FAITH OF THE FREE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

May 6, 2007

READING

from Mary Oliver

What is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me?
I can’t turn in any direction but it’s there.
I don’t mean the leaves’ grip and shine,
or even the thrush’s silk song,
but the far-off fires, for example, of the stars,
heaven’s slowly turning theater of light,
or the wind playful with its breath
or time that’s always rushing forward, or standing still
in the same – What shall I say? – moment.
What I know I could put in a pack
as if it were bread and cheese,
and carry it on one shoulder,
important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues unexplained and unexplainable.
How wonderful it is to follow a thought quietly to its logical end.
I have done this a few times
but mostly I just stand in the dark field
in the middle of the world, breathing in and out.
Life so far doesn’t have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.
If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet.
I simply go on drifting
in the heaven of the grass and the weeds.

SERMON

So, today we come round full circle. This church year I have invited you to reflect with me on the seven principles that our Unitarian Universalist congregations meeting in General Assembly adopted some 23 years ago to guide the work of our churches and our movement. We have done that, finishing with the seventh principle just a couple of weeks ago.

At the time the principles were adopted, association leaders urged churches to use them and embrace them, and in many ways they did. The principles have been printed in our hymnals, and on cards and bookmarks, displayed in posters hanging in our hallways and converted to child-friendly language and posted in our classrooms. One minister I know composed a song to the words and sang them each morning to children during Lake Geneva Summer Assembly, an annual retreat in Southern Wisconsin. A good 10 to 15 years later I’d be willing to bet that our daughters could still sing it to you.

And they’re not alone. These days if asked by a friend to describe their religion, the first thing most Unitarian Universalists do is point to our seven principles. So, it’s understandable that there is some anxiety these days about a project taken up by the Commission on Appraisal at the behest of our association’s board of trustees to review the principles and determine if they ought to be changed. It’s a process that will take several years with many opportunities for input from many different constituencies.

Unlike in the 1980s, when unhappiness with the language of principles written in the 1960s drove the initiative for change, there is to my knowledge no widespread cry today for changes. It is being described as more in the way of a tune-up. Still, whenever an organization opens the door for changes in its founding language, there is no telling just where things might go.

I have promised you some thoughts on how, if at all, I think the language of the principles should be changed, but before I get to that I’d like to talk a little about what the principles represent. From my perspective, the most important thing to understand about the principles is that they are framed, not as a creed, but as a promise. They address not what we as individuals believe, but how we as members of churches gathered in this liberal religious tradition agree to behave. This is a fine point that in my experience many people overlook, and yet the difference is crucial.

To make my point, I invite you to open your hymnals to the first page after the preface and title page and take note of the language in upper case type. It reads, “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote,” followed by the seven principles and six sources of our tradition. It concludes with this language: “Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision. As free congregations we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.”

In discussing the principles this year I have said a little about how the wording or placement of individual principles has changed since the first version written when the Unitarian and Universalist churches merged in 1961 and from earlier statements in the two individual traditions. But in truth the biggest change was the introduction of this language of covenant.

The language of covenant has a rich history with us, dating back to our predecessors, the Puritans. They had left religious oppression in Britain to create free churches that were gathered, not by assenting to a certain doctrine or offering sacraments given by priests, but by agreeing to walk together in the search for truth. It was a path where dissent and disagreement were expected, even welcome, and yet where mutual commitment of church members to each other assured they could work the issues through.

The terms of that commitment were expressed in covenants that each church community composed for itself. Here is one example of one of those covenants from our hymnal: “Love is the spirit of this church and service is its law. This is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.”

The purpose of such a covenant was not to require any particular faith claims, but to articulate how members of the church would be with each other. And so the commitment a person made on joining such a church was not to believe certain things, but to behave in a certain way toward others. The basis of membership was not creedal, but relational.

In the case of the Puritans, of course, the “love” that was the spirit of their churches had a particular context. They understood it as divine love experienced in some sort of spiritual encounter with Jesus. In time, some churches became very strict about this and even set up boards to examine prospective members to see if they understood or experienced this encounter in what they felt was the proper way. It was this exclusive way of thinking, in part, that led a number of churches to break away and eventually give shape to American Unitarianism.

