Celestial Lands

If there is anything that makes some of my fellow Unitarian Universalists more uncomfortable than my military past and probably future, it is my willingness to call myself, both in public and from the pulpit, a Christian. I remember one day in particular that a parishioner in my internship congregation came up to me after a sermon and said “David, wonderful sermon… but you sounded almost like a Christian there at the end.”

I replied, “Almost? Well, I guess I’ll have to try harder then, won’t I?” That parishioner and I had an enlightening discussion in which he realized that though I consider myself a Christian, it was certainly not the kind of Christianity that he had rejected when he left the Catholic Church. I will never forget a few weeks later when the same parishioner came to me and told me he had done some thinking and he was “okay” with my Christianity. What was for him a serious moment of growth was for me one part awe, one part funny, and one part feeling condescended to.

At least he decided he was “okay” with my being both a UU and a Christian. Not everyone is.  Each of the times UU Christians have been called members of a “fringe religious movement within a fringe religious movement”, I think about stones and glass houses within this supposedly non-creedal UU faith tradition.  I have encountered many of my fellow UU’s who find even my use of the title “Christian” for myself mildly offensive. 

To be clear, my Christianity is about as heretical from the mainstream church as it gets… to say nothing about my distance from many of the more conservative iterations of the Christian faith (or the conservative tradition I was baptized in). One of the aspects of my Christian Faith that I find amazing is that when I have private conversations with many mainstream Christian ministers, I find that many believe similar things to what I do… but they often do not feel they can take those stands publically for fear of denominational reaction. I have born witness to private ministerial confessions of doubts of the trinity, to confessions of universal salvation, and to rejection of the resurrection as literal truth. Among the reasons that I am a Unitarian Universalist is that this non-creedal faith allows me to hold publically and prophetically many of these Christian theological “heresies” without fear of reprisal from the formal structures of my faith tradition… even if I do have to have the occasional conversation with a UU who can’t understand why I still call myself a Christian.

A couple of hundred years ago my Christian theology would have gotten me tied to a stake and set on fire, as it did for at least a few of my theological predecessors. Now, I am part of a religious tradition that grants me the freedom and responsibility to go where the theological spirit listeth, to continue listening for the voice of the divine, and to share my theology not in the hopes of conversion, but in the hope of inspiration.

Perhaps it would be best for me to lay out some of what I mean when I say “I am a Christian”. Admittedly, there will be those who say that my theology is either non-Christian or that it is Christian Heresy. In the first case… you are entitled to your opinion, but that’s between me and God. Have a care when you try to speak for God. In the second, I will give you my answer before hand… Thank You! Calling me a heretic as compared to where much of modern Christianity has found itself is high praise, and I revel in it. Unless you make an interesting argument, I will probably not post responses to this article than follow either of these trends. Simply put, I have been down both of those roads and find they do not really lead anywhere.

I believe in the radical unity of God. What I mean by that is that everything in the Universe is a part of God. God is in the air we breathe and the ground we tread upon… in the stars above and the atoms at the heart of all things. God is in us, and through our lives we can give expression to God. When as a child in a Southern Baptist church I “Invited Jesus into my heart” what I really did was recognize that God was always there, always a part of me… and I just had never seen it before.

I believe Jesus was a man, born of a woman (Mary) and a man (Joseph) who walked this earth and taught based upon a deep and profound understanding of this radical unity that is God. He had such a connection with the divine within us and all around us that he connected to other people in ways that were miraculous. The power of that connection to God and to others inspired healing in some, and inspired faith in many. Both Jesus and the people he ministered with understood what was happening through the world-views and religious-views of the time, and that is why many specific details of the writings from that time have to be re-understood in today’s world. But the implications of his connection to God and to others is, I believe, timeless… and has profound implications for our world today. I believe it is that depth of connection that Jesus had with the radical unity that is God that we call “Christ”… and it does not surprise me that some confused Jesus with God because of it.

I believe that to be Christian is to recognize that connection/communion with the radical unity of God that Jesus manifested, and to feel or aspire to that same communion ourselves.

I believe Jesus was a teacher, a prophet, a minister, a healer, a model for life and ministry… and that he had a depth of connection to the radical unity that is God that few have ever come close to, and perhaps no one has ever equaled. The Buddha came close, and perhaps understood that connection better… and many others have experienced it to varying degrees. I have felt that connection to God in prayer, watching a sunset, and holding the hand of someone as they die. However, Jesus did not encompass all that is God… and his essence was that of a man. That man died on the cross… and the resurrection that his disciples witnessed came from the depth of their connection to him. I am sure they experienced him after he died on the cross… in a more profound but similar way to how I continue to experience some those to whom I was spiritually close who have died. This resurrection of Jesus had nothing to do with the forgiveness of sin for the early church, and it has nothing to do with the forgiveness of sin for me. It is simply part of life and the divine… and Jesus is far from unique in that.

I believe the trinity is one attempt to understand the complexity of a God that is all and is in all… and not necessarily a bad one. I would have gone with God the Father, God the Mother, and God the Child myself… or the Progenitor, the Comforter, and the Potential (Has Been, Is Being, Will Be). However, the trinity as classically stated is just another metaphor for a God that is and will always remain beyond human comprehension in its completeness. Anyone who tries to make their image of God more than such a metaphor is, in my opinion, crossing over into the realm of Idolatry. I personally operate with many working metaphors for God… and remember constantly that they are all woefully inadequate to encompass “totality inclusive of time and conceived as a realm of meaning.” In fact, our metaphors about God probably tell us more about ourselves than they do about God. Perhaps the best metaphor for God is the one the Hebrew Scriptures give… “I AM”, or being itself.

I believe whatever happens to us after we die happens equally. This is not to say that I do not believe in Hell, because I certainly do. I just don’t think that Hell is dependent upon our heart to stop beating before we experience it. Millions, perhaps billions of people are walking this earth right now trapped in the grips of Hell. Some are trapped in hells of alcohol and substance addiction, some are trapped in hells of depression, of mental illness, of abuse. I know that those few years after Bosnia for me were like walking through a level of hell, if a mild one compared to others. In depression and suicide research, I have heard a description of feeling that you are trapped a thousand feet deep in a well… so deep that you have no hope of ever seeing the light and cannot even imagine finding a way out. So you just sit down and die.

I contend that the person who feels that depth of hopelessness is in Hell long before their heart stops beating. The idea that Hell is something separate from our human condition on this earth has been used as an excuse not to address the hells that are all around us. Finding your way out of the hells we experience is a religious imperative not for some afterlife, but for this life. The mission of the Christian church should not be to help people avoid a metaphysical hell after death, but to help people find their way out of the depths of the hells they are experiencing while their hearts are still beating.

Just as I do not believe that Hell is a metaphysical place we will arrive at after death, neither do I believe that the Kingdom (or Realm, in more gender neutral language) of God refers to a metaphysical afterlife. When Jesus preached about the coming Kingdom of God, I believe he was talking about a state of being… about a commitment to peace and justice, a commitment to honoring God, living with the sacred trust of faith, and loving our fellow human beings with depth and compassion. The greatest description I have found of the Kingdom of God to this day (imperfect though it is) is in the Unitarian Universalist Principles, though I know that is not what they thought they were doing when the committee drafted them. In reality, however, the Kingdom of God is a set of commitments and a state of being that, if it comes to fruition in enough lives will become an inspirational spark that will transform the world, transform history, and transform what it means to be human. Many of those “prophets” that have inspired my life, theology, and ministry are those in whom I see reflected the Kingdom of God… Buddha, King, Gandhi, Barton, David, Socinus, many, many others… and of course Jesus of Nazareth. None of them manifested the Kingdom of God perfectly alone, for I believe that we can only truly see the Kingdom when it is manifested by many of us, together in community. For such reason were we called into ecclesia… or to be a church.

What happens after we die will take care of itself… with two caveats. First, I believe that whatever the afterlife is like (and I do believe that we continue even after our hearts stop beating) it will happen for all of us equally. Now, where I am fuzzy on this is that it is possible that what we carry with us in this life, we carry with us in the next. If your spirit is troubled in this life, (if you are stuck in, say, a hell of addiction or of fear) it is possible that you carry those with you. Not that you are stuck with them for all eternity (for I believe that the afterlife is one of change), but that what we experience in this life matters. In this way, there is a reason beyond the beating of our hearts to help people find peace, forgiveness, and love in this world. This is why atonement and redemption matter far more to us as humans in this world than they could possibly matter to God. We seek forgiveness for our trespasses not because God needs it, but because we do.

Second, we should not worry too much about what the afterlife is like… for I believe the radical unity that is God extends even beyond this temporal plane. I do not believe that a loving God leaves any of his children in hell forever… and that we are called to help one another find peace, justice, and forgiveness. In this way, both the “Kingdom of God” and the hells we humans can become trapped in are not metaphysical places we go after we die, but rather realities we experience and can create here on this earth that have the possibility of going with us when we throw off this mortal coil. And, of all the great questions about faith, God, and theology… this is the only one we are guaranteed an answer to, for we will all die.

Now you may notice that though I have made many references to scripture in the New Testament, I have not made any quotes… and that has been on purpose. I believe that the writings that were bound by the 2nd Century Church in the Canon represent a median of that early church’s attempts to make sense of the life and death of Jesus, and to support the building of Christianity as a new religious movement and not a subset of Judaism. The Hebrew Scriptures represent a people’s struggle to understand their relationship to God and to one another. Neither are the Word of God. They are the words of humans seeking to understand God. There have been many such words of humans that seek to understand God, and to the amount that each of them is inspirational to me or to many millions of others, they constitute my understanding of scripture. I do not have to agree with everything I consider to be scripture. I disagree with much of the Gospel of John, and yet it has inspired me to much of what I do believe about God, about Jesus, and about faith. However all such “scripture” is the word of humans attempting to understand God and ourselves.

