Re-imagining Unitarian Universalism, Part 4: Secularity

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4:  Re-Imagining Unitarian Universalism, Part 4: Thinking about Secularity

I became uncomfortable with the way that UU Christians had dichotomized the situation within the UU movement: a dominant humanist hegemony that placed all its eggs in the basket of "religious community" and a suppressed theistic and Christian past and future that called UUism into a more purposeful religious life.

Rene Girard's vision of the gospel floating free of the religion that tries to contain it rocked this understanding. I started to think about secularism, from biblical perspective. I was inspired by Lloyd Geering's and Don Cupitt's presentation at a Jesus Seminar conference in New York.

We now live in
A Global Economy and
In a Globalized Capitalist Civilization
A Pluralistic Culture
A Secular Society and under a Secular State
with Voluntary Religious Associations
and
Personal Spirituality

There are counter trends -- each of these are resisted in some way.

Indigenous peoples and local cultures resist globalization. Reactionaries resist pluralism in favor of monoculture. Religious fundamentalists want state favor

I got from a Robert Coles book (the Secular Mind),  the idea that secularism is a concept that has no meaning except in a religious context. Secularism is a religious word, just as atheism is a religious word.

The secular realm is that realm of life out of the reach of the religious: not governed by religious teaching, religious rules, religious authorities.

Did the secular realm always exist? Did the ancient Hebrew woman see her daily domestic activity as something outside of the religion -- "oh, those men, always thinking about Yahwah, and arguing about Him, while I am just grinding the grain and making the bread." Or was she doing the work in a manner prescribed or shaped by religious teaching"

Did she compartmentalize her consciousness in the way that we do?

There is a great deal of evidence that in the ancient world religion was a separate sphere.

In the stories and myths that the ancients told, the Gods, including Yahwah, once walked upon the Earth and related directly with human beings. Recall that story from the second chapter of Genesis, which describes how God was walking in the Garden in the evening, "in the cool of the day" and he encounters Adam and Eve, all dressed up in their fig leafed finery. It's a lovely image, but we can tell that the authors of that story did not believe it to be literally true.

And through the stories of the Genesis, stories which for the most part were collected and recorded by the writers in the court of King David, God withdraws from the world, making fewer and fewer personal appearances, and even then, appearing mysteriously and in disguise. Three strangers appear at the door of Abraham's tent -- were they God? A mysterious stranger wrestles with Jacob throughout the night -- some say that was God, but perhaps not. God appears in the visions and in dreams.

It is said that Moses is the last to see God face to face and still live -- up on Mount Sinai. God calls Samuel in the night, three times before he realizes that it is God calling him.

And then, there is that scene in which Elijah, on the run from the false prophets of the court of Queen Jezebel, hides in the mountains, and pissed off and harassed as he is, asks to see God. And God tells him to hide in a cleft of a rock, because God will pass by -- and there is wind and earthquake and storm, but God appears as a still small voice in the quiet after the storm.

By the time we reach the era of King David (which is the beginning of the Bible describing real and historic events, past the age of stories and legends and myths, God is enclosed in the ark of the covenant and then in the Temple. God is far away; God is remote. The Temples are only occasional residences of the divine.

People reach God through the Temple, through the Priests of the Temple who have access to God that the ordinary person does not. Over time, all the Temples were consolidated into the Temple on Mount Zion, Solomon's Temple.

God was remote, inaccessible. God was present in one special place. God was approachable only by special religous people. And one interacted with God through rituals performed by the intermediary priests. God demanded one's obedience and loyalty and one demonstrated one's obedience and loyalty through the rituals of sacrifice.

Bad fortune in your life showed that you had somehow displeased God. You then made an appropriate sacrifice to show one's obedience and loyalty to retain to God's favor.

Whatever the earlier stories written in the scroll in the Temple, when we first see the practice of the organized religion that shaped our civilization and culture here in the West, it is temple based religion of sacrifice to remote and invisible God, with a professional priesthood.

The story of King David in the two books of Samuel tells of how this royal family of David and the priests of the Temple and individual prophets split and divided over where access to God was located. Who spoke for God? And in that we see the beginning of a split between the royals (the state) and the religious authorities (the priests). Was this the beginning of a division of the culture into religious and non-religious spheres.

And during this period of time (roughly between 1000 BCE forward about 400 years) we have writings some of which are clearly Temple writings and some of which are on religious subjects but do not refer to Temple religious practice at all.

