Is Unitarian Universalism Enough?

Rev. Amy Russell - 2007-08-26

I am often asked by people who subscribe to other faith traditions, what is Unitarian Universalism about? And when I describe our tradition as creedless, as a faith where each person is on their own spiritual quest but where we also share our spiritual questions with each other, people often ask, “Is that enough for you?” They might say, “Is that really a religion, or just a discussion group?”

And I must admit that sometimes, I have the same question myself. Especially when I am confronted with people whose religion comes in black and white, whose answers to life’s questions are so clearly defined, I may sometimes sigh when I know that I must defend my faith to them.

But I do. As I know we all must do from time to time. When I’m feeling energized about being a UU and I’m able to pull out all the stops in talking about freedom of religion, tolerance for other faiths, and the use of reason in examining one’s beliefs. But then of course, they ask, “Yeah, but what do you believe?”

I can tell them what I believe. But I tell them that what I believe is beside the point. I stumble around telling them that we each believe something different. That we come together with our different belief systems to build a community where spiritual journeys are supported and encouraged. But I still get the feeling that people who have a defined dogma and a faith community who agree with them see our tradition as wimpy, wimpy, wimpy.

In asking ourselves this question, “Is UUism enough?” I think we must start with remembering the history of our faith tradition.

In our favorite UU hymn, Spirit of Life, we sing “Roots hold me close, wings set me free”. I love this phrase because it describes the deep roots of our Unitarian Universalist religious tradition that has the wings of religious freedom to “set us free”. When we consider the history of Unitarianism in Transylvania when King John Sigusmund declared Unitarianism as the state religion, but at the same time the state parliament made religious freedom and tolerance the law of the land, we know that our religion, if that is what it is, is founded in greatness.

William Ellery Channing, one of the fathers of Unitarian theology in New England in the nineteenth century, preached his famous Baltimore sermon in 1819. He outlined this new faith, founded in reformative Protestant thought, telling the world that God is One, that God’s love is perfect and is founded in perfect moral order. A God who is perfectly moral, could not create humans as sinful defective creatures who are born in degradation. God created humans as inherently good, he said, and he rejected that orthodox view that humans are only saved through God’s irresistible grace, pulling us or molding us into his image. Channing said that he believed in “our responsibility and the laws of our moral [ity]” as humanity’s inherent nature.

Hosea Ballou, one of the founders of Universalist thought in this country, spoke about a loving God and an imperfect but morally striving human turning toward God and away from sin. A loving God would never send his own creations into eternal damnation any more than a loving parent would damn his/her own children. Ballou’s Universalist theology emphasized the love available to humanity in the universe.

So, we see in these theological roots two strong messages—one of humanity’s inherent goodness, and the other the possibility for love and justice in the universe. These strong theological messages continue to resonate in the faith tradition we have inherited as Unitarian Universalists.

But many ask, since in 1961 the two denominations merged and we decided to become a “creedless” organization, can we see ourselves as a religion? Or as a religious people?

And this of course, depends on the definition of “religion” that you accept.

I looked at many definitions of religion—one from Webster’s—the very traditional definition— “the service and worship of God or the supernatural” to the more updated accepting definition offered by Religious Tolerance.org. Their definition said religion was “a systematic belief about deity, often involving rituals, a code of ethics, a philosophy of life, and a worldview.” They included Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Native American spirituality, and Neo-paganism among others. Their definition also includes agnosticism, atheism, and humanism because these beliefs include a belief about deity—either that these traditions don’t know whether deity exists or they have no knowledge of a deity.

This more open definition would certainly include liberal faiths such as ours. However, as a UU, of course, I would like to propose my own definition. I think that a religion that will offer people something of substance in today’s world would include the following:

First, it would include a belief in something that gives meaning to life, something that gives life purpose, that makes life sacred. And in this part of the definition this is where Unitarian Universalism depends on its tradition of religious freedom to point toward this meaning being an individual one. This is where we find ourselves on our spiritual journeys seeking what gives meaning to our own lives. We don’t accept what someone else said two thousand years ago, or three thousand years ago as automatically being sacred because it was delivered to humans by a Higher Power. This is where we take responsibility for our own experience of life to validate what we feel in our hearts, our minds, and our reason as being most holy and sacred to us. This is where we differ from most other faiths that have a set of dogma that is accepted creed by all believers.

