“we discover the meaning of our lives. . .”
In a religion that draws from many sources of inspiration and learning rather than one chosen scripture, it is the stories that we tell that communicate our Good News. This 2005 message from the Rev. Dr. Kenneth W. Phifer, now minister emeritus of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, gives us four of those stories:
The Stories of Our Lives
by the Rev. Dr. Kenneth W. Phifer
Is there anything more compellingly interesting than a story?
Is there anything of greater importance to our lives than the stories we tell and the stories we listen to and the stories in which we invest our faith?
Life-like or fantastic, ancient or modern, short or long, poetic or prosaic, musical or visual, written or spoken, filmed or signed, stories are a vital part of the human scene. Epics, comedies, tragedies, novels, short stories, grand operas and plays, soap operas, situation comedies, even advertisements, and dozens of other forms of stories fill our lives.
One storyteller observed, “so much of living is made up of story-telling that one might conclude that it is what we were meant to do.”
It is in stories more than in any other form of communication that we discover the meaning of our lives. That is why religion has always been more popular than philosophy. Religion is communicated mostly through stories-legends, myths, epic sagas, scriptural tales, and the stories associated with rituals, like that of the Seder which recounts the events of the Exodus and the Eucharist which relives the last night of Jesus’s life.Stories that we have lived and recall, stories that we have adopted as our own, stories that teach us about ourselves, stories that instruct us in the way the world works, stories have the power to give our lives meaning and richness, courage and inspiration.
The story of Red Sox Nation, with its temporary happy ending last fall, is a story that unites people across a whole region and in distant corners of the world. It is a story of patience, despair, loyalty, and finally ecstasy.
Stories help us to know who we are, what matters to us, where and how we fit into the scheme of things.
It is in stories that we learn about our place in the family, in the religious community to which we belong, in the cultural setting of which we are a part, and in the grander scheme of the whole universe.
Let me suggest some of the stories that are important to us.
The first story is the story of evolution, the larger universal setting of life within which we live our own lives.
Until a few hundred years ago, most understandings of the origin and functioning of the universe were grounded more in religious myth than in scientific fact. All that began to change when scientists like Copernicus and Galileo and Newton showed us a much more magnificent world than religious texts and doctrines had ever imagined.
Of special importance was the work of Charles Darwin, because he challenged our most fundamental notions of the place of humanity on this planet. His writings are centered around four ideas.
First, nature is dynamic not static. Change is the central factor in understanding how the universe operates. Change comes about not through divine intervention but through the operation of natural laws. Natural law explains how life functions, how things hold together, how change occurs.
Darwin called the process of change in life descent with modification, then transmutation, and finally, in 1873, evolution. One form of life comes from another. Change modifies the nature and characteristics of a species. Over time, a new one is formed. There is no evidence of a Divine Plan in this. Evolution appears to be without direction other than survival.
A third important idea in this story of life is that in the beginning there was a single source, or at the very most a few sources, from which all life has descended, branching into many varieties across vast stretches of time.
Darwin suggested that “there is a grandeur in this view of life with its several powers of growth, reproduction, and sensation, having been originally breathed into matter under a few forms, perhaps only into one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling onwards according to the fixed laws of gravity and whilst land and water have gone on replacing each other-that from so simple an origin, through the selection of infinite varieties, endless forms, most beautiful and wonderful have been evolved.”
All life has a common origin.
An obvious implication of this is that human life is animal life. Our recent learnings in genetics make clear that differences between human beings and animals are more in degree than in kind. Humans share almost all of their genes with chimps and apes and monkeys.
More than that, human genetic structure is shared with other forms of life, 71% with pumpkins, for example. Life is related to life. All life shares in the same origin.
Natural selection as the driving force of evolution is Darwin’s fourth idea. Individual members of a species will develop variations. These will prove to be advantageous or disadvantageous in the struggle for survival. The tendency of life-forms to breed in excess of the supply of food leads to a competition in which the best adapted individuals survive and the poorest adapted perish. Natural selection, operating through random variation and the survival of the fittest, is the process by which evolution operates.
