September 27, 2009

Religion Unbounded: Kenneth Patton & the Charles Street Meeting House

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

SERMON & READINGS

(Readings in italics are adapted from the writings of Kenneth Patton)

Give praise that we live, men, women and children

on this earth, under this sun, breathing this air, drinking this water.Give praise that we are born such creatures,to think, to dream, to grow, to remember, to create.Give praise that we can learn, to search the ways of nature,to glean knowledge, science, and wisdom.Give praise that we can love, that we can weep, that we can laugh.Give praise that we know we will die, for by this we know that we live.Give praise that we, of all creatures, are so enabled, enriched in being.Give praise that it is the way of nature that we come to be,

to rejoice in these days that we have to live.

From outward appearances it was a fairly run-of-the-mill, downtown church with a modest, Romanesque-style front and stout steeple just off Boston Common.  But once you walked through the front doors and up the stairs into the sanctuary of the Charles Street Meeting House it was plain that this was no ordinary church.

The pews, which once had marched row on row facing a raised pulpit, were now situated in concentric circles, gathered around a polar projection of the globe inlaid on the center of the floor in front of them. A speaker’s lectern just inside the circle of pews was all that remained of a pulpit, while on the pulpit platform was a large bookcase full of dusty tomes, several sculptures, an impressive stereo system and a large arrangement of flowers.

But what first captured your attention, even before the unusual room arrangement, was a massive mural, some 25 feet high, of the Andromeda galaxy. At the opposite side of the sanctuary, hanging from the ceiling, was an artist’s depiction of the atom. Lined up alongside the galaxy painting and scattered along the front of the church balcony along the sides were some 65 images taken of the world’s religions, and in alcoves underneath the balconies were glass cases containing religious art from around the world. It was like nothing else, and at a time when Boston religion, even among the liberals, had a reputation for being staid and stodgy, it was definitely out there.

Yet, this church was not the work of some upstart cult. It was the very intentional creation of a religious movement that, at the time the church opened in 1949, had been established in the Boston area for more than a century and a half. It was a Universalist meeting house.

In the years after World War II, seeking to infuse new energy into their movement after the ravages of the Depression had closed hundreds of their churches, Universalist leaders decided on a plan to capture people’s imaginations. Founded in the 18th century as a Christian sect centered on the belief in universal salvation, the sure passage to heaven for all after death, Universalism had shifted and grown in the years of the 20th century. Old theological arguments over one’s destiny at death gave way to more concentrated attention to the disciplines needed to living a good life. Having grown up as a faith tradition closely centered on the Bible, Universalism was widening its focus, and a new generation of leaders was pushing the church to expand its reach.

In 1943, a new general superintendent, Robert Cummings, issued a challenge: “Universalism,” he said, “cannot be limited either to Protestantism or to Christianity, not without denying its very name. Ours is a world fellowship, not just a Christian sect.”

It was Clinton Lee Scott, superintendent of the Massachusetts State Convention of Universalists, who came up with the idea. Though Boston was the historic home of Universalism, not a single Universalist church survived in the city. So, he proposed that the convention found a new church in a prominent downtown location, a church that would be a radical departure from the rest of Boston religion, that would serve as an experiment for what an unbounded Universalism might look like. And the minister he recruited to launch this experiment was Kenneth Patton.

Patton had made a name for himself among Unitarians for rejuvenating the congregation in Madison, Wisconsin, and leading it to choose architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design its new meeting house. He had grown up a strict Methodist household, but left high school for college hoping to become an artist. He settled on ministry in the Disciples of Christ as a way of making a living.

While serving churches in Illinois Patton attended seminary part time at the University of Chicago, where he found himself drawn to a naturalistic humanism that prevailed at the school at the time. For him the notion of religion grounded in the natural world rather than church dogma was freeing and it became the center of his ministry.

Jesus, you were the man of my vision and dreaming:

You were the perfect creature without stain or blemish,

the never sinning, the unmistaken, the all-loving, the all knowing;

you were the end of creation, the unattainable being, very God himself.

Jesus, you were the beacon light to my spirit,

the anchor of my hope, my hero, my teacher, savior, redeemer, friend.

You were the last rock to which I clung in the sea of flux and change.

Yet, there was that within me which could not hold forever onto you,

that forced me to shove off to swim by myself in the sea.

For there grew within me the knowledge that you too were by a swimmer,

and that the sea at last closed over you, as it will one day over me.