I believe the “Word of God” is found in the “Creation” itself. When you see the interconnection between the smallest atoms and the largest galaxies, you are seeing the Word of God. When you see the intricate movement of life from microbes to Mammoths, you are seeing the Word of God. When you recognize that for all our differences, we humans and all things are bound together in an “interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part”, you are seeing the Word of God. To believe that mere human words can come to represent all of the totality that is God is, again, to move into the realm of Idolatry.

And as the universe is ever-changing, ever moving, ever growing… so too is the Word of God and the words of humans that God inspires. Even more importantly than a changing growing Universe (and God, for that matter) is the reality that our human understanding of God (and of ourselves) is forever changing and growing. The Canon that humans created can be sealed by the traditional Christian Churches, but the Canon of all that God is can never be sealed. In truth, I believe that the sealing of the Christian Canon was a mistake, and such is one of my many heresies for which I am profoundly grateful I can no longer be set on fire. I prefer new meanings for being “on fire for your faith”.

As God is always changing and growing, as the Word of God is always changing and growing, as Scripture is always changing and growing, as human understanding of all of the above is always changing and growing… so too should part of our ideal be to be changing and growing. To not be changing and growing is to stagnate or decline… and such is a metaphor for death while trapped in a deep well of hell.

As such, even this articulation of my theology and my Christian identity is but a moment in time, and will be developed and revised each and every day of my life. I believe it is not my theology that makes me a Christian, but what I am called to do with that belief… in that I find Jesus of Nazareth as one of the primary models of my life.

I understand my ministry as not being “about” Jesus, but in the tradition of Jesus. I consider him the founding minister in my tradition of being a minister. Now, I hope my ministry will last quite a bit longer than his did… but the combination of a ministry of compassion and prophetic justice, of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and of using the example of living as best I can to inspire others to listen to my words and thoughts about life, the Universe, and Everything is my hope for my ministry. I see in Jesus’ ministry a commitment to the marginalized, to forswearing undue reward and adulation, and to standing up against hypocrisy and injustice. I see in the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth a mission to call people to a radical new way of living, of loving, and of being with one another and God, on this earth and perhaps beyond it… and I see him calling our attention to the possible catastrophic consequences of not reforming what it means to be human. I see him dining with “tax collectors and sinners” rather than placing himself on a pedestal. I see him healing the sick and giving hope to the hopeless. It is in that example that I find a calling for life and for ministry… and an acceptance that there are costs for this kind of ministry, perhaps even life itself (not necessarily a metaphor for a ministry in a wartime military.)

It is in all of these ways and more that I am a Christian… and I hope you can see in this theology why there is no religious community I could practice my faith in other than Unitarian Universalism. Perhaps I am on the fringe of the fringe… but I am reminded that this is also where Jesus found himself in his society and culture, and I am content with that. Inspired even…

Yours in faith,

David

I have spent the last five years in the occasional study of a religious system that I believe has always existed, but has never been academically defined (except perhaps in secret by some graduate engineering students). My interest in this religious system is that my wife is an adherent, and in order to better understand her I needed to have a deeper understanding of her religious faith. Through that study, I have come to realize my wife is far from alone… that tens of thousands, if not millions of people believe, either explicitly or implicitly, as she does.

The name we have arrived at for this religious system (and a quick search of the internet shows we are not alone in this either) is Murphyism. At its core, it is the religious belief that the principle known as “Murphy’s Law” (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong) is the guiding and unifying principle of the universe.

I will say from the outset that this article is a little tongue-in-cheek, but only a little. Perhaps because I am not a Murphyist I cannot fully grasp the seriousness with which the adherents of this faith take it. I know how serious it is, because I have seen it in this woman who has been my friend for 15 years, and partner for the last 8. So, I will attempt to place my own misguided lightheartedness aside, other than to say that if you find this article ridiculous, then you are not a Murphyist… but if it seems ironic to you, then you just might be a Murphyist…

If you ever find yourself making backup plans for your backup plans… you might be a Murphyist. If you have ever dated someone because you think they might be “lucky”… you might be a Murphyist. If you are really interested in the results of crash tests when buying a car… you might be a Murphyist. If you set more than one alarm clock when you go to sleep at night… you might be a Murphyist. If the first thing you notice about a new room is the number of fire exits… you might be a Murphyist. If you look at a glass and see it not as half-full (optimist) or half-empty (pessimist) but as something that might spill on you… you might be a Murphyist. If you have thought up new things that you do that could fit within this paragraph… then you might just be a Murphyist. I’d love to hear those new “You might be a Murphyist if…” one-liners.

As with many religions, the origins of this one are shrouded in myth and mystery. The modern wording of this “truth” goes back at least 150 years, although there is evidence that it was old even in that time. Its initial modern codifications began in the fraught-filled field of military engineering, and some have traced the initial prophet Murphy to an Air Force Engineer in 1949… but even this is shrouded in mystery and controversy. As best as I can decipher the legend, it was the colleagues of an Air Force Captain named Ed Murphy who first noticed that he had an inherent penchant for disaster… and named the law appropriately.

At the core of this religious faith rests the immutable law “Anything that Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong”. This however is just the beginning of the religion, for from this center flows an entire theology. I have identified two separate branches of Murphyists: Secular/Rational Murphyists and Religious/Mystical Murphyists.

Secular/Rational Murphyists are those who believe that the workings of this law can be demonstrably shown to be an inherent part of the universe through observation and the scientific method. They do not perceive their Murphyism as a religious system, and often do not perceive themselves as religious at all. They can often be found in engineering and the physical sciences. The scientific method, with all of its checking, double checking, verified and reproducible results, is a comfort for them, yet they are not surprised when it does not work. They believe that Murphy’s Law itself exists and operates independently of any being or intelligence. Like gravity, it is a fact of existence. Its universality is a comfort for them, for they are able to say that, also like gravity, the law operates equally among all people… and any perception they might have that they seem to have worse “luck” than others must just be perception, not reality.

For the Religious/Mystical Murphyist, nothing could be further from the truth. They are deeply aware that the “Law” does not apply to all people equally. The experiences of their lives have convinced them that some people are more prone to the effects of this “Law” than others, and they sense a mischievous divine intelligence behind this fact. Put simply, the Religious/Mystical Murphyist believes that they are the “chosen” of the God Murphy, and often feel like a small mouse that a cat plays with. The God Murphy is a fickle, trickster God who cannot be appeased, only mitigated and suffered.

The Rational/Secular Murphyist believes that:

Murphy’s Law is the primary, guiding law of the Universe.

Murphy’s Law applies to all situations and all people equally, though humans may not always perceive its workings.

Systems such as the Scientific Method have been developed to allow humanity as a whole to mitigate the effects of this law upon progress.

Everything in human life should be checked at least three times by two or more people before it can be trusted, and then that trust should only be provisional.

When systems such as the scientific method and other checks are used and things still go wrong, there is no guilt or fault that attaches, because the universe is designed to go wrong. You just find out how it went wrong this time, correct for that, and try again.
The Religious/Mystical Murphyist believes:

Murphy’s Law is the primary, guiding law of the Universe.

Murphy’s Law is manifested by a trickster God, named Murphy.

The effects of Murphy’s Law are not manifested equally throughout the universe. The God Murphy has chosen some human beings to be his “favorites”. They experience the effects of the law more profoundly than others.

The God Murphy cannot be appeased… only mitigated.

Some human beings, often termed “lucky” are mostly ignored by the God Murphy. Though this is unfair, it is simply the way things are.

Those who are the “chosen favorites” of the God Murphy have developed ways of living their lives that mitigate the effects of being the “chosen” of the God Murphy. Some of these strategies include always having multiple backup plans, utilizing all possible safety equipment, and spending time with (and sometimes becoming life-partners with) those that they perceive to be “lucky”, hoping for some balancing effect.

When things go wrong, Religious/Mystical Murphyists realize that is it probably not their fault. Fault only attaches if they can identify some precaution that they could have reasonably taken that they did not. If they took all reasonable precautions and things still went wrong, then the Religious/Mystical Murphyist remembers the God Murphy and seeks to mitigate any and all effects.

Each of these religious systems begins and ends in the same place… and in this beginning and ending lies the strength of each of these systems that I wish to hold up to close this article. I look forward to hearing from the Murphyists out there as to how well I have captured a snapshot of your religious system, as I am one of those “lucky” one’s that a Murphyist has married to seek some kind of cosmic balance. I freely admit that I am only seeing part of it, having not lived the reality myself.

The strength in each of these religious system is that they begin with a firm ideological foundation (Anything that can go wrong will go wrong) and the end with a way to place the fault for things going wrong on something besides the self, so long as one has done the hard work of precautions and testing that is the spiritual practice of the Murphyist. Thus, taking precautions, developing backup plans, testing possible results, cushioning consequences, purchasing safety equipment, etc… all of these become an intimate and intricate dance in the life of the Murphyist, be they religious or secular, rational or mystical. The Murphyist is called to live a life of preparation, knowing that all preparation will ultimately fail. However, if they can prepare well enough, then the God Murphy can shoulder any blame. The true Murphyist becomes an expert at “picking up the pieces” of that failure and trying again. It is all they can do.

As I believe that all good theology should have a Science Fiction analogue, I have found such an analogue for the Murphyist. If you reach deep into Science Fiction you will find, within the Universe inspired by Larry Niven, a race of beings known as the Puppeteers. They live on a world with no hard edges, no corners, and no surfaces that are not cushioned. They prepare constantly for any danger, mitigate any threat, and seek safety as their primary purpose. Any Puppeteer who seeks adventure is declared criminally insane, and immediately exiled. When they sensed the impending energy-death of the Universe, they moved their entire solar-system to an area of the universe that would last longer than others.

If such a world appeals to you… then you might just be a Murphyist.

