Rev. Joan R. Gelbein
Unitarian
Universalist Church of Arlington, VA
October 15,1995
I get one kind of question over and over again. Often, it's from the family of the bride and the groom, when I'm out there in the field doing weddings, who see my clerical stole with its array of needlepointed religious symbols, and hear the wedding ceremony I deliver, which is often without traditional religious language.
"What are you?" they ask in a polite, inquiring tone.
I have often wanted to be a lot more playful in my response to that question, but I silently quell any creative flights of fancy, and usually reply instead, "A Unitarian Universalist."
They say, "No. I mean.... Are you Christian?"
I say, "No. I'm Unitarian Universalist."
"No," they insist, "I mean what are you beyond that."
There's usually a pause here, and then I try again, "I'm a Unitarian Universalist. That's my religious affiliation. We're an organized religious body and that's what we are - Unitarian Universalists."
Another pause. The wedding party guest is almost ready to abandon this wheel of cognitive dissonance. "What is a Unitarian Universalist?"
There it is! There it is! The question that haunts my life. The dog at my heels, the bain of my existence. Someday, someday, -- I dream of never having to be asked that question again. Living in a peaceful valley, wild flowers in the field and buzzing bees and babbling brooks and sunny days and --- oh no---- someone murmuring: "God's in his heaven and all's right with the world!"
There it is again! There's no escape from the religious cliche's of the western mind. And, I'm off again, not only to explain my primary identity, but to try to understand it as well. For it never gets settled, it seems, and those people at the weddings are still standing around me, always waiting for me to get it clear after I make that first and most outrageous remark of all - "No, I'm not a Christian!" and follow it up with that Protestant-sounding obscurity: "I'm a Unitarian Universalist."
"What are you?" What are we, indeed!
But, that dialogue I've just described -- the guests-at-the-wedding-type-of-conversation that happens with people who've heard nothing or very little about us, is just one of two very distinctly different conversations possible on the subject of explaining what a Unitarian Universalist might be.
The second conversation is the one we have among ourselves. And, it can be just as daunting. Just as difficult. Just as frustrating. Sometimes. Through our history as a religious movement there have been times we've experienced major transitions.
Now is one of those some-times.
Unitarian Universalism has entered a time of theology shift, probably predictable, but suddenly and startlingly upon us nevertheless. We've been talking about change for a few years, but, hey, who expected it to sink in so fast! I thought we were still thinking about it!
Truth is, UUs are always primed for change. It's our middle name. We live on the liberal edges; we are creedless; we a free thinkers; we absorb novelty and distill its essence into substance. Openness is our religious nature and change is our human condition. We have no one to blame but ourselves for our precarious but dynamic orientation to life.
When some archaeologist examines our burial mounds some fine day in the future, she will find quite different religious artifacts at each of the fifty-year-levels.
What happened to make it so apparent that a shift had already taken place while we were in discussion groups pondering elements of the shift......? "Convo '95" happened.
Last March, some 500 UU ministers met in Hot Springs, Arkansas for five days and nights, for a Convocation. That well-attended gathering of the faithful, had as its purpose to create a covenant for ministry in the 21st century. At the time, I was not sufficiently funded in my church conference budget, or in my own personal budget, to make the trip myself. I was really sorry to have missed the experience, but I have heard lots about it from some participants and from others' written material.
The Reverend Farley Wheelwright, a self-professed "incurable materialist humanist mugwump" wrote that "the sum of the parts [of Convo] added up to a genuine religious experience." He loved the worship. "Every worship service, " he said, "should have 500 clergypersons belting out the hymns, dancing in the aisles, celebrating in a manner that might make William Ellery Channing roll over in his grave."
Best of all, he liked the small covenant groups to which all the ministers had been arbitrarily assigned, and which met two and three times a day during the five days.
"We UU clergy are an odd breed of birds," Farley admitted, "We tend to flock not together but in sub-groupings in order of our prejudices, theological, racial, sexual preferences or what other parochial ties that bind. But not at Convo '95. We were thrown together higgelty piggelty. Very few people in the group I was in knew each other or even shared theological or social action proclivities. But by day five we were all fast friends and planning all sorts of reunions which may or may not happen. Never mind. We bonded in Hot Springs and none of us will soon forget those sessions.