Well what happened next? The Kingdom of Judah is defeated by Babylon and leadership of the Hebrew people are taken into exile. The Temple is destroyed.

God begins his journey. God is delocalized. God no longer lives in the Temple on Mount Zion, but God is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. God is able to be with the Hebrews in the Babylon. God is also back in Jerusalem, waiting for them to return. God is in the wilderness making a path for them through the desert.

God is "out there" and whereever we go, we are still in relationship with God.

The Deuternomic historian rewrites the previous histories of the Hebrew people to emphasize a different nuance in the relationship to God. The point is no longer that God brought these people to the promised land -- but that God and the Jewish people are in a permanent, unbreakable covenant with one another. The point about the promised land is not the land but the promise. The promise and the covenant go with the people whereever they are.

At the same time, in another development, prophetic writers downplay the role of the Temple and Temple rituals during the same period.

These are writings that we religious liberals love and quote and hopefully, live by: what does God require of thee, asks the prophet, Micah: but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.

Another prophet, Isaiah writes 

the ministry is to to bring good news to the oppressed,to bind up the brokenhearted,to proclaim liberty to the captives,and release to the prisoners;.

Amos says: 

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them; and the offerings of well- being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harp. But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever- flowing stream.

You see what is happening here. Religious duty is shifting from ritual to ethics and morality.

The exile ends and the people return to Jerusalem. There is a counter-tendency to anti-Temple, anti- sacrifice and pro-justice strand of the some of the exile prophets.

The Temple is rebuilt in Jerusalem and a sacrificial religion is re-established at it. There are a couple of developments that are important to note at this point.

God is made cosmic. In this post-exile period, the first chapter of Genesis is written and added to the bible. In it, the transformation of the God from the warrior God of the Jewish People to the cosmic creator of all of heaven and earth from the beginning of time is complete. God can get no bigger, nor more powerful from this point on.

Secondly, during this period Jewish law is fully fleshed out and detailed. What God wants of us is made quite explicit. And our duties as a religous person is simple -- to obey all of God's laws and commandments. And those laws cover great expanses of life -- how food is prepared, financial and legal matters, family life, sexual conduct, diet etc.

Religion at this point is quite totalistic -- an ominipotent, omnipresent God concerned about all aspects of life.

One could say that at this point in time, the secular realm of life is minimized and the religious realm is maximized.

Well, what happens next?

In a stunning development, God comes to Earth again.

This far-off distant God, who deals with people through accepting their sacrifices offered up by priests, and who regulates all aspect of life through rules and regulation shows up on earth again. Well, his son does.

And his son, first name Jesus, Last Name Christ, is resurrecting understandings of God that had not been heard since the time of exile, hundreds of years before.

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

The kingdom of God is at hand, and within you.

Our father, who art in heaven.... you can directly address a prayer to God.

He points again to the temporary, transience of the Temple. He drives the merchants from the Temple, attacking the sacrifice practice of Temple ritual.

He says all the rules and laws come down to standing on the side of love -- loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself -- and that if you cannot love the neighbor whom you can see, how can you love God whom you cannot see.

Someday all who worship God will worship him not at Temples, but in spirit and truth.

Jesus is the return of a suppressed theology in religious history that is a counter gesture to the totalization of the religious realm.

Instead of God Omnipotent: God Incarnate. Human sized.

Instead of Ritual: standing on the side of love, morals and ethics. Reverence and Gratitude.

Great Stuff.

Too bad he got killed.

Then, the story goes, something quite unexpected happens.

He is resurrected, appears several times -- to 500 people, Paul says. And then ascends into heaven.

And then, God returns to Earth as the Holy Spirit, tongues of fire, at the Pentecost, inspires the faithful and establishes God's presence on Earth -- not in a land, not in a temple, but in a group of people who become the (hear this phrase with new ears) Risen Body of Christ-- the church. God is dispersed into humanity, as an internal spirit carried within. An inner light.

So let's review.

God starts out in story as a present as God's self on Earth -- walking in the Garden in the cool of the day -- over time becomes the cosmic, omnipotent, remote, unapproachable God of everything and all, to whom we owe sacrifice.

And then in an opposite motion, God comes to earth as a man, and dies and is resurrected as a people who are filled with his spirit.

God goes from way out there to in here.

God goes from demanding our loyalty, obedience and sacrifice to wanting our love, and for us to love each other, and treat each other with compassion, justice, ethics and morality.

