successful in recalling even three of them, whoever it is we are talking to is bound to ask, “What’s religious about that?”
At its heart, the problem is that we simply don’t speak the same language as other people when it comes to religious matters. This wasn’t always the case. In the early years of both the Unitarian and Universalist traditions, our forebears understood themselves as Christians – indeed, they considered their faith to be the truest and purest expression of Christian teachings – so Unitarians and Universalists described their doctrines with direct reference to the prevailing stories and teachings of Christianity, emphasizing what they shared with other churches (which was actually a lot) while noting the points where they differed, which, though small in number, were nevertheless quite controversial. In the eyes of our neighbours, the rejection of the Trinity and affirmation of universal salvation were great heresies that set us apart.
Early Unitarians and Universalists were liberal Christians whose understanding of the Bible, theology, and church history put them at odds with their neighbours. Ironically, Unitarian Universalism inherited a double-barrelled doctrinal name, notwithstanding the fact that, today, it is notoriously difficult to pin us down doctrinally. Although many efforts have been made to offer more expansive understandings of the names Unitarian and Universalist – such as we’re Unitarian because we embrace a unified view of life and we’re Universalist because we seek inspiration from many sources – the fact of the matter is that relatively few present-day Unitarian Universalists in Canada and the United States are either Universalist or Unitarian, at least not in the original doctrinal meaning of those words. Looking back, our evolution from those original doctrines seems quite natural and easily explained, given enough time, but the beliefs we espouse today bear little resemblance to the beginnings of our tradition. Like human evolution, spiritual evolution is littered with missing links.
Once again, we simply don’t speak the same language as the prevailing religious culture, even with the growing diversity of religions found among us. This realization was driven home to me more than three decades ago when I was flying from Winnipeg to Milwaukee for the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. On the plane, I was seated next to a gospel singer from Dallas who had been in Winnipeg to appear on the television show It’s a New Day. She asked me where I was going and what I did for a living, and, in a moment of weakness, I told her. “Unitarian Universalist? What’s that?” she inquired, and an awkward hour began to unfold with me trapped in the window seat. She peppered me with questions about God, Jesus, the Devil, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the prophet Jonah and his adventures at sea. Now, if she had been talking to Björn Pétursson and Jennie McCaine Peterson, the founders of this congregation, they would have had ready answers for her because they had appended an 11-point declaration of “the major articles of belief” to the church bylaws. They covered all of her questions – and more. But it was me she was sitting beside, not them, and she was unimpressed by my answers and, at one point, asked if there were any biblical teachings that I didn’t consider to be “merely metaphorical.” As we neared our destination, she got up and knelt in the aisle of the plane and began praying for me. I was mortified, but she wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to save me from myself and redeem my soul, if it were even remotely possible.
And thus began my practice of offering vague answers to questions on planes, although, in time, I grew more confident again – and more comfortable with being misunderstood. Moreover, the arrogance of age now means that I’m less reticent than ever about expressing what I believe personally without worrying that someone will mistakenly think that what I believe is what all Unitarian Universalists believe. After all, if you’re looking for a dozen different opinions, all you need to do is gather ten Unitarian Universalists together in the same room.
So, if most of us don’t believe what our spiritual ancestors believed, and if we can’t describe our beliefs using the prevailing religious language of the society in which we live, what’s at the core of our living tradition? Well, like biological evolution, which led to increasingly complex life forms based on a few simple laws of nature, our spiritual evolution is the product of a few simple guiding principles.
That’s why we fall back on our familiar statement of principles, whether they count seven or eight, and many of us have committed them to heart – or we can at least paraphrase them, typically emphasizing the ones we like best. So I’m a “search for truth and meaning” Unitarian Universalist with a deep love for the interdependent web and an abiding concern for human worth and dignity. That’s more or less my Trinity of values.
However, our current statement of principles only dates back to 1985. While they do offer a summary of values we cherish in language that is both succinct and poetic, and while these values can be discerned through a careful examination of our history, they are abstract and lend themselves to widely varying interpretations. Accordingly, they can only be fully understood and appreciated when those who profess them are aware of how they have been lived out in history. These abstractions cannot be separated from the real-life struggles and triumphs of our spiritual ancestors. They are sublime, but they aren’t likely to be the last things we think about as we slip away from life.
