“where spacious souls can flourish and grow. . .”
The third principle of Unitarian Universalism as set forth in the by-laws of the Unitarian Universalist Association is the covenant to affirm and promote “Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.” In the conclusion of his essay, “Love the Contradictions,” Rev. Robert Hardies challenges individual Unitarian Universalists to take on that spiritual growth through our common struggle with the contradictions of our world and our own selves.
A question for discussion: what responsibility does an individual member of a congregation have to the larger community when it comes to spiritual growth?
The essay was printed in the UUWorld’s summer 2007 issue, from The Seven Principles in Word and Worship, edited by Ellen Brandenburg (Skinner House Books, 2007). Part one can be found here, and part two here.
Love the Contradictions, pt. 3
by Rev. Robert Hardies
Let’s not be fooled by the false dilemma of whether we should focus our lives on spiritual growth or social justice, as if the two are mutually exclusive. When we frame the conversation this way, we undermine both our spiritual health and our work for justice, and we misunderstand the meaning of a world-affirming spirituality.
The moment I first understood this link between spirituality and justice was when I had the opportunity to study with Gustavo Gutiérrez, the father of Latin American liberation theology and one of the preeminent religious thinkers of the twentieth century. Gutiérrez is the priest of a large, poverty-stricken parish on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. I took a class with him just after I returned from working in Guatemala, when I was still trying to reconcile my experience there with my life in the United States. On the third day of class, a student asked Gutiérrez to explain how we, as residents of the richest country in the world, could best serve the poor in Latin America. After some silence, Gutiérrez confessed that he had always struggled with how to divide his time between being a parish priest and a theologian. Sometimes he felt guilty traveling the world giving talks and papers while his parishioners struggled just to survive. Other times, he felt frustrated that he couldn’t more broadly share liberation theology’s gospel of God’s love for the poor and oppressed. “All my life,” he said, “I’ve sought a theoretical or spiritual answer to this question of how I am to serve the poor: as a priest or as a theologian. But I haven’t found one. I simply try to find a balance between being a theologian and being a pastor. And in the midst of all the suffering—I know this might sound romantic—I try to be happy.”
“As for you,” he said to the student, “you have to find the answer for yourself.”
At first I thought, “You can’t get off that easy!” But eventually the message broke through my resistance, and something shifted for me. I have accepted the complex notion that the contradictions in our lives will remain, and that in the midst of those tensions we must try to be happy and to love the world.No one can tell us how to make sense of the contradictions of our world. We each have to struggle with these tensions ourselves. But I can offer you a model of what such a struggle can look like. I offer you the prophetic life of Gustavo Gutiérrez—his lifetime of service to his parish in Lima, his revolutionary theological career—and I hope for you that your struggle to live and love in the tensions of the world might bear a small fraction of the fruit that his has.
If we can truly love this world, the place of paradox and tension can be the place of immense creative power. Gutiérrez’s ability to remain in the tension of his vocation for twenty-five years—pulled in two directions—generated a creativity that fueled one of the most brilliant theological minds of the twentieth century. If he had lopped off either of his callings, I doubt his contribution would have been as rich. Gutiérrez shows us what it means to love the tensions in our life and use them to respond creatively to the world’s suffering.
In his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke uses the metaphor of the bow and arrow to speak to the creative power of tension in our lives. “The arrow endures the bow string’s tension,” he writes, “so that, released, it travels further. For there is nowhere to remain.” It is precisely in the tension that we discover the creative power of love.
A. Powell Davies, one of my predecessors at All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., used to say, “Life is just an opportunity to grow a soul.” In saying this, he wasn’t envisioning a narcissistic spirituality of retreat from the world—after all, this was a man who took on Senator Joseph McCarthy in the pages of the Washington Post and helped to integrate the lunch counters in our nation’s capital. An authentic Unitarian Universalist spirituality nurtures spacious and resilient souls that embrace the tensions of our world and propel us forward in our task of loving one another.
Our world desperately needs such a spirituality. Spiritualities of fight and flight, amputation and retreat, are not viable in a world that becomes more complex by the moment. This is why fundamentalism will ultimately fail as a religious option. It is not a credible or sustainable way to understand the world and our relationship to it. If our world is to survive in all its contradiction and complexity, it needs more people who are capable of loving it in its entirety; people capable of loving all of themselves, not just parts; people capable of loving all souls, not only some.
Unitarian Universalism’s third Principle sets before us a vision of our congregations as communities where spacious souls can flourish and grow. We grow souls on Sunday mornings when a sermon challenges and expands our thinking, or when music makes our spirits soar. We grow souls throughout the week in religious education classes for all ages, as we learn to discover the movement of the spirit in our lives. We grow souls when, amidst the clamor of war, we struggle to find paths of peace. We grow souls in our covenant groups, learning together and caring for one another, recognizing in others’ stories our own experience. We grow souls when we engage with one another in congregational self-governance, learning through conflict and feeling the power of a shared vision come into reality. The purpose of church is to provide spiritual sustenance for world engagement. Now more than ever, the world needs our congregations to be incubators of a generous, loving, and justice-seeking spirituality.
Source: “Love the Contradictions,” by Rev. Robert Hardies, who serves All Souls Church, Unitarian, in Washington, D.C. Reprinted with the permission of Skinner House Books and the author. The Seven Principles in Word and Worship by Ellen Brandenburg, from which this essay was taken, is available at (800) 215-9076 or www.uua.org/bookstore.
Tags: community, contradiction, creativity, deepening, hope, love, Robert Hardies, spiritual practice