God's truth has gone from divine commandment to human wisdom.

Our duty becomes to live by the inner light of God in the world as it is.

Re-Imagining UUism: Part 3: Rene Girard

Part 1

Part 2

I don't know why I first read Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled. It was quite a while ago, perhaps ten years or more.  I don't even remembering reading it for the first time.  I do remember leading a discussion group at the church about it.

I read it after I had identified as a UU Christian.  Bailie introduced me to the thought of Rene Girard, and by Girard I was inspired to a much larger vision of the work of the Holy Spirit.  An expanded view of the Holy Spirit is an important part of how I re-imagine Unitarian Universalism, today.

Let me explain:

Violence Unveiled is an exposition of the thought of Rene Girard.  Rene Girard is a living French literary critic, anthropologist, philosopher and Christian apologist.  He is probably 90 now and teaches at Stanford.  He has influenced a whole school of thinkers in a variety of fields.

How to explain Girardian theory?

There are really two parts to it.  One is a theory about human beings, how they relate to each other, and how that shaped human culture.

Rene Girard

Girard says that people operate by mimesis or imitation.  We want what other people want; we imitate their desire. Basically, we don't really see the value of anything or anyone until we observe someone else valuing it, and then we imitate their desire.  It's why kids surrounded by toys, will want the same one.  It is why fashion works.  It is why we think Brad Pitt is handsome.

It means that everyone is both a model and a rival: a model because we are copying what they want, and a rival because now we are competing for the same object of desire.

Mimetic rivalry leads to conflict, because each member of a group wants the same thing.

Conflict leads to scapegoating. Not only do we imitate each others desires, we imitate each others' rejections and condemnation. In a situation of great conflict, suddenly everyone unites against one, who now seems to be the cause of all the conflict in the system.

Scapegoating creates unity, as the group is united, the many against the one.  It also creates sacrificial violence, as the scapegoat is expelled or killed.

Up to now, this is not hard to understand, although it is a bleak view of human nature.  And it is
more mythic than research based as anthropology.  But here is where Girard has his most profound insight.

Sacrificial violence, the killing of the scapegoat, produces myths, or more bluntly, lies.  A story must be told that justifies the violence of the many against the one.  What emerges is a set of lies about the victim and another set of lies about the group.  The victim was extraordinarily evil, and we, well, we were extraordinarily brave when we turned on him or her.  You might even say that we were acting for a divine power.  We see this at work even today.

That's part one of Girardian theory.  It's interesting, but frankly, I didn't need to read another big theory that explains all of human behavior.  After all, I've read Marx and Lenin already.

On the other hand, Girard's analysis of the Bible rocked my world.

Girard believes that the ancient Hebrews and the early Christians decoded and deconstructed this process of sacred scapegoating and myth making.  For Girard, the Bible is multi-voiced and contradictory, but it wrestles with mimetic rivalry and violence. There are stories on all sides of this: many stories of rivalry and scapegoating violence, but also stories which begin to raise doubts about those narratives.  Stories to consider from this point of view are Cain and Abel, the story of Hagar and Ishmael, of Abraham and Isaac, the story of Jacob and Esau, Joseph thrown into a pit by his brothers who envied his coat.  The Story of Job; Girard says that the misfortunes of Job are mythic justifications for the crowd turning against this leading man of the community -- and the desperate effort of his friends to make Job understand and accept the lie that somehow he deserved it.  It is not resolved in Job, because Job ultimately gives up.  But the process is finally resolved in the story of Jesus, according to Girard.

Jesus was an innocent victim and scapegoat; the crowd mysteriously turns against him and he is executed. (The great unexplained hole in the center of the Passion story is "what is the crime?".) And his followers, despite their initial vacillation, document his innocence.  They resist the myth-making that Jesus claimed to be a rival King, or a military messiah.  They say he was innocent.  And in so doing, they exposed the power structure of Jerusalem, calling out the complicity of the leaders of the Temple, the Roman authorities, even the people in the street in the wholly unnecessary death of an innocent man.  The story even spotlights the vacillation of Peter, the most stalwart disciple, showing how even the most committed can be caught up in the contagion.  It's an interesting read of a familiar story.

But Girard says that this exposure of the myth of sacred violence is at the heart of the gospel. The heart of the gospel is humanity has a capacity for sacrificial violence,  but it has learned to recognize it and to rejects the myth it creates. It is a contested gospel, because the church itself has fallen backwards from its own knowledge and makes Jesus into a sacred scapegoat.

