There's No Fool Like...
As some of you may know, my birthday falls on November 1, All Saints Day, but I have
always thought that if the comos had been on its toes, I would have come into this
world on April 1, April Fool's Day. And in a sense, it is in early April that I
tend to celebrate my second birthday each year. For you see, it was in early April, forty
years ago, that Beverly and I first encountered this religious movement which has
consumed our lives and in the service of which we have grown old. And much about
that initial encounter seems very much like an April Fool's joke.
We were students at a small liberal arts college in Southwestern Ohio, in the midst
of our Junior year. We had known each other since high school, and had married the
previous June. Together we were working at virtually every odd job we could find
in order to support ourselves and pay our way through college. We worked half time in a
factory which manufactured automotive trim; we both worked in the college library;
I worked as a student assistant to an English professor; Beverly was the Bank-night
Clerk at the local motion picture theater. Somewhere, in the midst of all that, we found
time to edit the college paper, the student handbook, work on the yearbook and attend
classes and do the necessary studying.
I had entered college, intending to prepare for the ministry. After only a semester
at school, I had gone home to chat with my parish minister about a few minor theological
differences I was having with the tradition in which I had been reared. I shared with him my doubts about the doctrines of the virgin birth, the inerrancy of the
scriptures, the divinity of Jesus, the existence of an afterlife. The poor man sat
quietly, turned slightly pale, and then suggested to me that I really had only three
options. I could change my mind, or I could change my career goal, or I could change my
church. Well, I didn't know quite how to believe what I could not believe; nor could
I abandon a vocation which had been calling me for as long as I could remember.
So, I had only one choice, really. But I did not know of a church which would tolerate
my heresy, and so I continued to prepare for the ministry without any religious affiliation.
* * * *
Yes, 40 years ago this month we had been married nearly a year, thus having declared
our independence from our families; we were still in college; and we were both
looking toward some sort of ministerial career, but with questions and concerns that
our families and ministers back home found neither reasonable nor funny--strange, yes;
funny, no! Talk about the naivete of the young! We had some general sense of direction,
but where we might find the religious group that would acknowledge and allow our
questions was totally unknown.
Then one day the Universalist church in Blanchester was in need of pulpit supply and
willing to hire most anyone, even green college students. David and his friend
(who would soon graduate and go on to seminary the following year) agreed to be interviewed.
I, who had been more active than David in the student religious group that occasionally
did a "road show" for Sunday Schools and such, was not considered, of course --after
all this was the late fifties. I didn't know any better, either. But I did go along on the interview.
* * * *
You see, we had never heard of Universalism. Since we were history and English majors,
we had heard of Unitarians, but, never having encountered a live one, we had come
to the conclusion that it had died out with Ralph Waldo Emerson. And so, the Universalist church was a new experience for both of us.
The encounter with the First Universalist Church of Blanchester, Ohio, was truly an
experience. The building was a large brick gothic building with a tall bell tower
and stained glass windows. At one time it had been the most prestigious church in
town. Once inside it quickly became clear that the church had fallen on hard times. We
were ushered into a social hall which had been painted an institutional brown and
beige, long ago as the darker stains above the radiators testified. The Board of
Trustees was seated around a square oak table above which dangled one bare light bulb. The
members of the board were all over sixty. We chatted briefly about their hopes and
their resources, but it was clear that they had run out of options. The two of us
were their only candidates for the position of minister. Not wanting to sell their birthright
too quickly, the chair of the Board fixed us with a steely eye and announced, "We
don't want no hell preached around here!" Well, that suited us; neither one of us
had placed hell high on the list of homiletical topics. And so we struck a deal. And
it was thus that we entered into this movement.
* * * *
For our part, the opportunity to be involved in a religious community and the roffer
of some small remuneration with which to swell our financial resources was too much
to turn down. The guys agreed to alternate preaching until David's friend would
leave for Chicago toward the end of the summer. And so we signed on. I say "we," because
I got involved very quickly, playing the piano for services as substitute for the
regular pianist--we would eventually switch roles. And I agreed to help the one
public school teacher who brought along a couple of youngsters she knew to build a Sunday
School. All of us college types--the other guy's fiancee made us a foursome--put
together a summer program for kids; but we were working in the factory as well as
going to summer school classes ourselves, so it was not a full scale project.
By fall our friends were married and off to Chicago. We stayed with the Universalist
church. David preached regularly. I put together a church school for the 20 or
so kids we had gathered by centering it around a children's choir. They performed
several times for the few members and the admiring parents who came. We gave the kids
a sense of being a real choir by decking them out in little white collars which the
school teacher and I made. The Christmas concert included a rendition of "Jesus
our Brother Kind and Good" with a drone or one-note alto--that little girl with the low voice
could make a noise, but she couldn't get the notion of moving off her one note, which,
happily at least, was a middle C. Our final "concert" included an original tune
played by its 11-year-old composer on his mouth organ.
We stayed on for the first year after college as well, moving into the next door parsonage,
which the congregation helped furnish for us with attic- and garage-stored gems
of Americana. They paid David $50 a week for full time and charged us $50 a month rent for the parsonage. I went back to the the college to work as assistant to the
Acting Librarian so we could make it. There wasn't much backing with which to start
seminary, if only we knew what seminary to aim for. So we settled in for a little
while.
* * * *
You must have guessed by now that this was a moribund little church--else why would
they have accepted me as minister. Once the largest church in town, it had dwindled
to a membership of nineteen women and one man, all but one of whom was over sixty-five. Their only mission--and it was a powerful and demanding one--was to keep the doors
of the church open until all those whose families had once been part of the congregation,
and who had defected to other communions, would see the error of their ways and come flocking back.
