One of my Unitarian Universalist ministerial colleagues, David Rankin, writes about his friend Jake and his "Fetish on Fads."
"I feel sorry for Jake. We were friends in seminary - many years ago. He was now a broken soul.
When he was a college student, he was into existentialism - Camus, Sartre, and Kierkegaard.
When he was a graduate student, he was into world religions - Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
When he was a theological student, he was into the new psychology - Fromm, Rogers, and Maslow.
When he was a minister, he was into experimental worship - guitars, folk-songs, and dialogue.
When he was a community organizer, he was into direct action - marches, sit-ins, and rallies.
When he was a welfare recipient, he was into human potential - EST, Rolfing, and holistic medicine.
Jake had discovered all kinds of things - but never the center of himself. He could not dance in the empty spaces, or listen to the sound of no birds singing."[1]
Ours is the age of the spiritual quest, seeking the centered self. Everyone, it seems, is on a spiritual journey for something very elusive. Finding spirituality has been equated with "packaging fog." We seek it because we think we ought to have it and we are pretty sure we don't have it now.
This phenomenon is an important part of the Unitarian Universalist movement. We have been, are now, and perhaps will continue to be, a religion of "come-outers" or "come-inners" depending on your vantage point. Every year we host orientation sessions for those seeking a new spirituality.
People seek some kind of religious orientation not only for themselves but for their children. A New Yorker cartoon illustrates something of the nature of this search. A mother and father are talking to their young child who sits slumped in a chair. The mother says, "We're thinking maybe it's time you started getting some religious instruction. There's Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish - any of those sound good to you?"[2] That menu of faith seems to be the New Age approach to the spiritual quest.
Then there are those adults who have found the faith they were seeking - or at least think they have. Their children are not given the opportunity to choose from the theological menu - they pretty much know what they are supposed to believe. You may have heard of the children's sermon in which a minister asked the kids, "What I am thinking of is brown, has a bushy tail, and gathers acorns every fall." After a brief silence, a little boy raises his hand and says, "I am sure the right answer is Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me."[3]
Early on I learned the right answers are not the easy answers and I have become comfortable with that ultimate uncertainty. My religious quest has always been within the liberal religious framework for I am one of the rare ones - a born Universalist. Long before the consolidation of the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association in 1961, I was raised in the Universalist Church on Baptist Hill in Bristol Hills.
The little white church on the corner of Oakmount and County Road 32 was just up the road from my house - literally a stone's throw. There I was baptized - as we called it in those days.
There I received my perfect attendance pins - I've fogotten how many years I had an unblemished record.
It was there I cut my teeth on the "gospel according to Martin and Judy," a winsome curriculum exploring the early spiritual experiences of childhood when life was blissfully good.
It was there I was spellbound by How Miracles Abound, in which scientific truths were explored in the wonders of the natural order.
It was there I learned about sharing my sustenance with others as a normal outgrowth of the religious spirit by placing my nickels and dimes in red Christmas stockings for children in diabetic camps in America and villages in Africa and Asia and the Middle East.
It was there I learned that Jesus was first and foremost a loving human being, not the son of God.
It was there I learned that the most profound definition of God was also the most simple: God is love.
It was there I was able to practice the virtues of service and still have fun - ringing the old church bell at 10:15 to get people to church in that rural community and again at 10:30 to call them to worship.
It was there that my father taught me to be a good neighbor by helping out with no thought of reward.
It was there I learned something of compassion from my mother who was minister-without-portfolio, taking me to visit virtually all my neighbors in that tiny town.
It was there that I preached my first sermon at 14 - I have been doing it ever since.
It was there that my decision to become a minister was shaped and consolidated and confirmed.
The agony and the ecstasy of looking for a new faith I have never experienced. Of course, as one who takes other religions seriously, I have had to choose it again and again and again. And while I had a "call" to the ministry at 14 at a Boy Scout Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the evolution of my religious faith was not marked by dramatic transformations.
Antoinne St. Exupery once wrote that "to live is to be slowly born." That's what has happened to me. I have been slowly born as a Unitarian Universalist.
St. Exupery's remark challenges the current emphasis on being "born again" whether in the Christian sense of taking Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior or in the sense of that constant seeking for the one true faith in David Rankin's friend Jake.
I am born a Universalist, and because of the nature of my faith, in a way I have been born again - and again and again. What can being "born again" mean for the Unitarian Universalist? Most people come into our faith community out of some other religious tradition. I have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of stories from people who have left the faith of their fathers and mothers.
Some have simply left that tradition; some felt they have now outgrown it; some believe it no longer meets their needs; but some come out of a dramatic, if not traumatic, experience. Coming into our free faith itself can be an ecstatic experience - like being born again.
As one who grew up in this tradition, I find liberal religion as natural as the air I breathe. Never having been subjected to a dogma or creed, I have a hard time imagining what it must feel like to trade in that certainty for "the authority of truth known or to be known." Since no one has ever tried to impose a belief upon me, I have a difficult time relating to those who so deeply resent the dogmatism of their upbringing.
I'm never quite sure if this is good or bad. There are times I think I take this freedom, this joy in religious evolution - being born again and again and again - for granted. Many whom I have welcomed into our church obviously relish and appreciate the virtues of being a Unitarian Universalist. While I am proud to be what I am, I wonder if I lose the excitement - if not ecstasy - in being a free religious person who fashions his or her own faith. I have always enjoyed thinking for myself in religion and have always been encouraged to do just that. I celebrate the discipline required.