But the real gospel is that the victims are innocent, and that the powerful justify their power with lies about their victims, themselves and the meaning of their violence.  Jesus says in the gospel of John that when He has gone, He will send a Holy Spirit who will be the Advocate and the Defender.  The Advocate of whom? The Defender of whom? The innocent victims of our human scapegoating.

Rene Girard says that this Holy Spirit is active in the world, and is remaking it, step by step and year by year.  Everywhere, in every situation, we are now acutely aware of who is a potential innocent victim, and what are the stories being told to justify their victimization. Watch to see how alert people are to the potential of victimization. Such a Holy Spirit is not confined to the church, nor to the believers, but is everywhere at work.  (And when the UUA announces its intention to be an anti-oppressive institution, is it not aligning itself with that spirit?)

This rocked my world; I had reconsider the dichotomy that had been set up between mainstream Unitarian Universalism and Unitarian Universalist Christianity.  It was no longer so clear that mainstream UU's had abandoned the gospel to which the UU Christians had remained loyal.  When we UU Christians said that we stood on the gospel, did we have a cramped vision of the gospel in mind?  Perhaps we had more to do than convince our congregations to observe the Christian year, and to pray together on Sunday, and to study the Bible on occasion.

Perhaps the gospel had broken free of the religion built to contain it, and was free in the world, moving anyone who could see it. How did Unitarian Universalism, with its reflexive antipathy to conventional Christianity fit into a world like that?

Re-Imagining UUism -- Part 2

Part 1, in which I describe becoming disenchanted with the theory that providing "religious community" was the purpose of Unitarian Universalism.

"Religious Community" did not answer the question, "how does Unitarian Universalism change a person?".  There are those who argue that they don't want to be changed, or that asking the question implies a judgement against who they are right now.  You know, that's OK.  Each of us has those seasons in their life.  But a religion still needs a vision of the transformation it is working in adherents, because there are other seasons in life.

So, what was the alternative to the self-satisfaction of Unitarian Universalism?  For myself, I yearned for the moral grandeur of Christianity.  I did not want to emulate the real and actual Christian church, but I was deeply attracted to an idealized version of it: a living historic community of people, humble and self-aware of their sins and shortcomings, relying on God for mercy, doing God's work in the world, embodying a universal good intention and love for all.

I was raised a UU -- my father was a Unitarian minister in my early childhood -- and grew up in the faith, until I went to college. I returned to it twenty years later.  Six years later, I was in a Methodist seminary, and shortly thereafter, I was singing and testifying at the first Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship Revival in New Orleans in 1999.

The first Revival was a watershed moment in my life, and I think in some others' as well.  It made space for a kind of Christian piety, new to UUism.  The new UU Christian piety did not try to stay separate from popular Christian piety, but embraced it.  We sang "Jesus Loves Me" and had healing services.

But we also embraced our fallen-ness, and our need to be healed and transformed and changed, and our dependence on a power greater than ourselves to save us and the world.

There are three moments from that stage of my life that I remember expressing where I was at.  The first was a spontaneous testimony in New Orleans.  I reacted viscerally to what seemed like an over-politicization of Gospel. I stood before the group, and recounted my long involvement with the Left (which is another longer story) and how I had come to realize that I, and the world, could not be saved merely through our good works, but only through our faith.  It was pretty much straight up Pauline theology, with no chaser.

The second was a sermon: "Ten Things You Gotta Love About God."

And the third was a Communion Sermon in which I asked the congregation to reflect on the seven deadly sins, one at a time, and confess to themselves how their lives had been damaged by each one: lust, anger, pride, sloth, gluttony, greed and envy.

In my mind,  I saw this new UU Christian piety as the alternative and antidote to the self-satisfaction of contemporary UUism.  And even more than an alternative, it was a submerged and repressed part of us.  It's who we could have been if we had not become so humanistic in the mid-20th century.  It's the kind of church that we wished our churches were now, but too many other UU's were so allergic to Christianity and any form of "God language" to let us.  Understand me, it is not the totality of the theology that many of us yearned for, but that energy.

I hear that yearning in the voices of so many of my colleagues in UU ministry still.

But I have come to think that it is not the answer to the self-satisfaction of contemporary UUism.  It is instructive to me that I would think it was.  It is a nostalgia for what was once an alternate future, like a yearning for the golden age that would have been the Robert Kennedy presidency.

