What Do We Believe?
(Anything We Want?)

Given by James Covington on October 15th, 2006

Today I have decided to talk about our faith. Seems timely enough, since in the immediate context, we are offering a UU orientation class today for those interested to learn more about our faith. The subject is also timely in the broader context–at a time when Sam Harris continues to challenge the very future of faith in his book, The End of Faith, and now the sequel entitled, Letter to a Christian Nation. He rightly excoriates and exposes the flaws, inconsistencies and irrationalities of religious faith.

Indeed, we continue to see everyday the denouncement of gay and lesbian rights in the name of fundamentalist Christian faith and Islamic jihad violence against non Muslims, westerners and infidels. You will recall that Pope Benedict’s backhanded comments about Islam being a violent and inhumane faith was met with violent reaction. While I found that reaction reprehensible, I was also struck that the Pope made no mention of the violence perpetrated by Christianity over the centuries.

So, given the religious nature of international conflict today and since we are a religious community ourselves, it seems timely to think about our own faith. Now “faith” is a word about which many UUs have serious trepidation, because of the connotations of faith as recited above.

Faith is understood by most people has having to do with belief in a religious dogma or creed or a heavenly God or holy scriptures written by human beings thousands of years ago and considered to be the inerrant word of God.

But Unitarian Universalists like to proclaim we have no dogma or creed. Ours is a liberal religious faith wherein we are free to follow our own minds and conscience. Free to believe anything we want–our holy doctrine of anythingarianism. But is that true? Can we believe anything we want?

In a cartoon a few years back, two women are talking. One says, “My boyfriend thinks that if you’re religious, it’s because you’re weak and can’t think for yourself.” Her friend asks, “Hmmm, so will you still be getting married in a church like you wanted.” The first replies, “Well, I hope so, I mean, I’m not just going to sign a paper at city hall.” A third woman, overhearing the conversation, muses, “She doesn’t want an atheist kid, and he doesn’t want a Christian. . . Oh well, yet another Unitarian in the world.”

Unitarian Universalism has historically been a meeting ground for interfaith couples. Why? Because we do not require one to hold specific theological beliefs.

So we say we are a liberal religious faith. WE say we are the alternative to fundamentalism. But what does that mean? As for liberal, the word means “generous, flexible and free.” Another way of defining liberal is to say that it is the opposite of “literal.” Many religious faiths follow their particular scriptures literally, as though the words written by its founders are literally true. Unitarian Universalists do not believe this. Instead, we draw from all religious writings those truths that best enlighten us in our present time. In other words, liberals understand their religious writings to be symbolic and metaphorical rather than “literal.” We are a “non-creedal” congregation, which means that we seek religious truth through personal experience, conscience and reason–not from any book or religious authority. Instead we dedicate our lives to the values that we believe best promote responsibility, human dignity and compassion in the world. Only to that end can we believe anything we want!

The concern I have about our faith is whether or not we bring enough passion to the table and whether our theology is too obtuse or flimsy. I sometimes feel that many Unitarian Universalists have a “take it or leave it” attitude about any religious faith, including our own, even though they find our world view the most enlightening and satisfying. There are so many skeptics when it comes to relgious faith and organized religion–for understandable reasons. And so while those who find out about UU may be initally fascinated, they remain less than passionate or committed.

This concerns me, as I do believe we have a positive, saving and authentic view about life, human beings and human nature. Unforuntately, I believe we are known more for what we don’t believe than what we do. Unless we are clear about what we do believe, unless that belief is nurturing and transforming and speaks to people’s hearts and minds, then I hardly think our particular faith will ever become a more vital one to the general public.

There are as many Unitarian Universalists in the U.S. today as there were in 1961. By my calculation, that is not growth. So we need to be asking ourselves some hard questions.

Perhaps we need to define who we are in a more simple and explicit way that will touch the hearts and minds of a population, 92% of which believe in God. Perhaps the way we need to start thinking about that definition is to determine how your child might answer the question by one of his Christian friends: What do Unitarian Universalists believe? A Christian or Muslim or Jew would at least start with saying “We believe in God or Jesus or the Koran.” What would your child say? I don’t propose to have a simple answer to that question myself. Karl Barth, a great 20 century theologian was once asked if he could sum up all Chrisitian doctrine in a single sentence. He thought for a moment, then said, Yes, and the sentence is this: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Again, the standard answer by UUs to that question is “We believe whatever we want to believe.” OK. That answer indeed celebrates the openness and respect for one’s personal experience and knowledge and conscience. But is that enough? I think it is a wonderful outlook and one of the reasons why I am a UU and not a Baptist. But unless we can be more forthright about what we do believe, how we do approach life, relate to its mystery, work for the common good and are nurtured by our faith, we will unfortunately short-change an otherwise dynamic, liberating and saving religious faith. So, if we take the position, “Well, Unitarian Universalism is a really cool religion, they don’t have stupid, nonsensical beliefs, but, it is after all, still a religious faith, (even though you may never know that), so I will tell my friends I am a UU, but otherwise, well. . . . . . well what?

Well, what do we believe? Let’s start with God. We know we have different views about that subject in this Fellowship. However, Galen Guengrich, minister at All Souls Church in Manhattan recently wrote a brilliant sermon about all this in which he says: As Unitarians, we believe all names for God point toward the same mystery. As Universalists, we believe all creation shares the same destiny. One divine spirit within and arund us, and one destiny before us.

That is one of the better definitions of how to think about God that I have heard for a while. Here, Galen is talking about something more than freedom of conscience. He is talking about something substantive–nondogmatic– but nevertheless puts into words a powerful subjective way of relating to the world around us, to that which is greater than all, yet present in each.

