This piece was written by Sara Robinson, a journalist and Unitarian Universalist, in response to the events in Knoxville, Tennessee this week.

You can still donate here, and attend a vigil in your area if you feel so moved.

Of Madmen and Martyrs

by Sara Robinson

We are an odd group, we Unitarians.

Conventional wisdom says that we’re soft in all the places our society values toughness. Our refusal to adhere to any dogma must mean that we’re soft in our convictions. Our reflexive open-mindedness is often derided as evidence that we’re soft in the head. Our persistent and gentle insistence on liberal values is evidence of hearts too soft to set boundaries. And all of this together leads to a public image of a mushy gathering of feckless intellectuals that somehow lacks cohesion, backbone, focus, or purpose.

You can only believe this if you don’t know either the history or the modern reality of Unitarian Universalism. The faith’s early founders, Michael Servitus and Francis David, were executed for the radical notion that belief in the Trinity — which excluded Muslims and Jews — should not be a requirement for participation in 16th century public life. Four hundred years later, in the same part of the world, other Unitarians died in concentration camps for having the courage of their humanist convictions. Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother from Michigan who was killed by the Klan in the days following the Selma march in 1965, was one of ours, too.

(Read on … )

Welcome to the holiday shopping season!

Unitarian Universalists do celebrate Christmas, generally, and in this culture that usually involves giving gifts. However, it is interesting and worthwhile to examine how we can meld our faith lives and our “outside of church” lives when it comes to issues of consumption.

In 2001, the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly adopted a Statement of Conscience entitled “Responsible Consumption Is Our Moral Imperative.” The process for generating these statements has changed recently (PDF), but at the time this one was written, a study-action issue on some kind of social witness was selected each year by congregational delegates at the General Assembly, sending it out to the individual congregations for study and discussion over a two-year period under the guidance of the Commision on Social Witness. Each year at General Assembly, a drafted statement resulting from those two years of study would be presented to the delegates to be revised and approved. So, this study-action issue was chosen at the 1999 General Assembly in Salt Lake City, and the statement was drafted and approved in 2001.

The ideas presented in the statement are not unfamiliar in Unitarian Universalist circles, but are very thought-provoking in the context of the holiday shopping rush.

For consideration: What, if anything, has changed in this consumer-based culture since this statement was adopted? With what do you agree or disagree in this statement? How do these ideas inform individual choices in how we spend our money and other resources, particularly around the holidays? What is the nature of gift-giving in a religious context?

From “Responsible Consumption Is Our Moral Imperative”

the 2001 General Assembly Statement of Conscience

Our Unitarian Universalist faith calls upon us to approach the ethic of responsible consumption with a passion for seeking truth, a thirst for making justice, a vision of interdependence, and a willingness to re-examine our individual actions and beliefs. Becoming responsible consumers means putting into action our religious Principles of the inherent worth and dignity of all people and the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.

We each begin a personal journey toward responsible consumption from a different place. Wherever we start, we must be mindful of our behavior, attentive to the voices and needs of others, and conscious of the natural rhythms of the world. Our journey continues through education. Through secular and religious education programs, we must challenge ourselves to rethink the underlying assumptions that guide our choices. Through dialogue in small groups, we nurture each other’s environmental consciousness and examine competing claims of what individual responsibility actually means. Our journey is fulfilled through activism. We will work together for legislative changes that will reduce over-consumption, environmental degradation, and the unjust distribution of resources.

(Read on … )

This week is dedicated to the ideas presented in Rev. Robert Hardies’ essay, “Love the Contradictions,” printed in the UUWorld’s summer 2007 issue, from The Seven Principles in Word and Worship, edited by Ellen Brandenburg (Skinner House Books, 2007). Rev. Hardies serves All Souls Church, Unitarian, in Washington, D.C.

The essay is just packed, so I’ve broken it into three sections. The first describes Rev. Hardies’ personal realizations of the contradictory nature of the world, and his life within the world. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t struggled with this.

Part two can be found here, and part three here.

Love the Contradictions, pt. 1

by Rev. Robert Hardies

When I was in seminary, I had to take a test called the Minnesota Multi phasic Personality Inventory, a multiple-choice exam that asks questions like, “Have you been hearing voices lately?” When I sat down with the psychiatrist two weeks later to hear the results, he told me, “By and large, this is a healthy profile.” Then he pointed to a line that plummeted from the top of the page to the bottom. “But do you see this? This means that your soul is conflicted, filled with tensions and contradictions. Those tensions can either be a blessing or a curse; they can either stimulate creativity and vitality in your life, or they can shut you down.” Seeing my reaction, he reassured me, “Rob, you have to learn to love the tensions that are in your soul.” Love the tensions? I wasn’t sure I had heard him right.

