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.
