Davidson Loehr

August 27, 2000

Readings: Three Stories From Restaurants

1. A family settled down for dinner at a restaurant. The waitress first took the order of the adults, then turned to the seven-year-old boy.

“What will you have?” she asked.

The boy looked around the table timidly and said, “I would like to have a hot dog.”

Before the waitress could write down the order, the mother interrupted. “No hot dogs,” she said. “Get him a steak with mashed potatoes and carrots.”

The waitress ignored her. “Do you want ketchup or mustard on your hot dog?” she asked the boy.

“Ketchup.”

“Coming up in a minute,” said the waitress as she started for the kitchen.

There was a stunned silence when she left. Finally the boy looked at everyone present and said, “Know what? She thinks I’m real.” (Anthony de Mello, The Heart of the Enlightened [Doubleday, 1989], p. 45)

2. A man was a regular customer at a restaurant, and the management did its best to please him. So when he complained one day that only one piece of bread was being given him with his meal, the waiter promptly brought him four slices.

“That’s good,” he said, “but not good enough I like bread- plenty of it.”

So the next night he was given a dozen slices. “Good,” he said. “But you’re still being frugal, aren’t you?”

Even a basketful of slices on the table next day did not stop his complaints.

So the manager decided to fix him. He had a colossal loaf of bread baked specially for him. It was six feet long and three feet wide. The manager himself, with the help of two waiters, brought it in and laid it on an adjoining table, then waited for his reaction.

The man glared at the gigantic loaf, then looked at the manager, and said, “So: we’re back to one piece again!” (Ibid., p. 107)

3. An American preacher in Beijing asked the waiter in a restaurant what religion was for the Chinese.

The waiter took him out to the balcony and asked, “What do you see, sir?”

“I see a street and houses and people walking and buses and taxis driving by.”

“What else?”

“Trees.”

“What else?”

“The wind is blowing.”

The Chinese extended his arms and exclaimed “That, sir, is religion.”

(Ibid., p. 38)

Sermon: “In a Restaurant, Choose a Table Near a Waiter”

This is a sermon framed in stories, so I will begin with yet another one. A man is walking down the sidewalk at night when he sees a friend of his on all fours under a streetlight, crawling around and looking for something.

“What did you lose?” he asked. “A key,” came the answer: “a very important key, and I simply must find it.”

The first man offered to help him look, and for the next fifteen minutes the two of them crawled over every square inch of ground under the streetlight, but found no key. Finally he asked his friend “do you remember where you lost the key?”

“Yes,” came the answer, “I lost it at home.”

The first man stood up. “Then why are you looking for it out here?”

“Because it’s brighter here.”

There is a man with his table a long way away from a waiter. His key was lost back home in a darker place, and that is where he will have to look for it.

The story would be funnier if we hadn’t all done the same thing so many times. Where are your hungers and needs; what are the questions your heart or soul is pressing on you? Never mind the roles, the pretenses: who are you, who do you need to be, where are the gaps?

Or: who are you, what do you need to offer, to give to others, how do you want or need to be a part of a larger community- a family, a church, a world? These are the questions that can lead you to your most important hungers.

And it all begins when you own those questions and needs, whether they are the questions of anyone else or not, and whether they fit the answers that other people are offering you or not. For these deep questions and needs are the “still small voice” within you that theologians and poets speak of; that spark of the divine fire that you were born with.

These questions- what do you want, what do you need, what do you need to give- these are the questions that sketch the outline of who you really are and need to be. These are the hungers that need to be filled.

That’s the point of the “lost key” story: look for what you’ve lost where you lost it, not where someone else has put up a light. All the creeds and professions of faith ever written, all the religious answers ever proposed, can not help you one bit if they don’t answer your questions. And learning to have the courage to ask our own questions is one of the most important steps any of us ever takes.

This morning’s first reading about the little story of the boy and the hot dog is a parable. What was most real for him was just what the world would not see. If the point were only nutritional in a purely physical sense, then the more balanced meal his mother had tried to order would have been what he really needed.

But he didn’t need a steak: he needed to be heard, to be acknowledged as a real person with tastes that differentiated him from his mother and father. He didn’t need to eat as much as he needed to be.

The other side to this is that you must own your own needs and questions. So many people come here and ask where our answers are: “what do you people believe? Where is the neat list of creeds or worked-out beliefs that I can memorize and feel safe?” And the only answer to such questions is to ask what they need.

After you have been here awhile, you find that it wasn’t answers you needed. What you often need instead is, for once in your life, to listen to your own questions. What an awakening that can be! The first time you feel bold enough to look at old creeds or Sunday School teachings you have been reciting forever and finally to say “good lord, I haven’t really believed those things for years!” Then and only then is there room for the more troubling but more fruitful questions about what you really do believe, and what you hunger for.

But how often we can catch ourselves crawling around under a streetlight looking for a key we have lost somewhere else! I’ll tell you a story of my own about this. It is a story I have told to several people here at one time or another, about one of my former careers as a professional photographer.

I began as a combat photographer in Vietnam, where I discovered quite by accident that I had a natural gift for photography. I had a good eye for subjects and composition, and a good sense of timing. While many of my war pictures were picked up by AP, UPI, and several major newspapers and published in this country, it was clear early on that my real gifts were for photographing people.

When I returned, I worked as a wedding photographer during the summers while finishing my degree in music theory at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Then in 1972 I went around the country to study with the eight or ten best people-photographers I could find, and opened a studio that fall.

