On Being a Born-Again Unitarian Universalist
You
may have noticed that this is not the sermon title which was announced in the
most recent newsletter. Sometimes, for reasons I have never fully understood,
sermons refuse to be born, despite the announcement of their imminent arrival.
Sometimes, for reasons I have never fully understood, other sermons, other ideas,
other concerns shoulder their
way onto center stage, and demand attention. For whatever reason, that has
been the case this week.
It began in the Introduction to Unitarianism
Universalism group which has been meeting for the past few weeks. As is often
the case, we were engaged in discussing how Unitarian Universalism is similar
too or different from other religious traditions in our society. As I in to
this discussion, I found myself remembering conversations I have had recently with
church members who have expressed
concern about fact that religious fundamentalism is stirring again in this
country and around the world. Suddenly I was struck by the thought that despite
our distinctive religious stance, Unitarian Universalism swims in the same
ocean as most other religious traditions, and what is happening on the religious
right is but one manifestation--albeit a sometimes frightening one--of a phenomenon
which is occurring across the religious spectrum. In this country, and
around the world, there is a renewed
search for religious values, for a dimension of meaning and purpose in existence,
for a spiritual quality in human life. The resurgence of fundamentalism
is one expression of a general dissatisfaction with the materialistic, rationalist,
scientism which has spent much of this century presenting us an image
of the world as a mindless mechanism. The resurgence of fundamentalism is part
of a larger search for something more which, in these uncertain times, might invest
our living and our dying
with dignity and purpose.
I found myself thinking that while we do
not accept the solutions offered by fundamentalists, Unitarian Universalists often
share with them a sense of dissatisfaction with the mind-set of the modern
world. Most of us do not believe that the sacred, the holy dimension of life is
to be found exclusively between the covers of the Bible. Most of us do not believe
that a meaningful life can be found only in a return to the world-view of
the past. Most of us do not
believe that the purpose of our existence is defined by a static, narrow, sectarian
loyalty. But the fact is that many Unitarian Universalists are engaged in
a search for the sacred, the holy in their own lives. We, too, in our own way,
are caught up in the renewed concern for a spiritual dimension to existence,
which characterizes the times in which we find ourselves. I have found myself
intrigued by the attempt to define, a bit more fully, the Unitarian Universalist
expression of this cultural return
to religion. In short, I have been intrigued to describe what it would mean
to be a born-again Unitarian Universalists. For good or for ill, that is the
sermon which has forced itself upon me and upon you for this week.
Among Evangelicals, those Dr. Jean Houston calls "the hot and holy churches",
being born-again refers to that moment when religious faith ceases
to be an intellectual construct or a social convention, and becomes instead a visceral
certainty, determining
how the world will be understood and how life will be lived from that moment on.
Frequently, the experience of being born-again is the result of a profoundly
shaking emotional encounter in which one is--as it were--wrenched out of the
prior existence and injected into a world of novel relationships and understandings.
Frequently the experience is described as a total surrender of the self
to God, an opening of oneself to Christ, and a subsequent experience of life as
meaningful, purposive, beyond
the reach of those trivial concerns and worries which previously dominated existence.
Frequently the experience is described as that sudden shattering moment
when individuals acknowledge that they live not by their own wits but by the grace
of God.
It is this kind of sudden conversion which many of us
associate with the term "born-again"--a moment of mindless submission
to emotion and fervor through which the personality of the individual is reordered
in some significant manner.
It is not the kind of religious experience which most Unitarian Universalists
are likely to embrace or to value. We prefer much tidier enthusiasms; we like
to keep our fervor under some degree of rational control. We want to know the
terms of the contract before we enter upon it. Indeed, liberal religion on this
continent had its beginning, partly, in a strong negative reaction to the fervor,
the enthusiasm, the "born-again" religion of the great awakening
which swept the American colonies
in the mid-eighteenth century, and we are still suspicious of and hostile
toward that kind of revivalism which is associated with the experience of being
"born-again."
However, this is only the most dramatic,
the most public form of the experience referred to by the term "born-again."
A great many people use that term to describe a much more private, personal,
developmental experience which does not involve the frenzy, the self-abandoning,
mindless aspects of the
revivalist model. There are people who, in a time of crisis, a time of personal
loss or defeat, a time of unbearable confusion and despair, or a time of great
joy, may suddenly recognize that life as they have attempted to live it is
less than satisfactory and that there is another path open to them. Choosing that
other path, they then discover that their lives take on a different character,
that their relation to the world and to other people undergoes a subtle but
significant change, that they
are able to respond more creatively to challenge, to defeat, to hope, to fear.
Those who are part of the Christian tradition might refer to this time
of choosing, this moment of change, in terms of "inviting Christ into
their lives," the time when they became "born-again Christians."
Non-Christians, of course, would be unlikely to use that language, but that does
not mean that non-Christians, or post-Christians are immune to or barred from
that experience. Indeed, if
we are once able to overcome our innate hostility to the language, we might discover
that it is not such a great contradiction to speak of "born-again"
Unitarian Universalists, nor are such individuals as rare as we might believe
at first glance.