I have lost you, Jesus, my idol, the unscaleable mountain.

But I have found you again, Jesus, my friend,

who dreamed even as now I dream, who lost as I shall lose,

who died as I shall die.

Patton arrived at the Charles Street Meeting House intending to take Scott’s call for experiment in religion seriously. His goal, he decided, would be not to make a claim for Universalism as a sect with a unique revelation, but to reach across the divisions of all faiths and envision what he described as “a Religion for One World.”

The rearrangement of the church’s physical space was the first step in that direction. He wanted to move away from the standard Protestant format of pews lined up to receive the word from a minister on high. Early in developing the project, organizers decided at its center would be the circle, one of the oldest and most universal religions symbols of a unified reality. So, the pews were pried from their places and organized in a circular pattern facing a projection of the globe set into the floor viewed as if from above the North Pole, which made sure to give no continent a preferred place.

The point of the mural of Andromeda was to push the congregation’s awareness beyond the Earth, to help them understand their place in the Universe as centered in a galaxy, while the atom at the rear reminded them of the Universe at its smallest – the alpha and omega, with humankind somewhere in between.

The pulpit was moved from the platform to emphasize a form of worship that would be more like a round-table gathering, with books of the world’s religions, religious sculpture and religious symbols placed prominently to remind worshippers of the richness of human thought and imagining on the nature of the holy. The art collection, too, sought to express the many ways that belief and devotion are expressed.

The services continued the theme of experiment. They often interwove poetry, dance and music of many cultures, together with a worship leader’s “talk.” There were no hymnals or orders of service. Instead, worshippers received a black plastic notebook with spring-steel releases that contained readings and hymns that were switched out each week. Many of the hymns, like the two we are singing today, were old melodies that were given new words. As news of these revised hymns and readings spread and demand grew, the church created a Meeting House Press to publish them. Many were included in a new hymnal published in 1964, and some remain in our current hymnal.

I see the church of tomorrow set in the center of each community,

the hub of the life of the people.

The church will seek to serve the whole person and the whole community.

It will not strive to save us from the world;

it will save us in the world.

It will not revile the desires of the body and the adventures of the mind,

to cast a prurient darkness over the human spirit.

From the church will come the challenge of free minds to the evils of every age.

There will parents come with their children to be introduced to the world,

to learn to weigh the meaning of their days, to gather the wisdom of ancestors,

to know why one thing is called right and another wrong,

to treasure beauty, mercy, and justice in the deep places of their being.

As common as life itself, as strange as the air we breathe,

as reasonable as our own minds, the friendly companion of our days,

such will be the church of tomorrow.

The Charles Street Meeting House would have caused a stir for its unusual space and liturgy alone, but its reputation didn’t stop there. Patton could be an irascible character and often was a lightning rod for progressive causes. While still in Madison, he gave an interview on the radio in which he said he was so disgusted at the way that African-Americans were treated in America that he wished he could quit the white race. In Boston, he gave a sermon, also broadcast on the radio, called “The Prostitution of the Clergy,” in which he said many ministers are simply parrots for the prejudices of their congregations.

The Meeting House opened its space to meetings of various progressive groups from anti-war, feminist and gay-lesbian groups to the communist party. For a period of time, the church provided space downstairs for an African-American Museum, where Langdon Hughes spoke and, reportedly, Stokely Carmichael was once hid from the FBI.

Do we have a goad to sacrifice, a lure to devotion?

We have seen our fellows starving. We have seen misery, cities shattered by war.

We have seen the doings of unawakened minds and stunted hearts.

Have we nothing to do?

The commonwealth of humanity is ours to build.

In us flows the river of vision and strength.

In ourselves are the fire and the fury, the tenderness and the pity,

the wisdom and the courage, the love and devotion.

Yesterday was ours. Ours is today and tomorrow,

this life, this world, if we will make them ours by the largeness of our love.

As you can imagine, Patton’s ways were controversial among Massachusetts Universalists, whose funds kept the Meeting House open. Patton’s take-no-prisoners style often exasperated even his strongest advocates, and his disinterest in pastoral matters kept membership in the Meeting House small. It never rose much above 100 in the 30 years that the church stayed open.

