A Spiritual Walk Together

"Evil Prevails When Good Men do Nothing" at the Intersection of Faith and Culture

2011-11-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

A man hears a sound, investigates, flees, calls his father for counsel, receives the advice and does as he is told. A man is told, tells his boss, his higher-up, and continues with his work. If they are normal human beings, one will be haunted by what he saw and the other by what he was told, and hauntings are often caught and held in the unconscious. But, again if they are normal, what is also caught is an irritation concerning what they did not do. One did not intervene when he saw what he saw, and the other did no more than tell the person he was supposed to tell.

And we are left to ask, “What is the nature of an individual’s moral lapse, the moment when what needs to be done, is not done?” Before asking how human institutions are designed to be complicit in lapses that circumscribe moral failures, a question worth pursuing; and another, how individuals in those institutions take steps to protect institutions over people, we are compelled to walk on the shifting ground of complicity borne of moral inaction.

The man who saw and fled and followed advice from his father is, of course, the graduate assistant coach who walked into the Penn State football locker room, heard a slapping noise, walked into the shower to find a grown man he knew sexually attacking a young boy whom, presumably, he did not know. Had he walked into a situation where a lone individual was in peril because of a building malfunction, like a wall crumbling down, would he have rushed in to save the life? Had he walked into a situation where a lone individual was in the process of bleeding out from a self-inflicted wound, would he have rushed in to save that life? I think, maybe yes, even if he did not recognize them. I like to think that generally, we rescue from calamity or despairing demise. But when a defenseless child is being attacked by an acquaintance and former coach who is known, why didn’t he rush in at that very moment to protect the defenseless whom he did not know? Was the scene so horrific, and his loyalties and personal allegiances so shattered, that he couldn’t do what was morally required? And the counsel from his father? Why didn’t it include any concern for the defenseless stranger?

And the man who was told, held up over decades for his moral uprightness in following the rules, coaching young men, and shaping their character, why did he only follow the rules of the chain of command? Why didn’t he seek some kind of protection for the defenseless, whom he did not know, and remedy for future defenseless strangers? Why didn’t he, over a whole decade of moments where other action could be taken, choose not to act? Did the prospect of what he was told so threaten his loyalties to an institution he loved, and his allegiances to another he had known so long, that he couldn’t do what was morally required? Isn’t character building directed related to our obligations to those whom we do not know, especially the defenseless stranger?

Both had time to reflect on what they did and did not do; almost a whole decade in fact. They had time to mull over how they could have behaved differently, and even seek to change the future, for what they hadn’t done in the past. But, they didn’t. It was for others to tell the truth and force a confrontation with doing what is moral and right for the least amongst us, the defenseless, and the stranger, the ones we do not know. Why the moral lapse, and the continuation over time? Why is there such a distance between what we see and hear and lift up as right and good, and the will to take action?

Beware, those who claim some higher authority, even God, will save us from action we do not take when it is time to take it. Heed this story. We are responsible for what we do and leave undone, not some higher authority who will rescue us if we just report what we see or are told. Beware, those who claim there is no higher authority than the individual self. Heed this story. We go to great lengths to camouflage our moral obligations from actions that will both rescue and halt horror.

By our actions we become co-creators of redemption or conspirators with collapse and ruin.

What If It Doesn’t Matter So Much? Part Two

2011-11-02T12:46:00.000-07:00

What if it doesn’t matter as much what our individual moral makeup is, or the ethical acts we engage in, in terms of our spiritual identity? Many religionists in the West today, especially within liberal religion in general, and Unitarian Universalism in particular, assume that it does, especially if someone proposes, as we did in a previous post, that “beliefs” no longer can be considered primarily, or exclusively, as the source of religious identity. Without beliefs as that “definer,” the fallback position is usually morals and ethics. My beliefs may change, or I may not be able to communicate them meaningfully, but I am searching for “the good” or to be a “good” person, and/or I want to be right and not wrong on key issues of our times. Faith traditions may not be able to say with certainty what it is they believe in common, or have adherents who can faithfully toe the line consistently in terms of beliefs, but still pursue with cause and determination a conception of what is good and/or what is right. The characteristic of our time relative to religion, morals, and ethics, is that all three seem to have collapsed into political positions and policies such that the political is what religions, and individuals, are really wrestling with in terms of a search for the good and the true.