Artistically, the studio was a success, and by 1975 I was averaging $1,100 per wedding and $450 per portrait, so it was a pretty ritzy operation selling some very expensive pictures. Also in 1975, I won first place in the professional division of the Detroit Photo Show in Cobo Hall, in a field of more than 900 entries. I would not say that I was happy, and I don’t think I would ever have been a great photographer- but I was a very good one.

Then one Saturday morning in 1976 a good friend of mine called. Fred was a commercial photographer whose studio was a block from mine. I had a gift for photographing people, and Fred’s gift was for photographing things. Since neither of us was much good at what the other did well, there was no competition between us, and we had developed a pretty good friendship.

Anyway, Fred called one Saturday morning and asked me to take a camera and macro lens and meet him at the arboretum. He wanted to take some nature pictures, at which he was very good, and wanted some company. Since he called me, he apparently wanted the company of someone who was not very good at nature photography, but I figured that Fred needed his ego boosted, so I played the part.

We walked for over two hours that morning, during which time Fred took some very nice pictures of mushrooms and things, and I took some very mediocre pictures that I threw out shortly after we had developed the slides.

But the moment that makes this story significant came near the end of the walk. It was one of those watershed moments for me, though I doubt that Fred would even remember it.

We were walking down a path in the woods when Fred suddenly stopped and turned toward me, with a look of puzzled surprise on his face. “You know,” he said, “I’ve known you for six years. And in six years, this is the first time I have ever seen you pick up a camera when you weren’t being paid to. Don’t you like photography?”

I had never thought of that. I was so good at it that it had never occurred to me to wonder whether I liked it. Once he asked the question, the answer came like a lightning bolt. “No,” I said, “I never have.”

I had spent three or four full years serving a gift which gave to others, but which gave me almost nothing at all. I had never liked photography, and hadn’t even known it! Within months, I sold the studio, sold all of my camera equipment, and never missed it. A few years later I was offered a short job that paid for a whole new set of cameras and lenses, but I hardly ever use them, even on trips.

I had looked under the streetlight and found all sorts of things, but I never found a meaningful job there because I never thought to ask myself what I liked to do. And I can tell you from some experience that a gift that gives nothing to you, no matter how much it may give to others, is no gift at all. It is a trap.

Now you don’t have to love everything about your job in order to stay in it, but you do have to love something about it, and what you love about it needs to be very important to you, or your table is a long way from the nearest waiter.

So you have to know yourself a little bit: you need to know what you love, what can help fulfill you, and have to try putting your energies into an orbit around things that you cherish.

And this business of keeping your head in touch with your heart is an ongoing process. Your needs, and your spiritual needs, may change. As the poet James Russell Lowell put it, “New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth.”

The boy won’t always want hot dogs. His needs and his diet will change, and the only way to keep him growing is to keep listening to his questions and his yearnings, and to keep knowing that he is real- even when he begins to question your beliefs. That is the task of religion and of churches, as well.

There are so many people going spiritually hungry today, in a world that has all the riches they need if only they would look in the right places. I learned this week that Bill Moyers said that the six-part series he did with Joseph Campbell, the series that we offered here last year, has been seen by more than fifty million people so far, and that there are over two thousand study groups meeting to discuss the programs.

That is a lot of hungry people: hungry people trying to move their table closer to where there might be some nourishment for them, closer to a waiter. But it all begins there, with giving voice to your own questions and needs, and then in trying to change tables so you can get closer to the food.

And then comes the second step in this process. When you begin, it is often hard to know just what your own questions and needs are, as I had gone on for several years without ever finding my own.

But at the next step is the equally hard task of being able to recognize true gifts when you find them. That is part of what the second reading was about, about the man who thought he could never get enough bread. Here was a man who was being offered a gift and he didn’t even recognize it.

The gift was not the bread, but the kindness which offered the bread. And too often when we reject someone because they haven’t done anything for us lately, we forget what a gift it is that they ever wanted to do anything for us at all.

There is a story about this too, of course, as there is a story about everything really important. It is the tale of the old Zen monk who found a raw diamond nearly a foot in diameter. It was a good size for a footrest, so he took it back to his cave.

The word spread through the town that the world’s largest diamond, a jewel of inestimable worth, rested unguarded in the old monk’s cave. Then a man thought “If I could get that diamond from the old monk, I would have treasure beyond my wildest hopes!”

So he went to the cave, to try and find a way to trick the old man out of the diamond. But the old monk saw him staring at the diamond. “Do you like this rock?” asked the monk. “Oh yes, oh yes, I like it very much!” the young man replied.

“Then please take it, as a gift,” said the monk, and handed the priceless diamond over to the young man. “I can always find another footrest.”

Overjoyed, the man ran down the mountain with the diamond, and stayed awake that night guarding the jewel and thinking of all the things he could do with his newfound wealth. But the next morning something began troubling him. And after spending a second sleepless night, this time because of the troubling feeling within him, he arose early on the third morning and carried the huge diamond back up the mountain to the old monk’s cave.

“I have taken the wrong gift,” he said, setting the diamond back in its place. “I would have you teach me instead how you could let go of this so easily.”

Or the story of a young man who was blind from birth and fell in love with a woman. All went well until a friend told him the girl wasn’t too good-looking. At that minute he lost all interest in her. Too bad! He had been “seeing” her very well. It was his friend who was blind because he was unable to see her through the eyes of love.

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to recognize the look and feel of real nourishment, and to tell it apart from spiritual junk food.