Unitarian Universalism tends to be a religion chosen in one's late adolescence or adulthood. Our intellectual approach is characterized perhaps by the story of the seminary student in a class on spirituality who wasn't meeting the professor's expectations. So the professor called him in and said: "Son, you're not doing all that well in my course on spirituality; have you been studying?" The young man replied, "I don't have to study about spirituality; I'm led by the Spirit." "My friend," the professor asked, "that spirit ever lead you to the library? If it doesn't soon, you're in deep trouble."[4]
I am one of those who believe in going to the library, who believe one's religion ought to be intelligent, chosen deliberately. Our spiritual ancestor Ralph Waldo Emerson said it well:
"A sect or party is an elegant incognito, devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking."[5] In more contemporary vein, media mogul Ted Turner expresses that truth of our tradition when he says: "Almost every religion talks about a savior coming. When you look in the mirror in the morning, you're looking at the savior. Nobody else is going to save you but yourself."[6]
It can be scary when a religious public relations campaign, like that of the Unitarian Universalist Association, says that our religion puts its faith in you. Whoa! Who am I to think that I can be my own theologian? Who am I to dare to determine what is true and not true, what is right and not right?
This week at the Rochester Interfaith Forum a liberal Reform rabbi friend told us about his daughter's pilgrimage. She has maintained her Judaism, but has become more orthodox because she needed more definite answers than those provided by the tradition in which she grew up.
I never had that experience. I have always been reasonably comfortable by not claiming to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
At that same Interfaith Forum a Roman Catholic priest friend had the unenviable task of explaining the latest Papal enclyclical "Dominus Jesu." He was dismayed by its dogmatic tone, but suggested that probably every adherent of every religion had some sense that his or hers was the truth faith. I suggested that my understanding was not that there is one truth faith for me or anyone else, but that I was trying to pursue truth faithfully. And what I have found was good enough for me to build a religion upon. It was true for me.
The poet Maya Angelou wrote: "Many things continue to amaze me, even well into the sixth decade of my life. I'm startled or taken aback when people tell me they are Christians. My first response is the question, 'Already?' It seems to me a lifelong endeavor to try to live the life of a Christian. I believe that is also true for the Buddhist, for the Muslim, for the Jainist, for the Jew and for the Taoist who try to live their beliefs. The idyllic condition cannot be arrived at and held on to eternally. It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy."[7]
I couldn't have said it better. That is the meaning of being born again and again and again - a metaphor for our Unitarian Universalist truth that spirituality is not something you find once and for all.
Spirituality describes a way of being - an openness to truth which is not really something you discover, but something you live.
There is, of course, the danger that this openness to truth becomes the only virtue; that all candidates for truth are equal and that anything goes. There are really two types of openness: one is openness as indifference: life is so complex it is not worthwhile or even possible to come to any conclusions about it. The other is a passion for truth that invites us to the quest for conclusions, even if they evade us.
But ours is an impatient age. We want the truth and we want it now! The value of deferred gratification in religion is lost upon us. We think the spiritual journey should be at Mach 2 speed. The long climb up the mountain and along the plateau and in the valley is really foreign to our culture. If one approach doesn't work, then we want another and another and another until we find the final answer. Americans want the spiritual quick fix - a lightning strike of the spirit. Anything that takes longer is just not going to make it.
There is another metaphor - another image - that I think more accurately defines the way we might build our own theology, fashion our own faith, grow our own religion. It is that of the tree. As the tree develops it adds rings for each year of growth.
Depending on the growing conditions in a given year, the ring is narrow or wide. Yet, even as the maturing tree adds rings as it grows, the previously formed rings are still present in the central core of the tree's trunk. To be sure they have been superceded, but fundamental values with which we have grown up tend to persist.
I don't deny the lightning strikes of human spirituality. There are transformative moments in the lives of each of us that cause us to change direction. But I fear many people keep waiting to be struck like Paul on the road to Damascus, or believe they already have been struck and think there is nothing else to do - except to tell others about the experience and urge them to have it.
I'm with Maya Angelou: "It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy." I recognize the joy of being born again and again and again religiously. I realize the long-term discipline of the religious quest. I am suspicious of the quick fix, the ultimate truth, the one true way. It's just too easy.
I think of one of the central characters in Berrke Breathed's comic strip Bloom County, Opus the penguin. One day Opus decided he wanted to give up television and become more learned. As he walked up the steps of the "Publik Library," he announced:
"Attention, dark world of electronic gratification . . .
I would like to announce my intellectualization!
No more TV! No boob tube-a-roo!
'Twas turning my noodle to video goo!
Yes, there's something much better for smart chaps like me . . .
From what I have heard, it's known as 'to read'!
Books! I'll read books! Be they large or quite dinky!
Straight from the shelves all musty and stinky!
Faulkner! O'Neill! Twain and Saul Bellow! . . .
I think I"ll curl up with a few of those fellows!
Yes, I'll soon be well-read! Such a fab thing to be!
I've allowed plenty of time, at least an hour . . . or three."
Opus stands bewildered in the midst of shelves of books that climb to the sky. The shelves appear to be closing in around him. In the last frame, Opus is back home, munching on a snack, in front of the television, as a voice from the television calls out, "Gilligan!"[8]
If we wish the ecstasy of the born-again experience, this is probably not the place for us. If, on the other hand, we are eager to be born again and again and again - if we are open to the long haul spiritual journey - if we are truth-seekers and try to live what truth we have found - if we are willing to explore the center of our self and what that discovery might mean - then this may be the place - this may be the place.
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