It is impossible to be good or right, bad or wrong, alone. It requires a relatedness to entities larger than self, and thus one is ushered immediately into the political. You can individually hold beliefs about God and act on those beliefs without others present or in mind. Lord, help thou my unbelief, is an example. But morals and ethics are different. They involve politics, and how relationships between people and matters amongst groups are to be governed and adjudicated. So, while morals and ethics cannot be reduced to politics, they involve the political to some degree because all are social. It’s just that at our time in history, politics dominates our collective point of view regarding these things. Today, we collapse them all into the political.

But, suppose we tried to extricate religion and the religious. So, how could we conceive of “the religious” or “being religious” or “expressing my religion” or “the spiritual identity of an ‘us’” that does not involve the moral or the ethical primarily or exclusively, any more than it would put forward “beliefs” in that same way? Hopefully, this question stretches the mind to see religion, the “religious,” and “spiritual behaviors” and "spiritual encounters and experiences" as something more than beliefs, morals, and ethics; and, in fact, as something from which are derived beliefs, morals, and ethics, as secondary yields. They are important. But, they are derivative.

What could that something more be? Let’s let that question “percolate” a while, and be something that is mulled over and turned over, again and again; in part because it requires us first of all, to engage something in addition to that part of our brain that urges we categorize in ways that are currently set, though maybe no longer as useful because they are recognized in their narrowness. We are seeking some kind of unified view, and thus will categorize at some time in order to understand, but not yet. Right now, suffice it to say, that the old ways of seeing just aren’t adequate, as they had been more. We are more and differently religious than what beliefs, or the moral thing to do, the right action, lead us to see. We don’t need more vision, but a larger and wider view.

What kinds of things does homo religiosus engage in, do, contemplate, is surrounded by, seek, yearn for, and is a participant in? How does homo religious behave when being “religious” or “spiritual”? What activities does homo religious engage in and is a part of? What forms mark homo religiosus as being religious as opposed to when not?

And then, what are the ways homo religiosus is “distinctive” such that we categorize as one kind and not another, and give it a name, like Christianity, and further categorize with Protestant, Liberal, and then, Unitarian Universalist (my particular interest)?

Forgetting and Letting Go in the Age of Facebook

2011-10-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

Upon hearing of the death of computer/internet pioneer Steven Jobs, my second thought after marveling at his genius and impact, was to wonder if anyone would take his personal Facebook page down. I wonder because, according to my wife, friend and deceased ministerial colleague Suzanne Meyer’s still hasn’t been. Suzanne pops up from time to time on my wife’s page, with the standard Facebook invitation to my wife to suggest a friend to her. Though our grief has continued for a year and half, and her absence remains, there is something disturbing in this. We will never forget her but her presence is gone from us.

It is a kind of “reverse oubliette.” Years ago we took a church children’s choir to England for a tour that included a visit to Warwick Castle where there is a famous oubliette. An oubliette is a tiny, secret underground dungeon-for-one accessed by a trapdoor in the castle floor, the cell’s ceiling. It was named this, from the Latin meaning “to forget,” because a prisoner was thrown in there, never to be heard from again. Oblivion. The torture must have been excruciating. Keep the prisoner well-fed and forgotten. He knew it was as if he didn’t exist though he still did.

It is as if she never died, but she has. She doesn't know it but we do. Fortunately she is no longer in the pain that her cancer brought on. But, the electronic age won’t let her be. It hounds her to seek friendships with the living from the grave, which become teasers to us: What is she up to? Is her news good? Where are the pictures from the land she’s gone to?

It is macabre. And it hurts each time her picture appears in the rotation of Facebook friends. She is now a part of the “memory” that is God, and her peaceful return unto His bosom was welcomed by her cancer ridden body and her beautiful spirit. We will not forget her as long as we live, but why can’t the electronic age let go, whose memory is long, though the meaning it once carried forgotten?

