“to connect people with one another, to remain open to the unknown. . .”
The First Unitarian Society of Madison, WI, is one of, if not the largest congregations belonging to the Unitarian Universalist Association. The congregation of more than 2000 members, friends, and children, worships in a Frank Lloyd Wright building, and supports three ministers.
The Rev. Kelly J. Crocker, Minister of Religious Education, preached this fine sermon (PDF) last summer. In it, she addresses the fundamental question–what is the point of Unitarian Universalism? Why are we here?
The Point of It All
by Rev. Kelly J. Crocker, preached August 13, 2006 at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, WI
A few months ago, I found myself in the middle of that conversation many of us dread. I was talking with a friend about work and she suddenly said, “what is that UU all about again? I know we’ve had this conversation before but I just don’t get it.” So I went into my standard answer about our long history dating back to the Reformation and even before and how we had evolved as a movement throughout the years, and how now we were theologically diverse, non creedal, social justice minded, focused on the here and now, finding salvation here on earth, seekers together on a common journey of exploration and so on and so on. I thought I had actually done a pretty good job when she turned to me and said “Well, what’s the point of that? You don’t give people the right answers to those big life questions; you don’t guarantee them entrance into some heavenly place when they die; you don’t even tell them the “right” path to follow or what to believe. So why bother?”
I had to admit that it is a good question. A valid question from someone who was genuinely trying to understand our way of “doing religion.” Pema Chodron has it right. When people think about religion they usually are looking for “something to hold on to, something that makes them say, ‘Finally I have found it. This is it, and now I feel confirmed and secure and righteous.’” But sometimes that security and confirmation come at a high price. As Pema Chodron reminded us “when you cling to one belief system you cannot hear anything new; you become defensive and attack those who disagree. You choose to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.”These thoughts about the point of Unitarian Universalism brought me back to why I joined a UU congregation so many years ago. I had just left the Catholic Church thinking that I would become a Presbyterian minister and realizing that the theology of the Presbyterian Church and I did not agree on a number of very important issues. I could not declare my belief that humanity was inherently sinful, morally depraved, and predetermined to spend eternity in either heaven or hell based on the whims of a seemingly careless Creator. I was on a journey to find where I did fit and I kept running into the same wall. And that wall was exclusivity. At every church I visited and with every minister I spoke I asked the same question “what do you believe happens to those who do not believe the same way you do, who may not believe in anything at all, or believe differently than what you preach?” And the answer was always the same–the person had no way of attaining salvation and no way of entering into any heavenly place after death. They were lost souls.
In her book Seeking Enlightenment Hat by Hat, author Nevada Barr writes of running into a similar theological dilemma:
A whole lot of the ideologies I read focused on being the Chosen of God, the chosen – Us – and the not-chosen – those who are Not Us. This is rather like not being picked for a team in the third grade. To be among any given group of the Chosen, one had to follow an intricate series of rules and regulations. This done, one could then enter a heaven, described in varying detail, some right down to who will sit where.
Studying these many descriptions of heaven, what heaven is like and who will reside there and who will be turned away at the gate, I couldn’t help notice that fiction creeping in. Since we cannot know what stamps will be required on our passports to eternity, we do the next best thing: we make them up. Humans are audacious beasts, bent on controlling and explaining the universe.
In the face of the unexplainable, the uncontrollable, we shift into fiction and create a story that gives us the power: Salvation for Dummies. Each of the stories I studied was exclusive; entrance to heaven would be attained only by following that story’s tenets.
Then one day I read the words, ‘There are three thousand six hundred gates into heaven.’ I’ve forgotten the prophet who wrote it and the religion or philosophy that spawned it but the words stayed with me.
I like the idea. It feels right. I cannot conceive of any omnipotent being worth his salt who would be so narrow minded as to haggle over the small print of contracts penned by mortals, many of whom, I suspect, have axes to grind. That would reduce the concept of salvation to game-show status: say the magic word and win eternal life.
Once I decided that much of the conventional wisdom of established churches was driven by mortal turf wars and of no real consequence, I set out upon a long and continuing quest to make sense of good and evil, heaven and earth, spirituality and religion, life and death. If nothing else, you might as well dream big.
I set out along a similar journey and fortunately for me, that journey brought me to Unitarian Universalism. And what did I find here–if not exclusivism, or a focus on salvation in some afterlife, or the correct answers about good and evil, life and death? I think these words from my colleague Mark Belletini sum it up pretty well:
We are here
to turn, and see ourselves in worship’s mirror
and review the promises we have made
to ourselves and others,
and note the ways we have kept them,
so we might thereby begin again in love.And so once again, the morning finds us saying:
Living our lives with purpose and gratitude,
moved by the beauty of the world
and claiming justice for all who live upon it,
we open our hearts to greater loving,
healthier knowledge, deeper compassion and
hope of peace.A life of purpose and gratitude; a life that is moved by the beauty of this world and is called into action; and a life that is ever opening to more and more love–that is my Unitarian Universalism. And for me, that’s the point of it all.
