Why a Duck?
The Marx Brothers’ famous bit, “Why a Duck?” puts the question of the “why?” of anything at the forefront. Why talk about something “religious” like “covenant” in relation to the heritage of liberal theology, a liberal religious faith legacy like Unitarian Universalism, and within the experience of spiritual community? I think one of the chief characteristics of our age is the way that moderns collapse religion into politics; that the line that marks the difference has become so obscured that religious declaration without political partisan position is unthinkable. In politics that is ideology, but in religion it is idolatry; that is, when one maintains one’s position (today it would have political connotations) as the will of the Almighty. In our particular culture’s “civil wars” it might be well to start with one of the remembered phrases from another time of divisive cultural disturbance: “The Almighty has his own ways.” (Lincoln’s Second Inaugural)
One of the origins of this idolatry amongst liberals is the inability and/or the unwillingness to see their perspectives within an historical tradition of theological thinking, as part of the ideas that form a life of faith, and the disciplines, customs, and practices that give shape to spiritual community. Liberalism is understood predominantly as a political “duck,” and a particular kind of political and ideological “duck” at that, “outside” of liberalism as well as “inside” it. In my 23 years of ministry within a liberal religious tradition, living in and working with congregations, this is the single most prevalent roadblock: the unwillingness and/or inability of liberals to roots themselves in a heritage of theological discourse and a legacy of religious ideas informing the life of faith. When it comes to using religious language to inform and shape experience liberals have largely adopted the disclaimer of Herman Melville’s 19th century character, Bartleby the Scrivener: “I’d prefer not to.”
Language is, of course, a vehicle for conveying meaning, and can be a “public” tether connecting us in relationship to others in our time, others of previous times, and to generations yet to be. Language seeks connections or severs them. Even though it is imprecise and leads to as much misunderstanding as illumination, language still can bind people together in fellowship as surely as does shared experiences. In conversation companionship and camaraderie can be created. In attempts to make religion and the religious “relevant” and “true” to the individual’s experience, though, liberals have tried creating new religious languages, ironically yielding an abdication of religious language. The evidence in my own faith tradition is the emphasis on developing a “language of reverence,” as if religious language can be conjured up immediately, “out of time,” and without ties to history as the accumulation of the interpretations of human experience. The evidence in the culture is the political strategy of the Democratic Party to begin “faith-talk” hoping to make in-roads in that political constituency of the religiously fluent. How cynical and ironic! By any measure these attempts cut off the very conversation that language is meant to continue. Liberals cannot talk to the culture about the varieties of religious experience. Hence, religious experience either is exclusive, or is not perceived in the individual’s life at all.
Liberals today are religiously liberal; that is, holding “religiously” to a liberal interpretation of politics and policies. But devoid of religious language, one is severed from the life of faith. There are few liberal religionists. There are few who seek the theological meanings of ideas of community which incarnate liberalis; that is, which are broad-minded, generous, and worthy of free persons. For community to evidence this, a fundamental connection needs be lifted up to which various individuals can give devotion. Liberals are severed from the legacy of faith that gave rise to, and ultimate meaning for, the fundamental connection that binds persons in free religious fellowship and union. One becomes an anomaly in seeking to live out an understanding of faith, religion, God, Jesus, and thus, human nature that is faithful to liberalis as the aim and meaning of community.
Language is a dialectical pursuit with actual experience. You can’t talk about the life of faith without living on the inside of it and the communities that help form and seek to embody it. This is as true of spiritual communities formed for liberalis as it is for those formed to maintain doctrinal purity. The woman who is by herself is not free. She is alone. And you can’t produce a religious language any more than you can share religious experiences without communicating them. The man who conceives of the spiritual life as the absence or severing of connections to family, friends, neighborhood, city, country, and world is rarely religious and doesn’t possess a spiritual identity. He exists without meaning and purpose.