And that brings me to the third reading. And the point of that is much like the point of the first reading, which is that what we seek was really there all the time, right under our nose, because the primary search is inside of us, not outside of us.

How many stories there are that make this point! “The Wizard of Oz” says it: it was all in Kansas, it just took looking at it in a new way. The story of the blind man who learned to see through the eyes of love and then forgot how and became really blind is like a negative version of “Beauty and the Beast.”

Or the old Hasidic tale of the Rabbi from Cracow, who travelled to a distant city in search of a great treasure he had dreamed about, only to learn that the treasure was really buried beneath the hearth in his own home. You travel out to learn of the treasures you have always had but had never learned to see before.

It is the same story that Joseph Campbell tells of the Hero’s journey. The hero goes out into the world and goes through many adventures in which he grows and developes a deeper and surer self, and then returns back home again and is for the first time able to fully live in the riches that were always there, awaiting his return.

Or as the poet T.S. Eliot put it:

“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started- and know the place for the first time.”

And to know the place for the first time is to know that always, at all times on your journey, you are sitting in a restaurant where there is nourishment if only you will seek it. For this restaurant is nestled in a world that is filled with so many simple miracles and treasures: like streets and houses and people walking and buses and taxis and trees, and the wind is blowing. And when you can find your life in this world, and your peace, when your soul has found itself and found its world, and you have reached out with your mind, heart, and actions to connect the two, that is religion, and you are home at last.

Well, this has been a lot of poems and stories, so I will try to end it very factually by condensing it into a list of advice, sort of a traveler’s guide on how to choose a table near a waiter:

1. First, find your hungers. What is most real about you? Where do your deepest and most noble yearnings live? What gifts do you need to offer? Who, in other words, are you? Everything begins there.

2. Second, feed those hungers, not lesser ones. Or, as Joseph Campbell has put it, “follow your bliss.” Go where you and your world are richer for your having been there.

3. Third, don’t be afraid to change tables or even restaurants. Don’t linger where nourishment isn’t. Stop eating spiritual junk food, and know that all the creeds and rituals in the world can’t make you whole if they don’t help to connect your mind, body, and spirit with the riches of life abundant.

4. Fourth, know that in order to find treasure, you must look for it. The real and enduring treasures in life will energize you and bring you more life, not just more money. At the level where these hungers lie, all the diamonds in the world aren’t worth a good night’s sleep.

5. Fifth, know that you too are a waiter, and that without the nourishment that you can offer, this world would be a much, much poorer place.

6. And finally, don’t forget to leave a tip. When someone brings you joy or nourishment, for goodness’ sake, let them know it! Leave them something extra, something they can take home with them: a kind word, a kiss or a touch, even a silent look, if it is a look of thanks. For you know: this gift of life that we have been given is really quite a scrumptious feast!

Bon appetit!

Davidson Loehr
13 August 2000

PRAYER:

Who are we, and what do we really believe? Not in words written by others, but in our own words. Who are we, what do we really believe, and how should we live?

If we only conform to the expectations of others, we are likely to lose ourselves. If we care only for ourselves, we lose a necessary connection to the larger world around us.

These are the horns of our human dilemma: who we are, and whose we are. This morning, we’ll dwell only in the first question.

These are all questions more profound than answers. We need to bring both our minds and our hearts into the experience here.

Let us begin to center ourselves during these quiet moments of prayer and meditation.

SERMON: The Virtues of Heresy

We live in trying times. So much that once seemed certain has come loose. There is so much insecurity today. Things seem out of order.

We are killing our planet through greed and indifference, destroying rain forests and the ozone layer above us. We destroy things we did not create and can not replace. How do you live in these times? Isn’t there a kind of terror for you, when you stop and take inventory, and realize how little we once took for granted can be taken for granted any longer?

What are the proper roles for people today? What are the proper roles for women, both within the church and within society? For minorities? For gays, lesbians, and all the many others? We had the lines drawn so neatly a generation or two ago, and now it seems that no one is staying within them. The lines are being redrawn in so many areas, and we can’t put a pattern to it. Not all those old lines were good. Some were very repressive and unjust. But the changes still seem so fundamental.

Even religion seems to have gone to hell. Rather than promoting peace, the most vocal religions in the world promote war. Religious zealots from Islamic fundamentalists to militant Zionists, Irish Protestants and Catholics, or the religious right of our own country – they are all lusting after military power, aggressive defense postures, or a militant nationalism that seeks to subdue or destroy all who stand in their way, all who disagree with them. Many religious leaders may preach heavenly visions of loveliness in a world above the clouds, but they seem to lust after control of this world and its riches like everybody else. And of all the things that both religious and political conservatives – along with most religious and political liberals – will not tolerate, what they will not tolerate most of all is dissent. Religion has seldom been more thoroughly secular than it is today. Behind the holy words, behind all the talk about Allah, or God, or Jesus, lie aggressive, territorial, and imperialistic hungers that are thoroughly secular and disquietingly familiar.

When the road before us is no longer clear, there are at least two directions we can take. One is to cling ever more tightly to the old ways, to gather the larger and louder crowds, and shout down the fear rising inside because the old ways really won’t work any longer. The other route is to risk seeking new truths, even if it means going beyond comfortable boundaries.

This dilemma of choosing between an outmoded past and an unknown future is not new. It runs through all of human history, and makes of our own era just the most recent variation on two human themes that are probably as old as our species.

