Today I bring you writings from one of American Unitarianism’s patron saints, A. Powell Davies. Rev. Davies is probably best known for the cluster of churches in the Washington, D.C. area founded during his ministry at All Soul’s Church from 1944 until his untimely death in 1957.

From a biography by Manish Mishra in the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography:

Davies was a dynamic and prophetic preacher, claimed by many to be one of the finest orators of his day. He used his pulpit to remind people of the primary human calling: the cultivation and development of character and action. As Davies eloquently captured it, “life is just the chance to grow a soul.” With the skill of a poet, Davies probed and illuminated the human desire for connection and meaning. “There is no mystery greater than our own mystery,” he preached. “We are, to ourselves, unknown. And yet we do know. The thought we cannot quite think is nevertheless somehow a thought, and it lives in us without our being able to think it. We are a mystery, but we are a living mystery.”

According to Davies, spiritual life is the core of religion. “In the mind’s dimness a light will shine; in the spirit’s stillness it will be as though a voice had spoken; the heart that was lonely will know who it was it yearned for, and the life of the soul will be one with the life that is God.” God is a living spiritual reality encompassing the totality of the spirits of all beings. “God is what the soul ‘breathes’ as the body breathes air.” He sought God in the pursuit of religion, not its establishment. “For there is a God who never dies, the one and only living God whose face is ever set towards tomorrow.”

Read here a sermon called, “What to Do with Gloom,” given at All Soul’s Church on May 4, 1947, and archived by the Davies Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church.

(As with many documents from this time, you may find it necessary to substitute gender inclusive language in your reading.)

(Read on … )