What an incredible story this is! However it got under way, the story of evolution is a tale of wonder and beauty, relating us to all of life, catching us up in what the UUA’s Seventh Principle calls “the interdependent web of all existence.”
Given that 99.9% of all DNA bases are the same in all human beings, we can see that we truly are brother and sister to one another regardless of gender, color, race, ethnicity, or any other factor we have used to divide ourselves into good and not good, privileged and deprived, chosen and excluded.
Given that we share so much of our genetic structure with other animals, we can appreciate that our cats and dogs, our research mice and monkeys, the soaring and colorful birds, the fish in the sea, even the endless varieties of beetles and all the other wild and weird and wonderful creatures large and small are all our cousins.
Because the atoms and molecules that make us up get re-used in other forms of matter, we have a kinship with the trees and the flowers, the plants that feed us and heal us, the water that flows in streams and rivers, the mountains and the grass and even the distant reaches of space. Carl Sagan said it this way: “We are the stuff of the stars.”
It is sad to see people turn away from this grand epic tale of who we are and where we come from. Creationists, now using the name of intelligent design, not only fail in the facts, they also lack imagination, a sense of grandeur, a feeling for a billions-of-years-in-the-making world that is still making itself.
To be a part of that is awe-inspiring.
Evolution is the first and most encompassing story of our lives.
The second is the story of our country. This tale is embedded in the larger saga of western civilization.
The two primary sources of western civilization are the Hebrews and the Greeks. The former heritage was transmitted through the astonishing tenacity of the Jewish people and the political power of its offshoot, Christianity. The latter came to us primarily because of Muslim scholars who translated and preserved the works of the great Greek thinkers. In 12th century Spain, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars from all over Europe came together to study despite their religious and national differences.
This scholarly collegium under Muslim auspices led to a renewal of faith in human capacities. One consequence of this was the Renaissance, which was centered on the immense potential of human beings. The Reformation was also very humanistic, putting forth the then radical notion that every person can have a direct relationship with God.
The voyages in the 15th and 16th centuries that connected the American continents with Europe led in the 17th century to settlements that launched the American story. In general, there are two ways of telling that story.
One is the way most of us learned in elementary and secondary schools. It is a tale of manifest destiny, of a European people blessed by God with a vast continent to conquer and populate and exploit. This version of the story can be found in standard textbooks, one of the best of which is Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People.
The other way of telling the story is the way Howard Zinn tells it in The People’s History of the United States. This telling is from the viewpoint of women, the viewpoint of the tribes resident on this continent when the Europeans arrived, the viewpoint of the Africans brought here in chains and their descendants, the viewpoint of the Chinese who were lured here to build our railroads, the viewpoint of the laborers who were paid a pittance to build up our industries, and the viewpoint of all the other usually neglected folk who help make up the full mosaic of our country’s history.
Here is the way briefly I would tell the story. It begins with people looking either for commercial gain or for a religious haven. Among the former were the first holders of Africans in slavery. Among the latter were some who gave freedom to all people to worship as they chose and some who denied that freedom to any who did not conform to the prescribed way.
Among the early heroes of our nation were people like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, both banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy. Williams established the colony of Rhode Island where many different religious views flourished. He also bothered to learn the languages of the Indians who lived around him and bought rather than stole land from them. He was rare.
One of the defining moments of our country was the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Its many noble sentiments have been inspiring not just to people in our country but in many lands. Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. used some of those inspiring words in leading the civil rights movement almost two hundred years later. That fact needs to be remembered as we read the Declaration, because so many were not included in the minds of those who swore their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to uphold the words. Blacks and women and Native Americans were not among those considered equal, though that very equality was the first of the so-called self-evident truths mentioned by Jefferson.
Another defining moment was the creation of a written constitution, a noble but also flawed document. Its totally secular nature was a tremendous advance on existing governments, as was its separation of powers into legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and its recognition that power exists at both federal and state levels.
