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(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved  

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There is a story about a first time woman visitor to a Unitarian Universalist church.  She was invited by a friend of hers who was a member of that congregation.  During the sermon, this woman visitor became increasingly upset at what she heard from the minister.  She frowned and shook her head repeatedly.  After the service she remarked to her friend, “I can hardly believe what that minister said!”  Her friend smiled and replied, “That’s wonderful!  It sounds like you already fit in!”

I offer that bit of humor as an appropriate introduction to my message today.  My message theme this month is on exploring Unitarian Universalism and my topic today is on Universalism.   All of you from Northern Hills might wonder what I could tell you – with your years of experience in the UU.  I hope I don’t see too many shaking heads and frowns as I speak!  But even as my purpose this month is to inform myself and the Gathering about the history and ideas behind Unitarian Universalism, I hope my thoughts today might both inform and inspire each of us just why it is that we are a part of good and proud congregations like Northern Hills Fellowship or the Gathering.

Last month, when I spoke here on October 5th, I related to you some of my life journey and how I came to my present understanding of spirituality.  We each have our own important stories to tell but I wanted to relate mine so that you can better understand me.  I related that an important moment in my life was when I decided to come out as a gay man – to speak my truth.  In coming out to my family, I was extremely nervous – particularly with my two daughters who were teenagers at the time.  I knew I might alter their understanding of themselves, their family and their relationship to me.   When I sat down with them, I was visibly shaking and my words poured out in a jumble.  After I finished, they were briefly silent as what I had said sunk in, but then they each looked at me reassuringly and my youngest daughter reached over to me, wrapped her arms around me, and said, “Daddy, It’s OK.  We love you no matter what and that will never change.”  (pause)

I was dumbstruck.  I still choke up when I recall their words to me that day.  Their reaction is the single greatest gift I’ve ever received.  At a moment in my life when I was most vulnerable, they simply loved me.

What they offered was what I want to discuss today – no strings attached love.  It did not matter to my daughters what defined one small part of me.  They offered in that moment a love we all desire to receive and we all hope to give – unconditional, total love without any expectation or demand.  It is the kind of love the ancient Greeks called agape – a love that is almost unreal because it is so pure – untouched by romance or hopes of reciprocity.

I also relate this story because it reflects the principles and values of Universalism.  In a world that often demands retribution, in a world that judges others and expects reward or punishment for human actions, Universalists saw and continue to see a different approach.  Whatever force it is that we choose to believe animates the universe, that force does not judge humans on the basis of their merits or their actions.  We are not sentenced to hell – even if we don’t believe in such a literal place, as I do not.  Instead, according to Universalism, all people will find eternal grace and eternal love.  All people have inherent dignity and value.  All people are to be loved without any strings attached.  It is a beautiful and uplifting belief that is difficult to practice.  It is totally contrary to most other religions which assert that people earn reward or punishment and that a god will only love us if we return that love in the form of obedience, worship and belief.  Universalism tells us we each deserve to be loved no matter what!  No hell.  No judgement.  No condemnation.  Only love.

The history of Universalism is long and often deeply theological and philosophical.  It originated with the Greek philosopher Plato who taught that all creation emanates from a divine source and all of creation, including humans, will return to that divine source.  A very early Christian leader Origen believed much the same – all humans were born into grace and all will eventually return to that state.

But with the Protestant Reformation and its reaction to Catholic ideas that humans must earn their way to heaven, John Calvin in particular taught that everyone is born with the stain of sin, total depravity as he said, that is passed down from Adam and Eve.  God is so powerful, he believed, that there is nothing we can do to overcome her omnipotence.  She loves who she loves and she condemns who she condemns.  We are powerless to influence her mind.  Some are predestined from the beginning of time to be rewarded with heaven, many others are predestined to go to hell.

Early Unitarians and Universalists perceived a slightly different God from each other.  Unitarians saw in Calvinism a denial of human reason and its ability to cognitively choose to do good or bad.  If there is a god, Unitarians said, he or she offers humans the freedom to think and determine their own destiny.

Early Universalists saw a God of love.  It made no sense, from their reading of the Bible, for a capricious God to exist.  As they saw it, God cannot be a loving God if he randomly chooses to send some to hell.  Nor can that God encourage human love for others if so many are destined for hell.

While there were several streams of early Universalist theology, some believing that evil humans will spend a few hundred years in hell but their souls will eventually repent and go to heaven, the prevailing view was taught by F. D. E. Schleiermacher, the father of Universalism, who taught in the early 1800’s that hell cannot exist since those sent to heaven could not enjoy that paradise with the knowledge that many of their friends and family are forever suffering in hell.  Since he believed everyone will enjoy eternal grace and love – a symbolic version of heaven – it is therefore impossible for hell to exist.  His was a modern understanding of suffering – even those who might deserve to suffer are nevertheless to be pitied.  This contrasted with some theologians, and with fundamentalists today, who believe that those who are in heaven will be so in touch with the will of God that they will rejoice in his punishment of unbelievers and sinners.  Personally, I find that viewpoint incomprehensible.

In the 20th century, Universalists leaned toward a more Unitarian approach to theology and philosophy – that the human mind is capable of discerning truth apart from ancient texts.  In this regard, Universalists reasoned that if there is a supernatural force, it is logical it will be one of love for what it created.  Why create if the intent is to eventually condemn?  Even further, if any love, including that from a god, is to be genuine, it must be offered unconditionally.  If I tell you I love you but expect in return your devotion and worship of me, is what I offer really love?  Or is it, instead, a commodity I have dangled in front of you as way to buy your devotion?  Even worse, as in the case of a hell condemning god, is it a threat to worship me or else?  Universalists logically asked if one’s belief in a greater power is motivated by love, OR by fear that one might go to hell?   Bribery is not love.  Threats are not love.  Fear is not love.  Logic and our own experiences, much like what I felt from my daughters, shows us what real love looks and feels like.

As all of you Unitarian Universalists know, the two streams of today’s UU denomination came together in 1961 – a perfect blending of Unitarian emphasis on reason with Universalist emphasis on compassion, charity and love.  The head and heart wonderfully combined.  Our brains – or Unitarianism – operating on their own can lean toward cold intellectualism.  Our hearts – or Universalism – operating on their own can lean toward sloppy emotionalism.  Both need the other in order to effectively change the world.

Several months after I began as minister to the Gathering, I shocked many of its members by beginning a sermon with the statement that I believe in hell.  I heard gasps of wonder at just who they had hired as minister!  But I went on to explain that I had visited hell and that many of them had too.  Hell existed outside our doors in Over-the-Rhine for those caught in poverty, drug addiction or homelessness.  I had visited the worst of hells during two construction trips to Haiti where I was aghast at the extreme poverty I saw.  My group and I travelled through many of Haiti’s slums.  Our senses were bombarded with piles of trash, sewage running through gutters, pigs wallowing in filth, and, on one street, a dead human body covered with flies as people stepped around it.  Yes, I said in my sermon, symbolic hells do exist.

In Haiti, I visited a clinic run by Catholic nuns for children suffering from AIDS and tuberculosis.  Three and four kids were lying in cribs made for one.  There was no crying.  Most were so sick they mutely stared at us.  The nuns told us they had little money to provide medicine or treatment for these children – most of whom had been abandoned.  Very few survived more than a few weeks.  What they did offer, the nuns said, was comfort and love.  It struck me at the time that outside that little clinic was a version of hell on earth.  Inside those walls, however, the nuns had built a version of heaven, a place these children might experience a glimpse of unconditional love, a soothing voice, a gentle transition into an early death.

What I believe then as I believe now is that what those nuns were doing may not be for all of us, but it was and is consistent with our human purpose in life.  It is consistent with Universalist ideals that all people have inherent dignity and are deserving of love – no matter what.  If we hold those principles to be logical and true, then it is part of our responsibility to build places of heaven on earth for everyone – especially for the outcast, the poor, the dying, the oppressed, the least of creation’s children.

As I have been a Unitarian Universalist for many years without knowing it, I can now give my beliefs an identity.  My spirituality has called me to worship and serve a universal force of love – to strive to give that love away to family, friend and stranger alike.  I must do so with humility, kindness, joy, empathy, and gentle speech.  Reason tells me that my love must be focused through the prism of my mind – that sometimes love cannot be given as my heart desires but that it must often be in a form of so-called “tough love.”  It must be the kind of gentle and helpful love that initiates change of behavior in another person – not to punish or judge but to teach.

I also believe in the Universalist ideal that tells me love can never be compelled.  It must be given without coercion.  I can, therefore, only model it for others to see.  I cannot and will not tell others how they should love nor shame them if they do not love as I believe they could.  Each person loves in different ways and many of us find that during certain periods in our lives, expressing charitable love is limited by circumstances – by family, by health, by finances.  Empathy calls me to focus on my own actions and to acknowledge we each love differently.

I see at the Gathering and here at Northern Hills visions of what loving communities can look like – places of celebration for all people, places of wisdom and reason, places where each person strives to practice love toward everyone.  I see churches where visitors can come and instantly feel welcomed, churches that serve and speak out in behalf of the marginalized.  I see places that witness to the wider community how members peacefully cooperate and communicate with one another.  I see churches that are small beacons of light in an otherwise dark world of dogmatic, angry and competing religions.  The children here will soon model these visions of love as they hand out angel biscuits to each of us.  Our two congregations modeled such love yesterday – some from the Gathering assembling hygiene kits for homeless youth, a combined group from Northern Hills and the Gathering helping to winterize the homes of elderly and disabled poor.  Northern Hills Fellowship and the Gathering are important places – not perfect – but vital to this city, nation and world.  They are places free of religious judgement, sectarian rivalry and spiritual arrogance.  They are places of love for all people – no strings attached.  They must exist, in some form, long into the future.

Let us, in conclusion, live out the historic traditions of Universalist forebears and strive to give away glimpses of unconditional love – love that is based on reason, love that is generous, lavish, and true.  To me, to you, to those around us in here and in the communities in which we live, may it be said that we speak about universal love…and that we then truly practice it.

I wish you all much peace and joy.

 

For the heart to heart time or, as the Gathering says, “the sermon is not over until the congregation also has its say”,  I am interested in your thoughts about what constitutes unconditional love?  And, what are good ways to show that love to others?

 

 

 

(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved

 

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Galileo Galilei, as many people know, is famous for his multiple discoveries on the atomic nature of matter and our solar system.  Using his own observations and mathematical models, as well as borrowing ideas from Copernicus’s original observations, Galileo showed that the planet Venus revolves around the sun, that comets do the same and that moons circling Jupiter, which he discovered, prove his theories.  But such facts that he observed by telescope and had shown to many others, they were immediately labeled as heresy by the Catholic Church.  They contradicted several verses found in the Bible saying the earth is stationary and that the sun revolves around it.  Centuries of Christian dogma holds that the Bible was and is the inerrant and infallible word of God.  It is the source for all Truth and cannot be incorrect.

The earth was made by God as the center of the universe, such dogma claimed.  The sun, stars, planets and other celestial bodies revolve around it.  This geocentric universe was crucial to theological belief in God’s creation and his establishment of humans as the purpose for all existence.  A heliocentric or sun oriented planetary system, as Galileo observed and proved with his math, was a direct threat to that viewpoint.  If the earth and humans were not central to God’s creative plan to have all things worship him, if the Bible was somehow wrong in its geocentric verses, the whole structure of belief in God and the Bible could be questioned.  And, of course, that was a dagger at the heart of ecclesiastic control over human affairs.  Despite irrefutable evidence that even Church astronomers of the time had observed, the Church told Galileo he was wrong.  His observations, science and math were false.  The Bible is Truth no matter what.

At an advanced age, Galileo was put on trial for heresy.  A unanimous Inquisition verdict was rendered against him on June 23, 1633.  It stated, “The idea that the Sun is stationary is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture…”  Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment.  Because of his fame and age, the sentence was commuted the next day to house arrest for life.  Galileo was then confined to his home, under guard, until he died in 1641.

It was not until 1758 that the Church ended its ban on Galileo’s books and teachings.  Nevertheless, the Church has continually held that it was correct in putting him on trial because, it says, the science at the time was imperfect and Galileo’s ideas threatened social order.  As recently as 1990, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future and current retired Pope Benedict, stated in a speech about the Galileo affair, “The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just.”  Such a statement is breathtaking in its refusal to admit error.  And that points to a major problem with religious dogma.  Once a religious creed or dogma is stated as fact, once Scripture is determined to be infallible and inerrant – as fundamentalists say about the Bible and Koran – there can be no subsequent admission of error.  To do so brings the entire creed, doctrine and Scripture into doubt.  If one part can be wrong then the entire whole can be wrong.

