In UUism, there is an open door for our spiritual and philosophical exploration. The air of freedom is so exhilarating, it can be tempting to relax at this threshold. But now is the beginning of a journey.
Our foremothers and forefathers fought courageously for this freedom to attest to what we believe, and for it they frequently forfeited their lives. We are grateful recipients of their victory.
Our challenge is to use this precious freedom in order to develop our faith and become who we ideally want.
I am using the word faith here to refer to the foundation upon which we may ultimately depend. For some of us this grounding may be a belief, for others an unformulated experience, and for still others a kind of gut courage in living. Faith is the support of our lives, that which gives our life span meaning, and inspires us to live joyfully.
Faith is not something we so much create, as it is something by which we are created.
The way we express our faith will differ widely among us, since it reflects our various cultural backgrounds and unique life experiences.
We will employ diverse religious language to express and symbolize our convictions. Hopefully we will recognize that our different religious/philosophical languages are like all languages. They are different because they reflect varying topographies of the enunciator’s experience.
You may describe yourself as humanist, Jewish, Christian, mystic, pagan or undefined -- or unmentionable. We have listed in our principles and purposes, as one wag put it, “seven friendly suggestions” for sources of faith, ranging from the Judeo-Christian tradition to paganism.
Perhaps you have your own entirely unique perspective -- so much the better. At this moment in time, I consider myself an earth-centered engaged Buddhist UU.
But how we describe our religious journey at the moment is not so important as that we are committed to the journey.
Whatever our perspective, we need to enrich ourselves by it. We need to be “baptized” by it, to let it transform our lives. Our faith is something that ought always to be growing us and that we ought to be always growing out of.
We UUs live in a perpetual tension between the depth and breadth of experience. We are familiar with a diversity of beliefs and opinions in what I would call our “horizontal pluralism.” But I suspect there is at least as much diversity of depth among us as there is of breadth. We also experience a “vertical pluralism,” a great diversity of life experience and wisdom.
These differences are much subtler than those of breadth. The more rooted we are, the less likely we will be to argue our convictions. Thoreau put it well when he said: “Tolerance is the proof of conviction.”
II.
Over 400 years ago, when Unitarianism formally began in Transylvania and Poland, our faith was deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. But we wanted more latitude for different interpretations of scripture. We especially sought freedom for the point of view that did not equate Jesus with God. We came to be called unitarians because of this perspective, those who believed in the unity of God as opposed to the orthodox who included in the godhead Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and were thus called trinitarians.
Incidentally, Unitarianism was not a new idea in Christianity. It was espoused by many early church fathers until it was outlawed by the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.
Universalism also began in this country deeply rooted in Christianity. The universalists fought for a broader conception of salvation; they believed in universal salvation, and so they came to be called Universalists.
Our names, Unitarian and Universalist, belie our roots in the depths of a particular religious faith. The heyday of Unitarianism and Universalism occurred when we remained historically rooted while we were zealously expanding our interpretations. In those days, we could be rooted and rebellious. We “had our cake and we ate it too.”
As we have broadened, we have greatly enlarged our boundaries beyond liberal Christianity, so that today Unitarian Christians represent only one of many weavings in our religious tapestry.
But as we have grown more inclusive, have we grown less certain about who we are? Who among us has not at one time or another felt more confident in describing to an inquisitor what we are not, rather than what we are?
Perhaps it is such unclarity of belief that prompted a columnist to recently defend his lack of religious pretension by exclaiming: “I happen to be that lowest form of religious life, the fallen-away Unitarian” (David Bolt, The Daily Record, 1/18/99).
III.
It is easy for us to mistake freedom, which is our method, with the end, which is our individual religious enrichment. Freedom and reason and personal experience are our ways for approaching truth and treating differences. They are the means by which we search through humankind’s religious and philosophical experience -- our search engines, if you will.
But we must not confuse the process with the content. After all, one can even be a trinitarian Unitarian if he or she is willing to live among us tolerantly.
Hopefully, over time, all of us will outgrow convictions. Hopefully, we will be spiritually “born” again -- and again -- but will keep our methods of trusting personal experience, learning from diversity and utilizing reason.
IV. a.
There are some guidelines for this journey of religious/spiritual/faith development.
First of all, we must make peace with our past. This is a significant challenge for the many of us who have rebelled against a more restrictive faith. Many of us are in “recovery” from another religion.
To this day I find it easier to appreciate the services of a faith that is quite foreign to me than to appreciate a Presbyterian service, because it was that denomination that curtailed my religious development.
It is necessary for us to make peace with our past, in order to construct a non-reactive future. To make peace with the more limited faith of our childhood (or the lack of faith thereof), of course, does not mean agreeing with its doctrines. It rather means being growing more able to forgive it and to understand it.