Yours in faith,

David

One of the aspects that I believe defines the religious liberal is the acknowledgement that we encounter the world and everything in it through our own lenses. These lenses are shaped by years of experience… by the people we meet, what we have read, and the journeys (literal and metaphorical) that we have taken. Religious Liberalism is often spoken of as a “Faith of Meaning Making”. At its best, Religious Liberalism is guided by principles, developed together and shared in covenant. At its worst, Religious Liberalism becomes a formless relativism. In either case, it is a faith practice that requires comfort with uncertainty. As I said in an earlier article, Religious Liberalism is the faith practice of living on the shifting sands, because such sands are all there are.

This aspect of Religious Liberalism has distinct implications for our encounters with anything in the world, but perhaps the difference is seen most clearly in how Religious Liberals encounter anything recognized as “scripture”. Such scripture may include the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures, the Buddhist Sutras, the Koran, the Baghavad Gita, the Popul Vuh, or even some of our own “scriptures”, such as the writings of some of our theological forebears (Francis David, Emerson, Parker, Channing, and so many more). The experiences of our lives can be understood a living scripture. It might be poetry or fiction, it might be science or art. What counts as scripture for those of Liberal faith is, unsurprisingly, liberal… and often very individualized. For myself, scripture consists of writings and experiences that have had a profound impact upon my life, or have had a profound impact on the lives of countless others. The philosophical writings of Mark Twain have had a profound impact upon my life, and so I include “What is Man?” and “The War Prayer” in my personal canon. Though I am not much moved by the Gospel of John from the New Testament, I recognize that millions have been so moved, so I also recognize its scriptural authority and seek to dance with it.

As I have encountered it in myself and others, the metaphor of a dance is the best I can find for how I and many other Religious Liberals (though perhaps not all) encounter scripture. In taking classes with non-religious liberals studying scripture of varying kinds (from transcendentalism to Christianity to Buddhism and more) I found the questions they most often asked were: “What meaning can be authentically derived from this scripture (exegesis)?”, “What is the context of this scripture?” and “What does this scripture require of me?”.

In encountering some of these same classes and scriptures with my fellow religious liberals, I found a different set of questions being asked… and I think this difference contrasts how religious liberals and others practice faith. Instead of asking “What meaning can be authentically derived from this scripture?”, I found Religious Liberals far more likely to ask “What meaning is there for me in this scripture, in this moment and in my context?” In other words, I found myself and many of my fellow Religious Liberals called to an eisegetical approach to scripture (reading meaning into the scripture) and not purely an exegetical approach (reading meaning from the scripture).

Now, there is a broad divide between how exegesis and eisegesis are viewed in the academic approach to scriptural reading and interpretation. That divide can be stated clearly… exegesis good… eisegesis bad, bad, BAD! Every class studying scripture I have ever encountered (save the one on Buddhist scriptures) understood the purpose of the class in part as purifying eisegesis out of the student’s engagement with the scripture. Students are required to write exegetical papers, and are chided by professors when they make what are interpreted as eisegetical statements. Papers are graded in part for the amount of eisegetical content that might be found in them.

Now, there are two main problems I wish to highlight with this approach. The first is to ask the post-modernist question… Can we ever achieve objective exegesis? Is it possible to encounter a scripture (or anything for that matter) and leave all of the other experiences of our lives out of the encounter? Does not a poor black woman and a rich white man encounter a certain metaphor about camels and eyes of needles in different ways? How do you decide which of these ways is more valid or objective?

One of the answers to this problem of the variability of exegetical work that has gained traction, not in the academy, but in the encounters with scripture by many Conservative Christians, is the “Common Sense” approach. It is the belief that the biblical scriptures of the Christian tradition can be understood with “common sense”, and that you do not need any particular training or skill at interpretation… because there is no interpretation to be done. The meaning is plain and the same to everyone… and that if you do not agree on a scripture’s meaning that is because either you are being deceived by Satan or you are over-thinking it (or both).

Both the academic search for an exegetical objectivity and the “common sense” answer of many of my Conservative Christian friends share the same problem… they often seek to define the scripture as having one meaning, one interpretation, and one purpose. At least in the Academy they invite dialogue and conversation between different interpretations, however the purpose of that dialogue is often (in my opinion) is to convince others of your position. There is similar variability of interpretation among those who follow the “common sense” approach, with much less dialogue. I do find my “Common Sense” Christian friends to be a bit more strident on what will happen to you if you do not agree with them than my friends in the Academy. Failing a class seems so much less scary after listening to descriptions of hell and damnation.

I highlight these two different approaches to interpreting and finding meaning in scripture not to put them down, but to highlight the difference that I see between these approaches and the one I believe we are called to practice as Religious Liberals. Both the academic exegetical approach and the “common sense” approach has value in that it provides a basis for meaning for those who practice it, and each provides a larger base of thought on the scripture for the Religious Liberal to encounter and dance with. My concern with the academic exegetical approach comes when it does not make room for the validity of any other way of encountering and understanding scripture. My concern with the “common sense” approach comes when it seeks to enforce such an individualized interpretation of scripture upon others (for I believe that the common sense approach is actually a mask for doing eisegesis while pretending it is exegesis).

As Religious Liberals, I believe that we are called, as a spiritual practice, to “dance” with the scriptures that we find move us and have power for us in our lives. I believe we are called to “dance” with the scriptures that others find moving and powerful, and that we have yet to find the same within. I believe we are called to “dance” even (and perhaps most importantly) with those scriptures that we find disturbing, that challenge our basic assumptions, but that others see as authoritative. Our encounters with scripture (of all types) should be fluid and dynamic, an interplay between that which makes up who we are and the scripture.

Let me use a section of Christian scripture as an example of one part of my own personal dance. As a teenager in a Southern Baptist Church, I remember a day when a scripture reading seemed to contrast strongly with the practice of my church. I had long begun to believe that for many of my fellow Church members, they came to church mainly to be seen coming to church. There was always a show of how much each tithed to the church. Some people seemed to want to be noticed in prayer during the service. Some seemed to compete for who could say “AMEN!” first. I had accepted that trying to show your piety publically was a part of what it meant to be a Christian. We had regularly been told that we should “wear our crosses on our sleeves”, so that we could better witness to others. Everyone we met should know that Jesus had saved us, and that he could save them too.

Then one day the Pastor read to us Matthew, Chapter 6. At first, I thought I had heard him wrong, as he said “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them”. I was flabbergasted when the scripture told us not to pray in the temples and synagogues or on street corners, but rather to “go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.”

‘God is in secret?’ I thought. ‘Since when?’

I had been schooled in the “Common Sense” school of understanding the Bible, and the common sense meaning of this scripture told me that I should get away from this church as fast as possible… something I eventually did. At that moment in my life, this scripture became part of why I asked my parents to quit making me go to church (there were other reasons, many of them not so religious). It was then that I really began developing the idea of an individual understanding of my relationship to God, and seeking a private understanding of prayer. By twenty, I was a Christian Deist.

Years later, as I was studying with a Zen Buddhist Roshi and practicing Zen meditation, I encountered this scripture again. I remembered how important that verse had been to me in my teens, but now my dance with it had new steps. I had found a way to “pray” behind closed doors, if not always alone in a room then in silence, seated on the floor and facing a wall. I realized that part of my practicing Zen was a public form of piety… I was given credit by many of my fellow Unitarian Universalists for being “pious and spiritual” because I spent some time every day sitting and facing a wall, even though a spiritual piety was not necessarily my internal reality. I used my connection to Zen to foster that image however, because it was useful to be seen that way in seminary. And when I prayed as a minister in public, I found myself at times “heaping up empty phrases”, and realized there was a disconnect between my private prayer life and the public prayers that were a part of my understanding of the role of “minister”.

Encountering Matthew 6 was a part of my re-evaluation of the places that Zen, Unitarian Universalism, and prayer were playing in my life. That evaluation eventually led to my stepping away from Zen (among other reasons), and focusing again on my own personal practices of prayer and meditation. Eventually I will seek a re-encounter with Zen, but at a time when I am not seeking it for reasons of public piety and ministerial formation.

Two very different encounters with the same scripture… what was different? The scripture was the same, but the meanings I found at each time were very different, and in each case they were transformative for me. What was different was me. The scripture spoke to me differently because I had changed. I had different lenses, different needs, and different experiences. The ability for something, anything, to speak in different ways to different people at different times in their lives may be the unifying definition of what is scripture for me.

The dance with scripture is an interplay, across experience and time, between an individual human being and a fixed point of wisdom, story, experience or thought. I do not have to agree with the wisdom for it to be scripture… I do not agree with John 14:6, (I am the way, the truth, and the light. No one comes to the father except through me). Yet each time I encounter that scripture it teaches me something new about myself and what I do believe.

The exegesis, the context of the scripture, the criticism of the scripture and other interpretations, and the meanings the scripture has held for others… these all form the dance floor. To truly be dancing with a scripture, you need to be aware of these… what others have claimed the scripture objectively means, how it relates to other scriptures and to the whole of the religious system, what meanings have been regularly found within the scripture. This is the setting for the dance, and you cannot dance without it. But they are not the dance…

The Dance is the interplay between your sense of self and the life you have lived with this fixed point of wisdom we call scripture. The interplay and interconnection between myself and scripture is one of the places where I see the Holy Spirit within my life. The transformations and inspirations from that dance are primarily for the individual who experiences them. My purpose as a Religious Liberal Minister is not to teach others my dance, but to help others discover their own. Perhaps then I might also be inspired and transformed by how they dance with scripture.

I invite you to dance.

Yours in faith,

David

I don’t like tofu. I’ve tried to eat it and it actually makes me gag. When I was dating, I suffered through several tofu laden meals for a particular liberal-leaning young woman I was attempting to woo… until I realized that if it worked out I would have to eat tofu for the rest of my life. Wonderful young woman, except for her love of tofu… and her fanatical belief that tofu was a miracle food that could cure all ills. To have challenged her “faith” in tofu would have meant an ugly fight to end our budding relationship… so I just broke up with her.

