How Is That a Religion?

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

January 4 , 2009

READINGS

From “Transcendental Etude” by Adrienne Rich

There come times

when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die:

when we have to pull back from the incantations,

rhythms we’ve move to thoughtlessly

and disenthrall ourselves to silence, or a severer listening,

cleansed of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments,

static crowding the wires.

We cut the wires,

find ourselves in free fall,

as if our true home where the undimensional solitudes,

the rift in the Great Nebula.

“This House” by Kenneth Patton

This house is for the ingathering of nature and human-nature.

It is a house of friendships, a haven in trouble,

an open room for the encouragement of our struggle.

It is a house of freedom, guarding the dignity and worth of every person.

It offers a platform for the free voice,

for declaring, both in times of security and danger,

the full and undivided conflict of opinion.

It is a house of truth-seeking,

where scientists can encourage devotion to their quest,

and mystics can abide in a community of searchers.

It is a house of prophecy,

outrunning times pasts and times present in visions of growth and progress.

This house is a cradle for our dreams,

the workshop of our common endeavor.

SERMON

So, welcome to the New Year! I have always appreciated the opportunity that this particular moment in the calendar, turning this page forward, gives me. Amid the headlong pace of my life I am invited to slow down for a moment and take an inventory of sorts. Some of it is very practical: sorting through my closet for clothes I’ve hung on to but know I won’t wear again. Out they go into the Goodwill pile! Cleaning out drawers, sorting through books, trimming back the stuff in my life to an amount a little more closely approaching manageable is a freeing exercise.

But amid all this organizing there’s another kind of inventory that I’m taking. What am I doing with my life, with the precious time that I am given? What are the ruts, the sinkholes that I have let sap my energy? How might I devote myself more deeply to the people, the values, the work that bring me hope, meaning, and joy?

These are important questions in our scattered lives and answering them is a little tougher than tossing out that dated suit or reorganizing the junk drawer. They are the questions that religious communities over the ages have come together to explore. So, today I invite you, too, to take some time to sort through your spiritual closets and join me in a reflection on what our religious community here is and does.

I begin with a letter I received from my father-in-law, David, only a few months after I had entered seminary. David was not a churchgoer of any stripe, though his mother had been quite devout, but he regularly accompanied us to the Unitarian Universalist church we were attending wherever it was that we were living at the time if he was staying over on a Sunday. He had sat through the services but had never said much about the experience. So, I was curious to read on when in the course of the letter he offered his reflections on what that was like for him.

He said that, while the services in our churches were usually interesting, he was puzzled by the absence of the discussion of Christian beliefs. Looking around at those gathered for Sunday worship, he wrote, “I have always assumed that I was surrounded by good, honest, ethical, decent people. I have also concluded that they subscribe to no formal religion.”

Six years ago that letter was the launching off point for my first sermon as an aspiring minister at my internship church, the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin. I return to it today because I think the issue David raised remains an important one. For it’s true that the way that we as Unitarian Universalists frame the work of our movement is different from the way that many other faith traditions do. Perhaps you have had an interchange with a family member, friend or co-worker on the subject of the church that you attend and when you get done describing this place, the other gets a puzzled look on her or his face and asks, “How is that a religion?”

And they’re not alone. You will encounter people in our movement, I daresay people in this church, who would answer that question very simply: “it isn’t,” at least not what that person understands a religion to be. This issue of definition is a tricky one and more than just a semantic exercise, for it goes to the heart of why we as a community, as an institution exist.  I, for one, want to argue that we are, most definitely, a religion, and more than that, an essential one. We not only rightfully count ourselves among the world’s many faith traditions but we also fit a niche that is sorely needed.

And I should make clear that by this I also intend to say that I do not regard ours as the only true faith, or for that matter the only reasonable or responsible option for framing the religious journey. This makes me a religious pluralist. I believe that there are many religious paths that can be fulfilling and contribute to a person leading a good and honest life with compassion and hope. At the same time, I’m not a relativist: I believe there are paths that are abusive, manipulative and destructive of both body and spirit. But in this great panoply of religions I believe that Unitarian Universalism has a unique place and meets a unique need.

Getting back to my father-in-law’s letter, I must fess up now that it took me nearly two years – in fact shortly before I wrote that first sermon – to reply to him. Entering seminary I was confused or uncertain about many things, and I’m not sure that I felt equipped to respond. When I finally did, I identified two characteristics that I felt made Unitarian Universalism a religion: historical tradition and intent.