Here’s the pattern: time after time, we humans come to the edge of our old ways of seeing and doing things. We have outgrown them, their answers and perspectives no longer inspire our best traits, and they begin to call forth instead our worst ones. We have outgrown the reach of the old understandings, and there is a darkness over the land. We can either go back, or we can go on.

The first is the route of orthodoxy; the second, the route of heresy. This may seem an unorthodox way to use these two words, but it is not, as you will see.

Let’s back off a bit so we can see this pattern as it has worked throughout our history. Once, long ago, people believed that natural events had supernatural causes. The gods made it rain, made the crops grow, made the sun come up and the moon come out. Unseen forces were behind everything, and priests and shamans were needed to appease these unseen spirits, to keep everything working right.

About 2600 years ago a Greek named Thales appeared. Thales said he didn’t think the gods were behind all of this, that there were natural causes behind them, and that we could investigate those causes. Now Thales thought that everything was made of water: that water, in its various forms and shapes – and perhaps its moods – was the basis of everything. It isn’t clear what he meant by this. Perhaps he was trying to say that everything was fluid and changed its forms as water does in going from ice to water to steam. We don’t know. If he really meant everything was made of water, then he was wrong. But that is not the point. The point is that where everyone around him continued to recite the old story about the gods pushing everything around, Thales went beyond their boundaries and chose a new path.

I think one of Robert Frost’s poems that contains these lines:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

Now in our personal lives, we know what this is like. We all do some of this just to grow up, we leave some of the ways of our parents behind, and be-come who we must become. And in doing so, we all step beyond the boundaries of our families and friends in one way or another. Think of the phrases we use, like “leaving the nest,” “going out on our own,” or even “doing our own thing.” We all choose the road less traveled in some ways. It can be very hard just doing it with a family. Imagine doing it with a whole culture, or a whole history! It can be dangerous, you know.

But let’s go back to the Greeks. A century after Thales, who is now regarded as the first philosopher, came another Greek philosopher named Protagoras, who went even farther: “Concerning the gods,” he wrote, “I cannot know for certain whether they exist or not . . . Many things hinder certainty – the obscurity of the matter and the shortness of life.” 2500 years ago, this was heresy. Many would say it still is!

Within another century, Socrates would be put to death for his heretical beliefs, for going too far for the comfort of those around him, for choosing the road less traveled. The charge against Socrates was not holding the right beliefs: he died for choosing where others had declared the choices closed.

Four hundred years later another man would be charged with heresy and treason and killed. Jesus was called a heretic because he spoke, as they said, “as one with his own authority.” He left the nest, he sought his own way, and that can be a frightening thing to watch, if you are one of those who stay behind.

Today many still regard these two, Socrates and Jesus, as the greatest sage and prophet in western history. These two heretics, you could say, shed enough light before they were killed to help light the way for millions of people who would follow them. The others, those whose beliefs they outgrew, are now seen as narrow, ignorant, or even nasty.

This is a pattern that repeats over and over again. It is the conflict between orthodoxy and heresy. Now that I’ve given you some examples to put a little flesh on the ideas, let me define these two terms. What are these words, “orthodoxy” and “heresy”? What do they mean? Orthodoxy means “right belief” or “straight thinking.” You see the prefix “ortho-” in words like “orthopedics,” dealing with straightening out deformities in your bones, “orthodontics,” dealing with straightening out irregularities in your teeth, or in a more obscure word like “orthography,” which means correct or conventional spelling. So “Ortho-” means right, straight, or correct. The suffix “doxy” refers to beliefs. As one 18th Century wit has put it, “Orthodoxy is my doxy, heresy is thy doxy.”

That’s what most people think heresy means: wrong belief. But it is not what it means. The word “heresy” comes from a Greek verb meaning “to choose.” To choose. What heresy really means is to choose, when the choices have been ruled closed by an orthodoxy. It means to go beyond the boundaries of the group, to seek for more light where others forbid you to look.

First you have an orthodoxy. First you have this group of people who have the unfathomable arrogance to proclaim the right beliefs – which always seem to coincide with their beliefs. Then you have people who choose the road less traveled. And they are, by definition, heretics. And I want to tell you as loudly and clearly as I can that the light and courage and hope of the human race lies with our best heretics, and that the greatest obstacle to personal and collective growth, whether spiritual or even scientific growth, lies with the orthodoxies.

The heretics of yesterday become the saints, sages, and saviors of today. Thales was right: the gods aren’t pushing things around from behind the scenes like that. Protagoras had honesty and courage ahead of both his time and our own. Socrates’ challenges to empty authority are still taught in better schools to guide students toward greater light, and the parables and teachings of Jesus have brought comfort and grace to uncounted millions of hungry souls.

Think of the number of times that these two themes have been played out in our history. The early Christians were called heretics and atheists by the Ro-mans because they didn’t believe in the orthodox Roman gods. Martin Luther was called a heretic by the Roman Catholic Church, and was excommunicated when he began the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Michael Servetus was called a heretic by John Calvin for writing a pamphlet on the errors of the trinity, and was burned at the stake. The first generation of Mennonites, in the 16th century, were called heretics by Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists alike because they said, correctly, that infant baptism was nowhere mentioned in the bible, so should not be a sacrament. For refusing to accept infant baptism, the Mennonites were hunted and killed like – well, like heretics. They went too far. The choices had been declared closed before they had finished choosing.