Where my interest in Christianity led me is for tomorrow.

Re-Imagining Unitarian Universalism: Where I started

You should read the last couple posts on this blog.....


Like everybody of my era, I started thinking about Unitarian Universalism by thinking about the problem of how to define what we believe.  The basic problem of UU identity.  And like most of my generation, I adopted "the covenant, not creed" answer to that problem.  That quote by John Wolf - "I am not sure that I believe in God, but I sure believe in the church" was important to me.

That led to the belief that the congregation was the place of definition of Unitarian Universalism.  With that, congregational polity became the "thread that you follow", to use William Stafford's metaphor, through the history.

But not only congregational polity as a principle, but religious community as what we offered to people.  Become a Unitarian Universalist and let your life be transformed by belonging to a religious community, a group of people who gathered together to celebrate their relationships and to practice mutual care and support.

That is a powerful message, and attractive to people who hunger for community, which turns out to be a smaller group than we thought.

My dissatisfactions rose with that understanding of Unitarian Universalism, which I think is still the common denominator way we think of ourselves.

A community is less than humanity, so it is partial.  Building a religion based on making comfortable and supporting communities leads to consumerism.  It does not challenge people.  It makes all ministry pastoral at heart.It's prophetic witness becomes us vs them.  It either reinforces an unspoken set of assumptions as normative within the congregation, or it becomes a masochistic testing ground of how much disruptive difference the community can endure.

Most of the critiques of contemporary Unitarian Universalism from younger ministers and laypeople echo these concerns.  They say that Unitarian Universalism is self-satisfied.  My hypothesis is that the "religious community" as defining UU function is the problem.  It is an answer to a real problem, but not a good answer.

So, how to re-imagine UUism?

I needed a starting question.....

I started on this path at a Large Church Conference that was held in Boston.  I don't think that I really qualified to be there, but I remember asking Stefan Johanson if he could explain what transformation people should expect if they joined a UU congregation.  How does becoming a UU change a person?  Not, what benefits does a person get from being a UU?  I had heard that discussion lots of time, but "how will this change me?"

I had come to the conclusion that if we did not know the answer to that question, that our efforts to grow were going to fail.  Not only were our efforts to grow going to fail, but that we were failing in some fundamental way because we didn't know what we were doing, or even trying to do.

If we did not know the answer to the question "how does UUism change people?", then we had become a religion about itself.

Those Who have Influenced My Present Thought

First of all, I am inspired by the Deuteronomist historians.  At a time when the old ways of the ancient Hebrews had come to naught -- their kingdom defeated, the Temple fallen, their religious and political leaders taken off into exile in Babylon, they re-imagined their relationship with G-d.  They re-thought their earthly Kingdom given to them by G-d, and they re-imagined it as a Kingdom in covenant with God, and conditioned on Israel's faithfulness.  But that faithfulness was not just at the level of the state, but at the level of the person, as well.

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love theLord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.  (Deut: 6:4-9)

They made faith an inward attitude, love to G-d 'on your heart", a covenant made in the heart of the individual and the people, with G-d. They  re-imagined a religion that could be taken anywhere and survive any outward circumstance. Everything of lasting value in Judaism and Christianity has been along that inward path first suggested by Deuteronomist.

And I am profoundly influenced by Jesus, the Christ.  Not just the human Jesus, the man of prophetic utterances, farmboy wisdom and healings, but the Christ of the story, who was the Son of God, and who could have saved Himself from the cross with an army of angels, but who renounced divinity, and took on the life and death of a common man, even to the point of death on the Cross.

who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  (Phillippians 2:6-8)

He calls to us now to set aside "divinity" as a subject of our religious life and discourse.  We know not God, and we know not how to defeat, evade or transcend Death, nor do we know what lies beyond its horizon, that only horizon that comes closer as we travel.  Religion must take on the life and death of the human person as its subject.  Christ was the founder of humanism, and humanism remains to this day, Christianity taken at a slant.

And I am influenced by Theodore Parker.  Let James Ford of Providence describe him.  I think the

stuff about the pistol of the desk is really cool, but it is this sentence that sums up the inspiration that I take from Parker:

“Christianity is not a system of doctrines, but rather a method of attaining oneness with God. It demands, therefore, a good life of piety within, of purity without, and gives the promise that whoso does God’s will, shall know of God’s doctrine.”