My shortened history of Galileo’s persecution, therefore, offers us a reason why religious dogma and creeds, like the Christian Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds, are not only impractical but dangerous.   They are inflexible and give rise to irrational thinking that refuses to accept new understanding, revelation and discovery.  As I have set out this month to review Unitarian Universalism, the primary hallmark of that denomination is its refusal to accept, enforce or state any religious creeds.  As we saw last Sunday in my message on the history of Unitarianism, it has used human reason to logically evolve its understanding of spirituality.   Humans, Unitarians believe, have yet to discover absolute Truth.  Even science continues in its quest to understand existence and the cosmos.  As rational humans, therefore, we must open ourselves to many streams of spirituality, philosophy and science all to be used as tools to question, search and understand what is true for us individually.  Unitarians are radically tolerant in that regard.  Instead of insisting on one set of beliefs or Scripture, persons have the freedom and responsibility to determine their own spirituality and then to freely believe it.  All are welcome within UU churches as long as each respects all other persons and their beliefs.  Ultimately, Unitarian Universalists believe there are many paths that lead toward Truth and all are valid.

Since there are many viewpoints within Unitarian Universalism, members nevertheless unite in a common understanding of life from a humanist perspective.  Human ethics and rights are the common focus – instead of dogmatic theological beliefs.  In that regard, it is our duty and purpose to continually work to improve life for ourselves and others – to be change agents who work to create a better earth right here, right now, for everyone.

Such Unitarian principles have been arrived at by logic and experience.  And that is why Unitarians refuse to proclaim any form of a religious creed.  While people have the freedom to believe in them, creeds  are not based on empirical evidence that all people accept.  Creeds exist within the realm of religious faith, and such faith is a matter of the heart and soul, not of the mind as confirmed by observation and experience.  While all beliefs are respected in the UU, none are stated as absolute Truth precisely because they cannot be proven.  In other words, humans cannot know creeds, they can only believe them – and that is a very important distinction.

And therein lies a problem, as we see in the Galileo affair.  Religions assert that they know their doctrines and dogmas as facts when they are, instead, beliefs.  For instance, I can believe pigs fly – and forgive me if that sounds condescending toward religion.  But I and others cannot know that pigs fly as a fact because reason and experience do not prove it.  If, however, I am respectful to you in my beliefs about flying pigs, and I’m willing to listen to your counter arguments about them, you will hopefully accept me within your congregation.  We each have the freedom to believe as we wish.  And that is precisely what Unitarian Universalists do – all are welcome but nobody’s religious beliefs are stated as creedal fact. Unitarians further ask that each person remain humble enough in what they personally believe such that they are open to accept new knowledge – something the Catholic Church refused to do for Galileo.

Unitarian Universalists do, however, believe in the ability of human reason and experience to determine what is universally good and ethical.  Toward that end, they put forth a set of visions or principles which are based on human logic and thus the foundation for their denomination.  The seven UU principles are:   (show slide)

1)  The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

2)  Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

3)  Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritually grow;

4)  A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

5)  The use of the democratic process within congregations and in society at large;

6)  The goal of world community to promote peace, liberty, and justice for all;

7)  Respect for the interdependent web of all existence.

Other religions demean these principles saying they are so all encompassing that they do not form the basis of a distinctive spiritual community.  They are wrong.  The principles assert a belief in universal values to which almost nobody, no matter their religious beliefs, could disagree.  In other words, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others can all agree with them, and most importantly – and this is a key idea – all can BELIEVE in them because reason and experience tell us each principle is true.  The UU denomination is one of the few places (the Gathering being another) in which true religious cooperation and acceptance are goals that members, however imperfectly, attempt to meet.  Is this not a vision of a society to which all aspire – a place of coexistence between persons of every color, gender, sexuality, religion and ethnicity?  Is this not a vision of an earthly heaven, a kind of kingdom of God that Jesus and other prophets advocated?  I assert that it is.  (Next slide)

If you recall from my review of Unitarianism last week, in 1819 William Ellery Channing delivered a sermon which quickly led to the establishment of the American Unitarian Association.  In it, he stated his desire to establish a church that was purposefully non-sectarian – one that members of all faiths could find fellowship in a joint effort to practice the ethics of the human Jesus.  This church would not claim to be the one true church, as Catholics assert, but instead be the one human church in which all people, of all religions, find freedom, acceptance and respect.  The only way this could be achieved, Channing said, was to abolish all creeds.  He foresaw the problem that was revealed in Galileo’s heresy trial.  Creeds divide.  They are factual assertions that are implicitly non-factual because they cannot be proven.  But religions say they are fact and that very claim creates divisions because other people make similar claims about their own creeds.  Hate, conflict and violence follow.  Unitarianism, on the other hand, was founded on the very same ideals which we hold at the Gathering: we welcome everyone but, in order to promote peace, we will not assert a particular religious creed or dogma.

After my message last Sunday, Mary Anne Berry shared with me her insight that belonging to a Unitarian church is more challenging than belonging to a traditional church.  One has the responsibility to determine one’s own beliefs – to search, study and think one’s way through multiple theologies and philosophies to arrive at a spiritual path that is personally meaningful.  That is not easy, she said, because one is not told what to believe.

And that echoes a Reformed Jewish understanding of God.  If you recall the Biblical Exodus story of Moses encountering God at a burning bush, Moses is startled when the bush speaks to him.  “Who are you?” Moses asks.  “I am who I am,” God, in the form of a burning bush, replies.  That translation from ancient Hebrew has been shown to be incorrect by several Reformed Rabbis.  The Hebrew, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh”  is more appropriately translated as “I am becoming whatever I am yet to be.”  And that is a totally different statement of God’s self-identity than “I am who I am.”  In the original Hebrew, he is not claiming to be unchangeable.  Instead, the updated translation has him saying he will change, he will evolve, he will continue to become whatever he will finally be – a truth yet to be finalized.  He’s not locked into being, as the Christian dogma asserts, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  He might become god the gay drag queen, god the impulse to love and be loved, god the dirty homeless woman crying on a street corner.  Who knows?  But let us endeavor to find out!

Whatever it is that people believe defines ultimate Truth, or god, this has yet to be finalized according to Unitarian Universalism.  We say the same here at the Gathering.  And that is uncomfortable.  We must live with uncertainty about an afterlife; uncertainty about the existence or non-existence of God, about if there is a supernatural creative force, about a reason for life.  As much as we can believe certain things about a creator, existence and an afterlife, we are nevertheless uncertain.  Nobody has the evidence to claim their religious or non-religious beliefs are facts.  And that ought to fill everyone with profound humility in what we do or don’t believe.  We could all be terribly wrong!

What I find attractive about Unitarian Universalism is that it offers a spiritual identity within the confines of a historic church.  It has a long history of rigorous philosophical thought and struggle behind it.  I like that the UU church emerged from western and Christian roots – of which I am familiar by tradition – and it has now also embraced eastern and other streams of spirituality which I find attractive.  I can worship the transcendent and the ineffable, I can personally pray or meditate, without needing to fully understand what I am experiencing.  I can rest in uncertainty and still find spiritual beauty, wonder and awe.  For me, Unitarian Universalism embodies three short phrases: Open minds.  Open beliefs.  Open hearts.

Too often I find that dogmatic religious beliefs become arcane discussions much like the debate Thomas Aquinas is said to have had over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  Ultimately, what is the point?  We at the Gathering and our UU friends say much the same.  There are starving kids outside these doors.  There are people who hurt and grieve.  There are the defeated and forlorn who have given up on life.  There are millions of oppressed who are denied rights of dignity, freedom and justice.  These are things that really matter.  People everywhere ask the very same question: how can this life and this earth be improved for the one human family?  No matter what any of us believe spiritually, that is an eternally true creed ALL people can accept.

(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved

To listen to the message, please click here.  To read the message, please see below.

 

Most of us are familiar with the TV show “The Simpsons” which, in its earlier years, was derided as animated radicalism that ruthlessly satirized our culture.  Many conservatives and Christians were alarmed at the show’s popularity and its seeming attack on their values.  Over the years, however, the show has won praise from those circles as they noted subtle but genuine ways the show holds an honest mirror to our culture but has fun with its idiosyncrasies.  Unitarian Universalism has suffered, or enjoyed, its own attention from the show as its creator, Matt Groenig, is believed to be a Unitarian.

In one episode Bart Simpson, the troublemaking boy in the show, visits the home of his evangelical Christian neighbors.  He finds the two Flanders boys, Rod and Todd, playing a video game where they are shooting virtual enemies – a surprising pastime in this religious home.  But the boys explain to Bart that they are playing Bible Blaster – a game where they fire Scripture at Heathens.  If they get a direct hit, the Heathen becomes a Christian believer and is saved.  Ten hits and the player wins the game.  As Bart tries his hand at the game, he is unsuccessful until he scores a wimpy ping sound – unlike the explosion of a direct hit.  “Aw Bart,” Todd says to him, “you only nicked him.  You made him Unitarian!”

In another episode, Lisa Simpson, the precocious girl on the show, is enjoying an after church ice cream social.  She walks up to get her bowl of ice cream from Reverend Lovejoy, minister at the fictitious “Presbylutheran” church, and finds multiple flavors to choose.  But Reverend Lovejoy smiles at Lisa, knowing her liberal tendencies, and offers her a bowl of Unitarian ice cream.  Lisa frowns as she looks into the bowl and exclaims, “But its empty.”  “Exxxxactly!” says a smug Rev. Lovejoy.

Such humor reflects the attitudes of many people toward Unitarian Universalist principles.  In an effort to accept everyone, no matter their faith, and in promoting a core idea that there are many paths to universal Truth and all are valid, Unitarians are derided as believing in everything and thus in nothing.  The same could be said of our Gathering beliefs.  Religious critics see quasi-religious groups of people who lack the kind of strict doctrinal assertions of other religions.  They condemn Unitarianism as empty, weak and wishy-washy in its embrace of multiple principles that almost anyone could endorse but which offer no inspiration or solace in a confusing world.  Indeed, echoing critics of all forms of liberal religion, it is said that Unitarianism does not offer any means of personal salvation that can provide a person with the emotional and spiritual comfort most people desire.

John Shelby Spong, the famous liberal Episcopalian Bishop and author, agrees with most Unitarian beliefs.  However, he asserts that he could never be a Unitarian since it is, he says, too easy.  Its rejection of theism is too simple, he believes.  It’s better and far more challenging to grapple and struggle with Christianity and the Bible to find meaning behind their literal assertions, he asserts.

What most of us at the Gathering have implicitly known over the years is that our blend of ideals and values closely align with those of Unitarian Universalism.  We look to the Bible and other Scriptures for wisdom but we don’t take them literally.  We consider Jesus to be a great prophet but not a supernatural God.  What I have personally come to understand is that I’ve been a closet Unitarian for many years – without knowing it.  As a result, I’ve felt some unease.  Just what is it that I believe and find meaningful?  I imagine many of you might feel the same way.

From my research, I find critics of Unitarian Universalism mostly wrong.  Far from being empty, the denomination and its core beliefs are full of history, tradition and well thought ideas about what it means to be spiritual.  Indeed, any study of Unitarianism finds a church that has struggled with theological ideas for four centuries – a history that long outdates many of the emotional forms of religious fundamentalism we see today.   Contemporary Unitarianism is NOT simply a diverse group of people who have come together in rejection of doctrinal religion.  As simple as that assertion might sound, that modern Unitarians are defined more by what they are against than by what they are for, it ignores the well established framework of Unitarian principles, ethics and traditions that were built over the centuries, one atop the other, in a logical evolution of spiritual philosophy.  And those beliefs, much like what we claim at the Gathering, are not fixed in stone but are constantly updated with new understanding.  It is a church committed to both a diversity of ideas as well as a determined search for just what is true, good and beautiful.  If it has rejected anything, it has rejected the notion that a form of God or absolute Truth has been found.

But the search for greater spiritual insight goes on.  As answers are found, new questions arise and that has defined Unitarianism over the centuries – it has evolved with layer upon layer of new insights.   By claiming a set of principles instead of a defining creed, Unitarians, like us at the Gathering, celebrate the mysteries of spiritual living that call us to transform ourselves into better people so that we are equipped to serve and love others.  With all due respect for Bishop John Shelby Spong, a writer I admire, his views on Unitarianism are wrong.  It is far more difficult to embark on a sea of spiritual unknowns instead of accepting an already established religious template.

This month I plan to look at Unitarian Universalism in a way that hopefully both informs and inspires.  You will hear much that sounds familiar to what we believe at the Gathering.  I profess to my own incomplete understanding of the UU association and its traditions but I want to look for common ground as well as its usefulness in a world where religions compete in ways that are often violent and unloving.  I believe Unitarian Universalism, along with what we believe at the Gathering, offers a spiritual ecumenicalism that humanity desperately needs – a means for diverse people to come together to solve problems.  Instead of being divisive, it is radically inclusive – so long as participants practice universal human ethics of love, respect and humility toward the beliefs of others.   The historic scourge of religious based hate and arrogance must end and only an inclusive, loving spirituality – like that of the UUA – might end it.

