Re-membering Our Living Tradition
Given by James Covington on March 4th, 2007
The question I have been asking myself as I have been thinking about our 50th anniversary this week, is “why have I always needed or longed to be involved in a religious community?” Obviously, it has something to do with the way I was raised. I grew up as a Southern Baptist in rural west Tennessee. Religious community was very influential in my life, mostly in a positive way. I can also speak in public and apparently have a need to speak publicly to the larger questions and meanings of existence. The pulpit allows me to do that. But I believe there is a deeper reason. I have a need to belong to a tradition of human beings who strive to live for the common good, who seek to spiritually nurture and care for each other while also working to heal a fractured world. To reference A Powell Davies, “I go to church because I must have my conscience sharpened—sharpened until it goads me to the most thorough and responsible thinking and action of which I am capable. Because I must FEEL again the love I owe my fellow mean and women. In church I do.”
Now I am not saying that church or any religious affiliation is the only place one can experience that. There are many ways of gaining that feeling. And we all need to have that feeling fulfilled. I have just finished reading a marvelous book by Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, where he asserts that around the world, nourishing relationships are the single most universally agreed-upon feature of the good life. All people everywhere deem warm connections with others to be the core feature of optimal human existence.
For me, the UU religious community is one place where I can best have that need fulfilled. I have it fulfilled in other ways as well– with my wife, my children, my family and friends, my professional affiliations, but here in the religious community I feel I am also joined with a human lineage—a living tradition that connects me not only with the present but with a world view, a tradition, lived and followed by generations of good human beings before me and other human beings who will follow me. Our living tradition allows me to participate in something greater than myself and thus provides an environment within which I may thrive mentally, socially and spiritually. Do you see what I mean?
Ours is a living tradition of those who called themselves Unitarians and Universalists. The Unitarians believed in the Unity of God and rejected the trinity. The Universalists believed in God’s love for all creation and rejected the idea of God’s predestination of humans to heaven or hell.
Our living tradition draws from Michael Servetus, a Spaniard, who was a physician, marked for death by the inquisition in the 1500's for his belief in the Unity of God and a rational approach to the Bible. He was eventually put to death by John Calvin in Geneva.
Our tradition draws from George De Benneville, another physician who was banned from his church in 1720 for believing in universal love and salvation. He practiced medicine near Philadelphia for 50 years, doctoring to others out of the love he felt from his God, and speaking his truth of love at every opportunity.
Our living tradition draws from Louisa May Alcott, a Unitarian and the daughter of a failed radical schoolmaster, disorganized writer, and occasional lecturer, commune founder. With her mother's steady hand, she developed into a one of the most famous and beloved authors in American history.
Our living tradition draws from Susan B. Anthony, a Universalist, a New York school teacher, and the organizing genius behind the women's suffrage movement. Time and again, over decades, she heard others say that women should not have the right to vote, but she didn't let those voices snuff the inner flame of what she knew to be true.
Our living tradition draws from Malvina Reynolds, a blues singer and composer of folk songs, who saw an ironic and sad truth in the building trend toward sub-divisioning so much of America, in her song, "little boxes in a row…"
Our living tradition draws from hundreds of social activists, liberal scholars, writers and poets and spiritual innovators. And our living tradition draws from those 12 individuals who decided to meet and found a UU Fellowship in Croton, 50 years ago and so many others who soon joined them.
Of course, I want to lift up the most stirring and encouraging examples of our living tradition. We have some pretty low moments too, but we're still here. I think that the low end of our living tradition is the tradition of keeping quiet about being a Unitarian Universalist, and not wanting to draw attention to ourselves. This is our time. We are the future's, living tradition.
So, I suggest that as we celebrate our 50th anniversary, we are not only remembering the past, we are also making our future. And we do all of this by remembering. We love to remember. By remembering we create a narrative for our lives that gives us meaning. This is why we love memory and invite it. Because, without memory, we are a slave to time and its endless account of the trivial and the accidental. We are a slave to the chaos of events. But memory redeems the way literature does, through emphasis and hyperbole and theme, ultimately rendering harmony and balance and a sense of proportion. To be without memory is to be without story, and to be without story is to be drifting without any thread of anchor through this perilous world, in which false narratives everywhere surrounds us—narratives that have more to do with image than with depth or reality.
Cicero said: “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.” And of course there is that famous quotation by Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Suppose we thought of remembering as a hyphenated word. RE-membering. What if remembering is the very opposite to dismembering? You know what dis-membering is. You lose a limb, you lose a part of your self. You are dismembered. Suppose we start thinking, instead of being dismembered, about being re-membered so that the parts of us are given back to us—the members of our body, limbs, psyche, all come back together. Isn’t that what we do in in psychotherapy? Cut off from some of our emotions or some aspect of ourselves because we didn’t know how or were too fearful to fully express ourselves as a child, in therapy we seek to remember those repressed feelings. When we remember, we re-member. We reclaim a part of ourselves.
So this is not a trivial matter. It is a way of reclaiming, reconstituting ourselves all over, claiming those bits of ourselves that we lose by forgetting. Celebrating anniversaries is a way of re-membering. I want to RE-member myself by remembering those events, moments, and persons. I want to be RE-membered by remembering those things. That’s the poetry of us.
This morning we have heard wonderful stories recounting past decades to describe the life of the Fellowship. When people decide to join this Fellowship, you are asked to share the story of your religious journey and how you have come to be literally at his place, at this time. Whenever you share your stories here, you are re-membering yourself with the larger community. You are bringing that Self of yours, so profoundly and deeply and complexly defined by your past experiences into the fold of a larger community and re-membering yourself with a portion of humanity that can embrace your life and even celebrate it. It is a small segment of humanity, yes, but yet so very important. You are re-membering a living tradition.
So this morning, we re-member ourselves with those who came before us. This place is filled with dreams and aspirations and lives of people we never knew or will ever know. And yes the needs of this generation are different from those of other generations, both past and future. But our basic worldview, our aspirations, our way of being in the world, our commitment to the freedom of thought and to reason and tolerance, remain the bedrock of our faith. So, I RE-member myself with a whole history, a legacy of individuals whose work and dedication and commitment have made a difference in the world and possible for us to even be here. And we re-member ourselves with each other this very hour as we celebrate the life we share together. In so doing, we remain engaged in the making of our own living tradition and history—a tradition that will be re-membered by those who will follow. So be it.