Second, a religion needs to have a code of ethics or principles, which become actionable, which influence our behavior in this world. Not a set of rules that tells us what to do, but principles which give us standards against which we measure our behavior. Then we decide for ourselves whether we are measuring up. Unitarian Universalists have a set of seven principles which I think influence how we behave with each other in this world. They don’t tell us what to do or what not to do, but they remind us that there are standards for moral behavior.

And third, a religion has a world view, which describes our place in the universe. Our seventh principle does this nicely. Unitarian Universalists see themselves as interdependent in the web of the universe, as one small part of a large and awe-inspiring universe.

So, if in fact, you are willing to concede we are a religion by this definition, then does our “religion” have enough rigor to withstand the unbelievable moral questions that we face in today’s complex world? Do we as a faith have the ability to nourish ourselves spiritually? Can we stand up to fundamentalist faiths that say they have the answers to life’s questions and say we have a religious faith with rigor that can give people spiritual nourishment and moral fortitude?

The UUA 2006 Commission on Appraisal report on “Engaging Our Theological Diversity” surveyed members and ministers and people outside our denomination to find a “common core” to our faith tradition. They asked the question “What is the center of our faith? What it is that holds us together?” They looked for metaphors that described our theological journeys. The image they held up was that of Gandhi’s mountain of truth where mountain climbers are tied together on a common rope and are belaying down a mountain cliff safeguarding each other as they go. They saw this metaphor as describing how we are all in movement along a path, but tied together with a common purpose.

After talking with congregations and leaders, the Commission found some common ground in our faith tradition. They see us as a “grounded faith”- grounded in our theological roots. They call us a “profoundly human faith” wrestling with real human situations, human questions not doctrinal questions. Not having set answers to life’s questions makes us struggle with our own failings, looking to find help within our own strength.

During my time doing my hospital chaplaincy for my ministerial training, I learned how these human questions are handled so differently by different faiths, and by different kinds of people. Some of the students among us were from the Baptist seminary. I accompanied one of them when we went into a family who had just lost their 45-year-old mother. The Baptist student minister with me was asked to say a prayer and speak with them. The prayer mentioned how God “wouldn’t give us problems unless we could deal with them.” Following that was something about how we would never understand why God would take someone so young, but that she had gone to her eternal peace, back to her God.

I think for some of the family, this was comforting because it was so familiar. God gives and he takes away. But I saw some members of this family wincing with angry expressions.

Later, I approached the teenage daughter to ask if she wanted to talk. She told me that she could never love a God who would choose to take away her mother. We talked more about whether it was possible that God wasn’t in charge of these decisions, that these were just the natural events of the world. And that possibly God was there in her sorrow to help her through this, grieving with her. I suggested that perhaps God was there as evidenced in her loving family reaching out to her.

This kind of answer had been suggested to me by process theology (which was introduced partly by Charles Hartshorne, a Unitarian), which suggests that if there is a God that God is changing and vulnerable to life’s pain as we are. This was so much more helpful to her than the thought of a controlling God who decided to remove her mother from her life.

One description of our faith that resonated with me was that we are “an experiential faith”. We look to our experiences in the world to validate our deep intuitions.

Once I was visiting a gay man in the hospital. He had become a UU just a few years before and had grown up in a Baptist family. He told me that all his life he had been told about a God who was judgmental and strict and who couldn’t forgive him for being gay. Then he said when he learned about UUism and started going to a UU church, he started to experience God differently. When he prayed now, he said, he saw the faces of the people in his congregation who had been supporting him through his illness. He said now his experience of God was one of love and joy. His experience now told him that God could love him and accept him because of the people in his community who did.

The Commission also calls us a “relational faith”. They said that in all their interviews, it was language that spoke of relationship between people that was foremost in the conversations. Foundational to our faith is a belief in the “covenanted” community, or a community who is held together by commitment, not by obligation.

