"Zero?" by Gordon McKeeman in Out of the Ordinary, a UU meditation manual.
Dear Friends,
I ask all of you who converted to Unitarian Universalism, you "come-outers" from other faiths... and you "come-inners" from no previous faith... what first attracted you to this church? Were you interested in finding a group of like-minded people? Perhaps people who were interested in issues of social justice? Or who had an appreciation of the arts or literature or science? Or did you come because you wanted a good Sunday school experience for your children? All these are typical and valid reasons. Or perhaps you just wanted to be in a place that wiped clean the slate... and to start again in a place of zero. I agree with Gordon McKeeman, that our Unitarian Universalist faith is not a place of zero.
I doubt if any of you came or joined our congregation to be "saved"... the reason many of your fundamentalist Christian neighbors might join a church. I doubt if you came to find sanctuary from a sin-drenched world. And I doubt if you joined to be part of the one and only Universal Church, as Catholics claim their church to be.
But then again, we DO offer salvation, sanctuary and connection to the universal. It's just that we might define these differently than traditional religions do. It all depends on how you look at it. Our Unitarian Universalist faith CAN be a life-saver for people... in this world if not in the next. And it CAN be a sanctuary from a culture of intolerance, hate, and irrationality. And it CAN offer a profound connection to universal realities... to the rest of humanity or to a universal consciousness or to the Life Force which some call God. It is a hopeful, forward looking faith.
I think back to when my husband and I joined the UU church in Brockton some 25 years ago. We joined for some pretty ordinary and common reasons. At least that's what I first told myself. We were looking for a community of liberal religionists, people who weren't going to demand that we sign on to any particular set of beliefs, but who shared our liberal values. I was pregnant with our daughter Leah at the time, so we were also looking for a place with a Sunday school which taught the values we believed in, which encouraged the growth of feelings of self-worth and compassion for others and which believed in the use of reason in matters of faith.
But at heart I yearned for a place where I could be accepted as I was and which would also challenge ME to grow and to be a fuller human being. I was looking for a place which would make ME happy and whole. Later I learned that what I yearned for was spiritual healing.
I must confess that I had always felt out of step with the world. Maybe it was because of my shyness. Or maybe it was because I saw things differently from most other people. Why, I asked, as a girl was I supposed to like certain things, like dolls and ballet, and not like other things, like baseball. I wasn't particularly graceful in ballet class and didn't really enjoy the lessons. And I wondered why I couldn't try out for Little League with the boys.
And I wondered why as a Jewish kid growing up in a mixed neighborhood, my parents wanted me to have more Jewish friends (and I presume, fewer Christian ones, although that was never said out loud). To me, kids were kids. Some I liked and some I didn't. But how we played together didn't seem to be affected by our religious backgrounds. I remember feeling uncomfortable about a religion that seemed to categorize people as "us" versus "them," although later I understood that as growing out of my parents' immigrant experience. And I wondered as I grew older and became aware of the world why there weren't more black families living in my home town of Newton. Somehow, I always felt like a square peg in a round whole because I questioned a lot of the assumptions in my family and community.
Of course, by the time I was in high school, the winds of change had begun to blow. The civil rights movement and the feminist movement had changed many peoples' thinking about how class, race and gender forced people into narrow categories and limited people's choices in the world. I would like here to add another, less acknowledged change: religious liberation. Perhaps it was the influence of the other liberation movements... like a growing awareness of Native American cultures. The rise of earth-based and experiential approaches to spirituality helped free people from the narrowness and patriarchy of traditional religions.
I'll never forget when I was in my senior year of college seeing the musical "Hair" in New York. I was mesmerized by the song about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Maybe some of you know this. It begins, "When the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars." The second verse begins, "Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding. No more falsehoods or derisions. Golden living dreams of visions ..." I, too, dreamed of the coming of a golden age where peace guided the planets and love steered the stars. I didn't understand this in as a spiritual yearning then, but I do now. All I knew was that the song "Aquarius" moved me more than most of the sermons I had heard... and was certainly more memorable.
So when David and I moved to Brockton and I learned about Unitarian Universalism, I felt like a UU church was a place I might fit in. Not that it was "New Age" in any recognizable way, but that it was pretty accepting of differences. And it might just accept people like David and me, an intermarried couple from out of town. What we wanted and needed was a place where we wouldn't stand out like square pegs, where we could feel at home.
Over the course of the next few months, as I got more comfortable with the Brockton church (and even the word "church") and the people there, I found that I WAS accepted for who I was and I felt part of the community. Although I still prided myself on my uniqueness, I wasn't so odd or different after all. I learned that everyone had a different story to tell of their own life journey or religious quest. Everyone was unique in their way... and together we made the church an interesting and exciting place.
I found, too, that people were pretty open to new spiritual experiences. Although the congregation didn't have drumming circles or do goddess chants in worship, these possibilities weren't ruled out as sinful or heretical. I remember how every year we had a musical worship service of show tunes with religious messages. This was organized by Dick Warye, a theatre professor at Bridgewater State and a long-time church member. And I felt the hard and fast boundary between the secular and the sacred dissolve a bit more.