Each week I come into this space, face to face with all of you and have the opportunity to examine my life. Am I living a life with purpose? I believe that the purpose of my time here on this planet is to connect people with one another, to remain open to the unknown, to question and challenge my assumptions, to bring joy and ease suffering, to connect with that which is greater than myself, to join with others to make this world a better place. Each week I am given the gift of self-examination. I have the chance to think and rethink my purpose and to ask myself how I can do better, how I can be better. I am able to reflect on the past week – to grieve for those who have died, to smile for the new ones being born, to laugh at the jokes, and to cry with the pain. And each week I am reminded to be grateful for it all.
I believe gratitude is an amazing spiritual practice. It is a difficult one as well. There are weeks in which I feel that I remembered to be grateful, that I showed my gratitude to those around me and weeks in which I feel that there is nothing to be grateful for. This place calls me forth and reminds me of the many blessings in this life. Sometimes you may need to dig a little deeper to find them, but they are there all the same.
And moved by a spirit of gratitude for this world, and by the beauty within it and the beauty of those who inhabit it, we are called to work for justice. Decades ago L. B. Fisher was asked where Universalism stood on a disputed theological issue. Fisher stoutly proclaimed, “We do not stand; we move!”
Our faith focuses us relentlessly on the here and now of this world. Even the Universalists–who got their name from their belief in universal salvation–weren’t overly concerned about the afterlife. If everyone is going to get into heaven, as they believed, then there’s not much point in worrying about the afterlife! They, too, focused their religion on making as much sense as they could out of the mysteries of human life on earth, and on making the world a better, more just place. Unitarian Universalists have never been afraid to speak out for what they believed to be right, fair, and just. Francis David and other Transylvanian radicals in the 1500s had a wildly heretical idea – that there should be freedom of religion. Unitarian abolitionists like Theodore Parker joined with others who believed that all people regardless of race or ethnicity should be treated equally. Susan B. Anthony and Olympia Brown and all of the other Unitarian and Universalist suffragists acted on their belief that men and women should be recognized as equal. Today many UUs continue their work, and have added to it the quest to work for equal rights for those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. Our focus on the here and now moves us beyond talk about an afterlife and who is and is not Chosen; our focus on the here and now moves us beyond exclusivism to embrace all and work for the rights of all. Things will not change overnight – but we need to start here and start now right in our corner of the world.
Nevada Barr continued in her writing, “I can’t know what will happen when I get around to shuffling off this mortal coil. Not knowing the unknowable, I cannot prepare for it. If you don’t know what sport will be played, there’s no sense packing a lot of equipment. What I can do is prepare my little corner of Earth–treating all those I meet with kindness and generosity, taking care of creation to the best of my ability, attempting to echo, in my small human way, some esoteric heaven. Since I cannot realistically seek out any kind of God in the afterlife or the cosmos, I will keep my eye out for the divine in my neighborhood, try to be ever vigilant, assuming that everyone from the pizza delivery girl to the guy with the obnoxious all-terrain vehicle could be divine, at least somehow. I will cultivate blessings and grace in the dirt of my garden, the words of my friends, the eyes of my dogs.
“Then, when I die, should I fail to sneak through those pearly gates, I shall, at the very least, already have had a small taste of the love and joy said to abide there.”
And that, for me, is one of the most important points of Unitarian Universalism. Love and joy abide among us and there is, as the hymn says, more love, more joy, more hope and more peace. When we walk through these doors, we are reminded that there is more love and we need to keep on until we find it. And to keep on this journey, to keep working for the salvation of the here and now, knowing that we mean all and not some, we need one another. When we mourn, when we rejoice, in our tears, our struggles, our laughter, we need one another. To challenge us, comfort us, hold us up, catch us when we fall, and remind us of who we are and who we can be.
And so once again, may the morning find us saying:
Living our lives with purpose and gratitude,
moved by the beauty of the world
and claiming justice for all who live upon it,
we open our hearts to greater loving,
healthier knowledge, deeper compassion and the
hope of peace.
Source: “The Point of It All,” by Rev. Kelly J. Crocker (PDF), preached August 13, 2006 at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, WI, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Audio can be found here.
Tags: belief, deepening, hope, Kelly Crocker, love, Mark Belletini, religion, spiritual practice