The greatest moral flaw of the Constitution was its acceptance of slavery and the slave trade. It would take three quarters of a century and the bloodiest war in our nation’s history to end the disgrace of slavery, and a hundred years beyond that to rid the nation of the Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation of black and white.
The American story has moments of greatness; none more so than the astonishing entrepreneurial spirit of this land. Countless individuals have been able to set up businesses, launch new ventures in technology, and make discoveries in scientific and medical fields that have been of enormous benefit to the world. The automobile companies, for example, are remarkable creations, but so are the numerous sub-contractors who make products for them, often started and run by people determined to make a go of things for themselves. Who can do anything but praise the Salk polio vaccine, the wonderful new advances in cardiac care, and truly amazing achievements in prosthetics and orthotics.
We must also remember the dark side, the ease with which throughout our history we have justified war and violence as a way to extend our land holdings and economic outreach, the excessive influence of the rich in determining our laws and practices, and the failure to develop a true sense of the common good because we fear so much the loss of individual freedom.
Both stories, the Morison and the Zinn, are part of who we are as a people. Both need to be heard and told and understood. We need to know the dark side and the light side, the ways we really have made the world better and still inspire people all over the planet, and the ways in which we terrify people and have added to the burden of human suffering.
The main theme of the American story is liberty, liberty imagined, liberty gained, liberty denied.
The third story we are a part of is the religious story, a tale of Unitarian Universalism as an outgrowth of Judaism and Christianity.
It begins in the tales and sayings that form the Hebrew Bible. The heart of these writings is found in the words of the prophet Micah, who asks what the Lord requires of us, and answers simply that we are to “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.”
Build a community that is equitable for all. Be kind. Avoid arrogance.
Christianity was built on a foundation of love, the love of the highest and the best we can know that some call God, the love of neighbors, and even the love of enemies. The founder of this religion was able to say from the cross, where he died in great agony, “Father, forgive them,” teaching us by example how far into human misery the reach of love really goes.
The Unitarian story begins in the 16th century when Christianity had suppressed Judaism with its powerful political control of Europe and had itself become corrupt. The Unitarian story begins with Michael Servetus, who insisted on reporting honestly what he found when he read the Bible, namely that there is no mention of the Trinity. He was burned at the stake in 1553 by Protestant authorities in Geneva.
Sebastian Castellio protested his murder, saying that you do not kill truth when you kill an individual human being. Religious truth cannot be forced on others or controlled by authoritarian structures.
Faustus Socinus taught that we must use our full mental capacities in trying to discover truth.
The Minor Reformed Church of Poland set an example of how to deal with differences in theological or any other kind of understanding that has continued to influence Unitarian Universalists to this day. In a deeply serious debate over the issue of whether baptism should be administered to infants or only to adults, they agreed that whoever lost the debate would not be exiled, excommunicated, or excoriated, and certainly not executed.
In the 18th century, a bold band of thinkers growing out of Reform Protestantism put forth the notion that human destiny was all the same, that indeed all would be saved by the loving grace of God, universalism.
For more than two centuries Unitarians and Universalists, separately until 1961 and united since that time, have proclaimed these ideals of justice and love, of freedom and tolerance, of reason and human responsibility.
Mari Cook, for example, was the first woman to preach from an American pulpit. Shocking though this was in 1810, she was not the last woman in our ministerial ranks. Today more women than men minister in our congregations.
Theodore Parker refused to believe that any human being should be enslaved, and defied the law to try him when he aided runaway slaves.
John Haynes Holmes said that violence is the wrong way to pursue our goals, however worthy. Non-violence is the only means suited to the high ideals we proclaim.
Sophia Lyon Fahs taught us that children matter, that children have minds of their own, that children have hearts that break and burdens to carry and courage to face life’s difficulties. She urged us to build our religious education for children around the theme of teaching each child to see the sacred and inherent worth of every human being, beginning with his/her own self and extending to all other children and adults and indeed to all life.
Latterly our story has included the commitment to full civil and human rights for lesbians and gay males.
This congregation has throughout its 140 year history been involved in all of these movements for justice and truth.
The UU story is centered around a simple theme: how can we make the world a better place in which to live, a better place for everybody, a better place that allows for the diversity that is the truth of human life, of all life.
Now, in good UU fashion, I am going to commit heresy. As most of you know, I generally structure my sermons around three points. Today, however, I am going to do a fourth point because I could not think of a way to stuff the four things I wanted to say into three points.
Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m retiring!
Point number four is simply this: we each have our own personal story. As my friend, Father Vernon Ruland, says in his memoir, “each person’s unique story is of inestimable value.” I will tell my own story in the briefest possible compass here, partly because over 25 years I have told so much of it already, and partly because, as valuable as each story is, much of that value is of meaning to the teller more than to the listener.
I was born in Kentucky and raised in Tennessee and Missouri. The South was part of my upbringing, its foods, its mores, its language. My father’s family had come to this continent in 1774 from Switzerland. My mother’s family immigrated in the later 19th century from Baalbek, Lebanon. I had the good fortune to be raised in a home with two parents who loved each other deeply. Their marriage lasted 71 years and nine months.
Early on, for reasons still not clear to me, I began to identify with people to whom justice had been denied, especially African Americans and Jews. In the segregated world in which I grew up, I knew few Blacks. Jews were part of my life for as long as I can remember, and one of these early friends is a friend to this day. I agonized over what white people had done and were doing to black people and what Christian people had done and were doing to Jews.
I also had theological doubts I did not know what to do with: how could God deny, as my Presbyterian upbringing taught me God did deny, a place in heaven to Gandhi; how could predestination be true and I still be held accountable for my sins; why was God so mad so much of the time in the early books of the Bible, smiting this people and letting another people smite His Chosen Ones?
To deal with these concerns, I decided to become a Presbyterian minister. It was a natural choice as I was a fifth generation minister and I was named after an uncle who was also in the ministry. I attended college with this goal in mind, but felt my Christianity slipping away from me throughout those years. One term at Princeton Seminary made it clear that I was simply not a Christian believer.
I entered the Army, studied Russian, and became a spy in Berlin. I spent my 34 months, 5 days, two hours, and ten minutes in the military trying to sort out what I believed and what I should do with what I believed. I was still working on it when I was discharged.
I went to Hawaii and took up a teaching post at a local high school. While there I became involved with a fledgling peace movement protesting the war in Vietnam.
That work continued when I attended Divinity School in Chicago, where working with the Friends persuaded me that non-violence is the best approach to the resolution of conflict. That conviction has only deepened with the years.
My work as a foreign student adviser furthered solidified this understanding. I met with people from both sides of disputes in Nigeria, in Iran, in Israel/Palestine, in India/Pakistan, and other places. What I kept seeing were human faces, what I kept hearing were human cries of anguish, what I kept meeting were human beings.
Finding a Unitarian Universalist congregation on the west side of Chicago in the fall of 1971 was a watershed moment for me. At last I had found a place and a people with whom I could be fully honest about my theological doubts and beliefs, a place and a people who were focused on this world and struggling for justice and goodness here and now.
Seven years in Canton, Massachusetts, working to unite in spirit and practice two congregations-a Unitarian and a Universalist– that had consolidated at the end of my first year, preceded my coming to Ann Arbor.
Here, for the past 25 years, my story has merged with the story of this congregation. Hundreds and hundreds of individual stories have been lived out as mine has in the midst of our work and play together.
Together we have lived in the story of our shared faith.
Together we have lived in the story of our country, flawed and beautiful, horrifying and inspiring.
Together we have appreciated the grandeur of the story of evolution within which we and all of life live and move and have our being.
What could be more interesting, what more important than these stories of life itself, of western civilization and America, of western religion and UUism, of our own individual struggles and triumphs?
The telling of such stories is indeed “what we were meant to do.”
Source: “The Stories of Our Lives” by the Rev. Dr. Kenneth W. Phifer, minister emeritus of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, preached July 17, 2005.
Tags: History, Kenneth Phifer, living faith, principles, stories