Unitarian roots are found at their oldest level back in the fifteenth century in Poland and Transylvania.  They began in reaction to strict Calvinism and Lutheranism that emerged from the Protestant Reformation.  Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected Catholic belief in sacraments, purgatory and earning one’s way to Heaven.  Salvation is found only from God and his Son Jesus Christ they asserted.   As eternal beings who existed long before humans, this God in three persons knows all things and controls all things, past, present and future.   A Calvinist god has pre-determined who are the select few who will join her in heaven.  As creatures born with sin, we are incapable of saving ourselves.  We can only hope, pray and assume we were pre-selected to be saved.

Various theologians and ministers soon rejected this theology.  It negates human reason and the power of people to consciously choose to do good or bad, to believe in God or not.   Indeed, numerous Scripture verses point to the crucial concept of choice in belief.  God sent his Son so that those who believe in him shall not perish, reads a famous Bible verse, John 3:16.  Early anti-Calvinists were thus early Unitarians – asserting a belief in human capability to reason and freely choose a spiritual pathway.  This Arminian or anti-Calvinism was the first of four phases in developing Unitarian beliefs.

The second phase directly evolved from the first.  If humans have the ability to reason, as the anti-Calvinists believed, then they can interpret the Bible on their own.  If they do, they will find in it no basis for belief in the Trinity.  Indeed, a study of the Council of Nicaea, established by Roman Emperor Constantine in 325 CE,  reveals there were a significant number of people at that council who saw Jesus not as equal to God but as a prophet who might be divine but who is not God herself.  Such people were labeled heretics by the Council of Nicaea.  The Nicene Creed thus stated that God is a trinitarian being – she is God the father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  Such a belief has weak support in the Bible and many eighteenth century theologians, notably Justus Socinius, found no Biblical assertion by Jesus that he is God.  Instead, Socinians, as they were called, asserted Jesus and the Holy Spirit were not God.  Christianity had gone astray and rejected its monotheistic Jewish heritage.  It worshipped an idol in the form of Christ and it believed in a contradiction – God is three persons but God is also one.

William Ellery Channing, in 1819, delivered a sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity” which claimed that God is completely one being and that Jesus was only a man who pointed the way to her.  That message became the foundation of the American Unitarian Association in 1825 and hallmarked the second phase of Unitarian history.

The third phase came, once again, in natural evolution of thinking and inquiry.  Without the two preceding phases of history and tradition, the third would not have occurred.  It is labeled the Transcendentalist period.

If humans have the ability to reason and choose their spiritual pathway, as the anti-Calvinists believed, if they can use that power to better understand the Bible and assert the Unitarian nature of God, as the anti-Trinitarians believed, then they also have the right to skeptically examine other parts of Christian doctrine.  Transcendentalists began with rejecting the miracles of Jesus.  If Jesus was not God, if he was a human teacher, then miracles ascribed to him are not fact.  This idea was not based on mere belief but on human reason – that supernatural miracles described in the Old and New Testaments are myths lacking any supporting evidence.  Even further, we can find transcendent revelations on our own, without scripture, when nature, science and art fill us with wonder and new insights.  Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that humans must experience the divine on their own – particularly in nature – if they purposefully seek such moments.  Transcendence comes from the power of our own minds and experiences.

As one of the great Unitarian figures in history, Emerson delivered a commencement address at Harvard Divinity School in 1838, which was widely controversial at the time, but which established the basis from which Unitarianism evolved away from its Biblical and Christian roots.  Human experience and reason, in these first three phases of Unitarian history, had used logic and reason to turn away from Calvinism, from the Trinity and, in the mid-1800’s, from a theistic and supernatural God.

The fourth and most recent phase of Unitarian history began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  It was and is a logical evolution from the the first three Unitarian periods.  Two ministers in the 1880’s, Jenkin Lloyd Jones and William Channing Gannett, both began preaching that past Unitarian history was not as much about theology but about tolerating and accepting contrary beliefs.  Unitarianism, they claimed, is about openness, diversity and respect for any and all beliefs – and that must include those who do not believe in God.  More important, this kind of acceptance leads directly to universal values of humility over arrogance, love and tolerance over religious hatred, service and charity over self-interest.  Having discounted creeds and belief in a supernatural God, Jones and Gannett said Unitarians should instead follow an ethical approach to spirituality: right behavior toward others versus right belief in a theological deity.  They claimed we must honor the teachings of Jesus and other prophets instead of the prophet him or herself.  This humanist approach was accepted in 1894 by the American Unitarian Association.  It took until 1945 for most Unitarian congregations to fully accept humanism.

According to humanist ideals, people are the force that determines our well-being.   We are saved not for some mythical after-life, but for the here and now.  This earth and our present existence is what matters and must be the focus of spiritual endeavors.  While Unitarians merged with the Universalist Association in 1961, leading to a combined focus on humanism, love and social justice, my review of Universalism will wait for two weeks.  Even so, Unitarianism is known today for its emphasis on using our minds and experiences to determine what is ethical, beautiful and spiritually good.

The Seven Principals of Unitarian Universalism are said to embody its ideals.  Some have criticized them as being too broad so that anyone can agree with them.  But that is precisely the point – who could disagree with them?  All people can feel comfortable in a place that has such visions for human life: dignity, justice, democracy, truth seeking, peace, acceptance, and love for all creation.  While other faiths encourage people to “come as you are”, it is implied that if you do come, you must then change.  Unitarians encourage others to come as they are and not to change.  Just as it is at the Gathering, all are welcome and all are respected for who they are.

But as I elaborated earlier, such an open ideal can lead to a lack of direction, purpose and meaning.  We must give religious fundamentalists credit for understanding their singular purpose – to worship and serve God.  And with that purpose comes their identity.  UUA churches, like the Gathering, are prone to dilute a collective sense of purpose because there are so many different traditions and opinions.  That can create a lack of cohesive identity that spawns a vicious cycle – without purpose, no identity and without identity, no purpose.

But Unitarian tradition and history do offer an identity and purpose.  Unitarians have historically pushed the boundaries of belief while asserting the basic human right of self-actualization through sound reason.  That is a consistent identity.  From anti-Calvinists who were burned at the stake for their beliefs, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, to Unitarians of today, humanity has been the focus of spirituality.  It was not God or one individual that was and is celebrated, but the one human family.

In the contemporary UU ritual of water communion, people bring samples of water from hundreds of different sources.  And they pour them into a single large bowl – many waters, one common stream.  Such symbolism calls them and us to put humanist belief into practice – many people, but only one human species.  And that focus provides a clear purpose for Unitarians and, indeed, for all people.   We were each born with the purpose to serve and love others.  That is implicit in historical Unitarian ideals of dignity, reason, democracy and social justice.

By simple logic, we each matter.  We matter because alone we cannot survive.  We need to cooperate in order to thrive.  And we need to practice ethics required for cooperation – empathy, humility, gentleness, love.  We find in Unitarianism the kind of salvation story that resonate with our emotions.  Everybody has inherent dignity.  Everybody has rights and abilities to think as they wish.  Unitarianism champions the present possibilities in human affairs instead of the negative – sin, death and fear.  It worships the power of love, focused through a prism of our minds.  And that love works to create a type of heaven right now – for everyone.  From many paths, we find this one essential truth…..and a shining hope for the future.

 

(c) Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved

 

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Within the past few weeks anthropologists and archeologists announced in the magazine Nature a discovery from the nation of Indonesia.  Cave art, that is nearly identical to the famous depictions found in the Lascaux caves of France, have been dated to be over 40,000 years old.  That dating puts the Indonesian art at approximately the same age as drawings of horses, human hands and bulls found in France.  This new revelation is an earthquake in our understanding of humanity.  Modern humans did not evolve from a single lineage.  We were diverse and yet much the same from the very beginning of development even as human groups and tribes were totally isolated from one another.

Most important, what these discovered cave paintings indicate is that the quest to understand human existence, the yearning to define who we are, is a timeless and universal one.  Humans living in France were pondering the same questions and arriving at the same assumptions at exactly the same time as were humans thousands of miles away in Indonesia – at a time when interactions between those two areas were impossible.  The impulse to define ourselves is one that is implicit within all humans.

During this month of October, I have looked at the topic of how we define ourselves both as individuals and in the larger realm of humanity.  Our quest for self-understanding is a spiritual matter and one that leads deep into introspection about meaning, purpose and worth.  Two weeks ago, I related to you and to Northern Hills Unitarian my journey of self-understanding – from my years of falsely defining myself as a straight man, to my time spent seeking a god that would define me in his terms, to my eventual awakening to an inner truth about myself and my belief in the absence of a theistic god.  We are masters of ourselves, I concluded.  We are the gods that control destiny and goodness in the world.

Last week, I examined how our jobs and careers are too often used to define us.  Our jobs are falsely used by the culture and us to determine individual value.  Instead, I asserted that it is not what we do to earn a living that defines who we are, it is our hearts that matter.  How are we engaging the world to improve it?  How are we loving, gentle, forgiving and caring people – in our families and communities?  Who is our one true self across the spectrum of life – at home, at play, at our inner core?  Ultimately, who we are is so much richer than what we do or did in a job.

Today, I want to look at the Indonesian cave paintings and several other examples of history’s most important art, as ways people have been defined in humanist terms.

Stanford University Encyclopedia published an article by several professors on the relationship between aesthetics and existentialism.  This inquiry gets at the heart of my topic today.  Why is it, and how is it, that artistic and musical expressions are so closely tied with what we think, feel and understand about ourselves?  Existentialism, of which Jean-Paul Sartre is the leading philosopher, asserts that art is the primary way humans reveal themselves and the universe.  In other words, we use art to confirm reality.  Not only that, but we use art to interpret existence and answer the eternal question, “Why are we here?”

Sartre and other existentialists see art as a deeply spiritual undertaking.  Art is a way to understand what it might be that created and animates all things.  Humans have used all forms of art to convey the beauty, wonder and complexity of nature.  Art is thus a manifestation of our ideal interpretation of things that exist – whether that be the human form, a flower or even an emotion.  And that ideal depiction becomes for us the reality of an object.  A subtle and softly colored painting of a mountain exists in our minds as identical to the actual upward thrusting rocky mass.  In other words, a mountain truly exists not because it IS, but because we depict it as existing – in a painting, in a song, in writing or in a photograph.  According to Sartre, an art work manifests the reality of an object or thought because humans have interpreted it and rendered it in art.  And that is why humans hunger and yearn to create art – from amateur scribbles to the evocations master artists create with paint, marble or sound.  Art is a picture of truth, it’s a window into the spiritual domain, it’s a way to assert existence and thus to define ourselves.

Take at look at one of the Indonesian cave paintings.

While we may not see this as high art by modern standards, it is nevertheless remarkable.  At the dawn of homo sapien existence, around 40,000 years ago, an artist used paint and colored dust to assert his or her existence.  I not only exist, he or she proclaimed, but I exist in relation to the physical world around me.  And here is the one tool that makes me uniquely human – my arm and my hand through which I can shape the world unlike any other creature.  From this artwork and others like it in France, came the first cry – much like that of a newborn babe – “I live!  I’m here!  I am a god of my own thinking able to paint, make tools, build a shelter, and profoundly change the environment.”

Now take a look at two art forms from over 20,000 years ago – at a time when human villages first emerged.  They are what archeologists call Venus figurines.

Such carved pieces depict women with exaggerated breasts, hips and genitalia and they were likely icons of worship.  They have been found, in various styles, all over the world.  This similarity in art form, from totally different cultures, indicates a common thread of self-identity and definition.  These artists were rendering their understanding of both humanity and the divine.  The one miracle to which they experienced and found awe-inspiring was the ability to spawn new human life.  People – and most particularly women – were spiritual beings – goddesses – who brought forth life.  Once again, we find an artistic self-definition:  humans are gods unto themselves imbued with the power of creation.  These artistic interpretations of an ideal woman who holds the power of fertility IS reality and defines what we as humanists think about ourselves.  We are goddesses and gods.

And that fact ought to give pause to today’s culture.  Archeologists indicate that the overwhelming majority of art depicting the human form  throughout human history have been of the female.  It has only been within the last 2,000-3,000 years, and the advent of Judeo-Christian thinking, that art turned to being male centric.  The arrogance and violence of the phallus has supplanted the gentleness, humility and nurture of the womb.  We would be wise to return to a worship of the feminine, much like early humans understood.

This next artwork reflects both paternalistic thinking and the re-birth of humanist ideals.  That reverence of humanity and its ability to reason flowered in ancient Greece.  It was replaced by moralistic Christian thinking during the so-called dark ages when reason was rejected and human flesh was demeaned.  Myths of a supernatural God were preeminent.