What If It Doesn’t Matter So Much? Part 1

2011-09-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

What if it doesn’t matter so much what we believe? We Unitarian Universalists assume that it does. It is often the first thing we want to know about a new friend-in-the-faith, asking what “ist” they are, humanist, atheist, theist, etc. Individual belief means so much that ministers preach on how you don’t have to believe certain tenets to be a member of a Unitarian Universalist Church! "We will not be restrained in our beliefs." Admittedly, it is how we delineate the faith perspectives of others whom we meet. We even have a reading that survived two hymnal commissions, “It Matters What We Believe,” by Sophia Lyons Fahs.

Yet, what if it doesn’t, or, at least, doesn’t matter in the same measure we give credence to it? What if belief isn’t solely or even primarily what identifies someone from a religious standpoint? What if our basic assumption is taken to be that, an assumption, and that other assumptions might be even better taken as foundational to faith identity?

Historically, in the Christian tradition out of which we come, belief was the question mark of orthodoxy, and common belief the declaration of a creed. So, why would we adopt this assumption as so central to our faith, while at the same time taking great pains to differentiate from those “others”?

Any observer of religion in the early 21^st century sees how competing beliefs fare in the family of humanity. In religion, beliefs translate into truths. Truths are claims to how reality really is and how it operates. When we give supremacy, ultimate or proximate favor to the idea that religion is primarily or exclusively a matter of belief, aren’t we adding fuel to an already raging fire, even though we can claim in the same breadth, that we value all accelerants?

And how has seeing religion through the eyes of belief helped us gain a sense that when we are together, something is shared, like identity?

Maybe it is time to do away with the assumption itself or, if not outright discarding it (which I would not recommend), at least demote it from CEO of our identity, and send it back to middle management.

So, what could be an alternative? Well, the academic discipline of Religious Studies offers some. But, to see why this field has left “belief” at the altar, some history of the long courtship is in order.

And that history begins with the breakup. Postmodernism gave the study of religion two gifts, one which was accepted and the other which was outright rejected. First, the rejection: Postmodernism’s insight – that everyone looks upon phenomena with different eyes yielding a different picture – doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing of substance can be said or studied about anything, like religion. Because everyone has an opinion does not mean that everyone has developed a point of view; or, that all points of view are equal in depth. Postmodernism rightly pointed out that every point of view has its limitations and boundaries, is born of a subjectivity. But, that does not mean all subjectivities have an equal claim to validity or relevance.

We who study religion think there really is a discernible and distinct object of study to look at and understand. That is our assumption. And, whether we can say anything “normative” about religion - which, it is true, we cannot say about religious belief! - there still is this behavior. People keep going around being religious! They have experiences they claim are religious. The sacred keeps in-breaking into people’s lived experience. They display behaviors, conduct activities, and create communal forms that have something to do with what they cannot see, but appear to hold in reverence. And that, in and of itself, is interesting and worthy of notice and study.

The one gift postmodernism gave Religious Studies that it readily receives is that each person has a perspective, boundaries to what they see and know, a point of view which is rooted in assumptions which arise from a context. Thus, it is imperative to know both assumptions and context, because they most intimately shape point of view. And the context for the concept of “religion” as it has been largely understood and used the past century and a half in the West, is intimate with the concept of “belief,” and in some instances seen as synonymous with it. This “concept of religion” has its contextual origin in Western Christianity, with lesser links to Judaism and Islam. In other words, to insist on the use of beliefs to define one’s or another’s religion, is to use an old concept rooted in the context of Christianity, with assumptions derived from that context. It is an ill-fitted lens to see and understand Buddhism, Hinduism, the world’s other major faiths and minor expressions of the link between the sacred and the profane.

If we no longer assumed belief to be a useful description, what would better serve to give an identity to this “religious way of human being and existing”? Hmmmm...