Ten years later, I am still trying to discover what it really means to not merely accept the tensions and contradictions of life but to love them. We want to love the world, but does that mean we must condone all that is wrong with it, that we must quietly acquiesce to injustice? What is there to love about contradictions?

(Read on … )

Today’s post comes from the Rev. Christine Robinson, from her “Psalms for a New World” project. Rev. Robinson, who serves the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, New Mexico, writes, “I’ve worked with the Book of Psalms periodically over the years in my own meditation and prayer, but always with mixed emotions, because, for all its beauty and wisdom, the Book of Psalms has limits which I found off-putting.”

And so, she improvised her own versions on the themes and ideas in the traditional biblical writings as a spiritual practice, the results of which she has generously posted on a blog for easy reference.

This is one that speaks deeply to me:

Psalm 14: Will we learn?

by Rev. Christine Robinson

We wonder, in our hearts, if there is a God,
   or meaning, or hope.
Even our humanism is shaken, when it seems that people
   care only about themselves
The ideals we have and the airs we take on
   seem foolish and vain.
Is there anyone who is wise?
Is there anyone who is just?
Any who treat their neighbors
   as persons of worth and dignity?
or who are centered and mature in their faith?

There is only ourselves; half-wise, attracted
   to justice, trying to be good.
Only ourselves and the ideals that burn like fire in our hearts.

What will open our eyes?
What will soften our greed?
What will give us a passion for justice?

Only the voice that speaks in the longing of our hearts
That lifts our spirits and makes us sing.

Source: Psalm 14: “Will we learn?” by Rev. Christine Robinson, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, NM, posted at Psalms for a New World.

posted with permission from the author

For this Independence Day, I’ve dug out a really rich, wonderful address by Rev. Thomas Starr King. I’ve chosen some excerpts that I feel speak to the ideas of Unitarian Universalist patriotism is these times, in contrast to the perilous times in which this particular address was written in 1851. If you would like to read the entirety, the Google Books project has archived Patriotism, and other papers in PDF format.

Rev. King was a remarkable man, credited by President Abraham Lincoln with keeping California in the Union during the Civil War due to his stirring orations. According to the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography: “Barely five feet tall and physically fragile, King was undistinguished in appearance. Well into his thirties he appeared no older than a youth. His energy and magnetism as an organizer, minister, and preacher, however, quickly impressed any who had mistakenly judged him by appearance. ‘But, though I weigh only 120 pounds,’ he remarked late in life, ‘when I am mad I weigh a ton!’

He also “organized fund raising for the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization, headed by Henry Whitney Bellows, charged with overseeing the health and medical care of the United States army. By the end of the war California had donated one quarter of the money received by the Sanitary Commission. The first large donation, sent by King, arrived just in time to be of use at the battle of Antietam in 1862.”

Today, one of two Unitarian Universalist seminaries is named for Rev. King, the Starr King School for the Ministry, along with two mountains (one in New Hampshire, and one in California).

As with any document from 1851, you may want to substitute gender-inclusive language in your reading of this text.

Patriotism

by Thomas Starr King

The substance of this article is from a discourse, delivered in Boston, before the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, on the occasion of their two hundred and thirteenth Anniversary, June 2, 1851.

[Patriotism] is a constructive quality, quickening the intellect by its love of country to zealous ambition to improve it and raise it higher. It is an imaginative sentiment. Imagination is essential to its vigor. It comprehends hills, streams, plains, and valleys in a broad conception, and from traditions and institutions — from all the life of the past and the vigor and noble tendencies of the present, it individualizes the destiny and personifies the spirit of its land, and then vows its vow to that. So that it is of the very essence of true patriotism to be earnest and truthful, to scorn the flatterer’s tongue, and strive to keep its native land in harmony with the laws of national thrift and power. It will tell a land of its faults, as a friend will counsel a companion; it will speak as honestly as the physician advises a patient; and if occasion requires, an indignation will flame out of its love, like that which burst from the lips of Moses when he returned from the mountain, and found the people to whom he bad revealed the holy and austere Jehovah, and for whom he would cheerfully have sacrificed his life, worshipping a calf.

(Read on … )