Almost all religious figures whose names are still remembered were known as heretics in their day. If we want to find a way out of the nonsense of our own trying times, we should look not to the orthodoxies, which can not lead anyone forward, but toward the paths to be discovered by today’s heretics.

Now let’s stop and get real for a minute. While it’s true that we have the freedom to choose any beliefs we like, that doesn’t mean that any beliefs we choose are good for us, or wise, or even healthy. We choose nutty ideas too. Matthew Applewhite (of the Heaven’s Gate cult) was a heretic when he decided that his group should commit mass suicide to have their spirits transported up the Mother Ship. He was also, I think, insane. Hitler was a kind of heretic in proclaiming his people the Master Race and using their presumed superiority as a rationalization for the murder of millions of other human beings. He was also, I think, evil.

Learning how to choose more wisely is part of what our religion is sup-posed to help us learn. This is true for both religious conservatives and religious liberals, although the two groups tend to err in opposite directions. Conservatives are primarily concerned with obedience and conformity to the inherited ways, so when conservatives lose their way, they tend to lose sight of themselves in their devotion to the group. In a couple words, the error of conservatives tends toward fundamentalism in religion and fascism in politics, and those two are versions of the same mistake, the mistake of following a group too blindly, and losing sight of our own unique needs and differences. So conservatives tend to lose touch with themselves and their differences from their group.

With liberals, it’s the opposite error. We place our emphasis on personal freedom and individual rights. So our error is to define ourselves too narrowly, to exalt some idiosyncrasy of ours into our whole identity. We tend to forget that we owe something back to the larger world, and are not complete until we have found a way to make a necessary and organic connection with society and his-tory. As conservatives have to guard against sliding into fundamentalism and fascism, liberals have to guard against sliding into narcissism and selfishness.

I know that you know these things, but they’re worth repeating. So the heretics I’m praising here are those who’ve not only chosen their own path, but who have, in retrospect, also chosen wisely.

An irony of history is that when heretics attract followers, their followers almost never have the same beliefs as the heretics.

Heretics have a fundamentally different religion than their followers. But Jesus was not a Christian, Luther was not a Lutheran, and for that matter Marx was not a Marxist and Freud was not a Freudian.

This same pattern exists in the history of Unitarians. You think of the great names of 19th Century Unitarianism: William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau. All of these men were heretics who chose the road less traveled, and did not care who approved or dis-approved. They did not recite creeds or “affirmations of faith” to gain their religious identity; they acted under their own authority. Not one of these men would ever have let his beliefs be articulated by another person or group of people.

William Ellery Channing was a Congregationalist minister who started American Unitarianism in 1825 when he refused to repeat the trinitarian creeds of his Congregational church, and we love to tell that story. But an equally important story came at the end of his life, and we seldom tell it. When the Unitarian church he had served for forty years developed a statement of beliefs required of members, and tried to make him conform his beliefs to statements of faith designed by the group, he resigned.

We also like to claim the remarkable Theodore Parker, my own favorite 19th century Unitarian for his strong stances against slavery, for women’s rights, and for an honest understanding of religion. But Parker did not represent the Unitarians of his day. He was a heretic. He was blacklisted by his fellow Uni-tarian clergy, and not permitted to speak in any pulpit in Boston because of his opposition to slavery and his other liberal stands. He did not care. Emerson, Thoreau – these men defined themselves by going beyond the common bounda-ries and finding a rare kind of light forever denied to those who stayed behind.

This process is still going on today, while the Unitarian-Universalist Association spends a great deal of money to produce, promote, and teach the newest incarnation of our group faith. We have seven Principles which ministers and directors of religious education are supposed to teach to their people, so their people will know who they are and what they believe. Now I don’t want to finesse the obvious, but something is seriously wrong here!

We identify this religion as the religion of Channing, Parker, Emerson, and Thoreau, who spent their lives fighting against this lure of a group identity. As a species, no matter what we say, we love orthodoxies and the easiness of group identities and group faiths. We invent new orthodoxies at the drop of a hat, even in liberal churches – although in Unitarian churches, most of our ortho-doxies are political and social, rather than theological.

And so this is not a Unitarian problem, or a Catholic or Christian problem. Orthodox beliefs, say the orthodox, contain the hope for the future and the will of whatever gods, ideals or principles they are selling. But beliefs, once they have been fixed in creeds, formulas, and affirmations, are not the hope of the future. They are the corpse of the past, stuffed, propped up, and saluted.

Think of the shell of a Nautilus. You know those lovely shells you usually see cut in half, showing all of the little compartments growing out in a spiral. Each little compartment was once the home of a living thing. As the thing grew bigger the old compartments were closed off and new ones built. All that re-mains now is the shell, and we marvel at its beauty. But the shell has never done a thing. It is as dead as it has always been. Something living left it behind after it was through with it. It is a pretty thing, a Nautilus shell, but the life which created it is gone, and now nothing could live in it, for all the little compartments are shut up tight.

That’s what religious orthodoxies become. They are like the closed compartments of a Nautilus shell. They can offer a kind of club membership to those who conform, but they cannot offer life.

Let’s forget about theology or history for awhile. The truth of the things I’m saying is immediate, and is within you. It’s part of what it means to live as a human being. You can prove these things from your own life.

Think back on the times you outgrew parts of your past – we’ve all done this! These were the times you finally had the spirit, the courage, to let go of rules you had inherited which no longer served you. You outgrew the religion of your parents or peers, you finally reached beyond the horizons of understanding of your family, friends or teachers, and you chose the road less traveled and stepped into air so fresh that for the first time in your life you were able to draw a deep, true breath. You’ll never forget it! That was a sacred moment, and you know it even now.