We met to thrash out a covenant for modeling ministry in the coming century. No modest task."
Briefly, the small groups, all having been supplied with the same agenda, met to address specific tasks and were asked to achieve some sort of consensus. At the end of each session, a committee gathered all the group findings and tried to evolve some sort of consensus to them. A covenant statement did evolve that was voted upon favorably by the whole group, and, as a next step, sent along to the District UUMA (that's the UU Ministers' Association) chapters for further discussion, refinement, and so on. It is hoped that a covenant statement, will be ready to greet the new millenium.
But, Farley, the humanist, was also quick to notice an anomaly. In his words: "With an estimated 70% of all continental Unitarian Universalists professed humanists, it seemed to this observor that at least 70% of the preachers called on God (or a reasonable facsimile) to solve our problems...."
Herein lies the clarion call of a shift in the wind.
Mary Beth O'Halloran is minister of the St. Cloud, Minnesota Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. In May, her words appeared in First Days Record, a monthly exchange of (mostly) ministers' reflections.
She described herself as a humanist and also as an atheist. It was her humanism that drew her to Unitarian Universalism, where, she said, "I could finally live religiously, in community, as a humanist." But, even though her experience of Convo was "not all bad," as she put it, still, "there was clearly no room for humanism...."
She said that the worship was wonderful, though none of the seven midwestern congregations she has worked with would call it worship. She wrote, "...while the worship was the best aspect of Convo, it was also the worst. The ritual was fine, the music was great, and the aesthetic effort was impressive. The message was theism. In sermon after sermon the theistic perspective was presented as the normal, natural, exclusive way of being Unitarian Universalist. ... I felt like a dinosaur -- not because humanism is dying out, but because it is being bulldozed into a pit and buried."
Now, to the covenant statement that reflected the collective thoughts of that body of UU minsters. There is only one part of it that needs highlighting this morning because it alone is relevant to this discussion. The word that's making the most waves -- "HOLY," -- is contained in the first sentence of this first paragraph. Also making some waves is the reference to THE SENSE OF THE HOLY as a universal religious experience:
"We covenant to affirm that at the heart of our faith is a sense of the holy. We covenant to lift up this universal religious experience in worship, religious education, fellowship, and service; ..."
Dr. Sarah Oelberg, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Mankata, MinneSota, took some months to process her reactions to the Convocation in Hot Springs. But, by and large her impressions did not change, and she wrote in the September issue of First Days Record that she agreed with her Minnesota colleague and sister-humanist-dinosaur, Mary Beth O'Halloran, that those of us who were humanists were mostly marginalized and ignored. The marginalizing was evident to her in several ways, among them in "the everything-but-humanism worship, and in the omission of [any reference to] 'reason' in the final covenant." For her, Convo did not "feel good." She wrote, "At the heart of my faith is much more than just a sense of the holy. .... I kept looking for that 'something more,' but did not find it at Convo. The 'spirituality' train was running down the track, and the best I could hope for was to be a caboose. ... I felt I did not belong."
What touched me most about what Sarah wrote was this: She said, "The last day [of Convo], a member of [her small group] said that he had envisioned UUism as a series of concentric circles. ... the humanists were in the center circle, but over the years they had been pushed further and further out, until some of them probably felt that they were barely hanging on to the outer rim of the outer circle, not sure whether they would fall away, or be able to reenter the circle. This metaphor hit me with a bang! It described exactly how I was feeling. And I started to cry."
The humanism Sarah grew up with was a communitarian, caring and naturalistic kind of humanism, based on reason and social responsibility. She is concerned that in eliminating Humanism, we would throw out much of the best of what we have been -- much of what has defined us as Unitarian Universalists. Can we embrace and include new ideas without getting rid of the old? That colleague she referred to, in her small group, who spoke of the concentric circles finally said that he now realized he had to go back to his church and invite and enable those pushed-out humanists to come back into the circle.
I know that quite a few of the humanists in this congregation are having similar feelings of being disenfranchised. I don't want that to happen here - or in any of our UU churches and fellowships.