During the Renaissance, as we all know, a re-found appreciation for nature, as put forward by Greek philosophers Lucretius and Epicurus, led artists to once again define people by humanist ideals.  Even in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel religious paintings, one of which is shown here, the focus is not on God, but on humans.  We see bodies in their naked beauty.  We see eroticism in how Eve is the one first tempted by Satan and how she supposedly used sex to bring down Adam.  Her provocative posture, relative to Adam, seems shocking in a religious context and yet it perfectly depicts the Renaissance understanding of ourselves – as creatures of wonder, as sexual beings, as fully part of the natural world.  Once again, as with the Indonesian cave paintings and the Venus figurines, art offered a definition of us.  It is humanity that is acts as god.  It is the natural world, not a supernatural being, that is the pre-eminent reality.

Art, as we all know, takes many forms.  Art is also found in the written and spoken word.  William Shakespeare is one of the most influential of writers for his interpretations of humanity.  His descriptions of the human soul and his implicit definition of who we are stand even today as great insight.  Here is just a brief sample of his writing from the play Julius Caesar.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men. 

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; 

Omitted, all the voyage of their life 

Is bound in shallows and in miseries. 

On such a full sea are we now afloat, 

And we must take the current when it serves, 

Or lose our ventures.”

The play is a thoughtful interpretation of actual history and, indeed, of humanity.  Who and what controls our destiny?  Is it fate or God that controls us?  Or, is it our minds and our choices that map a life journey?  Shakespeare clearly believes in the latter – seeing the actions of Julius Caesar to declare himself Emperor, and assert his power to serve the needs of Rome – as decisions he alone made.   Brutus makes a similar choice to assassinate Caesar and save Roman democracy.

As an aside, Shakespeare’s words are perhaps also art from the past that can inform us, the Gathering, in our current merger deliberations.  Shall we be bound in the shallows, or will we embrace the flooding tide to explore new possibilities?

Shakespeare plumbed the complexities of the human soul in his humanist centered art  – art that sees us not as puppets but as masters of our fate.  We choose evil or good.  Do we succumb to our strong willed convictions and the arrogance of imperfect thinking, as did Caesar and Brutus, or do we listen to and negotiate with others of equally strong convictions?  The tragedy of Julius Caesar is that he and others refused the higher ethic to understand, talk to and compromise with opponents.  The story of human failure is one of competing and violent passions – Caesar against democracy; Brutus against Caesar who wanted to serve the poor and the marginal over a democratic but elitist culture.

Shakespeare’s written words define humanity as essentially good but also tempted by darker inclinations – to lust for power, for money, for the arrogance to assume one is right and all others wrong.  Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Brutus – they are all characters in whom we can see ourselves – persons with often heroic intentions but who fall due to a lack of humility and empathy.  Nevertheless, once again, existence is defined according to human terms, and not by the fiat of a mythic and callous god.

The other art form that defines who we are is music.  And, as countless experts have asserted, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, particularly its fourth choral and instrumental movement, is considered the greatest and most influential piece ever composed.  “Ode to Joy” is the classic piece that, in some ways, has been trivialized.  One critic said that Beethoven was too successful in his musical expression of the joys of human brotherhood and sisterhood.  The movement’s intricate and yet uplifting melody perfectly embodies what we universally think about our higher selves.  Here are the words of the chorus, adapted by Beethoven from a poem by Fredrich Schiller.

 

Whoever has been lucky enough

to become a friend to a friend,

Whoever has found a beloved wife,

let him join our songs of praise!

Yes, and anyone who can call one soul

his own on this earth!

Any who cannot, let them slink away

from this gathering in tears!

 

Every creature drinks in joy

at nature’s breast;

Good and Bad alike

follow her trail of roses.

She gives us kisses and wine,

a true friend, even in death;

Even the worm was given desire,

and the cherub stands before God.

 

The words embody the humanist self-definition I assert is represented in all great art.  Beethoven’s triumphal orchestral sounds evoke, without image or word, the goodness inherent in all people.  His symphony is art at the highest expression.  It is humanity’s exultant cry, much like the Indonesian cave painting.  “We are beautiful by the mere fact we live.  Our bond with the natural world is the joyous song of ages.”

I turn now from the truly sublime to what many of you might call the ridiculous – the modern art of Andy Warhol.

Even as his art is sometimes demeaned, his works have commanded some of the highest prices ever paid for paintings.  They have equally been acclaimed as some of history’s most important artworks – even as they depict the seemingly mundane and common – a Campbell’s soup can or an altered image of Marilyn Monroe.  Nevertheless, Warhol is considered an artistic genius precisely because his art depicted the popular and common.  And that describes pop art in general.  It is not art for the elites, but for the masses.  It is not art in need of academic interpretation.  It is the everyday object, image and common artifact that becomes, in all their ordinary appearance, high art.   Warhol saw beauty and meaning in the things we value as modern humans; they are things we mass produce – articles representing the height of human achievement in science and industry.  What is the image of Marilyn Monroe absent her fame in the wonder of film and TV?  What is a Campbell’s soup can without the science of mass production?  Warhol’s art does not revere the natural world.  It reveres the manufactured world – that which humans by their own hands and reasoning have fashioned.  These are artistic depictions of existence made possible by people – not nature and not God.

What we consider art is in the eye of the beholder.  A painted black square on a white canvas is praised by many art critics.  For me, a child could have painted the same.  Fortunately, most of us perceive great art when we see it, hear it or read it.  Such pieces do something to us.  They excite our minds with all kinds of thoughts and emotions.  They also provoke us to reflect about ourselves and about all humanity.  Personally, I find the Indonesian cave painting of an arm and hand stunningly profound.   It is the voice of the real Eve, the symbolic original human being.  The hand reaches outward to us and to all eternity.  “This human exists,” it seems to say.  “This human comes with good intentions.  She comes for a purpose – not as force of control and destruction – but to unite and build.  Take my hand,” she says.  “Share with me the delights of life and love, join me in both creating and succoring our sisters, brothers, sons and daughters.  Together, we are one human family, bonded in the reality of this life, and destined to do wondrous things…”

I wish us all much peace and joy.

 

 

(c) Rev. Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved

 

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Many of you may know the cartoon series “For Better of Worse” by Lynn Johnston that appears in the Sunday Enquirer.  It’s about two parents of young children trying to manage the challenges of career and everyday home life.  One of Johnston’s cartoons that appeared a few years ago, at the height of the recession, showed the mom having just lost her job.  She plaintively asks, “Without a job, who am I?”  Her husband looks at her stunned and without an answer – perplexed as many of us are at how to support those who lose their jobs.  In the final frame we see the couple’s toddler child wrapping his arms around the woman and simply answering who she is to him, “Mum” the boy says.

I shared in last week’s message the idea that we choose how we define ourselves by our beliefs about the world and about ourselves.  And this self definition has a profound impact on our actions, emotions and sense of self-worth.  While society tries to define who we are by its set of standards, we can choose to accept or reject that.   It is our definition of ourselves that matters and that dilemma is perfectly captured in the cartoon I just described.

As all of us know, when we meet someone for the first time, one of the first questions asked is “What do you do?” or “What did you do?”  Unfortunately, we and others use career and work life to define us.  We make assumptions about others based on their work – how smart they are, their work ethic, their education, their wealth, and their importance.  Too often we assume someone is either worthy or not based solely on their present or past job.

We also define our own sense of self-worth by our work.  Many of us are caught in the cultural stereotype that persons holding jobs with lots of power, high income and high prestige somehow have greater value.  We are caught in standards that tell us, for instance, that a movie star is of more value to society than is a teacher, social worker or homemaker.  My mom is someone who repeatedly told others she was of no use to the world since she did not work outside the home.

Today’s fluid economy also takes its toll on how we define ourselves by work.  No longer do most people remain in the same job at the same organization for a lifetime.  Who are we if our jobs continually change?  Added to that is how technology affects work and thus one’s self-definition.  Fifty years ago, people could usually leave their work behind at the office and have separate lives at home.  They had distinct identities that went beyond one’s job.  Technology, however, has tied people to their work 24 hours a day.  It is increasingly difficult to define ourselves outside of our work life.

Finally, changing work standards for women and men are also harmful to how we define ourselves.  70% of women with children under seventeen now work outside the home.  Young women say they WANT a career and actively pursue them.  But the demands of work and the desire to advance in a career mean that many women no longer define themselves as “mum”, “wife”, “partner” or complete person irregardless of career.

And the same pressure exists for men.  Many working men today want to define themselves by more than their job – by working significantly less hours, by being better partners, active and involved dads, sons, and friends – but they are finding that if they do so, their paychecks and possibility for promotion are limited.  In today’s fragile economy, the pressure to work harder both at home and at the workplace is intense.  Who is a woman with children if she is does not define herself as a mother or as a job title?  Who is a man caught in the same dilemma?  How can we define ourselves in a meaningful way that somehow moves beyond this problem?

Experts assert that no longer can we define ourselves by what we do.  Increasingly, defining who we are must be holistic and span across the range of activities in which we are involved.  What is our one true self?  Who am I both at work, at home and at play?  What are my transcendent beliefs and universal values that define me no matter what I do or where I am?

Importantly, we must move away from calling people by their job titles, by defining who they are by what they do for a living, by stereotyping human value by the supposed prestige of a particular career.  For one, I do not wish to be addressed in person as “Pastor Doug”.  I understand this is a title of respect and affection, but why are not others addressed in a similar manner using their job title and name?  My job is no more special than any other.  This kind of paradigm shift away from using work as a person’s status level will not be easy.  An athlete, actor or doctor will too often earn instant status over a teacher, nurse, social worker or homemaker.  To change this thinking will involve changing the culture.  But as we often say, we must be the change we want to see.

I often ask myself and others what it is we want to remember and cherish as we near the last days of our lives.  What memories will we hold dear?  What relationships will matter?  What accomplishments will provide meaning and perspective to our lives?  What legacies do we wish to leave behind?  We have the ability right now to shape our meaning and purpose.  Do we live to work or do we work in order to really live – to care, love, learn, listen and share?  Ultimately, the entry in the dictionary of life under our particular names must be written by us.

When I am talked about after my death, I do not want any of the jobs I have held to be used to describe who I am.  They are tasks that I performed.  They are not who I am at my core.  I want meaning and intrinsic values to define me.  Those will hopefully reflect, however imperfectly, the things I practice and do.  Neither saint nor sinner, I want to be understood by what I choose to believe.

My hopes about how I want to be remembered are consistent with modern ideas about human cognitive abilities.  How we think about life and how we define ourselves need not be determined by outside factors.  We choose what we think and believe.  We choose to feel or not the whole range of emotions and attitudes we adopt.  That includes how we think about and define who we are.  While circumstances and forces beyond our control can influence us, ultimately we decide what to think and feel and thus how we act.  This speaks both to the power and difficulty of cognitive change.  It is quite easy to tell someone to positively change their thinking and how they see themselves.  It is quite another matter to actually do so.  Far be it for me or anyone else to trivialize the process.  From personal experience, I understand how difficult cognitive change can be.

So, how we define ourselves is under our direct control.  Instead of allowing work to define us, we must first begin to change our thinking – about others and about ourselves.  We can begin by not asking soon after meeting other people what they do or have done for work.  We might, instead, seek a better understanding of others by asking about relationships, hobbies, books they read, and things that give them meaning.  We can better understand people in ways beyond stereotyping their intelligence, status and value by their career.

Men and women who choose to work within the home as a parent, homemaker and care giver, as one example, can no longer be demeaned.  We can begin by fully honoring what they do.  As we do so, others will too.  The hands that rock the cradle, as the old adage goes, change the world.

We must respect any honest labor that is diligently performed.  People whom we manage must be given opportunities for self-growth outside of the workplace.  Their families and home life must matter.  Longer maternity leave must be given.  Childcare should be provided.  Mandatory limits on hours worked – not by governments but by employers – must be set.  No employee should wrestle with competing demands of workplace and home.  Both are important but family and home life must always come first.  People are far more valuable than money.

Trust of an employer is the number one factor people site in whether or not they are happy at work.  As a part of trusting an employer, people say they want to be respected for their work, they want reasonable work hours and duties, they seek ample vacation time and personal rest, and they desire salaries that are fair.  Only by doing such things can we elevate work beyond its use as way to define people.  If all feel respected in their work, nobody need feel superior or inferior.  Certain jobs will lose their function as a means for status.

We must offer the same respect to ourselves.  No longer can we define ourselves by our work.  That means we no longer give it the highest priority in our lives.  No longer do we put it first and the well-being of families, partners, friends and our inner peace second.  Once again, this is a choice we must make.

Some of you know I was on vacation for ten days last month.  To my shame, I failed to let many of you know that in advance.  I failed to gently set boundaries on my work while I was on vacation by asking for time off for everything but congregation emergencies.  That is something I never do.  Even when technically off, I don’t actually turn myself off.  But I should have for at least this one vacation time.

I don’t say this as a complaint but as an admonishment and as an example of how I and others stay connected to technology and the constant demands of work and time.  I took time away from relationships that matter most to me in order to answer emails, make phone calls and deal with matters that could have waited.  I failed myself and others by not carving out just ten days of uninterrupted disconnection.  I allowed my own ideas about self definition to control me.  “I’m a Pastor whose work is just too important”, I implicitly told myself.  Instead, I need to define myself in broader terms as someone with more more important values.