The Challenges of a 21st Century Faith Identity, Part 1

2011-06-06T05:15:00.000-07:00

The chief intellectual challenge facing Unitarian Universalists at the mark of the 50th anniversary of the merger of two separate, but deeply related American faith traditions, is that we do not know who we are. We do not know who we are as Unitarians, Universalists, or Unitarian Universalists, and this admission is not a deep insight nor is it original with this author. Everyone knows this, and has for some time now. It is not because merger eliminated the distinctions and, thereby, begged the question of the identity of the "new thing" Unitarian Universalism, though it might have once. Our lack of understanding of who we are (others on the religious and cultural landscape may actually know our identity better than we do, a subject for another post) has roots in who we are, and “how” we have changed over time. I say "how" we have changed over time because there is a definite trend today towards responding with, "everything changes," as if this observation is an interpretation and a helpful one at that. But, offered as an interpretation it reveals frustration and despair, and is not a way to meet the challenge itself. In not seeking to understand “how” we have changed with the times, and how our changes over time have influenced who we are and where we are now, we give in to that frustration and despair.

Historical analysis is part of understanding identity. It is not a denial that time changes all things. It is seeking to understand how that change has changed us, whoever the “us” is! But, historical analysis needs some kind of template to understand the stages of identity emergence and change. To understand time in terms of stages is to take an historical view of things.

One template for understanding our intellectual history – a key to identity - can be found in Martin Riesebrodt's new book, The Promise of Salvation. In this 2009 book Riesebrodt identified the chaos postmodernism brought into the discipline of Religious Studies, and offered a path out of that confusion and its radical subjectivism. Postmodernism left many mute when it came to understanding "religion" in a way that the universal practice of it could be studied and understood. It caused an “identity crisis” in Religious Studies, as it has in other disciplines, until talking about talking – linguistics – came to be seen as the only real academic discipline, the “Queen of the Sciences,” one might say, a title once held by theology! Because Riesebrodt is up to the challenge of creating something post-postmodern (Tackling the interpretive challenge of what is “post” something that is “post”) he might also be an ally in attacking the chief challenge facing Unitarian Universalists in the 21^st century by giving us a way to understand who we are, and how we have come to where we are. He might help us in seeing our identity “post losing it"!

Riesebrodt offered three intellectual discourses that have formed the study of religion in the West since the Enlightenment. The first is the child of the Enlightenment, which also gave the world liberal religion in general, and eventually Unitarianism and Universalism as they have come to be known as historic faith traditions.

The Enlightenment introduced the use of Reason in a particular way, distinct from how it had been used in previous epochs. It became the means to understand “Religion” as a concept. In the area of Religious Studies, Marx, Freud, and Durkheim are examples of this. We are the quintessential historical faith tradition-progeny of this. Enlightenment Reason had two branches. In one, Reason was seen as heralding the eventual disappearance of religion. Gradually wed to modern science, Reason would evolve to replace the “species” of religion as the chief means to interpret human meaning and destiny. The other branch of Enlightenment Reason yielded traditions of discourse like the Unitarianism of Channing, with his paradigmatic declaration of Reason’s use with Scripture; and the Universalism of Ballou in uncovering the pathology of vicarious atonement in its underlying depiction of the nature of God. In our case the discourse of Reason was fashioned into the institutions and structures of the church. This discourse of Reason yielded the 20^th century’s Humanism of John Dietrich and Ken Patton, though with a significant twist. Held within our ranks were both branches of Enlightenment Reason, which gave us our 20^th century central discourse: The intellectual tradition of the Theist/Humanist (read, Atheist) debate. Goodness, it’s even evident in the contest between our red and blue hymnals! Our version of the Reason discourse continued to push this philosophical question to the forefront of our religious identity with a vigor that defined us: Is there a God?

But, how modern science came to be understood amongst us changed the nature of the debate as it evolved in the latter parts of the 20^th century, until it became more and more theism vs atheism and, finally, a kind of eclectic-spiritualism vs materialism. You can still see the vestiges of this discourse today, though after postmodernism, and another cultural trend, it now debilitates us in terms of our identity, where once it invigorated us. But, we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves!