Forrest Church, the other minister at All Souls is often quoted as saying something similar: When people tell me proudly that they don’t believe in God, I ask them to tell me a little about the God they don’t believe in, for I probably don’t believe in him either. God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each. Call it what you will: spirit, ground of being, life itself; it remains what it always has–in Rudolph Otto’s definition of the Holy–a mysterium tremens et fascinans, an awe-inspiring mind-bending mystery.

What do we believe about religious experience?

The religious impulse, which is universal, is the human response to being alive and knowing that we shall also die. Again, from Forrest Church and what follows. Religious experience springs from two primary sources, awe and humility. Neither awe nor humility is served by those who refuse to go beyond the letter–either of scripture or of science–to explore the spirit. Fundamentalists come in two basic varieties. Right-wing fundamentalists enshrine a tiny God on their altar. Fundamentalists of the left reject this tiny God, imagining that by so doing they have done something creative and important. Both groups are in thralldom to the same tiny God.

What is theology to us? Theology is poetry not science. During our brief span, we interpret the greatest and most mysterious masterpiece of them all, the creation itself. The creation is our book of revelation, not a bound book vouchsafed to us by some ancient guru. We rely on the oracle of our own experience, drawn from our reading of the book of nature and of human nature, including our reading of the Bible and our study of philosophy. The text of meaning is vast, its nuances many and various.

Let’s look at it this way: Gaze into the light of the heavens. There are 1.7 trillion stars for every living human being. The star to person ration is 1.7 trillion to one. That is awesome and it counsels humility. It should certainly discourage the scourge of human pride. But does it? No. Instead, we sit on this tiny, munificently fixtured rock arguing over who has the best insider information on the creator and the creation. Is it the Christian? The Buddhist? The Muslim? The Atheist? The Humanist? The Theist? Please! We humans trumpet our differences, even kill each other over them, while, in every way that matters, we are far more alike than we are different. We are born into the same mystery and the same sun sets on each of our horizons. Theologically speaking, we are certainly more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. In fact, by the time we die, we will barely have gotten our minds wet. The wisest of us all will have but the faintest notion of what life was all about. This counsels humility, but it also affirms oneness. Consider the etymology of human itself: Human, humane, humanitarian, humor, humility, humus. Dust to dust, the mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another. Truly we are one.

Why then do we choose to join together rather than exercise our full freedom to believe what we will in the privacy of our homes on Sunday mornings? Simply because experience has taught us that we need one another. We need guidance in recognizing our tears in one another’s eyes. We need prompting to raise our moral sights. We need companions in the work of love and justice to enhance our neighborhoods and to strengthen our witness in the world. And yes, we choose to join our hands and hearts because we know how easily we slip back into mechanical habits that blunt our consciousness. We need and know we need to be reminded week in and week out how precious life is and how fragile. So very fragile. And so phosphorescent. A year can seem to last forever, to the point that we may pray for it to end; yet decades flit past in an eye blink.

So in that regard, we are not so much the animal with tools or the animal with advanced language as we are the religious animal. Knowing we must one day die, we cannot help but question what life means. Unitarian Universalism doesn’t offer a single set of answers to life’s unanswerable questions. We seek meaning in life, not the meaning of life. But we do have a clear sense of life’s purpose, I believe. The purpose of life, and its truest test as well, is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.

This leads me to this final thought. To be at home with life we must make our peace with death. Death is one of two hinges on which life turns; without death, life as we know it could not be. For this reason, every time a woman gives birth, she gives death. Or to put it more gently, death is our birthright, perhaps life’s only guarantee. At birth, we receive a life sentence that is also a death sentence. To the extent that religion is a death-defying act, offering strategies whereby we can live forever, it diminishes our reverent appreciation for life, thereby representing a failure of awe.

It’s not that I disbelieve in an afterlife; I simply have no experience of an afterlife and therefore have little to say concerning one. I do know this, however: nothing (including any imaginable afterlife) could possibly be any weirder or more amazing than life before death.

To this miracle, we must each do everything in our human power to awaken. Awakening is like returning after a long journey and seeing the world–our loved ones, cherished possessions, and the tasks that are ours to perform–with new eyes. Think of little things. Reaching out for the touch of a loved one’s hand. Shared laughter. Shared grief. A letter to a lost friend. Expressing gratitude. An undistracted hour of silence, alone, together with our thoughts until there are no thoughts, only the pulse of life itself. Being in the moment.

Remember, the very ground we walk is Holy land. We may not understand any better than before who we are or why we are here. But for this fleeting moment–the one moment we can bank on–our life becomes a sacrament of praise.

The question is not where to look for God, whether on the cross or on the mountaintop or in the cosmos. It is not even whether God exists or not. The question is not why, or whether, or where, but how. It is how, when we look out our window as William Blake did when he was a boy of seven, to see the trees filled with angels.

Does that mean angels really exist? Not according to the canons of knowledge, they don’t. Like God, angels are beyond proof. Once we start arguing about whether or not angels exist, we have already missed the point. I will venture this, however. When angels dance on the head of a pin, they don’t concern themselves with how many can fit, as if they were crowding into a phone booth. Their full attention is devoted to the joy of the dance.

Numbering is a grown-up game. But, if we follow Jesus’ counsel and become again as children, we will be able to dance in the ring of eternity and let the light shine through. At the very least, by remembering that “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” will play for us one last time and then the earthly strains will cease, we will join the dance of life with more exuberance. How much finer it will be, when our band is struck, if we have loved the music while it lasted and enjoyed the dance.