And yet, in his writings Patton touched a nerve for many Unitarian Universalists who were looking for a way to articulate how one might locate the sacred in the world of everyday experience. David Bumbaugh, my seminary advisor, wrote that it was Patton who gave him a religious vocabulary at a time when he was moving away from a Christian tradition. “It was he,”  wrote Bumbaugh, “who taught a monotone rationalism how to sing; it was he who taught a stumble-footed humanism how to dance; it was he who cried ‘Look!’ and taught our eyes to see glory in the ordinary.”   

I have looked in many places for the spirit.

It is not to be seen as a thing alone, golden in essence,

nor handled and cherished in itself, even as the wind is not held in the hand.

It is not a visitor living under rafters of bone, to quit its shelter after a time.

The spirit is as hardness is to stone,

as odor and color are to the things of earth, as heat and light are to flame.

It is manifest in whistling and singing, in the lift and cadence of speaking.

It can live in words, in paint or music; it can be reborn in memory.

The body grows weary of doing and aches under the burden of time,

but the spirit is ever young and eager for life.

The spirit is like a flame passed from candle to candle,

never devoured by darkness though candle after candle be consumed.

Though I grew up in a Unitarian Universalist church and as an adult was active as a lay person and church leader, I had never heard of the Charles Street Meeting House until I went to seminary. Sixty years after it opened, 30 years after it closed, it is a piece of our history that has largely fallen by the wayside.

And there are understandable reasons for that. In many ways the Meeting House was driven by Patton’s vision, and when he left in the mid-1960s, largely for economic reasons, the guiding energy of the place left as well. Patton’s concern wasn’t to build an enduring institution but to launch an experiment, and when he left he was ready to move on. And, even though the Meeting House was started as a Universalist project, Patton himself expressed no allegiance to the Unitarian or Universalist traditions, so leaders of the association felt they had little at stake in continuing it. Besides, Patton’s goal was larger: not a revised sect but a Religion for One World.

Today, that vision is a bit of an anachronism. In the heady days after World War II there was a sense among religious liberals that maybe the time had finally come when religions could put aside their differences, recognize all that they had in common and join in a universal religion. In the years since, as cultural contacts have widened and communications and improved travel have brought peoples of the world in much closer contact, it’s become clearer how extraordinarily complex the picture of what used to be called “The Religions of Man” really is.

From that vantage point we can recognize all the more clearly the hubris of a western religious liberal presuming to define the parameters of a “Religion for One World.” At the same time, more conservative faith traditions have made inroads in the marketplace of public opinion while adding to their numbers. It has forced movements like ours to get to work on our identity and get clear on our values, seeking not to embrace the teachings of all faiths but to honor them as we articulate our own gift to the world.

In that respect, I celebrate Patton the poet and experimentalist, but not so much his triumphal vision of a universal faith. Patton caught hold of the truth that history and all that we know of our species teaches that we humans are born with a religious impulse, the drive to find meaning in our days, to dig into the ultimate whats and whys of our existence. But he also stumbled over another human predilection to declare the good and proper end of things as the universal affirmation of one’s own perspective.

There is every reason to believe that this trend of religions ossifying around one teacher or one teaching as the answer of the hopes of humankind will continue. Yet, beside it there will always be room, and for that matter urgent need, for a religion that understands itself as a work in progress, expressed more accurately in metaphor than in creed, maintaining porous boundaries and cultivating deep generosity of heart.

And if it is to endure, it will include those, like Patton, who teach the stumble-footed to dance and monotone speakers to sing, and it will embrace all that life and the cosmos have to teach us.

I look into the blizzard of galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field image, and I recognize that, in Ken Patton’s words, “love has no idiom for this epic.” It is too big, beyond our comprehension. And yet there it is, trailing back to the Big Bang and who-knows-what preceding that. And as stupendous as that image is, it gives only the slightest hint, a pin-prick in the night sky, of all that existence offers to our imaginations.

For now, we begin here on Earth, which, at least for now, as Robert Frost reminded us, “is the best place for love.” And it is love that will guide us in this church, in this tradition: love that embraces each person and the Web of life in which we find ourselves, the glorious field of stars and all the unseen forces that buffer our days. It is good. It is all good. It is good to be. It is good to be here. It is good to be here, together.

We have what blessedness there is on earth,

living each day in fullness of being, thankful for what we have in the having,

leaving nothing unlived that we might have lived,

having received our revelations of this life,

living in Eden and knowing it is Eden,

knowing that our lifetime is eternity,

we are opened to acclaim the abundance of the world and our years within it.

Having earth and one another,

we are thus blessed with all blessedness.