I told him, as I tell our UU 101 class nowadays, that the church we are today has its roots in a rich tradition stretching back at least to the Protestant Reformation and arguably much further and wider. What I told David was that our forebears were among those “who were cheered by Luther’s challenge to the institutional church but felt that he didn’t go far enough.”

Like us, I said, they were people who believed that “each person has both the right and capacity to craft his or her own religious beliefs based on his or her own experience and reasoned understanding.” They parted company with the Catholic Church, which locates authority in the priesthood, and with Protestant traditions that deem that we must await God’s grace to find salvation.

It’s true, I told him, that some years ago Unitarian Universalists left the Christian consensus, those churches that center their religious life on the teachings of Jesus, though we value and respect those teachings as among the sources of our living tradition. But we believe that wisdom from other traditions also bears on our search, not to mention the vast profusion of human endeavor from arts and sciences to what we learn in simple daily living.

Most important, I said, we believe that religion originates not in the great scriptures or teachers but in a disposition born in our own yearning hearts and inquiring minds. The great Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies put it this way, “religion is something that happens to you when you open your mind to truth, your conscience to justice and your heart to love.”

And here is where we come upon the matter of intent. What makes our movement a religion and not a social club or lecture society is our intent that what we do here will actually make a difference in our lives and in the world. We will not just meet interesting people or learn interesting things; we will explore here how to orient our lives so that we widen our concern, deepen our understanding and organize our lives so that we might be more authentic, moral and compassionate people.

My experience is that many find themselves at our churches for the first time after having had an experience something like what Adrienne Rich describes. There come times, she says, when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die. We can drift along for years making do, getting along, coasting by with whatever falls in our laps. But for many of us a time comes when we can abide it no longer, “when we have to pull back from the incantations, rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly and disenthrall ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static crowding the wires.”

It is a disorienting place, that silence. When we step away from the cocoon of distractions that we had gathered around us, the question occurs: now, what? At that moment, it is not prescriptions, someone’s glib formula for salvation that we are looking for. It is, instead, openness, a willingness to listen, a presence undaunted by ambiguity and a compassionate heart.

It may be that there are other places where such a response can be found, where the hunger for meaning is fed absent a demand for conversion to someone else’s program, but I believe that there is none that responds to it better than the churches of our movement. They are places that are committed to religion that is true to the word’s etymology, that connect us back to that source of wholeness from which our wondering first arose, that embrace freedom and respect diversity, that invite us into a circle of care and urge us to embody our values in ways that serve justice in the world.

I can understand, though, how people like my father-in-law can become confused. Absent from our churches are the creeds, catechisms and confessions that organize other religious communities. It is not because we lack beliefs but that we recognize that our beliefs shift and change as we grow. We are centered on something deeper, on an understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding that trusts in our capacity to figure what is meaningful and true, that sees in each person something of greatness, of fundamental value, and that holds that we are at our best when we act in the spirit of love.

It is this grounding that gives us the confidence to organize our religious life not around a closed confession but around an open covenant, a mutual promise freely entered into of mutual support. And the commitments we affirm in that covenant become a way that we imagine and interact with our higher selves, with how we aspire to be even when we fall short in our day-to-day lives.

We do this religious search in community rather than out on the forest paths because we see that it is work we cannot do it alone. However brilliant and enlightened we may be, we cannot escape our foibles and our blind spots. As Forrest Church puts it, “We need guidance in recognizing our tears in each other’s eyes. We need prompting to raise our moral sights. We need companions in the work of love and justice. . . . 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.”

Each year as I begin this spiritual house-cleaning I find that Church’s latter point especially weighs on me more heavily. So, each year that I continue in this line of work one of the questions I inevitably find I am asking myself is if service to this faith tradition is how I want to spend the precious time that I am given, if it is worth the energy that I must devote to it. And I find that it is.

Religion has taken its licks over the centuries, as it should, for all manner of misdeeds, for oppression and duplicity, for malfeasance and abuse, but it also holds the potential for helping guide our lives to integrity and joy, for healing wounds, reconciling conflict, awakening compassion and honoring the unity of all humankind.

Part of what makes us a religion is that, while we, too, have our quirks and blind spots, we commit to taking on this work. We understand that there is meaning in orienting our lives around a larger hope and a deeper vision of how we as human beings might be with each other, and we look to the complementary disciplines of freedom and love to carry us forward and hold us together in that work. That’s not to say there aren’t discouraging times for us personally and for us as a movement, but we can see in this path a way forward that feeds our questioning minds and yearning hearts and connects us to a larger life, to spiritual wholeness and to the sources of hope and joy.

May it do so for you.