That was your moment of heresy – and that is fresh, first-hand air that only heretics will ever breathe. The rest, the orthodox, get second-hand air, be-cause they breathe through the group’s nose. You chose where those before and around you lacked either the vision or the courage to choose. And it hurt. If you cared for those people, if you were comforted by the security of that world, it hurt to leave it. You remember. But in that moment you were born anew. You were “born again,” you were “born of the Holy Spirit”: that’s what that phrase means! In that moment you felt the spirit of life itself move you. It is these mo-ments, these precious and fearful and courageous moments when we make the unlikely but necessary choices that lead us away from darkness and toward the light – it is those moments in which much of the hope of the human race lives.

We live in trying times. Things have come loose, and the foundation trembles beneath our feet. There are those who would go back, and those who would go on: the orthodox, and the heretics. The hope of our future lies with the heretics. It lies with each and every one of us, for we all stand at the boundary between the past and the future, between imitation and innovation, between the second-hand faith of a group, and the first-hand heresy of our own honest minds and souls.

It takes courage to choose where others fear to venture. It is, again, like the shell of a Nautilus. The little compartments, left behind in their neat little spiral, are very pretty. But they are all dead; they always were. Only that one open chamber, the one reaching out into the unknown, could ever contain life. And so it is with us, my friends. So it is with us.

Davidson Loehr

August 2000

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

“I have my conviction that in religion, and also in the arts, that which is common to a group is not important. Indeed, very often it is a contagion of mutual imitation.” (Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, Beacon Press, 1961, p. 110)

Listen to the way people in our churches use the words “Unitarian Universalist,” and you will realize they aren’t referring to a religion. It’s more vague, more generic:

“We Unitarian Universalists really like to'”

“You know, Einstein really sounds like a UU!”

“Preaching to UUs is like trying to herd cats!”

“There are a lot of UUs out there who just don’t know they’re UUs!”

What we’re describing here, in wildly self-important ways, is ‘our kind of people.’ You know: bright, witty, independent, good people: the kind on whom the hope of the world depends. I’ve heard UCCs, Presbyterians and Lutherans describe the world in the same self-centered way. It’s like the famous cover that Saul Steinberg drew for The New Yorker years ago, showing a map of the whole world, of which a few blocks in New York City make up about 90%. It is Tagore’s ‘contagion of mutual imitation,’ showing that our natural tendency is to see ‘our kind’ as the best kind of people. It isn’t a religious statement at all, it’s self-flattery, waved at an indifferent world.

Empty principles

The idea that ‘Unitarian Universalists’ and ‘good people’ are synonyms is more imperialistic and arrogant than it may seem.

Several decades ago, for instance, the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner made a famous attempt to acknowledge all the non-Christians in the world who are nevertheless good people. He coined a phrase that’s become associated with his name and worth recalling here. He lumped together all the people of good character and intent in the world ‘ all the Jews, atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, etc. ‘ and declared that they were all really ‘anonymous Christians.’

Rahner meant well, but it was a deep insult to all other faiths, this claim that all true intelligence, compassion and good intent were really just an example of his religion.

This habit is no less offensive when people in our tiny movement make a similar claim that all reasonable, loving, liberal people are ‘really UUs.’ It won’t do, either for Rahner or for us, to claim that our peculiar habits represent the soul of all intelligent goodness in the universe. If the religion of ‘Unitarian Universalism’ is to be a real religion, it will have to have a distinct set of perspectives and understandings of the human situation that differentiate it from other, older religions. It will also have to be able to stand beside the insights of Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and other religious prophets and sages without looking trivial and silly.

No one would try to defend the Seven Principles as religious insights comparable to those of the great sages and prophets of history. It would be overkill to trudge through all seven vacuities in order to show what we already know: that these aren’t really religious principles of any insight or depth. But it might be worth taking the first and last of these, which seem to be nearly everyone’s favorites:

The first Principle we are told we affirm is The inherent worth and dignity of every person. To test the integrity of this statement, imagine how UUs would react if someone painted the words of the first principle on a banner and marched under it in a right-to-life parade. UUs would deride these people as ‘not getting it.’ This serves to illustrate that the first principle is not a principle at all. It is a bromide, a flag to be waved only over our pre-approved social and political biases. When I’ve asked Unitarian Universalists how they reconcile the first principle with their stand on abortion, the overwhelming response has been that since the Supreme Court has ruled that a fetus isn’t a person, there’s no moral issue here. This seems to mean that, for this religion, one nation’s (liberal) judiciary is granted the authority to define human life. So the ‘inherent’ worth and dignity must be added to human beings at some point after birth (‘the adherent worth and dignity”). The closer we look, the more quickly this dissolves into vapors.

The seventh Principle is Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. This is the prettiest of the bunch, but we don’t mean this, either. Just one look at faiths like Taoism or Hinduism shows us that we don’t mean all existence. We only mean the pretty parts, and the current fads of cultural liberalism. We love Bambi, but not the wolf that stalks and kills Bambi for food. We love the idea of protecting the spotted owls (which few of us could recognize), but can’t understand that loggers are equally parts of the interdependent web of all existence (we’re safe; our churches don’t attract many loggers). Here too, our application of this bromide shows that it is conditional. We only mean to use it as another flag to wave over the few parts of existence that please us. In what seem far more mature and complete religious perspectives like Taoism and Hinduism, creation and destruction are equally parts of the sacred dynamics of existence. We’re nowhere nearly that inclusive or profound ‘ nor, to be fair, do we claim to be.