The second tradition of discourse concerning “Religion” as a concept for study is the Romantic tradition. In Religious Studies, Riesebrodt sites the evidences of this tradition as well, in the form of Frazer and Eliade to name two. In our own context this began to distinguish itself separate from the discourse of Reason, through Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendental Idealists. Initially, though, this Romanticism was an “in house” conversation amongst us, which spilled over into the culture to become the American Renaissance. In the early to mid part of the 20^th century it was evident in figures like Jenkin Lloyd Jones and Frank Lloyd Wright, who straddled the line between our faith tradition and the Romanticism of the culture. It remained largely the domain of the culture’s literary canon, and as a means for us to engage with culture, until the second half of the 20th century when, under the social pressure of the 1960's, it emerged again into our now formed Unitarian Universalism in two guises; first, a religious environmentalism, which yielded the “web of existence” metaphor and all that has gone with that; and second, a suspicion of institutions, always a part of Emersonianism; and with the first being the institutions and history of the church itself. Since the 1960’s, this Romantic discourse has been exacerbated by the "come-outers," who brought their institutional suspicions, manifest explicitly in their leaving their previous traditions, into the center of the Unitarian Universalist church itself. We cared about the environment and the fate of the Earth, but knew the church itself, especially our own church, contained structures that oppressed more than liberated, and allegiance to the church could blind one to that. We looked outside the sanctuary and neglected its inside for the oppression it held there. It was a return to the “Protestantism” of old in the sense of protesting the structures of the church; but, with a modern ecological concern made sacred.

But these two intellectual conversations - Reason and Romanticism, head and heart in other words - shaped Unitarianism, Universalism, and Unitarian Universalism from its beginnings. Both are discourses; that is, both are ways of conversing about matters that shape us. Both are ways to understand who we are. Both are facets of the same “personality” that form us as one.

Yet, Riesebrodt identifies the third discourse which we will take up in the next post. Given the cultural context within which this third discourse arose, it has changed us from considering the question of identity as a matter of historical understanding, into a conviction that we do not and cannot know who we are because everything changes.

A Liberal’s Belief in the Rapture

2011-05-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

I believe in the rapture.

I believe in the rapture as a liberal religionist in general, and a Unitarian Universalist in particular. I don’t claim to know when the rapture will occur, or what it will entail, but I believe in the rapture. I believe in it because of the modern liberal’s unwillingness and inability to employ religious imagination to pragmatic matters of living. I believe in it because it demands that I push the boundaries of what I can conceive and know about the meaning of our life and times.

I have read countless numbers of dismissals of the rapture predicted to occur today. These are smug and snide rebukes of the literalism and hubris of someone claiming to know the will of God in matters pertaining to the fate of space and time. Of course, the claim that any one person makes that he or she can know things beyond what humanity can know, is hubris. But, that it is deemed worthy of the manner of the liberal rebuke begs several questions, not the least of which is why certain modern liberals conceive it necessary to comment in this manner!

I write this because belief in the rapture is a particular form of a general belief concerning the nature of time.

I believe in the rapture because it carries with it a belief in the future. The classic conservative doesn’t believe in the future, but holds an allegiance to a past from which the present has descended and atrophied. The orthodox hold that the spiritually pure grasp and live by a correct adherence to a doctrine declaring that God was revealed in a past act; Moses at Sinai, Mohammed and Mecca, Jesus on the cross. Even the most broadminded of the orthodox look to yesterday in holding that these events form the “center of time,” when the meaning and purpose of existence changed through God’s intervention in this world. But, still, the emphasis is on the past as the bearer of meaning.

My faith is both a protest of that, and a declaration of something different.