As the Unitarian movement grew, many churches also came to abandon or ignore their founding covenants, regarding them as vestiges of Puritan rigidity. It’s interesting, though, that many Unitarians retained the sense that participating in church ought to give one a deeper sense of commitment to others. And the word they used to describe this was piety. Today we tend to think of piety as a kind of personal devotion or religiosity, but those early Unitarians understood it more broadly. They saw it as a sense of peace, hope, and well being that can guides our lives, from which we reach out to others and widen the circle of our concern.

The language of covenant suggests that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we are born into this world in relationship: in relationship to each other, to the earth, to all life, to the mystery beyond our knowing that underlies it all. In the making of a covenant, we acknowledge that relationship and pledge to act in community in ways that will both honor it and help us to better understand it and our place in the family of things.

It is this sense of covenant, a recovered part of our heritage interpreted in a new and broader sense, that the last revision of our purposes and principles introduced into our life together as a religious movement. And it has moved like a ripple through our churches ever since. We here today reaffirmed it on welcoming newcomers to our community by reciting the covenant composed by the members of this church that expresses how we pledge to be with each other. We see it in our covenant groups, whose first act after they are formed is to draw up a covenant describing the ways they can be together so members can feel welcome sharing their spiritual journeys and concerns.

Each of these covenants is different, each serves its own purpose, and yet each arises from a similar understanding: that our work together is grounded in relationship. Our work will lead us to conclusions – beliefs, epiphanies,
understandings – but their importance is secondary. They will evolve and change as we evolve and change. As Unitarian Universalists we believe many things, but where we are centered is in how we behave.

And so as we consider which of our principles we should keep or replace I would like to begin by reaffirming that we frame them in the language of covenant, words that describe the way we will be in relationship with each other and the larger world.

That said, after some reflection I can still see no better starting point than our first principle affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Indeed, I think it is our foundation, the thread that we can follow back through the history of liberal religion, to those comrades gone before that we sang of earlier, whose lives speak and deeds beckon. They would not have humankind debased or oppressed by religious faith, but spoke up for the light of hope in every heart, the flash of insight in every mind and the spark of integrity in every soul.

To treat everyone as a person of inherent worth and dignity is not an easy discipline, for while we humans may be equally worthy we also tend to want our own way. We are ready to use power and advantage to benefit ourselves to the detriment of others or to distance ourselves from others who seem strange or distasteful.

When we turn our heads away from another, our first principle calls us to stop and look again, to see the precious humanity in that person we encounter, to accept that, come what may, we are all in relationship. I have long been a fan of our first principle, but to be honest it often it fills me with fear and awe. While I firmly believe that whatever hope we have as a human species hinges on it guiding our actions, I am aware how often I fall short of it myself. But then again that is the benefit of a behavioral covenant. Each day I am given another chance to try again and hope to hit a little nearer to the mark: not to give up but to stay in the game, to stay in relationship.

I am happy, then, leaving our first principle intact. It is when we get to some of the remaining principles that I find myself wanting to quibble. The second principle, for example, calling for justice, equity and compassion in human relations has an almost clinical feel to it. It makes an important point, but my inclination would be to find a way to put some heart into it.

One of our members, Mary, noted in response to my request for ideas on how we might change the principles that one word conspicuously missing from the principles is love. “How incomprehensible is it that we do not mention love anywhere?” she asked. “What the world needs now, not just for some but for everyone, what there’s just too little of. . . . Love’s gotta be a touchstone.”

I agree with her, and it occurs to me that the second principle may be a good place to introduce it. The justice we seek, after all, is not tit for tat retaliation, but the righting of wrongs that makes people whole. It is justice done out of care and consideration. Its motivating force is love. So, how about if we were covenanting to affirm and promote compassion, equity and justice in the spirit of love?

The third principle, affirming acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth seems little vague. What we are really talking about here, I think, is accepting another even when we’re pushed, even when our first inclination is not to accept them. So, perhaps this principle might read that we covenant to affirm and promote acceptance in the face of difference and encouragement to learning and growth.