Beyond refusing to define others by their work, beyond defining ourselves by our work, we can also ask that our culture and society do the same.  The United States ranks well behind other developed nations in the amount of benefits given to workers.   Paid time-off, provision of childcare and paid maternity leave are all much higher in most other developed nations.  As I’ve said earlier, this democratizes work.  It establishes that all who work have dignity and worth beyond job title and economic value to the employer.  Workers have value as human beings.

While it can be argued some nations have pushed the limit in granting greater benefits and that their economies suffer in lower productivity and gross domestic product, the question must be asked: what is it we really value?  People or commodities?  Relationships or wealth?  We cannot have it all and I am not so utopian as to believe we can have unlimited benefits.  Work has value and economies that are not based on diligent labor cannot thrive and thus cannot create jobs that allow more people to eat, live and find happiness.   But there is a reasonable balance and our culture is out of balance.  We worship at the false gods of wealth, power and status as the standards that both define people and that truly matter.

What must truly define us are the universal values to which we each aspire.  How large are our hearts?  How selfless are we?  How are we helping to change the world for the better?  How gentle are we when we speak?  How humble do we interact with others?  How diligently do we work to understand the needs, thoughts, dreams, hurts and fears of others?  How are we a force for good?

While we all want to be appreciated for skills and talents, it is our larger values that ought to define us.  Do we give to, reach out to, listen to and serve people at work and at home?  Do all who know us define us by our hearts and not our jobs?  Are we the same person no matter where we are?

These are questions we can aspire to answer affirmatively.  These are questions that will move us beyond seeing work as a means to status and definition.  Yes, we work to eat, clothe and shelter ourselves while enjoying modest pleasures.  But, we do not live to work as the only task set before us.  Who we are, at our deepest inner selves, is so much richer, complex and beautiful than our jobs.

(c) Rev. Doug Slagle, Minister to the Gathering, All Rights Reserved.

 

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Our reading this morning reflects some of how I came to my current beliefs.  I hope you will indulge me as I relate to you some of my story…

Merriam Webster dictionary defines an epiphany to be a sudden perception of the essential  meaning of something and an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.  I compare an epiphany to an “aha!” moment – a time when one understands a new truth.  Most people have had at least one major epiphany in their lives.  For better or worse, I’ve had three.  Each of them revealed to me aspects about life and myself that did not fundamentally change who I am – but they significantly updated what I like to call my personal operating system.

Experts tell us that our beliefs largely determine our identity.  We form our foundational beliefs when we are children.  Throughout life we update them to fit new understandings and new situations.  Most belief updates are minor.  Some are big and are what I call epiphanies – they significantly alter what we previously believed.  Our beliefs serve as maps for how we function, how we relate with others and how we think about self-worth.  Hopefully, our beliefs are well chosen and spring from our inner selves – the part of us that I believe is good, loving and open.

My first epiphany came eighteen years ago.  My youngest daughter had been invited to sing with a local church children’s choir.  Naturally, I attended her performances which were a part of Sunday services.  That was a new experience for me since I had grown up unchurched and with little understanding of anything spiritual.  Life was about me, my family and my close friends.  I had not engaged in thinking about issues of meaning, purpose and universal truths.

But the minister at this church spoke of a loving God who wants to forgive us for past wrongdoing and who seeks our love in return.  As this Pastor said, people are born imperfect and prone to be selfish.  They often want only what is good for themselves and thus will mostly disregard the needs of others.  Evil in the world is caused by such selfishness.  The answer he put forward was to believe in God, accept his forgiveness and thereby become a new and better person.

I had been living most of my life up to that time as a closeted gay man.  I was married, had two daughters and wanted to be a supposedly normal, macho guy.   I was not acting on my thoughts and I tried my best to deny them.  Society and my parents had all convinced me that being homosexual was terrible and wrong.  Ultimately, however, my inward thoughts and how I outwardly lived were dissonant.  I accepted the idea that being gay was wrong and so I tried to live as a straight person even though my same sex thoughts did not go away.

And so this Pastor’s words about a loving God who would forgive me and change me were strongly attractive to me.   While thinking that one can be saved from hell through belief in a supernatural god is simplistic – one that reason ought to reject, such is the emotional draw of religion for many otherwise intelligent people around the world.  I had my first epiphany – I chose to believe in God.

I very quickly dove headfirst into this new belief system.  I read all I could about it.  I studied the Bible and Christian theologies, I attended church regularly and joined groups that promoted so-called Godly beliefs and behavior.  I attended Seminary for a while and soon became something of a poster boy for how God supposedly changes people when they believe in him.

After several years of active involvement in church and learning about the Bible and God, I had my second epiphany.   My personal operating system got updated.  If God truly changes a person from thinking selfishly, then it followed for me that one should believe in serving others more than the self – particularly those who hurt, suffer and live on the margins.  I decided to leave my previous career in healthcare administration and become a Pastor.  I was determined to find a purpose for my life.  I was determined to try and live not just for myself and my immediate family, but for others too.

While I fully knew then and know now that people serve others in many ways – that being a Pastor is nothing more special then being a teacher, nurse, attorney, social worker or any other career, I felt a calling to do what I think Pastors should do – encourage, listen, care for and serve people in ways that build belief in something greater than the self.

And so I was hired as an associate Pastor at a large, conservative church on the east side of this city.  I was put in charge of all aspects of Pastoral Care for the congregation – listening to people and their struggles, comforting the sick and dying, visiting folks in hospitals and nursing homes, performing weddings and funerals, and organizing efforts to serve the poor, needy and hurting.  I enjoyed meeting all kinds of people but I especially felt called to befriend and listen to the struggles and needs of people who were a bit different from the majority – those who were slightly odd, who were poor, sick, depressed, out of work, or eccentric.  Some in that church teased me that I was a Pastor to the so called fruits and nuts.  For me, that is what any caring person does.   She or he does not reach out to those who already have money, power, or prestige.  Those people already have their security blankets.  My second epiphany revealed to me that the world can be a cruel one – that people do hurt – and that my purpose is to live in a way that helps make things better.

My third epiphany, and up until now my last one, came as I further evolved and updated my thinking.  I had gradually come to see that God is not real unless there is tangible proof of her existence.  After several years, God had not done as promised.  I had not been changed.  I had not been able to pray away the gay.  While some Christians might say that I was not diligent enough or that I did not truly believe, they are wrong.  I desperately wanted to change.  I desperately wanted to be what I thought was normal.  I desperately did not want to go to hell which is where the Bible says I will go.

I came to see that it was not God that was changing the world.  It was not even his people who changed it.  Generous, caring and selfless people, no matter what they believe – or do not believe – are the ones who help change the world for good.  Gandhi, as one example and someone whom I studied, had not believed in a Jewish, Christian or Muslim God.  And yet he taught more about charity, peace, social justice and goodness than perhaps any other person in history.  His words and his deeds helped transform communities, his nation and the world.  Crucially, I discovered that the wisdom and actions of history’s prophets – ones like the historical Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harvey Milk – they are ones to study and from whom humanity can derive insight.

Where was a theistic god in speaking up for the desperately poor of India?  Where was god in building a peaceful and non-violent world?  Where was god in eradicating disease, poverty, hunger and discrimination?  Just as he was absent in my life to change me from gay to straight, he was also absent in the world to change it for the better.

God is not floating on some ethereal cloud and shaping the world.  Nor is he shaping all who believe in him to be more loving.  Indeed, I quickly saw that many who profess a belief in a theistic god are decidedly unloving, hypocritical and selfish – in a way that no religion promotes.   I further learned of the many flaws and inconsistencies in the Bible.  If God loved humanity, why would he encourage the killing of thousands of men, women and children as he does in parts of the Old Testament?  Where is there evidence of his creative power?  Where is there proof of miracles, virgin births, and resurrection from the dead – except in Bible stories?  Anyone may believe as they wish, and I strongly support that, but if beliefs are proven by actions, then where are the verifiable deeds of a theistic god?  After many years of belief in God and praying for change, I was still gay.  The world was still full of hurting people.  Proof of miracles was nonexistent.

And so I had my third epiphany.  I came out of the closet.  I finally determined there was no possibility to change that small part of me.  I had to live according to my inward truth.  Ironically, it was something that Jesus is quoted as having taught that helped me.  He said, “the truth will set you free.”  And I had yearned to be free for so long.  Finally, I understood that only my inner self and the choices I make about what I believe – only those will make me free.  No god and no religious belief would do it.  I had to carefully choose, from the depths of heart and soul, what is true and thus what to believe.

And if God was not true for me, as someone who had fervently tried to believe, who had dedicated his life to that belief, then God, as he is represented in a literal understanding of Scripture, is not true.  I came out of the closet both as a gay man and as one who had peered behind the curtain of religious belief and found it wanting.

But as with many things in life, my freedom did not come without cost.  After coming out, I was immediately rejected by the church I had served for almost seven years.  I had soothed, cared for, married and buried many of its leaders and members.  And yet I became “persona non grata” to most of them.  I had not changed who I was.  I had simply revealed some small aspect of my inner being.  This almost total rejection by my church family only confirmed the reality that god could not exist.  Where was he in the hour one of his hurting people needed mercy?  Sadly, he was manifested in the judging, hurtful and unkind ones who told me that I was evil.

After a year of feeling angry at anyone who was even slightly religious, I was encouraged to attend a small downtown church that I was told would meet my changed beliefs.  That church was the Gathering where I immediately felt welcomed, honored and accepted.  After two years of membership at the Gathering, I submitted my name as candidate to be the sole Pastor of the congregation – after the founding Pastor announced he was moving.  Since I had not previously served as a preaching Pastor, I was hired on a trial basis for one year.  Five years later, almost to this day, I am still with the Gathering.  It is a congregation I love and respect not for being in any way perfect, which it is not – as I am not.  I love its people for trying their best to be a loving community both to each other and to the outside world.

Fortunately, my evolving beliefs and epiphanies about life and this world happened at a perfect time for my role as Pastor at the Gathering.  We have come to see that God is not an outside Being working for our welfare.  He or she is us – each and every person.  It is people who are to feed the hungry, serve the poor, tend the sick, listen to the broken hearted, advocate for the oppressed and strive for a better world.  It is people who consciously make the choices to be humble, giving, non-judgmental, kind-hearted, and loving.  It is we who encourage and help one another to learn and grow – seeking the inner changes that help us go out into the world to do the work we are meant to do.  We live for a purpose.  It is not so that we can die with the satisfaction that we have made only our own lives better.  It is not to honor a god that is either non-existent or impotent.  It is to leave behind a legacy of service to all humanity and to the universe of all things.

In one brief sentence, my life and my statement of purpose echoes the famous one spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr.  “The arc of my pursuit for personal meaning is a long one, but it bends toward compassion for others…and for myself.”

Even so, my story is nothing more special than any of your life stories.  In many ways, it is smaller – for it took me until mid-life to determine my core beliefs.  Many of you likely arrived at such beliefs at much younger ages.  I applaud you and am humbled when I hear your life stories.

Most of all, I hope my words about how beliefs and actions define who we are will resonate.  Both the Gathering and Northern Hills find themselves at a crossroads – potential change is ahead and that is both scary and exciting.  I have found in my life that when I was afraid to change, when I refused to honor my inner beliefs, I was caught in meaningless self-deception.  The Buddha said that the only constant in life is impermanence – the fact that all things change.  Instead of holding onto the past, instead of refusing to evolve, we must instead embrace the fact that moving forward, that finding new epiphanies, is good.  Whether or not our two congregations decide to merge, we can know that by embracing the possibility of change, we will have already changed.  Neither of our two congregations will again be the same after this undertaking.

The Gathering must confront its own tendencies to complacency and instead fully embrace it’s stated belief in progressive change.  We cannot afford to stand still.  We cannot wait for busloads of people to find us, volunteer with us and share our burdens.  Remaining as we are will only breed a steady decline.  We must go out into the world and be forces of change – not to serve our needs but to better enable our beliefs and our deeds.  Change must likely come to us at some new location, in new ways of telling others what we are all about, in new ways of making a difference.

And, while I do not intimately know about issues within this Northern Hills congregation, I imagine some of them are the same as those that face the Gathering.  I encourage us all to look around this room and see the power and goodness inherent in each person – to see the hunger for meaning, the hope each has in better lives for all people, the desire for purpose and lasting legacy.  It is said that churches must never become dusty museums of old ways and supposedly saintly people.  They must instead be vital and active centers of healing and growth for imperfect people – for their members, their Pastors and those outside their doors.  We will foster no guilt, no shame, no burden born of a sense of obligation.  Instead, as congregations who share many of the same values, we set ourselves the vision to make a difference, to choose our beliefs carefully and speak them with wisdom.  We then pledge to go out and be the hands and feet of change in a world that desperately needs loving communities of servants.  Long live Northern Hills Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and long live the Gathering.