If today’s internet had been around, I might have scanned through some webpages, and found this article from 1999 which claims that tofu causes dementia. I might have dredged up a few similar articles that claim that tofu causes cancer, or loss of eyesight. I might even have found a few commentaries by conservative bloggers that the reason that liberals don’t “get it” is because the tofu-inspired dementia is already setting in. I could have brought all of those to her and tried to convince her of the evils of tofu, and how she needed to give it up or she would die a cancerous, demented, nearsighted, and short-sighted death, and that soon!

Instead, I told her that I really was not ready for a relationship (somewhat true) and that I needed to spend some time alone figuring out who I was (true, though I did not know it at the time). What I did not do was tell her that this line of thought had been inspired by the fact I just could not take any more tofu. Her faith in tofu was so strong that to have done that would have been like challenging the core of her being.

Now, before any tofu-lovers who read Celestial Lands passionately put fingers to keyboards, I do not believe that tofu causes dementia, or cancer, or nearsightedness, or general liberal-wackyness. While I do not believe that tofu has the miraculous health benefits my ex-ladyfriend did, I do believe that it probably has far more positive health benefits than negative ones. If you can swallow it without nausea, then it is probably a wonderful addition to your diet. My wife eats tofu from time to time, and even has an affinity for soymilk and endamame… she just does not make me eat it. I’m actually somewhat fond of endamame myself.

Hopefully having diverted the onslaught of pro-tofu emails and posts, I move on to the point I hoped to bring by telling this story… and that is that believing something passionately does not make it absolute truth. Nor does saying something loudly and often make it absolute truth. We have come to a time in our culture, in our lives, and in our politics where many people have become convinced their believing something imparts to it ultimate veracity.

Let’s take the example of my ex-ladyfriend… we will call her Kara. Kara was smart, witty, attractive, cute, and downright passionate… most of what I was looking for in a partner at that time. She had read some articles in a few magazines on the health benefits of tofu a few years before, and became a convert. She bragged that she had once gone a whole month where she ate nothing but soy-derived products. She took college classes on nutrition (not her major) just to try and learn more to support her beliefs about soy, and was angry when the professors found her fixation odd. If there was a “Soy-Party Movement”, Kara would have been at the front of it, and would probably have organized her life around it… and for all I know she has.

There is an aspect of human nature that seeks to absolutize the conditional. It has been a part of human nature for millennia, and perhaps it always will be. We humans are not comfortable with a universe that is complex, complicated, and conditional… where any absolute truth that exists within the universe is too deeply embedded for us to even perceive, much less articulate into truths usable in our daily lives.

And so, we create our own truths… we give them a capital T and we spend the rest of our lives attempting to keep them from “caving in on us”, as Mark Twain wrote in “What is Man?” We defend them passionately not because we know they are the Literal Truth, but because our passion around them is a bright light to keep away the darkness of our own doubts. We yell these truths, declare them to be “self-evident”, place them on protest banners, and talk about the day when we can either convince or enforce them upon everyone else.

Sometimes, we claim these truths are divine revelation, one of the most powerful strategies for preventing our doubts from overtaking us. Then we end up fighting not over what each of us “knows” to be true, but over what our “Gods” have declared to be true.

Those of you who are regular readers of Celestial Lands have heard this sermon before… I shout it pretty loudly, and it has been a passionate divining force in my life. You can say “David’s on that Idolatry thing again…” one of his regular “making the conditional into an absolute” sermons. One of the reasons I say it so often and so loudly is to remind myself of the challenge that Mark Twain issued… to become a permanent seeker of truth, not someone who has found truth and is trying to defend it… for I know that while Kara and I did not have tofu in common, we did share a tendency to use passion and commitment to keep our doubts at bay.

I talk about this struggle between the absolute and the conditional often because I live that struggle every day. Because I live it every day, and because my formation as a minister has required I bring so much about myself that was below the surface into the light of my own reflection, I see that same struggle all around me.

I see the struggle of the human need for certainty in a universe of the conditional in much of the religious evangelical furor in the world, be it conservative Christians who find their primary faith practice in conversion to Religious Liberals who advocate handing out pamphlets for “Peace” on public transit.

I see the struggle of the human need for certainty in a universe of the conditional in all of those who passionately believe that President Obama is a socialist/Marxist/Fascist who’s goal is to destroy America… as well as those who believe that President George W. Bush was a “Manchurian Candidate” of Saudi Oil interests who committed war crimes to further the financial goals of his “owners”. I heard both lines of “truth” from passionately committed believers, and realize that the “truth” about each of these men is far more complex.

I see the struggle for the human need for certainty in a universe of the conditional in all of the people who will believe something must be true because a politician whom they ideologically agree with says that something… and the politicians who go on camera and say things that are demonstrably untrue knowing that their supporters will believe it regardless. You do not have to worry about demonstrable truth if you are supporting the absolute truths of those who support you. That absolute truth is more powerful than any demonstration.

I see the struggle for the human need for certainty in a universe of the conditional in many of the slogans that have entered into our political and sociological debates… “Death Panels!” ; “Tea-Partiers are Racists!”; “Obama is Hitler!”; “Virtual Strip-Searches!”; “God Hates Fags!”; “Militias are Traitors!”; etc, etc…

I will make a bit of a “mea culpa” here. I know that my own passion around the issue of the intersection between the tea-party movement and the manifestations of racism in America have, at times, been a bit absolutist. While I do believe that some of the endemic racism in America is being expressed within the tea-party movement, that does not mean that all tea-party participants are racists, nor that racism is their primary motivating factor. As I said, I keep coming back to this issue of absolutizing the conditional because it is one I struggle with, everyday.

What is fascinating to me is the paradox of the role that religion has played in this human instinct to absolutize the conditional. The understanding of God as the only absolute should open up the space for the rest of the human-perceived universe to be understood as conditional… and yet what often happens is that the Absolute Truth that God is supposed to represent becomes the model for how we understand any and all other kinds of truth. Divine Logos transmutes into human Logos, until we commonly confuse our own understandings with the infinite truth of God.

The task (not the truth) of Liberal Religion is not to convince others that we have the divine truth… but rather to lessen our own certainty as to our ability to perceive or conceive of any absolute truth that might exist. It is to struggle every day to live in a world of the conditional, to learn to live intimately with the doubts and fears that such a conditional world often inspires in humanity, and to show that it is possible to live “on the shifting sands.”

Yours in faith,

David

One of the common responses to Unitarian Universalism that I found among my military chaplain colleagues is the belief that we UU’s have no morality… when in reality I have found that few people carry a heavier moral burden than the Unitarian Universalist. Even among UU’s I have heard it said that we have “Ethics, not morality”. I want to say at the outset of my exploring the idea of the moral burden that we UU’s carry that I know this is a topic upon which many UU’s may disagree… this is my contribution to what is (and should be) a continuing debate among our dynamic, changing faith.

I believe that few faiths, if any, call upon its adherents to carry a heavier moral burden than Unitarian Universalism does.

First, let me define what I mean by “moral burden”, as it is a pretty meaning-laden term. It is distinctly different from the term “morality” which to me implies a system, a code of morals… and I do not think that is what I am talking about. What I am getting at with the term “moral burden” is more a sense, a deep rooted and sacred feeling of responsibility. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, when Simon of Cyrene was required to carry Jesus’ cross, gets at the feeling of what I mean by a “moral burden” (MK 15:21). It is a weight of responsibility that you carry because you feel you have no other choice. Simon of Cyrene carried his burden because Roman soldiers gave him no choice, but we Unitarian Universalists carry our moral burden because the values and the principles that we hold require it.

As one fairly new UU church member once told me, life was easier before she became a Unitarian Universalist. There were so many things going on in the world that, because she did not know about them , she did not have to care about them. Now that “her eyes had been opened” (her words, not mine) she felt a crushing weight of responsibility, because she could not but care about those things, and feel that she should be doing something about each of them. Unlike Simon, however, we do not have to carry our moral burden alone… we Unitarian Universalists have one another.

I believe there is a somewhat unique blend of theology, of history, of values, and of principles that calls Unitarian Universalists to carry this moral burden in a unique way… and that combination is one of the reasons I am a UU. I want to touch on a few of those unique threads that twist together to make the cord that attaches us to our moral burden. They are: human agency, responsibility for good and evil, a theology of transformation, and our understanding of the individual and the community. These are just four of many threads, but for me they are the most profound. Perhaps you might identify some other threads in the cord of responsibility to our UU moral burden.

One of the most common theological themes I have found in my fellow Unitarian Universalists regards the belief that it is humanity that retains moral agency in the world, not God. Even for the theists among us, we often have a belief that either limits or negates whether God can act in the world. We do not attribute the moving and miracles of our daily life to the actions of God, but instead seek the sources of daily events in our own actions and in the actions of the people around us… or in the natural processes of this earth we inhabit.

When an earthquake causes devastation and suffering, as it did recently in Haiti, we Unitarian Universalists do not seek to blame God for it; we do not see it as divine punishment for any perceived wrongs. We understand it as an unfortunate result of the natural processes of this world, and also (in the case of Haiti) we remember the issues of justice and poverty that made construction in Haiti so shoddy. We then feel a burden to assist in the aftermath, and to find ways to address the justice and poverty issues that let the situation arise in the first place. Unitarian Universalists feel the burden for assisting as we can in the relief and recovery efforts because we know that, at least outside the human spirit, human assistance is all that can be expected. The Divine may provide us inspiration and strength, but it will be human hands that clear the rubble, that set up tents, that serve food.

This is the first strand of the moral burden of the Unitarian Universalist… the belief that if a difference is to be made, the effort for that difference must come from human hands. Those hands may not always be ours… it may be that some of our treasure can go to fund other hands. All too often though, it is our hands that our moral burden calls us to use to make a difference in our world. Those hands may be serving food, or they may be holding up a protest banner at injustice. Haiti is an example of when both the immediate need and the systemic need for our hands and our work are so very clear.

The weight of both of those cannot be alleviated or lessened by a belief that a Divine force will take part of the burden. For those UU’s who feel the kind of divine connection with what I call God, what we gain at most from that connection is some of the strength necessary to carry the burden, not a lighter burden. We UU’s carry a heavier moral burden than some of our friends of other faith traditions because we do not believe that God will carry it for us.