I discovered that you may join a UU church because you think you have one set of needs, but soon discover others. A UU church is where you begin to believe in human possibilities, for this is a hopeful religion.
At heart, all religions are about relationships. The word "religion" comes from a Latin word which mean to "re-tie" or "re-bind." This implies that we are trying to link to something. But what is that something? It is not zero.
All religions are based on their distinct views of the world. Theology is literally means the study of God. But it is-in reality-not only about God or Ultimate Reality or whatever other terms we chose for the divine ... and about God's relationship to the universe. Theology is also about the nature of human beings. It answers questions about people's inherent goodness or sinfulness. It's also about the nature of the universe, whether that, too, is good or bad... or a mix of the two. It's about how we view the rest of the natural world... and the non-human life on our planet. Are we meant to dominate nature or to protect it and use it wisely?
All religions claim to help people in many areas of life, to better understand and relate to God or to Ultimate Reality, to understand one's own human nature, to find meaning in life, to guide us in how to be and act in human society and how we should relate to the natural world. And, ideally, religious communities are those which help us make these connections. Or re-make connections if they are broken. Or help these connections evolve into something more mature and life-affirming. Our religious community at First Parish Church is no different in that way. It is a place where you CAN find help in your search for answers to ultimate questions, in your search for truth and meaning.
As I said before, ours is a hopeful religion based on an ultimately optimistic view of human potential and our future on the planet. As Rev. McKeeman wrote, "We are not the only folk to have embraced such a hopeful vision of our future, and we are happy to join hands, hearts and hopes with others who share these convictions of our possibilities." But it helps, I think, to have some closer comrades who know you well.
To be a member of this religious community is to be in a covenanted relationship with others... where we respect and value each other and help each other on our life journeys. For some of us, it is a model of how the world ought to be. A covenant is more than a contract, such as what you may have with a plumber or a car salesman. It is an agreement which is based on trust and focuses on a way of behaving together more than a specific set of actions. Think of the unison affirmation we read this morning: "Reverently we covenant together, beginning with ourselves as we are, to share the strength of integrity and the heritage of the spirit in the unending quest for wisdom and love." To be in covenant is to minister to each other in our times of grief, pain and torment as well as to celebrate together in our times of joy. To be in covenant is to help each other grow as people... to summon each other to our better selves.
Most of us are aware, I'm sure, of how fundamentalist Christians view mankind as having dominion over the planet by divine decree. After all, in the Book of Genesis, God commands human beings to "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over... every living thing that moves upon the earth." As Unitarian Universalists, we hold nature not as something to be dominated and used for our own selfish ends, but as sacred and needing of our care and protection.
Thus our Seventh Principle about affirming and promoting respect for the interdependent web of existence. And recognition in the 1990's of the Sixth Source of faith: "Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature." Thus there are UU camps and conference centers in mountains and on seashores which teach children, youth and adults about ecology and the sacredness of Earth. Some have been around for a century. This is a long and well-established part of our spiritual practice.
We say that we have no one view of God or even that one is required to believe in God. Yet I find our approach to concepts of God to be both comforting and liberating. So many of us have come from patriarchal religions where God was always referred to as Father or Lord or King. Thus the word God may be problematic for us. If we do talk about God's gender at all as Unitarian Universalists, we speak about God as both mother and father. That's why a hymn like "Bring Many Names," which sings about a strong mother God and a warm father God, is so endearing to Unitarian Universalists.
I'd like to share with you something that I experienced in the district UU women's group, Womensphere, some years ago. At the beginning of our times together, we gathered in a circle, lit altar candles and invoked the four directions. And then we sang goddess chants, like "Sacred Mother, I hear you calling." I thought it is so much easier for women to see the divine spark within themselves when the divine is imagined as the great mother, as the maternal force generating all life. How healing and empowering that was for me and many other women!
So in discovering new images of God, a God who is loving and kind, a God who is both father and mother, I discovered a new self as well... a self which, I imagine, could really BE MADE in the divine image. I may not be a perfect image, but I was not quite so powerless and unequal in my femaleness.
And so we come back to the beginning of a spiritual journey. A journey from self, to community, to nature and the interdependent web of all existence, to God, and back to self, transforming each along the way. Hopefully our journeys will go on in a continuous circle, lasting as long as life itself. I referred a lot to my personal journey, but I think that journey might be similar to yours. Our Unitarian Universalist churches can, indeed, be places of salvation, places of sanctuary and places which offer us ways to re-connect.
And please don't limit your journey to this church alone for your search need not end here under this roof. Seek out such opportunities in our denomination as women's groups, men's groups, youth conferences, district meetings and retreat centers. There is a lot being offered out there of great worth.
In the words of Gordon McKeeman:
"Zero is important, and it's an acceptable place from which to begin a religious journey. But it's not a good campsite. Moving on requires discovering what we believe about who we are, where we are, and what we're trying to do [or] be."
Let us move on, then, as a covenanted community and help each other in our journeys. And let us say together "Amen!"