 

 

 

(c) Doug Slagle, Pastor at the Gathering, UCC, All Rights Reserved

 

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Ancient Israel was said to be a specially favored nation because it sought to follow a god that cares for and loves people. For a time, this belief was put into practice as Jews built a society of equality and freedom. As time passed, however, many Jews, like all people, turned to the dark side of their souls and began to favor wealth, luxury and ease all at the expense of fellow Jews. The Old Testament prophet Isaiah spoke strongly to his fellow Jews about that attitude, “This is the kind of religious practice I want from you, let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people. Share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless. Give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help.”
A prophet at that time was a person who speaks the wisdom of God. In many ways, contemporary prophets like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. also spoke what they perceived to be the heart of universal goodness. Jesus is perhaps the model prophet and his teaching was focused primarily on living true to the universal ideals of compassion, justice and serving others. As he famously said, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me…whatever you did not do for one of the least of your brothers and sisters, you did not do for me.” Jesus clearly equates great sin with a lack of concern for the marginalized.
History’s great prophets have therefore challenged people to act according to what is universally considered good – to think less of the self, to be humble, gentle and, above all, others focused. For most prophets, the primary sin at work in our world is human pride and selfishness. Sins of greed and indifference toward the poor, sick and oppressed are major concerns of prophets and they were emphatically condemned by them. Common to prophetic thinking is a desire to liberate those who suffer and who are treated poorly by power elites. Great prophets have throughout history sought to change greed prone human society into one liberated by a god force of universal ethics.
As I have sought this month – and as I hope you have also pondered – there are multiple ways to consider what constitutes theology. Under traditional religious thinking, theology is concerned with a philosophy of god as a supernatural, other-worldly being. But just as secular philosophies have evolved over the ages, so too have ideas about god. Theology need no longer only imply a study of God as a grey bearded puppet master determining our lives and our after-life destiny. This month I’ve looked at Pantheism as an alternate theology. Last week, I also looked at Civic theology as a non-religious understanding of American political and Presidential speech about god. In both of those cases, god is not a literal being but rather a an abstract concept and an embodiment of social justice ideals. For today, I assert that another theology about god is a both an abstract concept that is also a liberating one. A little ‘g’ god is found not only in the universe of things. God is found in the hopes, dreams and suffering of the poor and marginalized. God is found in work to liberate humanity both of greed, AND of poverty. God, in this sense, is a force for social change.
We know that many people around the world are not granted equal access to basic resources or to the universal freedoms of opportunity, life and happiness. The dark side of the human soul leads many to take more than their fair share, to be arrogant, haughty and indifferent. The dark side of the human soul leads some to demean and restrain others so that their lives can operate based on one’s selfish terms – for one’s personal benefit and according to one’s personal beliefs. If that means others are denied their innate human rights, so be it.
That leads me to my third “different theology” in this September message series – a different theology that speaks of a liberating God. This theology is a modern one begun in the 1950’s in Latin America by Catholic Priests who saw the stark disparity between the extremely rich and the terribly poor. But these Priests also knew the teachings of Jesus and other prophets who said the heart of the Divine is with those who suffer. Such a theology is often derided by orthodox Christians as being heresy. It is derided by many politicians and elites as socialist and more like Marxism than religion. These are false accusations born more of fear than of truth. The clear reality of liberation theology is that it clearly reflects the teachings of both Old Testament prophets and of Jesus who acted as social and spiritual change agents. Indeed, liberation theology, I assert, is more closely aligned to the teachings of Jesus than any other theology I have studied. Jesus was born poor. He lived as a working class poor man. He hung out with everyday people and made a special effort to befriend outcasts. He was a radical who dared to challenge arrogant and hypocritical religious and political elites. The heart of God, he implicitly taught over and over again, is focused not on money, wealth or power. It is to insure all people, especially those who hurt, have the basic rights and needs of life.
This liberating god is one that dramatically re-defines and reinterprets traditional theologies about God. This is a little ‘g’ god of justice totally different from a supernatural god of most Christian or Jewish churches and synagogues. A liberating god is solely concerned about injustice in the world created by human sin. This god favors the poor and imparts its special, I repeat special, grace on them and on others who are oppressed. According to one of the foremost of liberation theologians, John Sobrino – who is also a Jesuit Priest, “The poor are accepted as constituting the primary recipients of the gospel and, therefore, as having an inherent capacity of understanding it better than anyone else.”
While orthodox Christians widely dislike this theology because it threatens their own selfish perception of God’s grace, it is a fundamentally true understanding about how and why the poor are attracted to a god force of hope. Only by finding oneself without any hope and without any opportunity does one turn to a god of mercy and justice. This is a god of brokenness much like a crucified Jesus. Only those who are poor in spirit, broken and without the comforts and necessities of life can truly humble themselves before a force greater than themselves. This is the liberating god celebrated by African-American slaves, of poor farmers in Latin America who flock to charismatic churches, and of contemporary Hispanics, immigrants and blacks who, lacking the comforting cocoon of privilege, turn to a type of religion that tells them they are worthy and deserving of justice.
This liberating god is therefore not one for the after-life but rather one for the here and now – consistent with the declaration by Jesus that the kingdom of god is at hand. This kingdom is one concerned with present day matters of mercy and universal human rights. God is concerned with right now and right here. He or she is not sitting and waiting in some other-worldly place.
Even more important, a liberating god force is not concerned with doctrine, dogma or beliefs. It is focused solely on deeds and practice. Echoing the words found in the Biblical book of James, it is a theology that emphasizes works of service and compassion. James tells us that any belief without corresponding good deeds is an empty belief. How many theologies, religions and churches today are essentially empty? As written in the book of James, faith without works is dead. A liberating god, while not being a supernatural being, is nevertheless one totally focused on good works. Show me your good works, James wrote, and I will show you true godliness. This is a theology put into practice versus a theology that merely talks. To use latin derived words, it is orthopraxy versus orthodoxy, right practice versus right belief. A liberating god force is the expression of love as it is worked out by doing good instead of by piously preaching about it.
According to Duke University Divinity School professor Frederick Herzog, liberation theology is far removed from the ivory tower of academia, philosophy and the study of Scripture. As he says, “it carves out the truth in toil and sweat in the midst of conflict.” That conflict, he says, comes as the poor and marginalized confront sin that is found in this world – the sins of greed, power, and arrogance. The oppressed, Herzog claims, are liberated and saved as they understand their lot in life is not to simply endure suffering until an after-life of heaven. It is to seek and demand right now the rights taken from them.
Those who already have the comforts of life are also liberated and symbolically saved when they have their own epiphany – that to be good and righteous in this life, to be a person who acts according to a liberating god force, one must serve, share and care for others. This is not a simple noblesse oblige paternalism by those who have. It is not handing out a few crumbs to the have nots. It is a fundamental shift in outlook and practice. One’s theology and philosophy about god and life is no longer seen through a prism of individualism – what is in it for me in this life and how will I be rewarded in the afterlife. Instead, we live for a higher purpose to help realize a type of heaven on earth for everyone.
Liberation theology is therefore difficult to believe and practice. It asks each person to awaken to what defines god, goodness and love. It asks for sacrifice, for unconditional love, for humility in those with status and money. We cannot say we are loving people if we ignore racism, sexism or homophobia in our world. We cannot say we are loving people if we see poverty around us and do nothing to address it. We cannot say we are loving people if we see others denied the basics of life and do nothing to provide them. A liberating god force both manifests love and demands it, through tangible deeds of service and advocacy for the poor and outcasts.
For many of us who lament how fundamentalist religions have hijacked notions of god, I nevertheless still find a sense of god in our everyday world. In the streets and byways of this city I see god in the faces and actions of people who seemingly have no hope – but yet who do. It’s found in the persistence of working single moms raising their children, the entrepreneurial spirit in men who wash windows for a few dollars, the tired but still alive hope in homeless young people seeking to craft a better life, the lines of hungry waiting for a bag of groceries at the Freestore. I felt god firsthand almost every Tuesday last year when I and others tutored at Rothenberg just up the street from here. Bright eyed kids living in one of the most economically challenged communities in our nation would rush to greet us. DaVosha, the little girl I tutored, would usually run to me and wrap her arms around my legs in a big hug.
I could contrast her hope and child-like enthusiasm with that of my own girls when they were growing up – only my girls placed their hope in family, their nice shiny school, their safe neighborhood, their comfortable lives of relative privilege. DaVosha likely does not share those hopes in things. She has a hope in something more intangible. Hers is a hope not in me as her tutor or in any other who serves her – it’s a trust in the power of love, in a god force that somehow leads people to serve and give back. It’s nothing special about me or others. We are nothing. It’s something special in the liberating god force at work – one that loves and gives hope to the hopeless. One that animates every human heart to do something meaningful. Above all, it is a force of love, a god force, that can and does loose the bonds of injustice to set the captives free…

(c) Doug Slagle, Pastor at the Gathering.  All Rights Reserved.