The second strand of the cord that binds the Unitarian Universalist to our moral burden for the world is similar to the first, but different in its focus. One of the most difficult theological questions that Unitarian Universalists have struggled with over the last twenty decades has been on the questions of the primacy of good and the existence of evil. There have been many different positions taken in this debate, and I will not claim that it has been decided. For the purposes of this article, I am going to argue from the point of view of my position in this debate: that good and evil do not exist as metaphysical realities, but rather are aspects of human valuation. In other words, good and evil come into existence by what we humans judge to be either good or evil.

The result of this theology of good and evil is that responsibility for what is good and what is evil in this world rests not on some metaphysical beings, but squarely upon the shoulders of humanity. The realization that we cannot blame the evil in this world upon some metaphysical “Satan” means that we humans bear responsibility for anything we value as evil. The same is true for God and what we value as good.

When we judge something, from our values, principles, and beliefs to be good, we then take upon ourselves the moral burden of sustaining, supporting, and expanding that which we have named good. When we judge something, from our values, principles, and beliefs to be evil, we then take upon ourselves the moral burden of alleviating, ending, or opposing that which we have named evil. When something we have named evil occurs in the world (be it of human origin or not) we do not have the luxury of excusing ourselves of responsibility for it by claiming that an evil force, such as the Devil, did it.

Each judgment of something as being either good or evil places a sacred responsibility for that something upon the moral burden of the Unitarian Universalist. Individually and together, we UU’s bear the moral burden of supporting the good and alleviating or ending the evil we see in the world.

The third strand in the cord that binds us to the moral burden we carry as Unitarian Universalists is a belief that together we really can carry the burden that is upon us. For many who face the weight of responsibility for (as in one UU prayer) saving the world, the weight seems too much to bear, and they retreat back into apathy, often even more discouraged than they were before. One of the binding threads of our faith is contained, I believe, in the famous quote by Margaret Mead:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

This quote is almost a creed of the theology of faith of the Unitarian Universalist, and I believe it may be the most common theological thread among us. I have spoken with many who explored our faith and chose not to commit to it, and often the reason was because we were always preaching, teaching and calling for action about things they felt they could never change. Amid an ever increasing understanding of the problems and dangers of this world, amid social and political injustice, amid the reality of inequality, and prejudice, what I find in Unitarian Universalists is a hopefulness that Margaret Mead captured.

It is the thread of this hopefulness, which I can only describe as a beautiful kind of faith, that is what I believe keeps many UU’s from laying down the sacred responsibility of their moral burden and moving to an apathetic stance in the world. This faithful hopefulness is not only what helps us to carry our moral burden, but also binds us to it… and perhaps binds us together more than anything else.

The last cord of this moral burden that I will try and articulate in this article is found in a different understanding of what I term the “flow of morality”. For this, I will need to refer to the faith of my childhood, growing up as a Southern Baptist.

The system of morality that I learned in my childhood church was one that centered on the individual. It was a morality that consisted of few general concepts, and many specific edicts. The individual was called upon to not smoke, not drink, to honor father and mother, to obey those in authority. It taught that I (personally) was a sinful being who only found forgiveness in the grace of God, represented by Jesus dying on the cross. I should give ten percent of everything I owned to the church, and I should follow all the commandments of the bible (or at least the ones I was told about). My entire morality centered on the “I”… on the individual.

What broadening there was of this moral code to the community, to the nation, and to the world proceeded from this individual center. Communal morality then became the importation or imposition of this individual morality upon others, as individuals, in larger and larger contexts. The church then would only be moral if all the members of the church adopted and practiced the same individual morality. The nation and the world would only be moral when the individuals… all the individuals… adopted or had imposed upon them the same individual morality.

Now, there are many Christians who have moved from that individual morality to develop derivative cultural and national systems of morality that are not so individually focused… but in my perception those systems still proceed from this individual moral basis as their starting point and ideal, and are formed and shaped by that individual moral basis.

Unitarian Universalists proceed the other way with regards to global, national, communal, and individual morality. I believe we as a faith begin with an image and vision of global morality. We call it by different names: right relationship, beloved community, the “realm of God”. It is a vision not of how individuals should live their lives, but what a “world made whole” would look like.

It is from and in support of this vision of a world made whole that we then derive our moral systems at each of the other levels. All communal moralities are derived from this vision of a world made whole in how they support and promote that vision. Individual morality for Unitarian Universalists is not then the center from which all flows, but rather the ultimate derivation of what I as an individual can and must do to support, promote and some day achieve the vision of Beloved Community on a global scale.

It is no wonder that many who form their moral systems from an individual basis cannot see the morality of the Unitarian Universalist… they are looking in the wrong places. Our morality is formed not around individual commandments, but around a vision of, in the language I use, “the Realm of God”.

This is the fourth strand, and perhaps the heaviest in the cord that binds the moral burden of the Unitarian Universalist… saving the world. Without direct assistance from God, with responsibility for what is good and what is evil, and with the faithful hopefulness that we really can achieve it… we Unitarian Universalists carry with us the burden of saving the world. Of creating a world of justice and equality, of connection and interdependence, of hope and possibility. And, it is that hope and possibility that brings us to pick up such a heavy burden, smile and say with Jesus “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11. 30)

Yours in Faith,

David

I want to be very clear at the beginning of this article that it applies to the religious right, the religious center, and the religious left, and I’m going to focus on the religious left. This is something within human nature, not within specific religious traditions. If there is a difference in how this article applies across religious traditions, it is a difference of degree.

There is something in the human experience that calls us to desire certainty… to want to “know” something in its fullness, and to not have to continue to wrestle with doubt. Many humans seem to have an internal mechanism for certainty… and when that is shown to be impossible we often go to the other extreme… that nothing can be known at all.

Even we Unitarian Universalists are not immune to faith without doubt… it just tends to occur more on the ideological spectrum than the theological spectrum for us… though I’m going to focus this article on some of our theological “certainties”.

Many of you know that I love UU jokes. Partly this is because I think it is healthy to be able to hold a little irreverence for the things that you hold the deepest loyalty to… and also it is because that I believe a caricature of a thing is revealing about the core of that thing. I believe many UU jokes serve that role for Unitarian Universalism. Here is one of my favorites:

To have no doubts is fundamentalism.

To have some doubts is normal.

To have many doubts is a crisis of faith.

To have nothing but doubts is a conversion to Unitarian Universalism!

Now the joke is not literally true… to have nothing but doubts is not UU’ism, and it would be a hell of a way to live. I’m sure that fundamentalists have doubts about some things in their lives, whether they admit to it or not. I know that was true of the fundamentalist churches I grew up in. Humanity is never as clear cut as the distinctions above make it seem. That’s the point.

The deeper truth (lower case t) the joke points to is that we Unitarian Universalists recognize the importance of doubt, at least intellectually. I sometimes question how good we are at putting that intellectual and spiritual understanding of doubt into practice, but we are getting better… it is one of our “growing edges”. During my first few years as a Unitarian Universalist I made two profound realizations:

There are Unitarian Universalist Fundamentalists…

And I was one of them.

That realization helped me to begin to have a new, spiritual understanding of the concept of doubt. It allowed me to hold a new understanding for my Christian commitment to humility… not necessarily humility before others (something I have never done very well, though I try) but humility before ultimacy. The important lesson of doubt is not that we can know nothing, but that it is impossible to know everything. Certainty without ultimate knowledge (either knowing God perfectly or making yourself into God) is hubris.

There are many human attempts to make something that is limited represent ultimacy… so we can live in the illusion that it is possible for us to grasp all there is and remove all doubt. These attempts are not limited to any particular religious tradition. Believing a particular set of scripture to be “God’s Revealed Word” even when it is demonstrably the flawed work of human hands is one such attempt to transmute the limited into the ultimate. Believing that science and the scientific method can reveal all the “mysteries and secrets of the universe” when it is obviously limited by the senses and faculties of the human beings who practice it is another. Reducing God to idyllic forms and placing your faith for ultimacy in them, forms such as “Justice”, “Liberty”, “Truth”, “Love” or “Reason” are attempts to make the limited ultimate. I know this is the one I am most often guilty of practicing. I can always tell when I am trying to make such limited ideals ultimate, because I tend to capitalize those words.

I believe I am not alone in being drawn to this kind of certainty of ultimacy on the religious left. What I believe we need to realize is that it is our own version of believing the Bible is the “Word of God”.

I believe the corrective to each of these attempts to make the limited ultimate (be it scriptural literalism, scientific foundationalism, or idyllic formism) is to transform each of these not into a graspable substitute for totality (idolatry), but rather into a lived practice in our daily lives.

The corrective for exalting a scripture as the literal truth of God is to transform your relationship to that scripture into a dynamic dance… to give it the space not to speak as a commandment from on high, but a conversational reality whose meaning can shift as you shift, grow as you grow, and change as you change. It is to allow that scripture to work in your life in ways that transform, not command; in ways that draw-out, not condemn. It is to make a lived practice of dancing with the scripture… I will write an article specifically on this later as it is a much larger concept that I can capture in a paragraph.

The corrective for exalting Science as the literal truth of the Universe is to imbue into each act and practice of science that sense of wonder that Albert Einstein so often spoke of… to remember the metaphor of Einstein’s Library. It is to engage science not as discovery of truths… but as an ever evolving practice of wonder. For the same reason as before, I will write about this in more detail later… but you can see much of what I am speaking of in transforming science from ultimacy to practice in much of the thought of Einstein. He was the master of this particular practice.