I'm sure you have heard romantic stories about the deep and abiding love and respect
that exists among members of these kinds of small congregations. Truth be told, the
men and women of that little church did not like each other very much. They were
united primarily by the burden which they had inherited when others had walked away and
which they could not find any satisfactory way to lay down. On Sunday mornings,
fifteen or twenty of them would gather in that cavernous old sanctuary, where the
plaster drifted down from places where the roof leaked. No two of them would sit in the same
pew together. Scattered across a space which would have accommodated two hundred
and fifty, they stared at the great chancel window--a stained glass representation
of the Good Shepherd. It was an unremarkable work, not unlike similar windows to be found
throughout the country, except that over the years, the face of Jesus had been bleached
out by the sun until it was featureless clear glass, through which one viewed the
sign from the Sunoco station next door. That commercial icon provided the visual focus
of their worship.
* * * *
It was an eventful year. Besides my work with the children's choir, I led an adult
church school course in Eastern religions and began reading more about Universalism
in the various pamphlets and books the church owned. I made Chili for Fifty and
jellos and cakes and cookies for church fund raisers till I could barely look at, let alone
stomach, chili and jello. In the spring we hosted the convention of the Universalist
Church of Ohio. We hauled elderly Universalist women up hill and down to area Universalist meetings in Cincinnati--driving a car that would sometimes forget to pull
out of its leaning-over mode when turning a corner. (And we had no insurance on
the darn thing!) And once we attended a meeting with a well-known and distinguished
Universalist minister from Boston as guest speaker. We were responsible for his return to
the Dayton airport , but got lost and finally got Ken Patton to his plane just in
the nick of time. (If he remembered the occasion, he seems never to have recognized
us as the young couple responsible for that near-miss.)
* * * *
Now, given the bizzare nature of this first encounter, you must be asking, as I sometimes
find myself asking, why in the world would anyone emerge from this experience with
a life-long commitment to Universalism and later to Unitarian Universalism. The
answer, for me, is complex. In the first place, this was a context in which I given
the freedom to explore all the heresies which had been boiling up under the lid of
the orthodoxy of my childhood. And the congregation, peculiar as it was, was strangely
tolerant. The members were all over sixty. We were just twenty-one. They did not
expect us to have enough experience or insight or knowedge to be of much use to them.
Over the years they had seen ministers come and ministers go; they had heard more
than their share of dismal sermons; they had learned to draw sustenance from the wasteland.
Besides, they enjoyed fighting and quarrelling with each other--it added spice to
small-town life, and demonstrated their need for each other. And so, it gave me
a space in which to explore my own emerging faith, and they took my Sunday excursions as
an excuse for their coming together.
Sunday after Sunday, I used the sermon to unload the religious baggage from my own
past--all the conventional assumptions brought to this country by my Zwinglian ancestors,
enshrined in the Amish and Mennonite practices of my parents' families. Sunday after Sunday, I cobbled together out of my own need, a rational faith, rooted in a conviction
that religion, if it is to avoid irrelevance, must voice an ethical and moral response
to social issues. It was also in Blanchester that I began to experience the natural world as a vehicle through which I might encounter the sacred. In many ways,
The First Universalist Church in Blanchester was my true theological school. There
I encountered a religious movement which avowed its faith in truth, known or to be
known, which affirmed the supreme worth of every human personality, and which trusted
in the emergence of a human community in which peace and equity would prevail. It
was there that I shaped the faith which would evolve with me over all the years of
my ministry, and four subsequent years of formal seminary training only provided additional
resources by which to enrich the religious commitments that had emerged in my encounter
with that strange, dying congregation in Southwestern Ohio.
* * * *
That first encounter with Universalism that would in a very few years be finally yoked--and
rightly so-- with Unitarianism was of utmost significance for me. I continue to
carry as part of me much that I gleaned from that experience. Those children with whom I worked, though I have never seen them since, remain in my heart as reminders
of the marvelousness of all children who, no matter what their background, with a
little encouragement can literally and figuratively make music together. From them
I learned first what I keep learning over and over: be they children or adults, even one-note
singers have something to offer in concert with everyone else.
There I became aware of the mixed blessings of small groups--the joy of working together
and getting to know each other at a deeper level, and the challenge of needing to
break out of an ingrown group which can neither change nor embrace the new.
There I discovered for the first time a religious movement with a history and a mission
that supports intellectual and religious freedom undergirded by all-encompassing
love. My involvement with that adult study course in Eastern Religions later informed my specialty in History of Religion, also called Comparative Religions, when I
finally pursued my own studies in preparation for the ministry. As I became involved
in the "denominational" activities beyond that little congregation, I saw people
encounter each other's ideas and positions with vehemence and strong conviction, yet yield
in good humor when democratic process supported a different viewpoint. Important
as ideas and positions may be, human individuals and interactions--our interdependence
(as we would later label it) and worth are more valuable. I, we, had found a religious
home.
* * * *
It was in Blanchester that I learned to celebrate my rootedness in the natural world,
to honor my responsibility to the human community, to trust my own instincts and
to value integrity over conformity to tradition. Those are the values I have tried
to bring to ministry whether it has been in Suburban Chicago, or the nation's capital,
or here in New Jersey. When I think back across forty years to my initial encounter
with the religious tradition which would dominate our lives, I almost hear a burst
of cosmic laughter, I almost hear a voice whisper, "April Fool." But I also see the faces
of those twenty members of the First Universalist Church in Blanchester, and I recognize
that Beverly and I were their last gift to this religious movement. In a strange
way, we have tried through the years to be faithful to them, knowing that inevitably
an April Fools gift is always a mixed blessing.
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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