Recovering a life of faith as a liberal Religionist begins with placing one’s life under "disciplines of the free spirit." And part of those disciplines includes conceiving and interpreting one’s life using the framework provided by religious language as it is language about liberalis. It can’t be language conjured out of nothing, nor just “faith-talk.” It is borne out of a continuous connection with the history and tradition where a spiritual relationship with God is sought through a liberating walk with others. To be shaped by the language of faith one needs live a life of faith. In the larger liberal theological tradition, and in the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, “covenant” is one of those “connective” words that conveys religious meaning out of walking inside a religious community and a particular faith perspective. Thus, this particular “duck” and its “why.”
Dr. Brent A. Smith, Minister
All Souls Community Church (Unitarian Universalist)
Grand Rapids, Michigan
One of the origins of this idolatry amongst liberals is the inability and/or the unwillingness to see their perspectives within an historical tradition of theological thinking, as part of the ideas that form a life of faith, and the disciplines, customs, and practices that give shape to spiritual community. Liberalism is understood predominantly as a political “duck,” and a particular kind of political and ideological “duck” at that, “outside” of liberalism as well as “inside” it. In my 23 years of ministry within a liberal religious tradition, living in and working with congregations, this is the single most prevalent roadblock: the unwillingness and/or inability of liberals to roots themselves in a heritage of theological discourse and a legacy of religious ideas informing the life of faith. When it comes to using religious language to inform and shape experience liberals have largely adopted the disclaimer of Herman Melville’s 19th century character, Bartleby the Scrivener: “I’d prefer not to.”
Language is, of course, a vehicle for conveying meaning, and can be a “public” tether connecting us in relationship to others in our time, others of previous times, and to generations yet to be. Language seeks connections or severs them. Even though it is imprecise and leads to as much misunderstanding as illumination, language still can bind people together in fellowship as surely as does shared experiences. In conversation companionship and camaraderie can be created. In attempts to make religion and the religious “relevant” and “true” to the individual’s experience, though, liberals have tried creating new religious languages, ironically yielding an abdication of religious language. The evidence in my own faith tradition is the emphasis on developing a “language of reverence,” as if religious language can be conjured up immediately, “out of time,” and without ties to history as the accumulation of the interpretations of human experience. The evidence in the culture is the political strategy of the Democratic Party to begin “faith-talk” hoping to make in-roads in that political constituency of the religiously fluent. How cynical and ironic! By any measure these attempts cut off the very conversation that language is meant to continue. Liberals cannot talk to the culture about the varieties of religious experience. Hence, religious experience either is exclusive, or is not perceived in the individual’s life at all.
Liberals today are religiously liberal; that is, holding “religiously” to a liberal interpretation of politics and policies. But devoid of religious language, one is severed from the life of faith. There are few liberal religionists. There are few who seek the theological meanings of ideas of community which incarnate liberalis; that is, which are broad-minded, generous, and worthy of free persons. For community to evidence this, a fundamental connection needs be lifted up to which various individuals can give devotion. Liberals are severed from the legacy of faith that gave rise to, and ultimate meaning for, the fundamental connection that binds persons in free religious fellowship and union. One becomes an anomaly in seeking to live out an understanding of faith, religion, God, Jesus, and thus, human nature that is faithful to liberalis as the aim and meaning of community.
Language is a dialectical pursuit with actual experience. You can’t talk about the life of faith without living on the inside of it and the communities that help form and seek to embody it. This is as true of spiritual communities formed for liberalis as it is for those formed to maintain doctrinal purity. The woman who is by herself is not free. She is alone. And you can’t produce a religious language any more than you can share religious experiences without communicating them. The man who conceives of the spiritual life as the absence or severing of connections to family, friends, neighborhood, city, country, and world is rarely religious and doesn’t possess a spiritual identity. He exists without meaning and purpose.
Recovering a life of faith as a liberal Religionist begins with placing one’s life under "disciplines of the free spirit." And part of those disciplines includes conceiving and interpreting one’s life using the framework provided by religious language as it is language about liberalis. It can’t be language conjured out of nothing, nor just “faith-talk.” It is borne out of a continuous connection with the history and tradition where a spiritual relationship with God is sought through a liberating walk with others. To be shaped by the language of faith one needs live a life of faith. In the larger liberal theological tradition, and in the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, “covenant” is one of those “connective” words that conveys religious meaning out of walking inside a religious community and a particular faith perspective. Thus, this particular “duck” and its “why.”