The corrective for exalting idyllic forms is to make each of these a daily practice in our lives. Rather than seeking some metaphysical Justice, in what ways do you/can you create justice every day? Rather than pining after some metaphysical Love, what ways can do you/can you create love around you as you live? There are two parts to this process. The first is similar to “Precept Study” in Zen Buddhism. First we must look at our lives through each of these “Idyllic Forms”. To make Love no longer some substitute for ultimacy, we must very intentionally look at our lives through the lens of love: Where are we feeling loved? Where are we not? Where are we giving love? Where are we not? What kinds of love do we feel and give? What kinds of love do we reject? What kinds of love do we yearn for and do not have? What kinds of love have hurt us, or hurt those around us? What kinds of love have caused us to feel shame? What kinds of love have lifted our souls? Etc, etc.

Through this reflection, we not only make love real for us, we learn how we are practicing it already. Where we are responsible in our loving, and where we might not be. How our love affects us and affects others. Where our love may be harming others, or harming ourselves. We cease to think of Love as an unattainable metaphysical ideal and make it a real and living part of our daily lives.

We must do this kind of reflection for each of the different “Idyllic Forms” we find in our lives. Reason, Justice, Mercy, Faith, Liberty, Freedom, Equality… all of these and more would be used as lenses to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, of our lives, and of how we live with and affect those around us.

From that understanding we would then be called into living our lives with intention around those idyllic forms… because they would no longer by idyllic, they would be real and vibrant parts of our lives. If we have intentionally gained understanding of how we love and relate to others, we would likely then be called to intentionally practice that love in different ways. If we intentionally gain an understanding of were we experience inequality with others (where we are the oppressed and where we are the oppressor) we then would be called to intentionally practice how we relate to the world and to others in it in different ways. The same would be true for any of the idyllic forms we cease to make idyllic through intentional spiritual reflection.

This could become an intentional Liberal Faith (see the capital letters?) spiritual practice, and the intent of the article was to lay some of the foundation for this as a possibility. I could even envision a monastic order that found their “rule” in something similar to this… the continual self-reflection that then motivates a practice of living in the world “deliberately”… to borrow from Thoreau. And yet, recent movements in Liberal Faith as a whole, and UU’ism in particular, have sought to move right to the “living in the world” without the individual and communal critical reflection on what the “idyllic form” might really mean for us.

This is my core critique of the “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign. I perceive it as an attempt to make a practice of something we have yet to make personally spiritual… and as such it becomes another glorification of an “Idyllic Form” that we do not really understand, have less agreement on than we think, and do not understand how it relates to our lived lives. Before we can “Stand on the Side of Love”, I believe we need to deliberately understand love in our lives and in our spirits. That means finding ways to inspire individual reflective practice on love within our lives first, and from that move into the communal reflection, and then the forms of practice that the campaign is currently attempting. Otherwise, we run the danger of treating love as just another idol… another graspable substitute for certainty and ultimacy.

Yours in faith,
David

I do not often post my sermons directly to the Blog here at Celestial Lands, but something is moving me to share this one here this morning.  Perhaps because I have been so disappointed and depressed over some recent events in American Political History that this sermon, written a year ago, is also preaching to me today.  I am presenting it this morning at the Unitarian Church of Evanston, IL.   

“How Dare You People Bring THAT MAN Here!?!” shouted the man at the young taxi driver. “How dare you people bring THAT MAN here without our permission!?!”

Though it had been three years since “that man” had come, the young taxi driver knew instantly why he was being yelled at. It had happened before.

It started innocently enough. A young man working as a taxi driver after college picked up a fare. The man gave him an address on Greenwood Street in Evanston. The young taxi driver knew that address, because it was for the house that shared a parking lot with his Church, the Unitarian Church of Evanston. And so, without consulting a map, he drove his fare home.

When they arrived the man asked with some surprise how it was that the young taxi driver had known where to go without directions or a map. It was then the taxi driver admitted he attended the Unitarian Church.

“How dare you people bring that man here without our permission!?!” shouted the man, his face purpling with rage. It had been three years since the Unitarian Church of Evanston had hosted a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1962, but still the memory of that event was rough and raw for the yelling man.

“If we’d asked your permission, would you have agreed?” the young taxi driver asked.

“Of Course Not!” shouted the man.

With a smart-alec smile the young taxi driver said “Well, that’s why we didn’t ask!”

On October 31st, Halloween night of 1962 our church, the Unitarian Church of Evanston hosted a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. The event does not seem to have been advertised in the local papers. The church did not put up flyers saying it was going to happen. It had been arranged in part through the connections of a former minister of the church Rev. Homer Jack. Studs Terkel agreed to introduce Dr. King and to moderate the forum discussion. No recording of the event was made, and there was very little about it that I found in the Church’s Archives.

And yet, it was a profound and formative event in the life of this church. When I became this congregation’s ministerial intern, one of the first things I learned that had a real mythical quality was that Dr. King had once spoken here. As I spoke to several of the members of this congregation who were here that day, it became apparent that this was one of the two events from the time of the Civil Rights Movement that most shaped them… and no one remembered what he had spoken of in any detail.

By daring to invite Dr. King, this church created what was probably one of the largest interracial gatherings in the history of Evanston up to that point. Some told me that about 700 people, half of them white members of the church and community and the other half black citizens of Evanston had come to hear Dr. King speak. Black and white alike were sitting in these seats, standing in these isles, packed up the staircase and leaning over that balcony. All to hear Dr. King’s clarion call to racial equality and justice. You are in this room, this same room… take a moment to imagine it.

(Pause)

There were a few protestors outside, but the secrecy of the event meant there were fewer than you might expect. Packed shoulder to shoulder were Black and White, men and women, children and adults… all together in 1962. It was a moment of daring for all of the people who were involved…

“How Dare You People Bring THAT MAN Here!?!” shouted the closest neighbor to the church.

A few days later, one white female member of the church, who was there to hear Dr. King a few nights before, told her friend the store clerk at the local grocery what an amazing experience it had been to hear Dr. King. Immediately, all sound in the grocery store stopped, as everyone turned to stare in silence at her.

How dare you people bring that man here.

How profound it is to dare. How profound it is to dare to risk. How profound it is to dare to love. How profound it is to dare to dream. How profound it is to dare to hope. How profound it is to dare.

Through learning about this church’s involvement in the civil rights movement, I have found a new personal hero. His name was John O’Brien, and in 1971 he spoke in this church. He came to confess. A former Army Intelligence Officer, he came here to confess that he had been assigned to spy upon this congregation, on all of the churches in Evanston that were involved in the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. He had come to this sanctuary and written down names, he had thought of ways to distract the church from its work. He had arranged to have these windows behind me broken so the church would have to spend resources to replace them. He had helped decide who would be moved to concentration camps if marshal law was declared.

And over time, he had dared to ask himself the question of what was more important to him, following orders or obeying the Constitution. He chose to follow the constitution, and got out of the Army. He dared to testify before congress, and for this he faced character assassination, the loss of his income, possible arrest, and the scorn of everyone he had worked in Army Intelligence with, including my father. As his last act before removing himself from public life forever, John O’Brien came to those he felt he had wronged, and he dared to confess, in a sermon he presented from the pulpit of this church.

We do not have to look far to find such daring. One member of this congregation who was in Evanston during the civil rights movement dared to challenge his neighbors on their racism, when they chose to move to Winnetka instead of have their children attend the new integrated Evanston Schools.

Another member of this congregation dared to gather supplies from the Evanston community, and drive them down to the South each weekend, to Selma and Birmingham, Memphis and Montgomery, so the civil-rights protestors would have what they needed to print flyers, to have water, and to hand out pamphlets.

This church dared to invite other leaders of the civil rights movement to speak here, including James Baldwin, James Bevel, and Rev. Eugene Sparrow. They even dared to host a performance by Dick Gregory and the Freedom Singers.

This church as a whole dared to house an African American School for a period of time, until the Evanston Schools were fully integrated. UCE dared to hire an African American Music Director in the 60’s. UCE dared to challenge its minister to go to Selma after the death of Unitarian minister Rev. James Reeb at the hands of a white mob. Though ethical challenges would later bring Rev. Ross Allen Weston to leave this church, he accepted that particular challenge, and he went to march in Selma alongside hundreds of other Unitarian Ministers, and Dr. King.

If I were to pick a time in the history of this congregation during the Civil Rights Movement in which our church dared more than any other, it would be in the days that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Perhaps because Dr. King had spoken here, it seemed that it felt very personal to the members of this church that he had been murdered. Perhaps it was in the nature of the church’s brand new minister, the Rev. Charles Eddis to dare and to challenge authority… I do not know. I only know what happened. Rev. Eddis told me that it was one of the highpoints in his career as a minister.

When word came to the city of Evanston that Dr. King had been shot to death outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee on April 4th, 1968 there was deep concern in the city government that violence might erupt, as it had on the South Side of Chicago.

When two young black men asked the city for a permit to march in honor of King the following Sunday, those fears increased.

The city government, seeking a way to have the march but avoid any violence, called all of the Evanston Ministers together, both black and white. The Mayor begged the ministers to become involved in planning and leading the march, to hold a group rally and worship service in honor of Dr. King. It was thought that if the ministers were there, the crowd might be less inclined to violence.

I don’t know what came over him, where his daring came from, but Rev. Eddis had found his moment. He raised his hand and when called upon he dared to say something like this to the mayor: “We’ll lead your march, but you need to pass that Open Housing law that the city council has been debating for so long”. It was almost blackmail, for Rev. Eddis and the other clergy had long been advocating for the city to pass the law that would make it legal for Black Families to move into white neighborhoods in Evanston.

The mayor said they’d look into it, or something else fairly non-committal. When the ministers came together afterward, they knew that they would have to do something more, especially Rev. Eddis and the Rev. Jacob Blake, the African American Pastor of Ebenezer AME Church.
So, they held the march and rally for Dr. King… and then they kept on marching. Each night, the members of the AME church and the Unitarian church and other Evanston congregations would march in support of the Open Housing Law. They would follow behind Rev. Blake and Rev. Eddis, a Black Methodist from Chicago and a White Unitarian from Canada, locked arm in arm, carrying a banner which called for housing equality.

