March 7, 2010

Fling Wide the Windows

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

Asheville, NC

SERMON

Where does religious conviction come from? This was the question that Sophia Lyon puzzled over in her early days as a teacher. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, she grew up in the late 19th century intending to follow her parents’ calling. But she felt that if she was to be effective she needed schooling in how children learned.

And so she made her way to Chicago, where she met Harvey Fahs, the man who would be her husband and where first she came in contact with the progressive education movement. Instructors there invited her not only to think of the Bible in a more critical context but also to learn how best to teach children from watching the children themselves. But it wasn’t until now-Sophia Lyon Fahs followed her husband to New York in the early years of the 20th century that she began to explore how that might be done.

Studying at Horace Mann School, the practice school of Teachers College in Manhattan, she was intrigued and excited by an educational environment that treated children’s learning as a matter of discovery instead of rote exercises. And she wondered how she might apply this approach to her own field of religious education. An experimental Sunday School was started at the college, where she began adapting what she had learned.

At the time, in most churches, including many Unitarians, religious education was a matter of learning Bible stories and some form of catechism, where children were taught answers to religious questions that summed up the basic principles of that faith. In such an environment, Fahs came to see, religion becomes something that one is told to believe, whether or not one actually does. “The attempt is made openly and with general approval,” she wrote, “to bind young children by personal loyalty to the religion of their fathers and to hold them later in life to the religious fold into which they were born.”

Such methods have certainly proven effective in molding children’s thinking and feeling, she said, but “our concern is with the quality of the results.” For children so guided, the enjoyment they experience in religion comes from adult approval for their acts of obedience, not from the meaning of those words or acts. Yet, she said, “surely neither words nor acts that are without meaning to a child can really nourish his life.”

The alternate approach that Fahs came to promote was a process of what she called “religious development.” In this case, religion is not a script to be memorized, but, in her words, “a vital and healthy result of the child’s own creative thought and feeling and experience as she or he responds to life in all its fullness.”

This kind of religion, she said, “will develop slowly. The initial steps are largely emotional, exploratory and unorganized. . . . Influences from without and from the past affect the formation of such a religion; but the life-giving element is within the child.”

This way of gaining religion, she said, “never ceases. Full maturity is never attained. As the personality grows and changes so do the beliefs grow and change.”

 Writing in the 1920s she declared: “We cannot give our children a growing and creative religious life. A fine religion is a personal achievement.” And, she said, the essential elements of such a religion are a sense of wonder and an inquiring mind.

So, how are we to accomplish that? At Teacher’s College she studied anthropology and World Religions, and she reflected that in many cultures people’s first ideas about religion arise from their experience in the natural world. Why, she wondered, wouldn’t this be true of children as well? Rather than center a child’s religious education on recitation and Bible stories about people far outside their experience, why not begin with their responses to everything around them, on learning to get along and awakening to the natural world?

She worked to develop curricula that invited children’s discovery but put off Bible stories and traditional religious topics, even discussion of the notion of God, until later years.

Her approach stirred interest among Unitarians and in 1937 she was hired as editor of children’s materials for the American Unitarian Association. This approach was not new for the Unitarians. William Ellery Channing a century before had declared that the purpose of religious education was “not to stamp our minds irresistible on the young, but to stir up their own.” But with a few notable exceptions, many churches adopted the same practices as most other churches. The changes she sought to make were dramatic and many of our churches resisted her new curricula.

 But in the years after World War II when our churches began filling with young families they found a ready and enthusiastic audience. In fact, it’s not far off base to identify the progressive religious education in our churches promoted by Sophia Lyon Fahs as the single most important factor behind the explosive growth of our religious movement in the 1950s and 60s.

And here I must take a moment to testify: for the booming Unitarian Universalist church where I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey was certainly part of it.  And, to draw the net even tighter, my mother tells me that one of the first religious education classes I ever took at that church, one that she taught, had as its text a book by Sophia Fahs, in fact the very book that contains the story that Taryn read to our children this morning.

And so I acknowledge my own personal debt as well as our common debt to Fahs’ path-breaking insight, one that remains at the center of who we are today, that religion at its vital essence is not the great canon of the world’s scripture, not the endless inventory of cathedrals, mosques, temples and meeting houses.