We call our way in religion a living tradition for a reason. It is dynamic and changing. And that living tradition is more a process than it is a product. That’s one of the reasons we have such a difficult time explaining Unitarian Universalism to others. While most religions rely upon a complex web of mythology and history, doctrine and ritual, we embrace a methodology informed by a number of principles – an approach that looks something like the scientific method in religion, albeit with room for feelings and emotions, not to mention some robust assumptions about the nature of the world and humankind.
In the middle of the 20th century, as the world was dealing with authoritarianism run amok, James Luther Adams articulated five guiding principles of liberal religion, which his editor Max Stackhouse described as the “five smooth stones of liberalism,” alluding to the story of how David slew Goliath, but I think it’s better to think of them as seeds rather than stones, which is precisely what you would expect at the core of any fruit.
“Religious liberalism depends first on the principle that revelation is continuous,” according to Adams. And the fruits of our faith, for want of a better term, all flow directly from that initial observation. Neither the Bible nor any other source of knowledge and wisdom, including the latest discovery of science, has the final word. We are engaged in an ongoing voyage of discovery and the end is nowhere in sight. Whatever writings we may consider sacred, their last chapters have not yet been written. Just when we think we’ve figured things out, we have something new to learn. And neither age nor our own sense of certainty absolve us of the responsibility to continue learning, to be open to new ideas and insights, to listen to the ideas of those around us.
Secondly, religious liberalism assumes that “all relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion.” It is this principle that lies at the heart of our broad tolerance as a religious community and our affirmation that the best way to organize human affairs is to do so as democratically as possible, recognizing that democracy takes time, trust, and tenacity.
Thirdly, religious liberalism “affirms the moral obligation to direct one’s efforts toward the establishment of a just and loving community.” As Waldemar Argow observed, it’s not enough to know and to feel, we are compelled to act on what we know and feel for the betterment of the world in which we live, or at least the tiny portion of it that we call home. If we are lucky, we learned this while we were still very young – to play fair, to clean up, and to care for our friends as well as ourselves.
Fourthly, religious liberalism recognizes the importance of enduring forms. “And the creation of a form requires power,” said Adams. “It requires not only the power of thought but also the power of organization and the organization of power.” Adams preferred to state this fourth guiding principle in the negative, declaring, “we deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation.” Goodness is embodied in good people, and it grows with the nurture of good communities. In other words, a worldview, a philosophy, a sentiment of goodwill that is not embodied in the form of institutions devoted to realizing its vision for the world will never reach the goodness it aspires to achieve. And so we gather in spiritual communities precisely because we are stronger together than any one of us is alone, and we can achieve more through common effort – for ourselves, our families, and our society – than any of us can hope to accomplish on our own.
Finally, “liberalism holds that the resources (divine and human that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.” This may be the hardest principle of all for us to live up to, since it is so easy to succumb to despair. But we cannot afford the luxury of despair. Life may often be tragic, but it’s not hopeless. And while we may not realize our aspirations in this moment, or even the next, we can trust in the ongoing renewal of life and, despite setbacks and reversals, hope that the future may prove better than the past because progress is not an inheritance, but a journey forward.
So, to summarize: the principles at the core of our living tradition affirm that revelation is not sealed, but that humankind is on a voyage of continuous learning and discovery; as sure as science continues to push back the frontiers of knowledge, liberal religion aspires to discover new insights about the human spirit. We assume that relations within our congregations and in society at large depend upon mutuality and freedom, that democratic living is both the seed and the fruit of the free church. We are morally obligated to strive to create a world that is more just and loving. And this requires the organization of power and the power of organization because social ends can only be achieved through social means. And through it call, we are called to be hopeful, even optimistic, that the world of our dreams is a world that can be attained through human ingenuity and effort, working in harmony with the nature that is our home. It is our duty to save humankind and the planet itself in this life, not another.
Knowing these five guiding principles helps us to better understand and explain how Unitarianism and Universalism grew from being sects within Christianity to becoming something more expansive, more inclusive, more complex. But here’s the rub: none of this gets us even an inch closer to having a compelling elevator speech. Ours is a way that defies the elevator speech while inviting us to become more comfortable with ambiguity, uncertainty, and the acknowledgement that our spiritual life, like the Facebook relationship status, is complicated.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment