“ways to say that which is deeper than we can speak. . .”
One could say that how we talk about religious and spiritual ideas is the most important part of how Unitarian Universalist churches minister to the needs of our members. The Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Texas, delivered this essay to the Ministerial Conference at Berry Street in 2003, somewhat in response to the Unitarian Universalist Association President William Sinkford’s call for a greater “language of reverence” in our churches earlier that year.
This essay is quite lengthy, but very, very worth your while. I have broken it into sections — come back Friday for part two! (If you just can’t wait, the full text is linked at the bottom of this post.)
“Images for Our Lives”
by Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister, First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Berry Street Essay, 2003, part 1 of 3
I want to dedicate this essay to the memory of two men who died the same week in March. The first is Harry Scholefield, who was my mentor and friend and partner in the work of articulating a spiritual practice for religious liberals. The second, perhaps less known by many of you is Hardy Sanders, a layperson in my congregation in Dallas—a more passionate and devoted and generous UU I have not known. These two losses, and what these men stood for, in the midst of so much we have had to bear this year, have weighed heavily on me as I have prepared this essay.
Each one was devoted to our faith. At the same time, Hardy felt that we were frittering away our message with petty diversions. And Harry felt that we, especially we UU ministers, ‘used’ poems and wisdom literature, without having lived them. In many ways their lives and concerns shape what I have to say today.
I want to talk about imagination. About religious imagination, to be more specific. I want to say that we are in a crisis of language, (and I believe that we are), because we have forgotten what religious imagination is and does. The purpose of my essay today will be to remind us of the importance of religious imagination in all our varied ministries. In ministry itself.But first, let me go back to 1971.
I was 28 years old, home with my then one-year-old toddler. (I had been a teacher and a curriculum consultant in my short career in education prior to that.) I was asked by Roy Phillips, who was the new Minister at Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I was a member, to join a committee he was forming to rewrite the Sunday School curriculum. He was gathering a group of members, mostly teachers, to talk about what was needed. Mary Anderson, who is here today as my guest, was a member of that group of seven. She is Lebanese, was raised a Muslim, is a devoted UU and helped us broaden our perspective significantly in those days, which now seem so long ago. Roy said that there was a felt need being expressed in the congregation for a religious education that centered on traditional religious themes—an education that would help the children to know themselves as religious people. Would I help?
Needing a project with some challenge in those days, I said, “Yes.” It is to a large degree why I stand before you today.
Because you can ask a person what they believe, and they may tell you something halfway interesting. But if you ask them what should be taught to their children, you quickly get down to basics. We were about the gritty and difficult duty of deciding what would be taught our children, and how and why.
The curriculum was called Images for Our Lives.
That work, which took up four years of our lives, was long ago and far away. But I bring it up because I learned two important points that apply to what I want to say today.
The first was our decision always to look for the “religious existential dimension” of the story we were teaching, whether the story was from the Judeo-Christian tradition (as we called it in those days), or from our own Unitarian Universalist Tradition, or from Other World Religions. (We gave each of those categories 12 weeks a year.)
We actually devised a chart. I found it in an old file. It was called “Three Ways of Interpreting a Story”. The first was the “Literal, Popular, Fundamentalist interpretation.” The second was the “Rational, Critical, Historical interpretation.” And the third was the “Religious, Existential, Spiritual Interpretation.”
I was familiar with the first one. I had been raised a fundamentalist. I knew my Bible, and I know the literal interpretations of the story.
And to some degree, we were familiar with the rational, critical, historical interpretations. Although Roy recounted once that he had been taught in his Sunday School, in an attempt at a rational, interpretation,–he had been taught in his Unitarian Sunday School 50 years ago, that when it came to the story of Jesus walking on water, that he had really walked on sandbars.
We had some sense of the new thought that had brought about biblical criticism, and it had more substance than sand bars, we knew. So we made a place in our chart for such interpretations.
It was the third category that most interested us, though. The Religious, Existential, Spiritual interpretation.
I’m not sure where that phrase came from. It wasn’t tied to Existentialism per se. Roy says he used the dictionary definition at first: “grounded in existence or the experience of existence.” But after much discussion we decided that the “Religious Existential Dimension” of each story was to be the center of our work. We would try to find the part of each story which would allow the children to “take the story as an image of their own experience of life.”
For example, the Noah story. The story of Noah became less a story about a god who wanted to start things over, and more, an incredible image of a tiny boat, built to specifications, but oh so small in that huge sea, and Noah, who had been so faithful, left for five months with no horizon, no contact, with nothing happening.
That was something we could resonate with. And if our children couldn’t at the time, at least they would have it as a container for their life-experience in the future.
At some point, we thought, if one of our children was in a life situation with no shore in sight, as if forgotten by their Mamas and their Papas, and even by God, we wanted them to remember Noah. We wanted them to be connected in a deep way to all those others who had felt forgotten until they sent out a dove and it returned with an olive branch. All those others who had to wait so long for hope to return.
That is why we called it “Images for our Lives.” Every story we presented, whether Noah or Emerson or Kisogatami, was considered in its Religious Existential Dimension. As an image of existence, with image-i-nation, with the recall of an image with which our children could associate their life experiences. Which brings me to the second point I learned while working on that curriculum. We called it the “piñata effect.”
At one of our weekly meetings, we were going over a lesson. It was a good lesson educationally. The author was quite sophisticated in the development of curriculum, and had created an interesting and compelling lesson with a piñata at the center. (And who among us hasn’t had a piñata at some church event or other.)
When we asked her what the “religious existential dimension” of the piñata lesson was, she couldn’t name it. It was interesting culturally, the children would have a great time, it might be group building, but it did not point to anything beyond itself, it could not be “grounded in the experience of existence”, at least in the imaginative way we were working. It was simply interesting. She agreed to throw the lesson out.
From then on, whenever we were, however brilliantly, creating curriculum that strayed from our purpose of nurturing the religious existential and spiritual dimension of our material, we simply said “piñata” and out it went.
To this day, when I am writing a sermon, or preparing a lesson, the word “piñata” will rise up in my consciousness, and I will realize that no matter how eloquent, no matter how clever, it is not doing what I should be doing—which is to speak to the depth of human experience.
Today I want to say that one of the reasons we are having a crisis of language among ourselves, is because we haven’t said “piñata” enough. It is because we have been charmed, sometimes by the sound of our own voices, sometimes by the brilliance of our own minds, speaking eloquently about this or that, but forgetting the foundation of our work in the world—the religious existential dimension of life. The communication from person to person and generation to generation of a kind of truth that is based on the reality–as Bernard Meland once said—it is a truth based on the reality “that we live more deeply than we think” (Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols, p. 184). We live more deeply than we think.
If the Religious Existential Reality is “grounded in the experience of existence”, and “we live more deeply than we think”, then we had better find ways to say that which is deeper than we can speak.
Now I am keenly aware of my audience here today. Most of us are off the scale when it comes to our verbal abilities—after all, didn’t the Wall Street Journal recently tell us that the young people in our churches score the highest on the SAT’s in the Nation? (I assume that includes the Verbal SATs.) We who are the leaders of perhaps the most educated group in the country—though we’re embarrassed to admit it—so often forget what we know when it comes to religious language. And we forget that it is our job to teach our congregations what we know.
Source: Part one of three, “Images for Our Lives,” Berry Street Address 2003, Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Texas.
Tags: Berry Street Essay, children, language, Laurel Hallman, passion, religion, reverence, spirit, truth