"Whoso does God's will, shall know of God's doctrine."  We know of God's will; it has been declared again and again, and it has nothing to do with temples, and bloody sacrifices, institutions and saying "Lord, Lord" with the lips.  It has everything to do with loving mercy, and walking humbly, and doing justice, and serving the least of these, and worshipping the Father in spirit and truth. Need we say more? No.

And I am influenced by Rene Girard, who convinced me that the Gospel of Jesus that is actually remaking the world is not information about Jesus at all.  It is the truth that his followers revealed about Jesus, a truth hidden since the foundation of the world.  It is that the victims of sacrificial violence are indeed innocent.  Jesus was innocent,  a truth once grasped reveals that the world has been from the beginning, a system built on the murder of the innocent, and justified by lies.  Rene Girard says that the gospel that decodes our reality is to look for the victims, and once seeing them to deconstruct the lies that hide their innocence, and thus reveal the true nature of the world.  It is a gospel that is not always carried by the religious, but often carried by those who are not religious.  As a religious people, we need to remember that.

And I am influenced by Don Cupitt, who intimated in a talk at a Westar Institute conference that

secularism was the culmination of the inward journey taken by Western Religion that was started by the Deuteronomist.  What was formerly the subject of religion has become the subject of all our thinking about Life-With-A-Capital-L.  The world over is thinking about Life.  There are so many that are no longer interested in Religion, but are intensely interested in Life: what is a good life, how should we live within ourselves and together.  Life is a word that describes a reality greater than God.  When the ex-Christian minister, Jim Palmer of Nashville, says that "religion is my life", he is talking Don Cupitt.

And I was profoundly influenced by the subtitle of a book I bought at the same Westar Conference.  It is by David Boulton.  "The trouble with God: Religious humanism and the Republic of Heaven."  I want to be citizen of that Republic.  Think how much more I will be moved when I get around to reading the book.

This is not the exhaustive list of those who have shaped my religious journey.  But they are the ones who have moved me to try to re-imagine Unitarian Universalism as a Great Awakening of the Liberal Spirit, a mass movement of people trying to embody the virtues of liberality in their everyday lives, a people no longer just religious, but spiritual, no longer just spiritual, but engaged, alive and becoming, citizens of heaven.


Links:

Theodore Parker:

Rene Girard:  I recommend "I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightening" as an introduction to his thought.

Don Cupitt: 

David Boulton: 

Re-Imagining Unitarian Universalism

The pieces are coming together in my mind to reimagine Unitarian Universalism.

First of all, we need to really, actually and truly shift from belief to practice as the core of what the spiritual life asks of us.  To make as one's central claim that we have no doctrine is as much a belief-based system, as a catechism teaching doctrine.  It's just a negative doctrine.

Imagine a different core identity.  No longer: "UU's can believe anything". Or: "UU's accept all."  Instead: "UU's act a certain way". "UU's are good people".

So, let's turn our attention to virtue and character.  Let's re-imagine our spiritual work as learning new habits of the heart, learning to practice the virtues of openness, solidarity, self-possession, reverence, gratitude and generosity, honesty and humility in our daily lives.  Let's re-imagine our spiritual work together as being witnesses to each other's efforts, and catching each other when we fail and fall.

Let's re-imagine the ways that we gather people together.  First, let's explore all the new ways that people come together: networks, and small groups, and on-line groups.  Whereever people gather to explore and embody the virtues of liberality, we respect that spirit, and want to be there, in spirit.

And then, let's re-tell the stories of our congregations: how our history of performing rituals of worship and reverence has helped change people and communities.  Congregations make those rituals possible: the core community, the ritual leader, the sacred space all supported and tended by a group of people democratically working together.  A congregation is a crucial node on a much larger network of  people living the liberal spirit.

We have to re-imagine our congregations, from being "community organizations" of themselves, to "worship leaders" who provide worship experiences to a wider network.  What's a worship experience? A chance to place yourself before God, or to contemplate the ultimate source, a time to re-dedicate yourself to what is the best, a time to see your life from the largest perspective.

The worship service is not the show a congregation puts on in the hopes of enticing people to join their religious organization, so they can give money and serve on committees.

Re-imagine the worship service as a public ritual of self-reflection and re-dedication offered to one and all in the hopes of changing people's lives.

Let's shift from trying to build up our own religious communities to trying to build up the wider community.   We need to move from membership growth to virtue oriented evangelism.