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The following are quotes from American Presidents. While not a test, I encourage you to think who might have uttered them. I also encourage your thought on why such statements are the currency of Presidential and American political speech.
According to one President, “The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forbears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” (Who said this?) John F. Kennedy said these words in his Inaugural Address.
Another President said, “It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors.” (Who said this?) George Washington said that.
Finally, one President prayed this prayer in a speech, “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. We know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.” (Who said this?) Franklin D. Roosevelt so prayed on June 7, 1944 – the day after the D-Day Normandy landings in Europe.
Such quotes capture over two-hundred years of American Presidential words about God. As much as many people see the marriage of government and religion as contrary to the American ideal of separation of church and state, words invoking the power and protection of God are a part of our national history, vocabulary, and identity. Every US President has publicly called upon God in some form. They have seemingly wrapped God in an American flag and employed God as an implicit benefactor of our nation. Indeed, most of our Presidents have acted as a national Pastor – one who utters our collective prayers, soothes us with assurances of God’s concern in times of distress and embodies all that we supposedly believe. And yet no President has called our nation a theocracy. All have claimed to lead a secular Republic. All at least voiced tolerance for anyone, no matter their faith.
Are Presidential supplications to God mere words intended to pacify the most religious among us? Are they insincere? Are they the stuff of political posturing? Or is there, in many of the thousands of Presidential statements that name God, a different theology that is non-religious – a theology that refers not to a Biblical God but to a concept of god and, most importantly, to eternally human values?
A further question results when we investigate what many Presidents believed to be God – or at least to what they referred to when they named God. For instance, there are many statements by the founders of our nation which invoke the name of God. But most of the founders were Deists who believed in a creative god force of nature that is discerned by reason and observation. This Deist god is not supernatural and performs no miracles or other mythical types of actions. A Deist god allows the universe to function according to physical laws of nature.
Many Pastors and religious leaders have called Deism a false belief and assert that it is, in reality, Atheism. Of the seven men considered the most significant founders of our nation – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Jay, Hamilton, and Madison – only John Jay is said to have been an orthodox Christian. All others spoke of god in Deist terms and almost never referred to Christ or belief in the kind of salvation said to be offered by him. These men rarely attended church, often refused to take communion and avoided religious leaders. Thomas Jefferson was strongly opposed in his bid to become President by many Pastors because he was an avowed Deist. Jefferson did not believe in miracles described in the Bible, he rejected the idea of the Trinity, and he said the virgin birth is a hocus-pocus myth. He re-wrote large portions of the Bible by deleting verses that alluded to anything supernatural or miraculous. But, as President and almost until the day he died, he often wrote of God and the Providence of God. That kind of paradox – to speak of God but not exhibit much religiosity is true of many Presidents.
Despite this paradox, many contemporary Christians mistakenly use the words of Washington, Jefferson and others to state that America was founded on explicitly Christian beliefs despite the fact that the constitution never uses the words God, Bible, Christian, Christ, Creator or Divine. Christians claim the same with almost all other Presidents as a way to insist that America is a Christian nation – even though almost no President has ever uttered in his seemingly religious statements the words “Christ” or “Christian.” And yet, intonations about God by Presidents sit uneasy in our minds. Where is the wall that allegedly divides church from state? Where is the acknowledgement that many Americans have not and do not believe in a personal, supernatural god?
I assert, however, that while some Presidents opportunistically have used the name of god in order to cloak themselves in the mantle of a Christian God, especially in years since Jimmy Carter freely discussed his Born Again Christianity, most Presidents have spoken a much different form of theology – a Civic theology or Civil Religion of universal ideals. God, in this sense, is not the god of the Bible. In American civil religion, god is an embodiment of justice, mercy and equality. God is the natural force behind universal human rights, the force that proclaims the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. God, according to this non-religious civic theology, is the intangible impulse behind American ideals embodied in our secular national scriptures – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address.
And that speaks to my purpose in this September message series of “Seeking a Different Theology”. When considering religion, we have too often divided into opposing sides. We understand god through either a prism of belief or of unbelief. Our theology is either Atheist or religiously theistic. Instead, my September message series intends to ask the question: is there a different way, a way found someplace in the grey and ill-defined middle, a way to find some small turf of common ground on which both Atheist and theist can unite? Might we, as seekers after truth, find some balance between a belief in the power of science and reason, and the mysterious forces at work in the universe that deal with meaning, transcendence, and universal values?
I maintain that American Civil Religion does just that. As such, can we as spiritually open minded people get past the seemingly offensive religious words used by most Presidents and find, instead, a broader and truly universal celebration of human rights? I turn to Abraham Lincoln as perhaps the best expositor of a national non-religious religion. He has been called the father of American Civil Religion – one based not on traditional theological belief in an all powerful God but, instead, in a reverence for national virtues like equality, freedom and justice. Lincoln, as reported by both his wife and his best friend William Herndon, was deeply spiritual but not a religious Christian. As President, he eloquently equated god with the values we hold dear as Americans. In his mind, god and the ethic of freedom were one and the same.
Lincoln’s use of God’s name in his speeches were far from being evangelical or even nationalistic. He never claimed that God had chosen America as his or her exceptional example of a moral nation. Rather, Lincoln claimed that our values, and most importantly our protection of freedom, are ones derived from a universal power that he generically called God. America is worth saving and honoring because it aspires to follow nature’s god that grants us the universal rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. America was created to insure such rights for its citizens and it is therefore a nation worth protecting because of its adherence to those eternal ethics. America is not good because it was specially anointed by a Christian God. America is good because of its stated values.
In his Gettysburg Address, considered by many historians as the single greatest American speech and one that epitomizes American civil theology, Lincoln famously began, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Two short paragraphs later, Lincoln concluded, “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
It is important to note that two written versions of Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863 do not contain the words “under god”. Eyewitness accounts also do not claim he spoke those words. At a later date, however, Lincoln signed and dated a copy which does contain that phrase and it is that version which has become the official one. Nevertheless, with or without the naming of God, the speech borrowed heavily from the cadence and phrasing of the Bible. His famous words “four score and seven years ago” echo those found in the Psalms: “three score and ten years ago.” The words “brought forth” are those used in the Gospel of Luke to describe Mary’s birth of Jesus. And his final words “shall not perish” are the same as those reported in Luke to have been spoken by Jesus at his crucifixion.
According to Robert Bellah, who wrote a landmark article on American civil religion in 1968, the Gettysburg Address is a perfect example of our national non-religious religion. Lincoln described an America conceived not by god or God’s intentions, but rather by a purely human intention to promote universal ideals which by themselves were godly. America began because of a proposition that humans are born both free and equal. The actions of the founding fathers, the efforts of Americans since 1776, the sacrifice of Union soldiers on the fields of Gettysburg – all these were done, according to Lincoln, so that those propositions of freedom and equality would not end. Americans therefore bow in reverence not to a Supreme Being but rather to supreme ideas. That is our civil religion.
Lincoln beautifully framed the American story around a subtle analogy with the birth, life and death of Jesus. That symbolism and use of Jesus themes further defines both his beliefs and those of an American civic theology. Americans, Lincoln believed, are united not by a religion that worships Christ. We are united by a civic religion focused on the concept of a god of ideas – on a set of values similar to those of Jesus, ones we hold as self-evident, eternal and even mystical. That is an American religion of universal principles, Lincoln implicitly asserted, of Washington, Jefferson and all other great activists in American history. I assert that is the civic religion of other Presidential reformers like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, Obama and, indeed, of all Americans who believe in freedom, equality and social justice.
It is interesting to further note that Lincoln’s other famous Gettysburg phrase was borrowed from a well-known Unitarian minister of the time, Theodore Parker, who said in a sermon that upholding the ideals of liberty and equality demanded a democratic government “of all the people, by all the people, for all the people – a government after the principles of eternal justice…” The sermon likely caught Lincoln’s attention because it so well described his personal faith in a god found in the universe as a whole, a god force that embodies eternally sacred values. Lincoln was nothing if not a great politician – in the Gettysburg Address he turned pious, evangelical and often hypocritical religiosity on its head – he used its phrases and its cadences to speak of an inclusive civic theology that united instead of divided.
In that regard, modern Christian fundamentalists and my own experience with some of them have nevertheless caused me to cynically discount anything that sounds traditionally religious. When I hear a politician invoke the name of God, I’m often turned off. Just a few weeks ago, President Obama asked that God both bless a murdered journalist and America itself. They were soothing words designed to comfort our shocked sensibilities. I cannot know what motivated Obama or any other President to utter those words – “may God bless America.” But I find in my cynicism a jaded thinking that is angry not at the words but at their often exploitative use.
By offering today a different theology, much like I offered last week in the Pantheism of Albert Einstein, I call both myself and you to a less cynical perspective on American intonations of god. Much like what Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln believed about god, I subscribe to a divine force of goodness and beauty that operates and animates the world. Universal values and ethics that were true ten thousand years ago, are true today and will be true ten thousand years from now – these are foundational American beliefs that are not unique to us but rather ones we aspire to uphold.
As such, we do not need to flinch with disapproval every time we hear the name of God invoked to bless America or, indeed, to bless any of us. Nor do I believe we should discredit the words of many past Presidents and our nation’s founders who spoke the name of God. I believe they mostly referred not to a Christian or any other religiously specific god. Nor did many of them refer to a god who favored America. Rather, I believe our American theology seeks to honor, like we do, the eternal god force of goodness – the god force that blesses any government founded on liberty and equality, the god force that compels a government to protect persons denied such rights, the god force that asks of nations that they insure the basics of happiness for their citizens. That’s a civic non-religious religion I am proud to proclaim and one I try to follow.

 

(c) Doug Slagle, Pastor at the Gathering, UCC, All Rights Reserved

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Many of you may have heard of a recent church trend with the formation of Atheist congregations that meet weekly, sing communal songs, listen to messages and engage in serving their local communities – much like many other religiously based assemblies of Christians, Jews or Muslims. As oxymoronic as this trend seems to many people, it likely reflects some envy on the part of many Atheists who want all the positives of church experience, but without religious faith. They have implicitly recognized the advantages of attending and joining a church community.
Even so, I posit a more nuanced explanation for the rise of Atheist churches. Many Atheists have become dissatisfied with an outright rejection of theism. They want something more than a negative belief. They seek something positive, uplifting and perhaps even transcendent. Whether or not some Atheists admit it, they seek mystery, inspiration, and awe. For many people who do not believe in a personal, all powerful and all knowing God, including myself, belief in the power of science to explain all things is unsatisfying. Science offers an incomplete understanding of the mysteries we ponder – why are we here, what purpose we serve, what created the original stuff from which all else is derived?
In that sense, I’m a seeker far more than I am a “rejecter”. As with many things in life, I’ve come to a conclusion that anything founded on negativity is not so good. I’d rather focus on what is positive and so, instead of speaking against something, I find what it is I can be in favor. I don’t reject god as much as I seek a positive god concept within the confines of a natural universe. A god force is out there in some form and within some structure. (I use the word, little ‘g’ ‘god’, very carefully here.). For me, god is a function of the observable, natural world even if humans do not fully understand all aspects of a universal force that might loosely be called god. God, as a function of nature, is a great mystery, a force of wonder, a function of exquisite complexity discovered in physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry. To believe in this type of a natural god is, by definition, the opposite of Atheism. I assert a positive belief in a force that is theistic in terms of it being a type of god. As such, I’m a non-religious theist.
This belief of mine is certainly nothing new. Most say a form of this natural theism originated in the seventeenth century with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza who was described at the time as being “god-intoxicated” since he saw god in all things. Spinoza advocated what has come to be called pantheism – a combination of the greek word roots ‘pan’, meaning ‘all’, and ‘theos’, meaning god. Spinoza saw a universe of remarkable complexity that nevertheless worked as an integrated whole. God, for him, is not some outside anthropomorphic being manipulating all creation like a great puppet master. God is pervasive, immanent and all-encompassing. God is everywhere and in everything – in a tree, a stone, a star, a child’s face. While some state that pantheism is merely a reverence of nature itself, that the universe and god are one and the same, others reject that simplistic definition. Many people both past and present believe there is a force that is common to all things – a god force that fundamentally explains everything.
As a classical and religious pantheist, Spinoza asserted that god is an actual force that exists in its own right. God is not a being but rather a truth that is a fundamental characteristic of all nature. Science can as yet explain aspects of this force but it cannot fully quantify it. Such is the force that spawned the first cellular life, that designed the human brain, that pushes the boundaries of the universe ever outward feeding on an energy we do not understand and cannot explain.
And that leads me to an investigation of Albert Einstein and his much discussed spiritual beliefs. While many, including Richard Dawkins who is a contemporary Atheist, say Einstein was in reality also an Atheist, Einstein himself would have none of that. As he said, “There are people who say there is no God, but what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views. What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.”
Einstein later clarified his beliefs by writing, “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium of the people’—cannot hear the music of the spheres.” He adds, “The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man.”
Despite his disdain for angry and arrogant Atheists, Einstein was certainly not a believer in a supernatural god. For him, science and religion are seemingly incompatible but yet they share a common inquiry – to understand what animates the universe. He said at one point that science without religion is lame and that religion without science is blind. Indeed, he also said that, “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”
What Einstein attempted throughout his life was to give voice to the complex, often paradoxical thoughts he had about theism, god and religion. How can one be a religious nonbeliever? In his vastly superior mind, this was not paradox. As he observed the universe and as he discovered physical laws that describe how things work, he could not prevent himself from still being awestruck. His mind could understand how things work but not why they work. Why does the law of gravity work the way it does? Instead of gravity using the mass of a larger object to attract things, why not repel them? What force initiated relativity and how light, time and space function? For what reason is the universe expanding infinitely? Indeed, if we can even wrap our minds around the idea of an infinite universe, why is it that way? Does it have no beginning? But yet Einstein and science can trace an alleged beginning to the universe at the so-called Big Bang. But what caused the Big Bang? These unanswerable questions of why things work as they do, made the laws of physics and the organization of the universe all the more profound and beautiful to Einstein. Such unknowns were the essence of his spirituality and his confessed humility before the almighty cosmos.
In this regard, Einstein once told David Ben-Gurion, when asked whether he believed in God or not, that despite his great theory on the equilibrium between energy and mass, there must be something behind energy. In other words, something must have given rise to the original energy of the Big Bang. Implicitly, Einstein was saying to Ben-Gurion that, yes, he did believe in a type of god force in the universe that is behind all basic laws of physics and nature, a god force that would explain WHY those laws exist in the format that they do.
Einstein gave voice to his form of religion and belief when he said, “A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.”
What I propose for a Gathering theology, if you will, is a religious non-religion much like what Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein proposed. Our minds and our human reason give us great power to understand many things about the natural world. But our minds can take us only so far. They take us to an observation window through which we see a natural world that is supremely captivating, intricate and far bigger than anything we can comprehend. But a mind as powerful and advanced as Einstein’s was still left totally humbled.
For anyone to categorically deny the existence of some great god force – even if that force is an entirely natural force – that presumptive assertion is exactly what many of us find so distasteful about most religions and some non-religions. They are fundamentally exclusivist and arrogant. They presume to have all the answers to everything. Such people are both the fundamentalist religious, and, forgive me to many of you, the Atheist. I propose, as I do in many things, a middle way.
Atheism asserts that there is no great unknowable force that operates our universe – that there is no god force at work, no mystery, no powerful unknown. Atheism implicitly tells us that ultimately science and the human brain will be able to define and mathematically explain all things – not just the how of things – but the why of things. Science, they say, will be able to tell us what began the Big Bang and where that original bang of energy and mass came from. For me, that presumption manifests the height of arrogance. Who are we as humans to presume that we have the unique gifts to explain all things, to find ultimate Truth? Even Einstein is said to have stated that, given the choice, he’d prefer the company of religious believers over dogmatic Atheists since at least they are in awe of something.
Like Einstein, we at the Gathering similarly reject dogmatic arrogance. It is a stated premise of who we are that we begin from a foundation of humility towards all matters of faith, practice and attitude. I myself strive for a demeanor of humility even as I often fail. In my mind, to be humble in thought, in wants, in speech, and in deeds is the greatest of attitudes. We at the Gathering embrace a diversity of ideas, ways of life, politics and philosophies that offer a range of options. Ultimately, we believe not in answers but in questions and in an ongoing exploration of what is good and true. We are seekers in the truest sense of that word. We seek understanding into how our minds work, how our emotions work, how best to live, how best to serve, how best to act toward one another. We cannot say what animates the cosmos even as our experience and reason tell us there is no grey bearded puppet master. All that we rely upon are our own limited powers of reason and observation – or that of great minds like Einstein who are capable of doing such investigations for us. And those great minds, those scientists, they tell us many things but they cannot tell us everything. And Einstein knew that. He had the humility to know what he did not know and could never know. As humans, we are thus left with mystery and wonder. We are left in awe. We are left seeing a small ‘g’ god in the design and workings of all things.
That is why I propose a form of religious pantheism – a worship of the universe, of nature, of physical laws and of the intrinsic divinity in them. In everything we observe, there is some hidden truth beyond the how of its existence. The more humans discover about the universe, the more they find what they do not understand. We exist in a universe of complexity wrapped around complexity hidden within mystery – such that humans may never come face to face with ultimate Truth. But even if we cannot know what that Truth is, we can know it is there.
Science cannot fully explain the music of the spheres – the sublime melody of quarks, protons, atoms, dark energy, planets, and stars all singing the same magnificent tune. But what IS the master composer of that music, and why did it compose as it it did? It is within that mystery – the limitations of science – that we find the god force of nature. And at the altar of tree, star and mind, at the altar of the universe, Atheists and religious believers can unite. We are filled with deep, deep awe at natural beauty and complexity. As humbled humans, we can then find reconciliation between Atheism AND theistic religion. God is paradox. God is dead, and god is alive. God is nowhere, and god is everywhere.
I wish you all much peace and joy…