Most of the ministers in our movement know the history of liberal religion well enough to know that our tradition’s greatest leaders would not have listened to a congregation of grown-ups recite the Seven Principles without running out of the church ‘ or just throwing up. The ‘Principles’ are club slogans, designed to be said in front of others, to the accompaniment of a superficial feeling of specialness.

Almost all of these so-called ‘principles’ are derived from the secular values of the 18th century Enlightenment, though with the depth and feel of something designed by a committee. But for these seven to be honest, they would all have to end with the phrase ”within the currently approved limits of our political ideology.’

The Religion of Our Masses

The Seven Principles are the Creed of Unitarian Universalism, which is the religion of our masses. When the first adult catechism came out a dozen years ago ‘ What Unitarian Universalists Believe, An Introduction to the Seven Principles ‘ The newly-invented religion began dumbing down the people who had come to us for raising up. I wrote to the men who had endorsed this program. The one who answered said the principles didn’t do much for him either, but ‘people need a simple place to start.’ I disagree, but even if so, why on earth would they need a simple social and political place to start, when our center is supposed to be religious’

The theologian Karl Barth once told young ministers, ‘People expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so.’ Maybe I’m too idealistic to survive, but I’ll take Barth’s advice over ‘a simple place to start’ any day. Wouldn’t you’ Barth’s words lift up and inspire; ‘a simple place to start’ is a demeaning and insulting aspiration for any religion with our great heritage. (Try to imagine Servetus going to the stake or Channing or Parker taking the courageous and costly stands for which we revere them, on behalf of ‘a simple place to start.’)

Unitarian Universalism may be the worst religion in the UUA, and for several reasons. One is that it is a group faith that cultivates rather than suppresses the herd behaviors ‘ that ‘contagion of mutual imitation’ ‘ which liberal religion is supposed to help us rise above. Another is that it isn’t really a religion at all, but a social and political ideology posing as (and displacing) a religion. Such political visions could lead toward a healthier world only if everybody else were just like us. But this is the dream of political solipsism, not religion.

Yet this mind-numbing groupthink controls what will or won’t be featured in the UU World ‘ which seems like little more than a cheerleader for ‘our faith,’ and a series of variations on the theme of ‘How do I love me, let me count the ways.’

There are those who say all successful religions need a simplified version for their masses, a second-hand faith taught for memorizing and rewarded by granting an easy group identity to those who conform. These people cite ‘ at least off the record ‘ the ‘realism’ of famous cynics like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor ‘ those same people Ortega y Gassett said had to have their opinions pumped into them from outside. They say a movement can’t attract numbers large enough to make a difference without dumbing its message down to give people ‘a simple place to start.’

I’ve heard these arguments in various forms from many colleagues. Maybe they’re right. My idealism wishes this weren’t so, but history offers plenty of evidence that it is. The giants of history, including the religious giants, seem to have been able to manufacture their own oxygen. The rest, like the rest in all times, breathed second-hand air through their group’s nose. ‘A simple place to start’ quickly reduces to ‘a contagion of imitation’ ‘ if it ever differed at all.

Where were our leaders?

I am using a double standard here that I’ll defend. I’m not blaming ‘the laity,’ the people in our congregations who come to our churches hoping for vision and leadership from the professionals they are paying to be their ministers. I’m blaming the ministers and the leadership at the UUA. As professionals, we are supposed to be raising the bar, not lowering it. Karl Barth again: ‘Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so.’ Barth was right. How did we ever forget this’

Ministers who have had even a mediocre seminary or divinity school education can be expected to know the difference ‘ and they do know the difference ‘ between a religious identity and the more paltry one offered by social, political or denominational clubbiness.

As professionals, we owe people more than the mind- and soul-numbing bromides of ‘Unitarian Universalism.’ Every minister in our movement knows the history of liberal religion well enough to know that people like Hus, Channing, Parker, Emerson and the rest would not have listened to a congregation of grown-ups recite the Principles without running out of the church ‘ or just throwing up.

As professionals charged with taking our congregants more seriously than they take themselves, we have dumbed down religion to a denominator so common and low that no one should consent to being defined by it ‘ least of all, ministers.

There isn’t a big mystery here. It isn’t hard to know what to do. Our leaders ‘ by which I mean ministers, teachers of religion and Association officials ‘ simply have to find the courage to admit that we have made a terrible mistake by shallowing out the religious tradition which the past has entrusted us to pass on to the future.

We really have a rich, if small, legacy of genuine religious heroes, and need to be emulating them instead of aping the group faith of the ‘masses’ against which the leaders we respect stood out. A few examples:

Jan Hus, the 15th century Catholic priest whose story is symbolized in our flaming chalice, argued a century before Luther that the chalice (symbolizing the sacred and life-giving power of religion) was to be shared with all, as religion was to be the property (and challenge) of all. He was the first to translate the Bible into the vernacular of his people, in another effort to tempt ‘the masses’ into the larger world of first-hand religion. Our chalice stands for the ‘open chalice’ that symbolized his larger and more inclusive view of religion. The flame reminds us of the flame in which Hus was burned at the stake ‘ the cost of standing out too far in front of the masses.