Imagine a public voice, clear and strong and present, that speaks always for holding the Earth and all her peoples with reverence, as due the body and images of God.  Imagine a public voice that counsels openness and curiosity for the "other", a voice that reminds each of us that all our views are partial and incomplete, and that the truth really matters. Imagine an always audible voice that whispers privately to every individual that they have a right to be their true selves, to think what they think, to love who they love, to be who they know themselves to be. Imagine a public voice that insists that we live amidst actual abundance of all we need most.

We could be that voice.  We say those things now inside our walls to each other and to our children.  We need to imagine ourselves turned inside out, telling the same things to the world.

Afraid to lose ourselves

Be the change you want to see.
What we need is a world that operates by the values of liberality: openness, reverence, honesty, humility, gratitude and generosity, self-possession, solidarity. We need a world where people live honestly and lovingly in a mutual atmosphere of respect and solidarity.
We have to find, and inspire and activate the people who are willing now to live into the future -- who are willing to be the change that they want to see.
Those people are everywhere, in every city and town, in every ethnic and cultural group, of every religion, of every economic and social class. They are men and women and both and neither. They are gay and straight and all kinds of queer.
They are already living into a better future for us all, leaving aside the values of the grim and indifferent world that seems to be dominant now, but is dangerous and doomed.
But they need inspiration and support.
Unitarian Universalism is a faith community of mutual inspiration and support. It is only now growing into its possibility.
Its job now is to catalyze that world wide coalescence of people who can be persuaded to live by the virtues we need for a humane society. Our job now is to inspire people, especially to inspire ourselves to the reverence by which we hold the Earth and her people as sacred and worthy of awe and wonder. It is our work now to also hold us in our inevitable failures of judgement, nerve and courage, and let us start again. We are to be a community and a means of grace, and even a source of salvific knowledge, for it is not immediate obvious that this world is in the process of being reclaimed through us, by a power greater than us.
The present generation of Unitarian Universalists are anxious and full of self-doubt. They live in a world where they think that a 5% or 10% growth in our tiny numbers would be astonishing. They think that only those who understand their very peculiar historical path would be willing to join them. What they don't realize is that their very peculiar history has been a process of shedding everything that stands in the way of their universality. They now stand naked, shorn of dogma, shedding their ethnicity and class, clothed only in their willingness to be open, to be reverent, to be in solidarity with others, to embrace the limits of their knowledge, to hold to their own self-possession. They are only afraid now of losing themselves in a rising tide of humanity committed to a better world.
Now is the time to be the change that we wish to see.

Principles, Virtues, Growth and Evangelism

I have been arguing that UU's ought to de-emphasize our "principles" as the basis of our moral and ethical work, and turn instead to promoting a set of virtues that make up liberality, or liberalism, or liberal religion.

I think that we ought to state explicitly that the purpose of our common religious life is to promote reverence, humility, self-possession, openness, gratitude, solidarity, and honesty as personal and public virtues.  I don't want to make them a code, so you may have a slightly different list, or different words, but you get the idea, I hope.

Our worship are public and inclusive rituals that inspire us to recommit to these virtues in our daily lives.  Our congregations are covenanted communities for the purpose of mutual inspiration of ourselves and others to make these virtues the defining signs of our character.

It doesn't much matter why people think that these virtues are important; it's that they do.  And it doesn't matter much how people understand how they come to them -- whether through introspection, detachment, divine grace, or intellectual clarity; it's that commit themselves to that process.  As long they understand that the process of personal and social transformation is on-going, uneven, and filled with trial and error, we are partners.

Principles are things that one believes in.  They are intellectual propositions.  It makes our work of growth and evangelism a process of persuading people of things they should believe in.  Which, of course, we don't like to do.  As much as we try to avoid it, we end up persuading.

Virtues are habits of the heart -- ways of acting.  Our work of growth and evangelism is inviting people to practice these virtues in their lives, and to reflect on the results and on the obstacles to them.  Our role is to inspire, more than persuade.

Concretely, and this is a distinction that others have made: Principles ask people to believe first, then belong and then behave.

Virtues turn that around: behave first, then belong, then believe.

What a difference it would make if we stopped the search for like-minded people, and just tried to inspire the people in our communities to adopt the virtues of liberality.  Suddenly, instead of thinking that the people who are our potential companions are a tiny group open to a particular set of religious propositions, we see that we are part of a much larger body of people trying to lead lives open-hearted reverence, honesty, humility, conscience and justice.