"Live Like a UU"

READING

By the late nineteenth century, Unitarianism had spread west from its center in New England, with frontier outposts in Chicago and other Midwestern cities. Western Unitarianism held a much more liberal perspective than its counterpart in the east. Dialogue between them was often full of conflict. In an attempt to define their position and heal their divisions, William Channing Gannett, minister in Hinsdale, Illinois, drafted a statement titled "Things Most Commonly Believed Today Among Us," for the Western Unitarian Conference. It is a poetic and positive declaration of the Unitarian faith in the goodness of humanity and the Universe. The conclusion reads as follows:

"We believe that we ought to join hands and work to make the good things better and the worst good, counting nothing good for self that is not good for all:

"We believe that this self-forgetting, loyal life awakes in [us] the sense of union, here and now, with things eternal, - the sense of deathlessness; and this sense is to us an earnest of a life to come:

"We worship One-in-All, - that Life whence suns and stars derive their orbits and the soul of [humanity] is its Ought, - that Light which lighteth every [person] that cometh into the world, giving us power to become the [children] of God, - that Love with whom our souls commune. . . ."

SERMON

"Things Most Commonly Believed Today Among Us" may sound at first like a quaint reminder of times gone by, simpler times, when all we had to do was "join hands and work to make things better," and it would be so. To live well is to seek goodness; its spiritual rewards are evident. A "loyal life," William Channing Gannett wrote, "awakes in [us] a sense of union, here and now, with things eternal." Faith is an attitude of confidence and trust in humanity, in life, in time to come.

The stance is simple, almost innocent, although of course these were not simple people or innocent times. The effects of the Civil War were still present then, with raw divisions from the struggle over slavery. Gannett himself was an abolitionist, who later worked to help freed slaves attain self-sufficiency and adjust to life after the War. He knew exactly how hard it was not only to make "the good things better," but the "worst things good."

His Unitarian faith community was also fraught with conflict and divisions, searching for identity and for common ground. Gannett's words helped bring east and west back together again. He reawakened that sense of union, that "One-in-All," as he put it, in which "our souls commune."

In whatever time we have found ourselves, wherever we have landed and gathered together our congregations, Unitarian Universalists have sought to articulate what it means to live by our faith. Our efforts have yielded statements, such as William Channing Gannett's, or more recently, our "principles and purposes" covenant and affirmation, crafted some twenty years ago. We have also built institutions, not only local congregations, but also the Unitarian Universalist Association, and all the affiliated organizations that express our mission and encourage community among ourselves. There are always tensions in these activities.

Around the same time as Gannett wrote his "Things Most Commonly Believed," a radical element of the Unitarian movement known as the Free Religious Association argued that the Unitarian faith should be free of organizational structure altogether. Their reason was simple. Faith was purely individual; it should be unencumbered by bureaucracy or even the obligations of democratic governance, such as bylaws or meetings. It's just as well for us that these radicals did not prevail. It's unlikely we would ever have built a church as far west as Santa Monica if those free spirits had had their way.

And yet a spark of genius inspired them. A sense of truth about being alive and fully awake pervades their writings, such as Gannett's, and they seem to have grasped something fundamental about who we are - as Unitarian Universalists and as human beings. The spiritual insight by which we live our lives cannot be completely defined by our churches, let alone our committees or our headquarters; our original vision is of a reality much larger than ourselves. We do not own it and no name can contain it. We are Unitarian Universalist, but our home is with the "One-in-All," with life, with nature, with "that Love with whom our souls commune."

Even now as it was then, this spark of insight is our strength as well as our weakness. The powerful sense of connection to the "One-in- All" and the notion of "self-forgetting," to use Gannett's interesting terms, coupled with the moral vision of joining hands "to make the good things better and the worst good," are as legitimate a road map for spiritual life as any I can imagine for us. It's as if we are always being pulled towards something larger than ourselves, that asks a lot of us, and never lets us down.

In Gannett's time, it was a faith that was inspiring enough to transform lives, giving rise to the abolition movement and a host of social reforms. It was also vague enough to leave room for individual belief and to make room for the new revelations that science had in store for religion. These were the same people who embraced Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and quickly looked for ways to apply it to their faith development.

In recent years, other Unitarian Universalists have given voice to the same sensibility Gannett expressed. Robert Weston, a twentieth century Unitarian Universalist minister, wrote the words I used for our meditation this morning. "There is a living web that runs through us to all the universe," he wrote, "linking us each with each and through all life, on to the distant stars. . . . We move in a fog, aware of self . . . then sometimes, as we look on unawares, the fog lifts and there's the web in shimmering beauty, reaching past all horizons."

It all sounds familiar. There is something tremendously appealing about these images and the positive effect they create. They are constantly calling us out of ourselves, away from what divides us, and towards all that we see to be whole and universal.

We are mystical, in our own way. This is why our Unitarian Universalist identity is vague, and our institutions modest. We identify with the values our tradition has taught us, the values that we put into practice when we reach out beyond ourselves. We are known by our good works and our open minds, not by how we define who we are. We give generously, but we put our own needs last. Our fund raising campaign for the building program has been enormously successful, considering how much we give to other causes.

To be a Unitarian Universalist is to be much more than a member of a congregation. To live like one is to identify with something greater than ourselves - greater than Unitarian Universalism itself. Our longing for unity surpasses the limits of our institutions and of our identity as a people of faith. That is what unity asks of us: willingness to put aside differences and the self-interest they promote.

The brief fable I read at the beginning of the service comes from a contemporary Unitarian Universalist, Christopher Buice. He gives us two rivers, flowing side by side. They argue about which one is best, showing off all their good qualities to each other. But in the end, when they get to the sea, they learn that there is no best. "There is no greatest or least. All things are one and all are joined together like rivers in the sea." Wherever you look in our tradition, you will see that we are always moving towards that One-in-All; nothing else commands our full allegiance or fulfills our longing, and in our own way, we stay true to it.

There are times, when we are talking among ourselves, that we regret our diffuse identity and our loyalty to a faith that cannot be defined by the institutions we have created. But this is what it is like to be who we are. It may have more to do with being human
than we realized.

Max Johnson sent me an interesting article from "The New York Times" this week, which provides a good illustration of this reality. It tells about a professor at Penn State University, who gave complex genetic screening tests to 90 of his students. He wanted "to shake students out of rigid and received notions about the biological basis of identity." For the tests revealed that most of the students "shared genetic markers with people of different skin colors." Only a tiny fraction of the students were actually one hundred percent black or white. According to the article, "One 'white' student learned that 14 percent of his DNA came from Africa - and 6 percent from East Asia. The student's reaction was one of surprise: ‘When I got my results I was like, there's no way they were mine. . . . Then I was like, Oh my God, that's me.'" The professor says that the test demonstrates that "race and ethnicity are more fluid and complex than most of us think. . . ." The article concludes, "If the genetic testing fad pushes things in this direction, it will have served an important purpose in a world that too often thinks of racial labels as absolute - and the last word when it comes to human identity."

So often what passes for identity is a partial view of who we really are. The truth is in the whole, in the rivers flowing to the sea, in the longing for unity, and in the faith that heals divisions. It is in the life that is "self-forgetting" and yet totally awake, that we find our faith. We live in a world that needs to be healed of its divisions. Everywhere we look, people who put their faith ahead of everyone else's bring great tragedy to all. This is the time to live our faith, our Unitarian Universalist faith, that looks beyond all differences and trusts that when we do, we see that "One-in-All" to which we all belong.

The article from "The New York Times" is "Debunking the Concept of Race," July 30, 2005. Thank you to Max Johnson for bringing it to my attention.