They would begin at a church, march through the white neighborhoods, stop in front of the house of the mayor or a city council member, hold a rally, and then march to another church. Often they would march from a white church to a black church, or visa versa. For two weeks they dared to march each evening, always respectful, following traffic laws and street signs. They dared to take their children with them, black children and white children playing at marching together. They dared so much that the mayor was heard to exclaim from inside his home “We’ll pass your damn law!” while he was apparently holding a shotgun behind the door.

A member of the church who did not march watched out her window as her fellow congregants of our Unitarian Church dared to walk through her neighborhood calling for integration, and she said the feeling of that moment has never left her.

It was a moment of daring in the life of this congregation. Not only did they call for the city government to act, they lead the movement to force them to do so.

At one march on Easter Sunday, over 5000 people marched with Rev. Eddis and Rev. Blake through the white-only neighborhoods of Evanston. When the law was passed, the members of these two congregations dared to make the “V” for victory sign at the city council members, as if to add insult to injury.

How profound it is to Dare! How profound it is to take a stand, to challenge even at risk to yourself and your own interests. Some people left the congregation because of its stand. About ten years before Dr. King spoke in this hall the congregation had voted not to become involved in Civil Rights. It was too risky… so what changed? From where did this daring spirit come?

I have seen this congregation dare. How daring it was to invite a former Iraq weapons inspector and a former U.S. ambassador to come and speak to a crowd of almost 500 about what a disaster an Invasion of Iran would be. How daring it was to make public our stand against the war in Iraq. This congregation has not forgotten how to be daring.

How daring it is to regularly read the names of those killed in the current wars in public. How daring it is to hang a banner on the church for equality, to put a peace pole out in a time of war.

You dared to invite me to be your ministerial intern, when many other congregations might not have. I am a son of the south, white mixed with Cherokee, a military veteran, and a Unitarian Universalist Christian.
Not only did you dare to invite me to preach to you for that year, but you dared to look closely at your own assumptions about the military and those who serve, about Christianity, and about the South, and I am deeply honored by that daring audacity.

How dare you all bring that man here! How dare we? There is more I wish we could dare. There are many things I wish we as a denomination could dare.

I wish we could dare to ask ourselves the deep questions about why there were more African American members of our denomination in 1968 than there are today.

I wish we could dare to have the conversations about why some of our longer-term Unitarian Universalists are made uncomfortable by the presence of all these young families that are new to our movement.

I wish we could dare to change the way our denomination and our congregations think about money in these times of economic trial, and what it is our money supports when we invest it.

In the year that I was with you, we dared to bring into our midst the stories of the veterans among us, who for years have kept silent about that part of their lives… I wish we could now dare to reach out to the military families in the communities around our churches. There are more of them than you might think.

It is going to seem presumptuous of me, as I am not a part of the daily life of this church anymore… but I have been thinking about what I might wish this church to dare. Perhaps my dreams might inspire you, even if it is to find your own dreams of what you as a church might dare.

I wish this congregation could dare to ask why, over 40 years after the open housing law that our congregation marched for was passed, the map of where blacks in Evanston live and where whites in Evanston live looks almost as segregated today as it did then. In other words, I wish we would dare to look closely at how race and class are intricately linked in this very affluent city.

I wish this congregation could call attention to the racial bias shown by the Evanston Police, and the racial hatred and violence shown by the Chicago police around my own neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.

If I have a prayer for you, if I have a prayer for our church, if I have a prayer for Unitarian Universalism, if I have a prayer for the movement of Liberal Faith this morning, it is this:

Let us Dare.

Let us dare to challenge our own assumptions, prejudices and beliefs, so that we can learn from them and break their hold upon us.

Let us dare to challenge the pre-conceived notions all around us, about race, about class, about creed, about culture, and shout to this world that the whole is much more complicated than many of our traditions make us think.

Let us dare to risk, to speak out and garner our neighbor’s ire when we see injustice and racial inequality. Let us invite those who have dedicated their lives to the values and principles we believe in, not to speak to us, but to speak through our faith to the wider community. Let us dare to hope that we can make a difference. Let us dare to dream of what this world will look like when it has become whole, and share that dream with others as the center of our living faith. Let us dare to love, even those who disagree with us. Let us Dare.

How dare you people bring that man here?

Let us Dare.

So may it be, blessed be, and amen.

If you are looking for hope from me, today is not the day. For several days, I have debated whether or not to write about my feeling that this week might have marked the end of American Democracy… or rather, if some day in the future I might look back on this week and say, “Yes, that was when the myth of American Democracy was exposed”. I was driving in my car when I heard the Supreme Court had decided that corporations have First Amendment rights, creating a nearly unlimited right for corporations to spend money to directly influence American electoral politics.

I turned the radio off NPR, and put in my CD of the New Testament. I remember thinking, “Well, it’s not like my caring about politics has much of a point anymore, does it?” I hope I don’t stay in this mental and spiritual space, but after the Supreme Court decision, I feel like my rights as an American Citizen have been stripped away. For what value is an individual’s right to free speech when there is little to no hope of being listened to? At least, not by those who make policy in this country.

You can turn on the television, or even listen to the speech the President made regarding this Supreme Court decision, and hear the doom and gloom… you don’t need it from me. At least the President is good at finding some way to bring hope. I just don’t feel it at the moment. Like a prophet of old, I can see the ramifications of this decision spreading out before us as a nation. The composition of the Supreme Court is unlikely to change for at least ten years, and by that point the damage will be done. Politicians will realize that they have much more to fear in the next election from corporations than they do the American People. Corporations will realize that they no longer need to bribe candidates with donations… that it is much more effective to threaten them with opposition. Soon, corporations won’t even have to spend they money to control politicians… the threat that they could will be enough. Our political structures at all levels will become creatures of corporate interest. Individual Americans are, as of this week, no longer players in American public discourse. It will just take a while for us all to figure that out.

I know, some have claimed this to be true before… but before at least a veneer of our politics being the venue of the people had to be maintained. That veneer allowed for a mass public response that assisted in the election of President Obama. I believe that this Supreme Court decision would make the last election impossible to repeat. I fear that we will have a couple of elections where corporate interests wage campaigns against any politicians who believe they are still responsible to the American People, and then the political establishment will come to terms with just who their masters really are.

I know, this article does not sound like me. I know I’m reacting emotionally. I know I’m not sounding very “rational” at the moment. I’m not feeling rational. I’m somewhere between shock, angry, fearful, and hopeless.

I will say this though… as I was driving around to see my hospice patients this week, listening to the Gospel of Matthew on my car CD player, several stories took on new and different meanings because of the mental space that I am in…

Especially the one where Jesus came in and threw the moneychangers out of the temple.

Yours in Faith,

David

I love it when the responses to an article prompt me to another article. One of my most respected teachers, Joshin Roshi, responded to my last article on the symbolic construction of reality by reminding me not to miss the forest for the trees… to not discount the direct experience of totality amid all of our human attempts to make sense of it. It is a point well made.

It is the space between those two… between direct experience of transcending unity, mystery, and wonder (see, words fail even here) and our human attempts to not only use language to express that experience, but also our human attempts to make private meaning from those experiences, that I believe rests much of human conflict and strife. We humans just do not seem to be wired to do the “experiencing” without then trying to do the “knowing”… and it is in our attempts at knowing that our pre-conceptions, prejudices, and constructed symbolic reality come into play.

As some of you may have read in my most concise representation of my theology to date, my theology begins with the kind of experience of (God, totality, oneness, kensho, etc) that Joshin Roshi points to. I believe Roshi is right when he claims that our human attempts at knowing that begin from authentic experience have the most meaning… and yet even from the same or similar experiences we humans come to vastly different meaning-sets.

I believe that what I call “God”, that experience of oneness and totality that has snuck up on me from time to time (watching a beautiful sunset, reading Isaiah 41 during a stressful time, watching a child being born) I have also learned to experience intentionally through meditation, through quieting my mind, stepping a little away from my constructed self, and giving myself permission to simply be. When I either attempt to place myself in this spiritual space, or find myself in that communion with totality unexpectedly… this is what I think of as prayer. Those moments, brief though they are, when I feel myself in the presence of the totality that I name God… those moments are for me the root behind all forms of communion. One of the first times I remember sensing myself in the presence of this oneness was a childhood experience of kneeling, taking a wafer and a cup of grape juice, and partaking of them to the words “do this in remembrance of me”.

And yet God, prayer, meditation, presence, communion… all of these symbols are part of a meaning-set that I have placed upon the experience itself. They arise from the experience as I encountered it, based upon my life history, my training, and my pre-conceptions. They say far less about totality/oneness/God than they say about me.

God is not found through meditation. Who I am in the presence of God is.

Many others have placed different meaning-sets upon the experience of the totality that I personally name God. I believe that the same universal wholeness can be sensed through Islamic prayer, through Tibetan chanting, through speaking in Tongues or through Evangelistic rapture… among many other forms. What differs in each of these is not the reality of a totality experienced, but how the individual experiences that totality and what meaning-sets they place upon that experience.

Now, I’m not going to claim that all human religious thought arises from the “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder”(as we UU’s put it in the six sources). Nor am I going to claim that all human attempts at meaning arise from authentic experience of anything… I think we humans are amazingly adept at making meaning from just about anything, including our ability to make meaning from prior meaning from prior meaning from prior meaning. My own theology is an example of making meaning from meaning… for it arises from the authentic experience of totality but then is influenced by the meaning-sets of many others.

What I will claim is that there is a certain depth, a sacred nature to the meanings we have created the closer they get to the experience from which they arise. The knowings about my relationship with my wife that I hold most dear are the ones most closely related to my direct experiences of her love for me. Yet the space between those knowings and the experiences they relate to must be respected, or we are in danger of replacing the wonder of the experience with the meanings we have made from them. To lose the space between what we know about the experience and the experience itself is what I regularly refer to as idolatry. It is the impulse that my understanding of totality becomes that totality… and it is the most dangerous theological fallacy that we humans fall prey to.