Whatever the debate that is rising in our midst, be it humanism vs. theism or reason vs. mysticism, or rational vs. spiritual , there is a recognition that whatever the coherent center of our theology is, it is changing. Certainly most of us can see that spirituality is drawing more members and newcomers at this time, than is a strict humanism.
It is natural for us to take on the process of re-visioning religion to make it continually relevant, but it must also be just as natural for us to remember, to celebrate, and to honor our UU history. Otherwise we shall be as a house built upon the sand, subject to erosion, instability, and destruction. My thought is that if we don't take the richness of what we are as a unique, dynamic faith along with us into the discovery zone, we risk becoming merely "trendy," offering nothing of substance, reflection, and generativity to new ideas and insights; instead, only copying and following and sputtering out. It is the work of integration that is the hard work of this particular religion, because we don't expect to receive any absolute answers to life's mysteries, full blown and carved in stone. We must build our understanding of life carefully and patiently......and, together.
The Reverend Arthur Severance of The First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Antonio commented on our new controversy. He calls it the rational versus the spiritual debate, and says it is raging among us in much the same way the old humanist-theist debate once did. Art knows that some people would like to include the word "REASON" in that first paragraph, and he agrees because he is a believer in a both-and approach. He calls himself a Mystical Humanist or, on a good day, as he says, a "Naturalistic Theist." He says he is a firm believer in spirituality, though he doesn't believe in angels, channelling, crystals or pagan rituals. He does believe that other folks have the right to believe in those things and even practice them among consenting adults.
He conducts workshops on spirituality and writes, " I believe it is all rational, that the head and the heart don't operate very well separately without the other to balance. He thinks that spirituality is one of those "slippery" religious terms, and the question of what it means is often the greatest problem facing anyone threatened by spirituality. Spirituality has a lot to do with feelings of connectedness to oneself, others, and all there is. It is experienced as a feeling, an intuition, even a hope that the spirit within is connecting with the spirit in the wider world.
Personally, I, too, am a humanist who is also a spiritual seeker. I know the two can co-exist because they do, within my being. I call myself a Mystical Humanist. This works because I respond to the label of agnostic rather than atheist; in other words, I do not close the door on the possibility of some larger connective meaning in the world that may exist beyond my comprehension. Another factor is that I have been trained in the arts and so have a mind's eye that is primed to full participation in life-as-metaphor-and-symbol. This cuts me a lot more slack in perceiving the world's reality. Agnosticm and an artistic nature are the kinds of variations that can lead this Humanist to walking the labyrinth and being opened enough to receive my own deeper wisdom through the discipline of its path.
And, living quite in harmony with that side of me, there is also a lively skepticism about the excesses of being a spiritual seeker, and a respect for the scientific method and the democratic process in reaching rational decisions. And, while being a feminist who is deeply drawn to feminist spirituality, I am not a pagan or a witch or a theist in respect to the goddess.....although I have respect for those ideas and for those people who choose to practice the wiccan and other earth-based religious rituals. My worship needs are met, by and large, in the humanist-based Unitarian Universalist tradition that looks to reason, tolerance, and freedom as the touchstones of a liberal religious faith.
Humanism is an important component of our religious tradition. Humanism as a religious movement that is human-centered is appealing and has enduring value.
In America, in 1825, the Unitarians broke away from the Congregationalists and officially established their own organization, the American Unitarian Association. Unitarians were not Humanists, but they were, on the whole, liberals in theology, backers of most of the significant social reforms of the nineteenth century, and believers in the right of individual religious freedom and thought. As such believers, they welcomed into their ranks even those who questioned the existence of God.
What gradually developed from within Unitarianism, some 75 to 100 years after its founding, and particularly located in what was called the Western Conference (essentially the mid-west) was the movement known as Religious Humanism.
Dr. Curtis W. Reese, a Unitarian minister, set the course of this history in motion with a series of challenging sermons and addresses, from Des Moines in 1917 to Harvard Divinity School in 1920. This God-or-no-God debate resulted in the definite emergence of Humanism in religion, eventually culminating in the first Humanist Manifesto of 1933. The document was prepared by three Unitarian ministers, and two university professors, one of religion and one of philosophy.