And they also call our movement a “hopeful faith”. From our earliest roots of Universalism which describes a loving God, not a judgmental one, and our Unitarian roots which is founded on the inherent goodness possible within humankind, our movement has always seen the possibilities in life. Humanists continued that tradition by seeing humans as the only possible salvation for the world.

I have to say that my experience in the Heritage congregation on September 11 and in the days and months to follow was a lifesaving one for holding onto my hope. The day of 9/11 I held onto my phone talking to my daughter in her New York apartment, ten blocks from the World Trade Center. I heard her screams as she watched the second plane hit. And I had to be the one who would calm her as my whole world shook and caved.

But then I went to church and the staff and other members and I sat in my office and watched the events unfold as we cried and held each other. Afterward, I went outside to the church’s labyrinth and spent an hour just walking and walking.

My hope came back when I walked into the sanctuary and saw our chalice. I envisioned all our members standing together holding up the hurt and suffering people of New York. I thought that in this time of world fear of a group of people that used their religion to hate and kill others, that I was so glad that our religion was founded on love and acceptance of other faiths.

That night we held a vigil and as we sat in the candlelight in silence, letting people share when they needed to, and to just sit together as we grieved. I did feel great sorrow and grief. But I also felt within me, centered in that group of people, strangely unexplained hope. I felt that if the people of the world could all come together with something like the principles that we professed and lived every day, that there was hope for the world.

But can we react robustly with a religion that has no backbone, as many accuse us of? Can we create for ourselves a safe harbor in which to meditate and pray? How do we move forward optimistically with an attitude of believing in humankind when all we see humans do is blow each other up? It’s not easy being someone who believes that the future progress lies in the hands of humankind as opposed to believing that God will save the righteous of the world.

Marilyn Sewell, another of our great ministers today, critiques our movement by saying that while we have maintained that tolerance for the individual that our forebears fought and died for, we tend to turn aside when individual behavior should not be tolerated. She says, “Yes, our deep respect for the uniqueness of each person in our midst is one of our great strengths. On the other hand, the shadow can lead us into a kind of radical cult of the individual. Elevating individual freedom is a national trait, to be sure, but it is magnified and sanctified by our movement. This assumption about the relative value of the individual versus the value of the community too often prevents us from coming together around a mission greater than keeping our individual members satisfied, in a ‘consumer church’ model.” She reminds us also that we must recognize “evil” when we see it in the horrors of war and atrocities and oppression.

Sewell says that “we are a religious movement”. She unabashedly stands on the side of our being a religion. We are a religion that teaches respect for other’s beliefs, whatever they may be, she says. But, she says, that we must face the fact that our freedom of religion must include a freedom “for” religion, not against religion. Sometimes we reject the notion that religion can mean belief in a spiritual way of being—sometimes some of us fear being “spiritual”, she says because it implies a certain kind of spirituality. Sewell emphasizes that this spiritual nature is what will give us the freedom toward creating a religion of robustness in today’s world. “Our theological grounding rests in freedom and is expressed in love and is articulated nowhere more profoundly than in the words of Francis David: We need not think alike to love alike.” Unitarian Universalism will be more robust a liberal theology if it allows spirituality to be whatever it is to each person.

In my experience, Unitarian Universalists are some of the most intentional people I know. They are people who care about their place in their own community, in the world, and in the universe. They are seekers who are constantly re-examining their beliefs, not accepting it at face value. Many UUs lead intentional lives meaning they choose their careers, their homes and communities, and their lifestyle with great deliberateness. We are known for our concern for social justice and for our often sticking up for the “underdog”. Many of us have spent our lives in seeking a spiritual path that will give us great satisfaction, rejecting religion that came with its own packaged instructions.

But that doesn’t let us off the hook. We must take responsibility, as Sewell points out, for witnessing “evil”, both in our personal relationships and in the larger world. Since we recognize the importance of the individual’s personal choices in life, that gives us the responsibility to safeguard the freedoms of individuals to be able to make those choices. And since community is at the heart of our faith, we must continue to strive to make our religious communities places of safety and of welcome.