This reality is less obvious than it might be,
in part, because of our historical antipathy toward the revivalist model. But
even more significant, it is hidden from view because, throughout our denomination,
a large proportion of our
adherents are relatively recent come-outers--people who have left the religions
in which they grew up and are involved in the necessary process of defining themselves
in relation to their new freedom. Consequently, for many of our people,
their new-found Unitarian Universalism has a decidedly negative tinge to it.
Typically, new Unitarian Universalists may not be able to tell you what they
believe, but they will have little difficulty expounding on what they no longer
believe. Often they are Unitarian
Universalists largely for negative reasons--because this religious body validates
and accepts their doubts and does not demand that they meet some external
standard of religious belief. Here they may redefine, question, or deny the
existence of God; here they may proudly reject any metaphysical or theological
explanation of existence; here they may redefine, question, or denounce as invalid
such traditional religious practices as prayer or meditation; here they may
question all assertions and
even give vent to anti-clericalism and hostility to all forms of organized religion,
including this one if they wish. Here no one will demand they embrace a
view of life they cannot embrace in good conscience.
Some people seem
never to get beyond this stage in their religious development. For some people,
Unitarian Universalism is important because it provides them a breathing space,
a decompression chamber, an institution which will help them to get unhooked
from the religious assumptions
with which they grew up. This is part of the reason that we witness, over
and over again, the phenomenon of people who join us and for a few months or years
are filled with enthusiasm for the church and its program, and then gradually
and without explanation drift away. The church has been useful in the process
of unhitching them from the past, and when that has been accomplished, their
need for our church is no longer so great. They become our "graduates,"
people who learned here how
to be free from religious assumptions and dogmatic demands which had become painful
and crippling, but who no longer feel a need for the church after that task
is accomplished. They still feel warmly toward us. If they ever go to church
again, it would be to a Unitarian Universalist church. They would hate to
see us go out of business, for there may be other people who need us as they once
needed us, and some day, driven by some other need, they may come back for a
post-graduate course. But for
the moment, organized religion no longer has an important role to play in their
lives.
Occasionally, the men and women who carry the burden of supporting
the ongoing institution feel frustrated that so many people for whom the
church was once so important can become indifferent to it and its needs. I
seldom allow myself to feel hostility toward such people. The church performed
an important task for them, and during that time they contributed to the life
of the church, making it a more
vital and exciting place. When they need us again, perhaps they will come back.
But the future of the church does not rest with such people. The future of
the church depends upon those I would call "born-again" Unitarian Universalists.
And fortunately, there seem to be enough of such people around to
ensure our survival.
Some Unitarian Universalists, having gone through
the experience of being unhooked from old, personally destructive religious
forms, discover that the experience
of freedom is not the end of the journey. Freedom from dogma, freedom from
creeds and traditions, freedom from past ways of thinking and looking at the
world is not the answer to any ultimate question. Rather, freedom poses the
most terrifying of all questions: Now that you are rid of past loyalties, of past
commitments, of past concepts, how will you use your freedom? "Freedom
from" always casts us into the dilemma of "freedom for what?"
To what will you be loyal? By
what will you be defined? By what star will you steer?
It is the
recognition that freedom is not enough, that it is not an answer to any existential
question, that helps explain another aspect of Unitarian Universalism--our
occasional faddishness. Recognizing that freedom is not enough, we sometimes
begin to search our experience and the world for that value, that goal, that dream
which is important enough that we may commit our lives to it and in that act
of devoted service discover the
meaning and purpose of our unique existence. In the process, we sometimes engage
in a lot of foolishness and idolatry. We are tempted to hook into the latest
fad from the psychological sciences. Some of you may remember when Unitarian
Universalists all seemed to be involved in sensitivity groups, or Jungian psychology,
or Transactional Analysis, or Assertiveness Training, or extended families,
or programs which promised to make us perfect parents or happy widows or
sensitive singles or terminally
married or what have you. Or we hooked into the latest imports from Eastern
religion and sat around chanting and humming and buzzing and attempting to force
our resistant western limbs into unfamiliar postures. Or we latched onto the
latest good cause to march and leaflet, protest and lobby and demonstrate: against
prisons and capital punishment, for abortion and human rights and arms limitation,
against tobacco and drunk drivers and prayers in schools. Or we hooked
into the results of some scientific
study and began to swallow vitamins, give up meat, forego the use of aerosol
cans, and scold the unfortunates among us who still smoke or won't wear
safety belts.
I don't want to suggest that any of these enthusiasms
(many of which I share) are wrong or improper but only that none of them is adequate
to provide the sense of meaning and purpose we seek. We move from cause
to cause, from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, seeking that to which we may give ourselves
freely, until our churches
sometimes resemble a bazaar of bizarre fads. But every now and then, in the
midst of all the running around, all the frantic searching, all the flirtations
with one passion after another, some of us are struck with the sudden insight
that life doesn't have to be as difficult as we seem determined to make it, that
what we are looking for so assiduously and having such difficulty finding is
something which used to be called religion, or faith and that it is still available
to us. And it is in that
moment of recognition that the "born-again" Unitarian Universalist comes
into being.