William Ellery Channing is celebrated in our tribe as a Congregationalist minister who stood out against the conforming background of trinitarian Christians by arguing for a unitarian Christianity, stripped of the traditional myths that most people continued to recite. We don’t mention nearly as often the fact that late in his life, he also stood out against the conforming background of his own congregation, when he resigned from his church rather than agree to be spoken for by the creed his congregation had created ‘ a foretaste of today’s ‘Principles.’

We celebrate the remarkable Theodore Parker as though he represented mid-19th century Unitarians. But he did not. He was banned from speaking in other Unitarian pulpits in Boston because of his opposition to slavery and his other liberal stances. It was the background masses who really represented mid-19th century Unitarianism, and whom we would rather forget about now.

It is time for UU ministers to borrow these leaders’ bravery and lead our congregations in a healthy religious direction rather than a paltry political one.

We don’t need to traipse around in sackcloth and ashes for our sins. We can forgive ourselves for the folly of the Seven Principles and our clubby past. It is part of the human condition, as Shakespeare noticed, we seem to tend toward loving to love “not wisely but too well.’

Emulate the Leaders, not the Masses

We had some notable leaders a few centuries back. Hus, Channing, Parker, Emerson were men whose beliefs were in stark opposition to the vast majority of their fellow-believers at the time. They saw the religions of the ‘masses’ of their times as obstacles to, or enemies of, honest religion. They would have agreed with Tagore’s observation that, in religion, ‘that which is common to a group is not important’ and is very often ‘a contagion of mutual imitation’.

It takes more than merely ‘standing alone,’ of course. We expect a good religion ‘ even an adequate one ‘ to help its followers become blessings rather than curses to the larger world around them. (Evil and insane people, after all, have also had the courage and vision to stand out from the crowd. Adolph Hitler and Matthew Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate come to mind as examples from those two extremes.)

Still, the pattern is that liberal religion always seems to occur against an illiberal background, where the illiberal background is composed of the group faith that defines the religion.

I think this pattern holds in every religious tradition. The “masses” of the background ‘ always the vast majority of the religion ‘ have a second-hand religion, rather than a personal faith they can express in their own words. There’s both institutional and peer pressure to stay within the box, because the group identity is contained within that box. But groups don’t think. By definition, there’s no such thing as a herd of liberals. And we should remember that we never look back with respect for the ministers who led their people to the lowest common denominator of a group faith. We respect only those who had the vision and courage to breathe their own fresh spiritual air ‘ we have never sung hymns to the masses who breathed their second-hand air through the group’s nose. Nor will those in the future who look back to see what we passed on to them.

My prescription for our little movement is simple. We need to say goodbye to our group faith, shed our club-like mentality, then rediscover and recommit ourselves to the path of the religious liberal.

Who should we be?

We are religious liberals. That’s the umbrella term under which almost all of the religious paths within the UUA can be grouped. It is the broad religious tradition passed on to us, though it is of necessity far broader today than either the Unitarians or Universalists of the 19^th century would have permitted. The reason ‘religious liberalism’ can’t be abused as easily as ‘Unitarian Universalism’ has been is because it is much bigger than our little movement, and we don’t have the authority to define it.

Liberalism is a style of being religious, rather than a position. As a style, religious liberalism is the opposite of religious literalism ‘ change one letter, and change a whole religious worldview. ‘Liberal’ means, among other things, a bigger helping. It also refers to a symbolic and metaphorical ‘ rather than literal ‘ approach to religious writings.

The soul of liberalism is the search for commonalities that transcend our more superficial differences. We’ve lost sight of that, but it still offers the only healthy road out of our morass. Lately, we seem to pretend that there are only differences, that there aren’t any significant commonalities that might let us aspire to become ‘a people,’ a part of a much larger world, not made in our image. This just isn’t true. Our radical individualism, with its narcissism of small differences, has flown the course of the fabled Gorp Bird, that mythical creature that flew at ever-increasing speed in ever-decreasing circles until its head vanished beneath its tail feathers with a sound like ‘Gorp!’ We can do better ‘ we could hardly do worse!

A Modest Start

Here is a short list of things I think both we and our children can say to those who want to know ‘What do you liberals believe, anyway” These aren’t meant to be replacements for the Seven Bromides. Rather, they are some of the common attributes of adequate faiths almost everywhere. They are attempts to identify those ideals that have the best chance of making us better people, partners, parents and citizens.

‘ We know we’re a part of life and that we owe something back to the world for the gift of life.

‘ We know that we are supposed to live in such a way that, when we look back on it, we can be proud, and can make those we care about proud.

‘ We know we are to try and make this world a little bit better because we passed through it.

‘ We believe that truth, justice, and compassion are required of us. We believe that love is better than hatred, understanding is better than prejudice, peace is better than war.

‘ We believe if there is ever to be a better world, you, I and those whose beliefs differ from ours will have to help each other build it.

‘ We know that each religion says these things differently, but we also know that down deep they are all saying that we are sacred people who need to treat everybody else as though they were sacred, too.

These fairly obvious and enduring truths aren’t rules of a club. They refer us back to the human situation, and begin to identify some of the common attributes of adequate faiths and decent people everywhere. This is the level of deep commonality that liberal religion is supposed to seek, articulate, and incorporate. Without this foundation, we are simply not engaged in liberal religion, not protecting or passing on the soul of honest religion for which the great religious figures have lived and died. Some day we’ll all die too. That’s not a failure. The failure, as we’re going now, will come when the religious liberals of the future look back toward us to see what we had the courage to live for.