Dr. Brent A. Smith, Minister
All Souls Community Church (Unitarian Universalist)
Grand Rapids, Michigan
posted by Brent Smith | 6:17 AM
5 Comments:
Your comments about liberals' strange dance with a "language of reverence" is helpful. It has been a curiosity to me for a long time why liberal religious leaders will not use certain words because they are "buzz words." Isn't that the very reason to use them-- because they have power due to their history and context? The strange willingness of liberal religionists (as well as political liberals) to abandon any tool as soon as it feels as though the right has been using it effectively leaves me baffled and sad. I understand why members of congregations hesitate to use words like "God," "Holy Spirit," "prayer," "blessing," etc-- they know that in the current climate, they will be heard a certain way. But it is up to the liberal religious leadership, it seems to me, to reclaim those words so that those in our congregations can reclaim them as well.
Building on the dialogue with both Brent and Catherine.........the next issue becomes.......is there a proper lexicon? Every tradition, movement and culture has a lexicon.....that which distinguishes one from another..........Within the liberal religious tradition, would that not imply that the lexicon is as diverse as the members of the community?.......the history and tradition they bring to the community, their ways of knowing and experiencing............
In some ways, it ties to the current immigration debates......can we exist in community, bringing our perspectives, language and experiences for the purpose of dialogue vs. debate............that is, to understand and be understood rather than "winning the point" (matchpoint?)
Responses to Selected Responses
Ski said...
Dr. Smith,
I'm not very smart, and I'm not sure I totally get the Why a Duck, however it does conjur up a question: Do I have to join a church or some other religious community? You seem to be saying that it is from there (inside a community) that my faith and spirituality will grow and blossom.
I look forward to more of your writing.
Warmest Regards,
Ski
Brent Responds:
I’m not very smart either, so perhaps we are spiritual kin?
“Do I have to join a church or some other religious community?” No, I would never say that because individual consent is the vehicle for expressing individuality and, therefore, is the basis for any relationship whose spiritual aim is freedom. However, I would ask back, What part of human nature, and thus one’s spiritual life, is not being invigorated because one’s relationships to others are not informed and shaped by religious community? Praying alone, for example, and praying in communal worship are two different spiritual acts. Talking with friends at a dinner party about spirituality, and engaging a preacher through the conversational medium of pulpit to pew, in the context of communal worship, with coffee hour conversations with others following, are two fundamentally different experiences of the social self in relationship to matters of the spirit.
“You seem to be saying that it is from there (inside a community) that my faith and spirituality will grow and blossom.” Yes, that is partly what I am saying. And here is the rationale.
I think individuals have to ask themselves why it is that at this time in history spiritual development is conceived to be primarily, I would even say exclusively, the product of the individual’s determining; that is, the individual’s will, consent, and effort. Consent is critical, as I maintained above. Yet, what value is there in only listening to my own opinions, preferences, beliefs, and attitudes, especially when it comes to something as critical as faith? I think that persons like myself who are liberal theologically particularly have to ask themselves how our individualistic conceptions of faith and spiritual growth have actually stunted human development. There is a history to this. The early part of the 20th century was in many ways the culmination of the psychological concept of the spiritual self. William James wrote that religion is what an individual does when he is alone, echoed by Alfred North Whitehead who identified solitariness as the central spiritual arena. The middle part of the 20th century to our own day has shown how human being’s social nature can be so distorted as to smother individuality, first in Nazism, then in Sovietism, in Jim Crowism in this country, and finally in worldwide religious Fundamentalisms. Liberal religionists rightly saw the distortions of community: the extremes of conformity and its power to wipe out individuality, and thereby freedom and liberty as well. But we neglected to see how our recoil at that dimished our understandings of human spiritual sociability and the religious nature of human relationships. This history has given liberal religionists a skewed view of religiosity. To be by oneself has become the primary spiritual path, or to be in a community whose primary aim becomes keeping intact the subjective nature of the spiritual path of its individuals. To be related to a group that has its own identity as a group became a dangerous thing to liberal religionists because group connection was seen as coming about only by relinquishing individuality and submitting to a “group conformity.”