Time will help to heal those of us who are in “recovery,” but in addition to time, we need to consciously work at it.
IV. b.
Secondly, we must always, always trust our own experience
And at the same time, we must challenge ourselves to open up to other experience. To honor these two admonitions is a major challenge in all areas of life, and it is particularly difficult in religion.
A second-hand religion will be second-rate. To assent to a perspective merely because we take it from someone else; to be convinced of a belief by fervor or by authority, or by promise of future reward, either in heaven or on earth, is to sacrifice our integrity.
On the other hand, to limit our investigation to the boundaries of our own experience is to absolutize our relative perspective, in effect to affirm that our own perspective is omniscient. Though our experience is a reality, and it is our reality, it is not necessarily the reality.
Our reality is conditioned by that of our parents, and our culture. As psychologists, anthropologists and religious leaders have pointed out, other families, other cultures and other religions do things quite differently.
To honor our own experience and, at the same time, open ourselves to another’s, we must be willing to live for a while in limbo, to experiment, to try on new models for fit, to suspend judgment.
I believe there is something in our lives like the traditional Christian concept of grace. We each have an ability to recognize the intimations of something better than we now know. As A. Powell Davies, the well-known Unitarian minister formerly of this church, put it, “We are tempted to be good.”
When we are ready, we will find the right sources, we will avail ourselves of the right experiences and we will locate the right teachers. As the adage from Eastern religions puts it: “When the student is ready, the guru arrives.” Truly wise teachers usually do not come to us. They do not need students. But when we are ready, or more often just slightly before we think we are ready, we will find them. We will recognize in someone a quality that draws us to him or her for a lesson of the spirit, just as we may be drawn to a spouse or to a partner.
We define our identity partly by the ways others see us. Nearly all of our childhoods and our cultural surroundings have conditioned us to see ourselves the way they would like us to see ourselves. To grow, then, we need those who can see more than is commonly seen in us; we need one who can perceive in us more than we ourselves may believe possible, who can appreciate that in us which is ready to be born.
Gracefully we meet such people in our daily living
Or we may receive inspiration from a Buddha, a Maimonedes, a saint or a yoga teacher.
We have a wealth of mentors right here in this congregation, those who have the wisdom one of us may need. We must just remember that the one who is appropriate for one may not be so for another.
We would do well to celebrate the depth of our spiritual experience in our congregation.
It is not enough to have principles and guidelines. When we experience physical calamities -- the loss of loved ones, political defeat, personal hurt -- we need living human beings who can provide us with inspiration.
I strongly believe in telling the truth, but it is when I witness someone telling the truth when the cost is high that I am inspired to become more truthful.
V.
Our Sunday morning celebrations offer us one opportunity to develop our faith. This is the one time when all of us are together. In this experience of spoken word and music we will hopefully gain intellectual inspiration, spiritual insight and ethical reinforcement.
But for many of us, our spiritual deepening will require the additional support of more intimate settings. In a smaller group, we can be more vulnerable. We can feel safe enough to talk from our heart about our values. We can risk exposing our growing edges. We can reflect together in shared silence. We can benefit from feedback of the way others view our experience, so that we may enlarge our vision. Through trying times we can gather support, and we can avail ourselves of continual reinforcement.
VI.
Within the last few decades, the motivation for those who become UUs has changed. One minister friend, the Rev. Sydney Wilde, describes our newer members as “come-inners.” They are coming in to our movement looking for something, not running from something. Although a broad perspective is also important to them, they are searching for a dimension of depth.
They are “come-outers” from secularized society, not orthodox religion, from a society that seems to have lost its spiritual core, which trivializes what is precious, which equally notes the infamous and famous, and which is becoming ever more commercial, a society without heart, focused on greed. Unlike earlier Unitarians who rebelled against a constrictive faith, these rebel against an unproscriptive, loose, vacuous society.
Many of us also wish for a deeper grounding. The degrading of our quality of life is bringing home to us ultimate questions.
It is our task to move from the exuberance of liberty to a liberation of our spirit, from lingering rebellion to redemption, and to engage ourselves in righting the wrongs of our world.
Each of us knows his and her own path. The right one should be a little frightening. The true path will require us to take risks.
When we take on these risks, we will move toward our spiritual awakening, the utilization of the freedom our foremothers and forefathers have made possible for us.
As we grow, we will realize there are levels of wisdom within ourselves as yet undreamed of. We will appreciate ever more the “vertical” diversity that is in us and within our community.
We will discover the truth of the words by which we will close our service: that “behind all our differences, beneath all our diversity, there is a unity which makes us all one, and binds us forever together, in spite of time and death and the space between the stars.”
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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