Roshi, thank you for inspiring these thoughts in me. Gassho.

Yours in Faith,

David

In the discussion of a recent article of mine on the growth of the myth of a post-racial America, it became clear to me that the article depends upon a particular understanding of the nature of reality as we human beings have constructed it, and that I had never articulated the line of thought on which it is based. Since this conception of reality and of human nature is a fundamental building block upon which much of the rest of my theology, cosmology, and sociological understandings are built, it is probably necessary for me to lay this foundation before I can make significant arguments in defense of the article itself.

The basic premise of the article in question did not seem to be challenged… that the idea that America has moved beyond race as an issue is indeed a myth. Rather, the question that became contentious was whether or not all human beings carry with us pre-conceptions about race each and every moment of our lives, and that those pre-conceptions affect many of the interactions, decisions, and choices of our lives. For some, this appears to be a liberal version of a “Doctrine of Original Sin”, and while I admit I have seen it operate that way within our liberal faith movement (just as Global Climate Change can operate as an end-times revelation for some of us), my own understanding of human nature does not attach this kind of negative valuation to it.

The objection was surprising to me because I forget not everyone understands what it means to be human in the way that I do. You see, there is no part of human knowledge that is not in itself a mass of pre-conceptions, including my own theology. We human beings can only relate to the universe we inhabit through our own pre-conceptions… or rather through the symbols that we can conceive.

I begin from an un-provable assumption: The universe is vaster than the human mind will ever be able to conceive. I do not take this to be a weakness to my argument, because I also accept that all human arguments ultimately rest on un-provable assumptions. I cannot prove the existence of God, nor can I prove beyond all doubt that my wife loves me. I cannot prove the sun will rise tomorrow, or that what I think of as the color blue is the same as what you think of as the color blue. Human knowledge rests on a whole series of ultimately un-provable assumptions. I posit that the primary reasons for the un-provable foundations of all of human knowledge is that the universe is limitless and the human capacity for knowing is limited. I do not foresee a time or space in which the universe will be limited or the capacity of humanity will be limitless.

Therefore, human knowledge will always remain imperfect, incomplete, and a merest shadow of all that is, was, and will be.

Not only will human knowledge always be incomplete and imperfect, but that knowledge will be experienced and perceived differently by each human being, based upon how much of human knowledge they carry with them, what attitudes they have about that knowledge, and in what order that knowledge came to them. The atom has a very different meaning-set for someone who has dedicated their life to ending nuclear weapons than it does for someone who has dedicated their life to discovering cold-fusion. My wife and I share a life together, and yet her experience of our love is very different than mine.

The fourth point I will posit (the second being the limited nature of humankind and the third being the variability of human experience) is that, in my experience of myself, in my experience of others, and in my understandings of human psychology, humanity has developed a way of functioning in the midst of being limited creatures in a limitless universe in which human knowledge is limited and variable… and that is by creating symbols.

One of the greatest examples of the use of symbols to mitigate the limits and variability of human knowledge is language itself. Human beings learned to allow the symbol of a sound to represent a reality that cannot be perfectly grasped. Language is about much more than the communication of information. The symbols we call words are actually nothing more than a ball-park approximation of what they are meant to express.

Let’s take the word “Rose”. Now a rose is a flower, a particular kind of flower. More than this, it is a category of flowers. These flowers come in different colors, they come in different sizes. Two roses that look almost identical might be from different strains, and have different characteristics of hardiness, of texture, of lifespan. Even if someone knew every last variety of rose blooming today, how could they also conceive of every type of rose that ever existed, or every type of rose that might be developed someday.

Even this understanding would leave out all the different meanings that a rose might have in a culture. In our culture, the rose means love, but it can also mean grief. The blue rose was once the symbol of secrecy, and the white rose can mean anonymous love. Yellow roses have some meanings that only Texans understand… and yet the young Chinese woman who once stood before some tanks in Tiananmen Square was called “The Yellow Rose”.

Add to this that millions of women in western culture have been named “Rose”… including my Great Grandmother. It is also a color, a scent for perfumes, and the name for the taste of a particularly nasty chocolate candy I once ate…. And you barely begin to scratch the surface of all of the meanings, knowledge, patterns, and beliefs bound up with this one, four lettered symbol in a single language from a particular set of human cultures.

And then think of all of the different possible meanings, interpretations, and understandings of every single word I have written in this essay… or has ever been written in any single language and read by any single human being who ever attempted to read and write… and you begin to see the complexity that is behind the symbols we so blithely use and assume that everyone understands them the same way we do…

I made such a point of this involving the complex symbolism of language in order to try and be as clear as I can before I make my next point… as with language, human beings can only relate to the universe through such symbols.

It is here that the argument I made in the previous essay begins to merge with this essay. Often we express the symbols by which we limited beings relate to a limitless universe and a limited understanding of one another in the symbols of words, but not always. Our feelings are symbols (or feelings as messengers, in common CPE parlance). Our attitudes are symbols. Our values, stated or unstated are symbols. Each of them is a short-hand representation for realities that are too complex to express in their fullness, and also too complex for each of us to understand in their fullness ourselves.

These value symbols, attitude symbols, feeling symbols, are also understood and encountered differently by each and every one of us. How I encounter the symbol of my value of the inherent worth and dignity of every person will be different from how you encounter my value of inherent worth and dignity of every person.

I hope I have made the universe and all of our human reactions within it seem a jumbled up, impossible mess. I hope I have made it seem as if there is no hope that any of us will ever be able to communicate anything to anyone, how all hope of any kind of knowledge is lost, and how we are all lost in a morass of our own misunderstandings and drowning in not-knowing. I hope I have created that impression so that my next point can seem a little more profound than it really is…

We human beings are experts at “making-do”.

The development of a symbolic understanding of the universe is in essence that “making-do”, and it is a large part of what I think makes humanity beautiful. I will never fully understand what you might mean by the word “Rose”… but I can get close enough to make it work. I will never fully understand what my wife means when she tells me she loves me… but I can get close enough to know it is similar to the feeling-symbol I have for her. I will never understand the complexity of what my physicist friend calls “string-theory”… but I can get close enough to nod intelligently at parties.

There is another human symbol-set that I have not yet discussed (along with many other symbol-sets, like mathematics), and it is the one that I was pointing to in the article that was the impetus for this article… and that is the symbol-sets of pre-conceptions… particularly pre-conceptions about our fellow human beings.

All of the complexity that I highlighted with the word “Rose” can be multiplied by six billion when it comes to the words person and human. It would probably be easier to hold the entire complexity of all the stars in the milky-way galaxy in your mind than the entire complexity of every human alive today. Add to that the entire complexity of every human who has ever lived or ever will live… and you reach nearly the same limitlessness that the universe itself exhibits.

Yet among humans there are patterns, and we can begin to grasp those. We can see that humans come in different colors, different shapes, different genders, different ages, different sexual orientations, and different abilities. Humans also hail from different cultures, different countries, different continents. Among each of these different categories there are some broad similarities that we can begin to grasp… even when it is impossible to grasp the differences of each individual in their wholeness.

Perhaps at one time human communities were so small that each individual human could limit the number of other humans they might encounter in their lifetime to a number that they could encounter in something close to their wholeness, though I doubt it. That certainly is not true for the overwhelming majority of humanity today. We simply do not have the capacity to encounter each human being we come into contact with as a unique and separate individual, even if it were possible to take the time to encounter each person in their fullness. And so, we fall back upon the method of “making-do” that has served us for all of our history… we create symbols. In this case, we create pre-conceptions about the humans around us.

Notice that I am not particularly condemning the human use of the symbols of pre-conceptions as wrong or negative… the use of this kind of symbol for a complexity we cannot conceive is simply a part of being human. I called it beautiful and often it is. It is what allows us to function in a world that is too complex for us to fathom. I said in the previous article that all human beings carry pre-conceptions about race, and I meant it. What I mean in its fullness is that all human beings carry pre-conceptions about everything and everyone we encounter in this world. We learn symbolic pre-conceptions at the same time we learn symbolic language. It is simply a part of who we are.

Its been a long essay… and I promise I will come to a close soon… but there is one last point I need to make… and that is what we do with these pre-conceptions. What value we place on them, whether they serve us in positive ways or whether they become negative and destructive depends not on whether or not we have pre-conceptions, but rather upon how we relate to them. I believe there are three primary ways that we human beings relate to the pre-conception symbols we carry with us.

The first is when we place so much importance on the validity of our pre-conception symbols that we cannot encounter any variance from them. This type of engagement with a pre-conception symbol is what is often symbolized by the word prejudice. When it is connected to the power to enforce the pre-conception, it becomes racism, sexism, ageism, etc… Theologically, allowing the symbol to replace the complex reality that the symbol is only supposed to imperfectly represent has a word-symbol of its own. The bible calls it Idolatry. This is the heart of all forms of fundamentalism, for fundamentalism is the denial of complexity.

The second is a bit more subtle… and that is when we either pretend that such pre-conceptions do not exist, or that whatever pre-conceptions we might have do not affect how we relate to the world. This denies how almost all (if not all) of what it means to be human is bound up in our symbolic nature. Everything we do as human beings we do through symbol, for the symbols are all we can grasp. To pretend not to have any pre-conceptions is simply to be willfully blind to our nature. Whether this manifests as denial or apathy, it also has a biblical word-symbol… hypocrisy.

The third form of engagement is the one that I believe that liberal faith is called to, and that is a continual practice of awareness. This form is one in which each individual is called to continually deepen their own awareness of the pre-conception symbols they carry, and how those pre-conception symbols affect their interactions with others and the world. They use such symbols with caution, aware that they can only be symbols… never the reality. This form of engagement calls upon the practitioner not to remove pre-conceptions… but to be aware of them, and to be willing to alter them as their experience changes.

And if I were to give it a biblical word-symbol, I would give it one so full of meaning that it can almost never be translated… I would call this one “the Realm of God”.

Yours in Faith,

David