In 1925, the Reverend John Dietrich showed how Unitarianism had naturally laid the basis for Humanism. It offered opportunity, he said, "for the enunciation of Humanism by virtue of its underlying spirit of spiritual freedom, by its insistence upon intellectual integrity rather than intellectual uniformity, by its offer of religious fellowship to everyone of moral purpose without regard to his [or her] theological beliefs."
Dietrich knew that Unitarianism was the natural soil for the growth of humanism because it revolted against orthodox Christianity in the interest of the worth and dignity of human nature and in the interest of human life. Many Unitarian Universalist Churches in America today are acknowledgedly Humanist, and a large portion of Unitarian Universalists in all of our churches are Humanists -- as Farley Wheelwright said, some 70% of UUs would use that word to identify themselves religiously.
Humanism is a human-centered theory of life which advocates the methods of reason, science, and democracy and insists on getting away from religious control of knowledge.
It is the classical Humanist viewpoint, according to Corliss Lamont, author of The Philosophy of Humanism, that "human beings have but one life to lead and should make the most of it in terms of creative work and happiness; that human happiness is its own justification and requires no sanction or support from supernatural forces; that in any case, the supernatural, usually conceived of in the form of heavenly gods or immortal heavens, does not exist; and that human beings, using their own intelligence and cooperating liberally with one another, can build an enduring citadel of beauty and peace upon this earth."
Humanism sees the here and now as the only viable "promised land," and sets up service, compassion, and altruism between human beings as the ultimate moral ideal.
A pretty clear picture of what has been defined as a Religious Liberal for so many years, is that of a Unitarian Universalist, and most of those Unitarian Universalists have been, and are, Humanists -- agnostic humanists, atheistic humanists, mystical humanists. And, look what's been happening in these strange reactionary times of Robertson, Buchanan, and the like. The "L" word has become dirty, and Humanism, according to Tim LaHaye of the Moral Majority, "is destroying our culture, our families, country, and one day, the entire world." "Most of the evils in the world today, says LaHaye, "can be traced to Humanism, which has taken over our government, the United Nations, education, television and most of the other influential things of life. I believe there is yet time for us to defeat the Humanists and reverse the moral decline in our country that has us on a collision course with Sodom and Gomorrah."
And, so what's happening to those dear, precious Humanists who have toiled so long and hard in the fields of American life, who have met and dreamed and worshipped and cared for each other in our UU churches? On top of being thoroughly Satanized by the Religious Right, they are also being marginalized within the ranks of the Religious Left.
The Rev. Forrester Church of the All Souls UU Church in New York City, said in an interview, "I worry that if the word that is most emblematic of our tradition of liberal democracy becomes a swear word, we are in danger of losing our soul - the soul of America. The liberal spirit is the spirit that has lead to all the great reform movements. It is the word most often invoked by those overseas who are trying to throw off the shackles of ... tyranny ... The great irony to me is that the only place the word 'liberal' is out of fashion is in the United States of America."
We move away from our UU tradition of Humanism, it seems to me, at our peril.
I'm not sure what is at the center of our faith. We're in some transition period when our faith is not as clearly defined as we would wish it to be. Humanism as a religious movement that is human-centered is something all of us can live with. Perhaps its rigid view of spirituality could shift as new information from the world of science has been broadening our religious perspectives of Truth. And, those who center on the Holy can meet their Humanist brothers and sisters in the realm of our seventh UU principle -- the interdependent web of life -- as we work together to protect the natural world which is our Life.
I urge as many of you as can, to join in on the series of duscussions on Humanism scheduled for Monday nights here in the church, starting tomorrow. And, by the way, believe it or not, when I decided on the topic for this sermon, I didn't even realize the series was planned so serendipitously to follow. A Holy coincidence, no doubt!
Let us be lively and loving with each other!
Reading: "Cut and patched" By Rev. Gelbein from Rev. Jane Ranny Rzepka's Sermon given during the Service of the Living Tradition at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly which took place in Milwaukee, WI, June, 1990.