Or, in other words, we liberal religionists have lost the social part of human nature. We’ve lost the part of the “self” which comes to its identity through connection with others and with groups. We do not know how to belong to a group that has an identity separate from what we as individuals are willing to give it. We do not any longer understand how to be connected to a group that has a religious identity within which we find our own, individual identity, especially in freedom. We gave up that part of human nature that in belonging to something larger than the self, grows under the disciplines of that relationship. Thus, we struggle with commitment, have virtually thrown out the idea of “religious devotion” to anything we don’t personally agree with, and only want communal expressions and experiences that “reflect me.” And we flee religious connection with communities as soon as the path they head down causes uneasiness.
An individual is not an isolated, separated self. Neither can an individual grow spiritually without engaging the social component of human nature. When I conceive of my relationship with God to include how God moves through my relationships with others, instead of just what I do in my solitariness, then I am beginning down a path where I attend to relationships as sources of spiritual freedom and power for all humankind.
Anonymous said...
Building on the dialogue with both Brent and Catherine.........the next issue becomes.......is there a proper lexicon? Every tradition, movement and culture has a lexicon.....that which distinguishes one from another..........Within the liberal religious tradition, would that not imply that the lexicon is as diverse as the members of the community?.......the history and tradition they bring to the community, their ways of knowing and experiencing............
In some ways, it ties to the current immigration debates......can we exist in community, bringing our perspectives, language and experiences for the purpose of dialogue vs. debate............that is, to understand and be understood rather than "winning the point" (matchpoint?)
Brent Responds:
“Every tradition, movement and culture has a lexicon… that which distinguishes one from another… Within the liberal religious tradition, would that not imply that the lexicon is as diverse as the members of the community?... the history and tradition they bring to the community, their ways of knowing and experiencing…”
When an individual encounters a faith tradition, and by exercising individual consent joins that community, that individual is not joining a religious group whose identity is simply the composite of all the experiences of the current members. The individual is not joining either a community or a faith tradition that began its existence when that individual became a member. The thing about a faith tradition is that it is a tradition. A church is a community of memory as well as hope. Both have a history that predates the arrival of the individual. The individual does not shape the spiritual community and faith tradition that community represents, by defining that community and tradition. That already exists when the individual arrives. That is, I think, part of the inability of current liberal religionists to “do community” very well. Community is seen almost exclusively from the point of view of the individual, various as they are. The community itself is an entity, and an entity separate, though related, to the individuals that make it up. Being separate from the individuals is what makes it possible for the various individuals to join it. Groups have a reality separate from the individual. But, unless the individual can conceive of that, using language of course as you point out, the reality of the group as something separate from the individual will go unnoticed.
In other words, when I joined the church of which I am currently a member I joined an entity that had a reality separate from me. In fact, as a faith community, that community had a relationship with a faith tradition that was separate from the community itself. I joined both, and by that consented to have that community and faith tradition shape me. Being in relationship is about being connected with entities that are not just “us writ large.” That is the power of community to shape and transform the life of the individual.
Thus, it is as I bring my experience to the walk the spiritual community is already on, within a faith tradition that I have become a part of, that my spiritual life is enlivened and I can be transformed. And as I learn about and understand the character of the community, and the disciplines and ideas and language of the faith tradition it is charged with incarnating, that I can shape the community. I don’t invent the words, the lexicon, because it predated my arrival. I have to find a way to learn about it and risk being shaped by it.
The discussion about religious language etc. applies directly to me. For a long time, I was reluctant to use religious terminology since I believe it has been so misused by others (especially with respect to politics) in our society. By doing so, I basically forfeited the use of religious language (and to some extent, a spiritual or religious life) to others. I am hoping this is no longer the case. I now have a way to see my spiritual life (through Unitarian Universalism) as part of a historical tradition of liberal religious thought. This type of community is important to me and makes a lot more sense to me than being part of an independent liberal community. Thanks for the duck.
An excellent and relevant post. I get very annoyed that religion is such a political issue and that because of this the Democratic party is trying to attempt to have religious conversation.
It does not seem genuine and the attempt scares me.
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