In my earlier definition of a religion I said that a religion offered its believers a way to find meaning and purpose in life. Searching for truth and meaning is one of our foremost principles. I think we demonstrate this is our Sunday services that offer many theological points of view and in our discussion groups that encourage people along their own spiritual path.

Are we spiritually robust enough to nourish our members, however? Many criticize our churches for being “spiritual wastelands”. And some members leave our fold when they don’t find enough to fill up their spiritual needs.

I ask these people, what are they looking for? Have they been exploring their own spiritual needs by trying out spiritual practices that they find interesting? Being in a discussion group isn’t enough for many people to explore what they need spiritual. Spiritual practice is personal and unique. What one person finds fulfilling and joyful may feel phony or uncomfortable for another person. But until you actually try something, experience something, it’s impossible to know what works for you spiritually. As UUs, we have a spiritual responsibility to explore not just our belief system, what we believe about the universe, but also to explore what feeds us spiritually. Finding a spiritual practice that works for you is one of the commitments I think we make when we choose a faith that gives us this freedom.

In a Sunday service, we explore many ideas of different religions and spiritual ideas, different social justice issues, various ways of living one’s life ethically and morally. And we may experience prayer or meditation. Our music may be very spiritually uplifting. Being together in community is a spiritual practice in itself. However, for most people who are seeking spiritually, our Sunday services are not going to be enough to nourish them spiritually. That’s why I encourage people who are seeking to try different spiritual practices either by themselves or in a group to find what fills them up.

It may be a meditation practice, a prayer group, a yoga practice that some may find spiritually fulfilling. Maybe it’s the work you do for the local food bank, or your political activism. Many find spiritual nourishment in our women’s group. That group taught me about me spirituality by teaching me ritual and teaching me to look for sacredness in everything in my life. For some it’s walking in the woods, talking to friends, or immersing oneself in artwork. For every one of us, we have a unique way of experiencing that feeling of deep meaningful fulfillment.

A religion is also based on an ethical code of behavior. Our principles that affirm justice, equity and compassion and the use of the democratic process urge us toward applying a moral code. And our principles demand that we use our conscience—that inherent moral guide that Channing talked about as being uniquely human without the need to be guided by a Higher Power. All these principles hold us toward a high standard of ethics.

Many of our UU communities have implemented community covenants which describe the kind of behavior they expect from each other. While MVUUF still has work to do to move toward a behavioral covenant, we are exploring ways of making a covenant something more than words. I think the institutionalizing of this kind of covenant, really using it daily, puts our ethics into practice, creating a community where we are intentional about how we act with one another.

And finally, a religion defines a worldview for its believers. As UUs, we believe that we are an integral and interdependent part of the universe which contains a unity; that we are intertwined inextricably with all of the natural world, but that we don’t own the world. We have a responsibility toward cherishing the world and safeguarding its gifts.

So, is UUism enough? If I looked at our principles as a new member, I would wonder, “Where’s the beef?” I would ask, “What nourishes you spiritually?” Because it’s not clear from our principles that we believe or practice anything.

Diana Eck, an author who writes about interfaith dialogue, critiques our movement as not having enough substance. She says we worship a “smorgasbord” of faith traditions and therefore end up with nothing.

What she doesn’t understand and what is not clear from just reading our principles is that each UU takes the responsibility for our own beliefs and our own spiritual practices. We have deep spiritual beliefs. Some of us believe in a Universal spirit—a unity in which we all participate, some have a personal God to which they pray, some see life as a natural event explained to some degree by science but having an incredible mystery that is not explained, and some of us wake up each day to figure it out again.

When people of other faiths ask us, “Are you a religion? What do you believe?” I think we can firmly say, “Yes, we are a faith that believes in freedom for the individual to seek and find personal meaning and a nourishing spiritual practice. We believe in establishing and living in a Beloved Community, and we take responsibility for working toward a peaceful and more just, equitable world.”

Benediction from Theodore Parker

Be ours a religion which, like sunshine,

Goes everywhere,

Its temple, all space,

Its shrine, the good heart,

Its creed, all truth,

Its ritual, works of love,

Its profession of faith, divine living.