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Two months ago, three sixteen year old Israeli teenage boys were kidnapped as they hitchhiked back to their homes, they were tied up, beaten, killed and then buried under a pile of rocks. A few days later, a few Jewish extremist vigilantes responded to that murder by kidnapping a fifteen year old Arab boy as he waited for friends. He was horribly beaten and then burned alive. Hamas fighters, acting in response to that outrage, began launching explosive rockets toward Israeli settlements and cities. Several homes and a few Israelis were killed. Hamas fighters snuck through underground tunnels leading to Israeli towns with the hopes to perpetrate a mass killing of unarmed Jewish civilians. The Israeli army responded by invading the Gaza Strip where Hamas rockets were launched and where the tunnels began. Because Hamas fighters hide themselves within schools, shopping centers, mosques and apartment buildings, Israeli tanks and fighter jets destroyed not only the rockets and tunnels but also killed hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians. After multiple deaths on both sides of the conflict, the worn out combatants pulled back and began a series of cease fires. Even so, Israelis and Palestinians still stare at each other across the Gaza border with visceral hatred. Each side still harbors the desire to destroy the other. This cycle of violence may have stopped for a time, but there is little doubt it will begin anew at some future time.
I have no desire to plumb the complexities of who might be to blame or who caused the original affront. I hope you will not allow your thinking to do that either. Instead, I hope to focus our thoughts on the horrible violence that happened and specifically how that violence relates to us. I hope to focus on the hate involved and the need for a lasting peace between people everywhere.
As we turn our gaze at a world that is now so violent in so many places – in the Ukraine, in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Somalia, Nigeria and elsewhere, I pray we re-focus that gaze inward, to do what I have talked about in my August message series. How can WE, as individuals, be the change we want to see? How do we turn a macro vision of warfare on our planet into a micro vision of it – how violence infects our own interactions with others. Indeed, I call out the hypocrisy in me and in others that too easily condemns the violence I see around the world but also too easily acts with angry speech or actions toward someone in my life whom I perceive has hurt me. The hate and anger that can rise up in me is no different than the hate and anger that animates Israelis and Palestinians. How can I be a peacemaking change agent in my own life and thus, as Gandhi encouraged, a change agent for peace around the world?
The key, for Gandhi, is to create spiritual reconciliation. Peace between two persons or two groups of people means that they co-exist and have a relationship that is respectful and absent verbal or physical violence. To resolve issues between two parties is different from reconciling and re-establishing relationship. Resolution requires a complex and difficult intellectual examination of facts – most of which are interpreted differently by the opposing sides. Trying to negotiate a resolution between two sides in any dispute is almost impossible when passions of rage and hate predominate.
People can have their differences while still enjoying a peaceful relationship. Between any people in conflict, the critical goal is to get them to respectfully relate with one another in such a way that the hard work of resolving differences can take place. Ultimately, establishing a peaceful relationship requires each side to recognize the basic dignity of the other and to love the other as a fellow human.
And if that seems like a pie-in-the-sky utopian dream, that any person or any nation will be able to forever banish angry or violent thoughts towards others, it is. And Gandhi agreed. But as much as he acknowledged the human propensity to hate and to violently attack others has existed for millennia, he also perceived that a spiritual ethic and sensitivity exists within every person. Almost any of the world’s problems, or the problems any of us face, have spiritual roots. And that is why his statement that we must be the change that we want to see is more than a nice slogan. It is literally true. Racism, poverty, crime, violence, envy, hatred, war, terrorism – they all originate in the hearts of individuals. We cannot change these problem unless we first change the cause – which is found inside us.
As the central premise for my message today, individuals must rigorously examine themselves and willingly hold themselves accountable for violent speech and actions in any format and toward any person. Following on that premise, it does us no good to talk about what others should do. Beginning with me, beginning with each of us, we need to examine our own thoughts, words and actions that are violent and are not peaceful.
In my message two weeks about changing the world by serving others, I noted that Gandhi believed each person is born spiritually blind. Only by exploring one’s inner heart can one self-realize and find spiritual sight.
Each person has the same spiritual impulse to love and be loved. This inner truth force is the same no matter one’s sex, ethnicity or national origin. As humans, we hunger for connection with others. We delight in affection and love that is showered on us. All humans can be enabled by this force to unconditionally love, give and care for others. We all have seen this in action – in ourselves and in others. I saw it firsthand in how some acted last week in honoring Worley Rodehaver. There was no benefit to people giving and loving in his memory. They simply did it – springing from their inner truth force. Too often, however, we blind ourselves to its reality. Anger and hate can cloud our spiritual vision. We don’t purposefully endeavor to see as our hearts want us to see. The problem with any conflict we face is how do we enable and put into action our inner truth?
For Gandhi, the crucial step in becoming a peacemaker, in re-establishing a relationship with one who has hurt us or with whom we are in conflict, is to tap into our truth force by forgiving. And forgiving involves a three step process. First, he believed we should acknowledge and remember the pain we have suffered or the reason why we are in conflict. Forgiveness does not involve forgetting.
Then comes the difficult part. Even though we remember a hurt, the second step is to make a conscious decision to refuse to act or speak toward a perceived opponent in ANY way that is violent, hateful, demeaning, mean spirited or vengeful.
Third and last in the process of forgiving another is to build empathy for the offender by working to understand his or her reasons, thoughts and motivations. We should literally place ourselves in his or her shoes and try to think as they think, to perceive a situation as they perceive it.
In sum, three steps to forgive and let go of anger at an offender or opponent. Accept the memory of a hurt. Refuse to react with violence. Build empathy.
As with so many endeavors in our lives, forgiving is a spiritual process. Gandhi called this effort satyagraha, the pursuit of the inner truth force of which I just spoke. When we forgive another, we act out our truth force of love. We were blind but suddenly we see in a divine way, in an unconditionally loving way, in a universally and eternally good way.
And that is what people must do in order to begin the process of being a peacemaker. But for Gandhi, becoming a peacemaker does not necessarily create peace. We might forgive and be a peacemaker only to have an offender still hurt us. As anyone who knows about the Civil Rights marches of the 1960’s, African-Americans were acting as peacemakers. They had both renounced hateful speech and violent actions and implicitly forgiven white oppressors. And yet they were met by hate and violence – police dogs, water cannons, arrest and racist words.
Change came when the oppressors and onlookers saw the satyagraha truth force of the African-American protestors. They saw their implicit love, their implicit forgiveness, their purposeful renunciation of violence and, most importantly, their willingness to endure suffering for the sake of peace. Such suffering approaches martyr like proportions – a suffering that accepts pain for the greater cause of establishing peace. Few offenders or onlookers will long persist with violence in the face of suffering and forgiveness on the part of a victim. The battle will be won, the moral high ground achieved. Non-violence ultimately prevails.
Contrasted with the recent history I recounted earlier of tit-for-tat murders of Israeli and Palestinian youth, is a story about the death of a 12 year-old Palestinian boy, Ahmed Khatib, in 2008. On the day of Eid, the Muslim holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan, young Ahmed put on his holiday clothes and went out to play with friends. His friends soon told him of an Israeli Army patrol that was inside his Jenin refugee camp located in the West Bank. As a Palestinian boy, he often joined other boys by throwing rocks at Israeli troops – their way of fighting back. Ahmed’s friends and parents acknowledge he carried a wooden toy gun with him that day. He had gone out, like many boys all over the world, to play with a toy – much the same as boys in the US might do playing cops and robbers. He soon, however, joined other boys by hurling rocks at an Israeli armored troop carrier. He was still clutching his toy, wooden gun. Tragically, whether by mistake or on purpose, a shot rang out from the armored carrier and hit Ahmed in the leg. He screamed in pain but then another shot rang out striking him in the head. He was rushed to a local hospital which soon received permission for his transport to an Israeli hospital in Haifa. When his mother finally reached his bedside, he was still alive but cold and unmoving. His clothes were covered with blood and gore. No surgery was undertaken as his injuries were so severe – a large portion of his brain had been blown away. He lingered on life support for two days.
During that time, Ahmed’s parents were overcome with grief. They struggled with the decision of what to do – keep him on life support or not. They finally decided to allow him to die by removing his breathing tube. While in the hospital, Ahmed’s mother Abla saw suffering all around. Many young Jewish children were fighting severe illnesses – one girl dying of a heart defect, a boy dying with liver failure. After his death, she knew what needed to be done. She donated his body and his organs to be used to save others. Within hours, Ahmed’s heart, kidneys, lungs and liver were transplanted into six Israeli children.
Abla, his mother, was angry that the Israeli soldiers had shot Ahmed for any reason. He was a young boy throwing stones against an Army traveling in an armored vehicle. Even if his toy gun might possibly have been perceived as real, it could not threaten the fully protected soldiers. Even more, she asked, why did the soldiers not stop after shooting him in the leg? Why did they have to shoot him in the head? Nevertheless, she said of her decision to donate Ahmed’s organs, “We saw a lot of painful scenes in the hospital. I have seen children in deep need of organs, in deep pain. It doesn’t matter who they are. I didn’t want other children to suffer regardless of who they are. Maybe by this, just one Israeli soldier will decide not to shoot a child. Violence against violence is worthless. This is a message from us to them. A message of peace.”
Her act stunned Israel. A few years before, the relatives of a Jewish victim of a terrorist bombing had donated her organs – many of which saved Palestinian patients. But Ahmed’s organ donation was the first by an Arab for a Jew. Ehud Ohmert, the Prime Minister of Israel, personally called Ahmed’s parents and invited them to his office. He said their act was remarkable and had profoundly affected all of Israel. The stereotype of Palestinians being violent haters had been shattered. The Orthodox Jewish father of a girl who received Ahmed’s heart was reduced to sobbing with gratitude when he met Abla. Her loss of a son had been his gain of a daughter saved – a Palestinian heart beating inside a Jewish girl.
With one gesture, Ahmed’s parents had become the change they wanted to see. They had acknowledged their hurt. They had refused to react with violent speech or actions. They had forgiven despite their deep suffering. They had reached inside themselves to tap the force of love for others. They had become peacemakers. Why could not both Israelis and Palestinians have acted in the same way over this past month? By not doing so, both, both, are to blame.
But once again, I use this example to turn us back toward ourselves. With any of our big or small conflicts, we too can be peacemakers with those around us. We too can purposefully choose to renounce the use of angry, hateful or violent words – against family members, friends, enemies or political opponents. We too can choose not to seek vengeance, in any form, against another. No gossip. No name calling. No bullying. No bitterness. No envy. No hate. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in echoing the ideals of Gandhi, hate does not end hate. Only love can do that.
It is time for each one of us to decide here and now that we will begin to be the change for peace we want to see in the world. Peace can only be built one heart at a time. Let it begin with us. We must tap into our own inner truth force that deeply wants to love and be loved. May we speak to and about others with gentleness and civility. May we treat our opponents and enemies with respect. May our politics be gentle and civil. May we find the ability to understand and. May we choose to heal our spiritual blindness and begin to really see.
I wish you much peace and joy…

For our talk back time, I’m interested in your thoughts on non-violence in particular and the concept as used by Gandhi and MLK as as a type of force or weapon. It’s been a paradox that non-violent protest combined with stoic suffering is a type of force. We see this play out in Ferguson, MO where the majority are protesting peacefully – most with arms upraised and chanting “Don’t shoot”. The images of that are searing. Saturday morning, many of these non-violent protesters even blocked access by violent looters to a beauty supply store. But other young looters voiced their outrage by smashing windows and looting a liquor store. Some say their is a generational divide with young people expressing their anger and frustration violently saying that is the only way to get the attention of whites and power elites. I want to hold comments to the issue of violence and non-violence if possible – but is violence ever warranted? How do people keep from appearing weak and impotent in the face of violence against them – like white police shooting unarmed black youth?