I have no quarrel with the fourth principle, which calls us to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. As I said in February, this declaration stands out as our distinguishing principle. No other religious body leaves the question of religious truth as open as we do. And, again, we can do this because we are not centered on any particular belief.

You may believe in God, the Goddess, mystery, or the light within. In our churches you have the freedom to frame your religious beliefs in terms that speak to your own experience and understanding. But because we gather in community we agree to conduct our own search responsibly, in a way that is principled and respectful of others. And what is more we look to that community to help us sort things out because we are gathered in a covenant of care.

I’ll admit some ambivalence about the fifth principle affirming the right of conscience and use of the democratic process. In many respects the right of conscience is implied in the notion of affirming a person’s inherent worth and dignity, acceptance in the face of difference or a free and responsible search for freedom. And I’m not sure that we want to enshrine the notion that the solution to whatever may divide as a religious community is always to be found in a vote. Still, respect of the call to conscience echoes throughout our tradition and a decision-making process that honors the franchise of all certainly is in tune with our values. So, perhaps I’ll let that be.

Of all the principles, the 6th, affirming the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all, seems the most labored. And that’s too bad because it speaks to such a critical concern in our shrinking world. Rather than affirm a goal, it seems to me, we should affirm a process aimed at joining efforts to unite humankind world wide, so I offer the following as a substitute: We covenant to affirm and promote the ways of peacemaking and the building of world community.

Then, finally we come to the seventh principle, affirming respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. I said earlier that I considered the first principle our foundation, that which grounds us and links us to a rich and vibrant past. To my mind our seventh principle is of equal stature; it is our bridge to the future. It incorporates the understanding that has only begun to dawn on us in the last century, that we human beings are an integral part of the web of life.

The seventh principle denies the founding myth of western culture, that humans were created separate and apart and were granted dominion over the Earth. The truth is that humankind emerged some one million years ago from an evolutionary process that has been going on for several billion years, the same evolutionary process from which all life on earth emerged. Instead of dominion, we were blessed with the gifts of insight and foresight. We are now faced with using those gifts to reverse the destruction of life on Earth that we and our short-sighted practices are helping to accomplish. So, proclaiming and acting on our seventh principle was never more important.

Another member, Drew, suggested to me that as important as our seventh principle is, the way it is framed is too passive. “I wonder if, to most UUs, the interdependent web is more than just something to respect,” Drew wrote. “I think we recognize our interdependence as a fundamental feature of the universe. The more we embrace it, the fuller life is, the more meaning it has, and the more we create a world we want.

“Interdependence is like love or compassion. We don’t just respect love; we love. We don’t just respect compassion; we experience compassion. So, I suggest that we make this principle more of an action. How about, ‘We embrace our interdependence with the web of all existence of which we are a part?’”

Thanks, Drew. I like it. Framed as a covenant it might read, “we covenant to embrace our interdependence with and responsibility to the web of all existence of which we are a part.”

So, all in all I have not suggested much in the way of changes, and where I did my intent was not so much to displace existing principles as to sharpen them and make them a stronger impetus for action. I hope in some way this exercise has been useful to you. As this work of review and assessment goes on at our association and there will be opportunities to comment on it.

In the meantime, I reflect on how it is to live in a religious community centered not on a statement of belief but a promise. I accept the humility that it implies. With Mary Oliver, I often feel as if I could put all I know in a pack as if it were bread and cheese and carry it on one shoulder, important and honorable, but before the vast ocean of existence so small.

I have figured out a few things, followed a thought or two quietly to its logical end, but much else continues unexplained and likely unexplainable. Mostly it seems I just stand in a dark field in the middle of the world breathing in and out.

And yet I am not alone. I don’t know exactly how, but I know that I am connected to all things. I am in relationship, and I can rely on that relationship. All that awaits me is that I acknowledge that relationship and join it with some purpose and intention. I do that through a promise, a promise that I live as faithfully as I can.

I am not always sure how to do that, but I know that it takes time and work and that it is accomplished through community. May this community help us carry and realize that promise, the promise that we are to the world.

So Be It.