It is in its essence the creative, human response to life in all its fullness that has at its center a sense of wonder and an inquiring mind. Let me repeat: religion in its essence is the creative, human response to life in all its fullness that has at its center a sense of wonder and an inquiring mind.

This is religion not just for children but for adults as well, and for us adults the chief vehicle we have for attaining it is cultivating a sense of reverence. In moments of reverence we feel fully authentic and deeply connected to the world.  It is such times when, like Wendell Berry’s five-year-old granddaughter, we can reach the end of the day after digging in dirt – cold, tired, plodding along – then look about and say, “Isn’t it fun?”

 Isn’t it amazing that events should conspire that this conscious self is breasting the currents of this river of time, the sun at that angle, the rhythmic clop in our ears, the wind tousling our hair, the tendrils of love linking us, one with the other?

Some years ago the philosopher Paul Woodruff sought to explore the notion of reverence. He said that we mistakenly take it to be a strictly religious virtue. It’s not, though it can coincide with religion. But religion also can prove at times to be decidedly irreverent. His definition goes like this: “Reverence is the well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have.”

Right away several things are clear about this definition. First, reverence is not an absolute virtue: it exists in context, a context in which we might judge what the “right” feelings are to have at the time. Second, while it involves the cultivation of certain feelings, it is not itself a feeling. It involves a habit that is created over time that not only has some utility but also contributes to living a good life.

We practice reverence when we regard something or someone with respect and awe, yet like most virtues true reverence cannot be commanded or compelled. Reverence is true when it arises from true feelings. As with the personal experiences that Sophia Fahs observed gave rise to faith, true reverence comes about in response to truth, and it is reinforced by experience. We welcome with awe and respect that which authentically calls us to higher feelings. But an event that once fills us with awe may later evoke distaste and even disgust if it is linked in our mind with falsity or wrong-doing. Trickery, hubris and over-reaching are the surest ways to defeat reverence.

Implicit in reverence is a sense of humility, an appreciation of one’s own limits and yet also a feeling that one is in touch with a larger truth in the world. The reverence we feel connects us with deep truths that matter in our lives. There needn’t be any supernatural associations involved. Rather, reverence is a way of honoring our deeper commitments and underlying values.

In this way, reverence implies participation in some kind of community. It makes itself felt through behavior, in how we associate, in how we act, sometimes in ceremonial ways. It is by acts of reverence that we make clear how we are connected.

Reverence gives us the tools to make our connections to each other known and to strengthen them. As Paul Woodruff puts it, “reverence gives us the power to make changes toward each other, changes in attitude and ceremony that allow us to go on being at home with new or changing people, or in the absence of loved ones.”

A cultivated sense of reverence in communities like this one offers a container for our grief at loss and our joy in new connections. Experiences that to others would seem unimportant come to have great meaning for us because they reinforce the sense of reverence that the community represents. Experience in the larger world can take on larger significance because it connects us back to a sense of shared meaning. Reverence, then becomes an underpinning to our religious lives, an ethos grounded in truth that people experience, not forced or compelled but arising from our common lives.

So, to ask again the question that I began with, what is the source of religious conviction? One could argue that we find it in reverence, reverence arising from lived experience, born as seeds in every one of us, a part of our emergent consciousness, nurtured in love and care, fed with attention and a sense of adventure, tempered by humility and the give and take of community life, aged in the wine of time and experience, ever renewing and ever renewed.

Sophia Fahs had the right idea. And while the details of religious education that we offer in our churches has evolved from the ideas that she pioneered, the spirit that she infused in our religious life, the spirit of affirmation and religious discovery that informs a creative, human response to life in all its fullness that has at its center a sense of wonder and an inquiring mind remains at our core still.

Upbringing in such a spirit makes us capable of living with confidence and joy, seeing in the world around us and our connections with others the grist that feeds a deep sense of reverence for the world and our lives together.

Sophia Fahs may have put it best:

She wrote:

We pause in reverence before all intangible things that the eyes see not, nor ears can detect – that hands can never touch, that space cannot hold and time cannot measure.

There is never an end to our yearning to know the unknown after all our labor at learning.

There is never an end to our trying the untried after all our failures in striving.

Fling wide the window, O my soul!

The bright beams of morning are warm.