It is not that suddenly individuals return to the
religion earlier rejected. Rather, in that moment of insight rejection is transcended
and the recognition grows that beneath the shell of hide-bound, worn-out
and irrelevant traditions, there may be an understanding of life which can be
defined as religious, an understanding which is available to us precisely because
the shell of the past has been
broken apart and the old ways discarded. That understanding takes different
forms with different people. For me it has been grounded in a recognition that
meaning and purpose are not things we add on to life by our own heroic efforts.
Nor are they things we find, goals we attain as a consequence of playing well
some great cosmic game. Rather, meaning and purpose are inherent, essential
parts of existence, with us all the time, and only waiting for us to recognize
that fact. In my religious quest
it finds expression in a persistent attempt to discover the sacred, the holy,
the religious dimension not in the traditional practices and categories, not
in the traditional texts and concepts where it has been ghettoized and drained
of power, but rather in the world of contemporary experience and interaction.
For me, the religious dimension of life is to be found most abundantly, to use
the words of Carl Nelson, "in life and the living of it."
That simple recognition has
important implications for how we view existence and the interactions and relations
which comprise our world. If meaning and purpose are inherent in life, then
the patterns of an individual life are something more than simply the erratic
whims resulting from idiosyncratic decisions; rather, they are part of a process
which brought us into being and through us is working out a design we cannot
fully comprehend but which surely involves all existing things. Indeed, the
shape of life is altered by the
recognition of the importance to the scheme of things of that quality of "something
more" which eludes our ability to define it, but which is there,
active and vital and real and upon which all reality rests. Gunther Stent, in
an article on the new biology, talks about the significance of the context
in determining how the cell of an embryo will develop; whether it will become
a liver, a kidney, a nose, or a strand of hair is determined by the environment.
The same cell has many
potential paths. The one it finally follows is determined by the context in which
it finds itself. Victor Frankl points out that in the center of the eye,
where the organ of seeing attaches to the nerves that lead to the brain, there
is a blind spot which is crucial to the process of seeing although it is blind,
and that underneath consciousness there is an unconscious process of which we
cannot possibly be aware which determines to a large degree how the conscious mind
will work and what will be
admitted to our awareness. All of these are concrete symbols of the fact that
we exist, we are sustained and supported by "something more" than is
apprehended by our senses, by our understanding of factual reality. The religious
understanding of life, the life of faith adds to this recognition the affirmation
that this "something more" which infuses all of existence, which
brought us into existence as sentient beings, which sustains us throughout our
lives, and which, in some sense
can be said to be living us, is not whimsical, but is to be trusted.
The born-again Unitarian Universalists are those who have broken the mold
of the past, have transcended their rejections, and now reach toward the affirmation
of life and the "something more" which underlies all the various
forms and rituals, dogmas and assumptions of religion. Born-again Unitarian
Universalists recognize that the religious life, in all its complex and varied
expressions, seeks primarily to
affirm the existence of that "something more" and to help people live
more richly in terms of that mysterious reality. They do not want to return
to the religion of the past, to the outworn symbols and practices which sought
to express that reality and have become strangely impotent to communicate their
interior meaning to this generation. Neither do they want to be trapped in rejection
and negation. But they do want to witness to the possibility that the
experience with life which those
symbols and practices expressed is vital and valid and capable of releasing
men and women from the drivenness which results from a conviction that the world
is only what appears to us and that consequently our lives must be spent in the
effort to create meaning in a meaningless universe. Born again Unitarian Universalists
live in warm communion with the world, knowing they have nothing to
prove, that their efforts in behalf of truth and mercy and justice are amplified
because they occur in a meaningful
universe and they are valid in and of themselves, and not because they succeed
or because they bring praise or recognition or a fleeting hope that the
cloak of oblivion may be held back for a little while.
Part of our
involvement in the global search for a religious basis for life is to be found
in the recognition that life and the living of it is rich in meanings we may never
have words or concepts or categories to express. Part of our involvement in
the global search for a religious
basis for life is to be found in the recognition that while we are never more
than a heart beat from death and the human race never more than a generation
from extinction, the human venture takes place in a meaning-bearing universe,
and the significance of that venture can never be fully known from our limited,
time-bound perspective. For this reason we can never know fully what purpose
our lives may advance or the importance of our decision to serve life. In the
space which that mystery offers
us, we find the possibility of a life of faith and hope which need not be limited
by the materialistic, cause and effect world which this century has constructed
and defined as reality. In the space which that mystery offers us, we may
find existence seems richer and fuller and more glorious, despite the horrors
and terrors we sometimes confront; that failures and disappointments and disasters
seem more bearable and grief more acceptable. Born-again Unitarian Universalism
offers none of the assurance
and certitude offered by the fundamentalist revivals around the globe. True
to our history and our style, ours is a tentative reaching out to the mystery
in which our lives are rooted, a modest affirmation of a nameless "something
more" in terms of which we live and move and have our being, an effort
to find a stance toward life which opens us up to the world in which we exist,
to the possibilities of this moment and the promise of the future. It is a modest
attempt to recover the religious
dimensions of life, but it may be all we need to live in faith without
fanaticism; to love our fellow creatures and this uncertain world which is our
home.