I believe in the rapture because I believe in the future. I seek to employ a hermeneutic of suspicion, which demands that I realize I do not and cannot know when, where, or how. But, to “believe in” the rapture in the most basic way possible, is to assert that time will be fulfilled ahead of us, in a future that is “not yet,” as opposed to in a time behind and before. It is to claim that the future means something, though we cannot say with certainty today what that is. The future is yet to be determined. Thus, our activity today gains a heightened significance. To believe in the rapture is to take the stance of hope over lament and despair. And, it is to locate us as agents and participants and co-creators of that hope. What you believe in and work for and towards today, means something, not because of a past blueprint, but a future possibility. Those who seek to employ the hermeneutic of suspicion need to remind those who are certain they know when, where, and how, that doubt outlines the boundaries of our humanity in what we can and cannot know; what can and cannot be understood by us, or say for sure. But to the modern liberal, the threat of employing a hermeneutic of suspicion is to mistake the method for the substance. It is a tool for deepening faith, not faith itself. No one can stand very long on a foundation that is suspect, the object of unrelenting doubt, the shifting sands of uncertainty and mistrust. Anyone who has been in an earthquake knows you cannot stand when everything is constantly shifting, and yet, most of life is composed of moments of stability. Quakes subside and aftershocks disappear. Your allegiance, ultimately, resides in something. And doubt and suspicion - while excellent tools to outline what we can and cannot know, what we are and are not privy to - are poor substitutes for faith.

I believe in the rapture because I believe there is yet more meaning to be revealed tomorrow. I believe in the rapture because I believe time will be redeemed and fulfilled at last. I believe there is more to existence than the material, and that the expanding and expanse of the universe and all that exists far outdistances our capacities to create meaning in time. I don’t know where it will happen, how it will happen, or when; and, those things don’t really matter to me. But belief in tomorrow over yesterday is not unconnected to holding that love conquers fear. And, I do love today, even more than I loved yesterday, and not as much as I will love tomorrow. And I look with hope to what is yet to unfold.

A Holy Kind of Spirit

2011-05-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

About fifteen years ago there arose a focus amongst younger clergy concerning “ministerial presence.” I even remember talking with a younger colleague who spoke of a “theology of presence.” I just didn’t know what she meant. Being liberal religionists the conversation was not about Christ’s immanence, but a more vague recognition of the power of simple human presence as critical to the pastoral moment, be that moment whatever it might be. Theologically it was closer to an understanding of the immanence of the Holy Spirit; the idea that when people are in close proximity to one another, especially during particularly stressful or traumatic times, and that closeness is characterized by a certain kind of care and concern and giving (a certain kind of “Covenant of Being,” as one theologian called it), then a Spirit leaps across the boundaries of personhood to connect us to one another in deeply meaningful ways. It is a unique feature of human existence that this kind of deep sharing and connection can occur. And it seems there is no better word to describe that than a “holy” kind of “Spirit.”

Comedian Woody Allen has been quoted as saying, “90% of life is just showing up,” and “80% of success is showing up.” Whatever the percentage, and whatever the effect, presence has certain qualities to it to which certain fruits can be attributed. This is apparent to ministers and educators, but maybe less so to others in our internet world. It’s a different experience to offer succor to someone in the hospital via a phone text. Likewise, it’s a different kind of class conversation conducted online.

Presence yields something more.

When one is present to and with another, one is vulnerable because of the face to face encounter. Body language and voice inflection give one up to those with eyes to see and ears to hear. The more there is at stake during the encounter, the more one wonders, “What should I say?” If you are “present” with someone who is facing a terminal illness or cancer diagnosis, or the loss of a spouse or child or marriage, or is at wits end as to how to help their children get their life back on track or what to do with “Mother’s mental demise,” your mind often races through all the scenarios of what to say, trying desperately to find those magical words which, set in perfect sequence, would restore order to chaos. Presence exacts something from us, as we extend ourselves to others and, by our care, help them shoulder an unimaginable burden. Empathy and sympathy are emotionally and physically painful and exhausting. Yet, if 90% of life and 80% of success, is showing up, the power of that “holy” kind of “Spirit,” which transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves, is 100% in our willingness to show up.

This may be an odd commentary on a Facebook driven world.

At 56 years of age I am just inside the Baby Boomer demographic, and it is true that we are the “Me Generation.” But today, life is driven by the “Look at Me Generation,” embodied by Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Web Sites, Streaming, and YouTube; even blogs, I am afraid, which this is one! This is not the kind of presence to which my younger colleagues fifteen years ago were referring. It is more the “advertisement of Me,” be that “Me” an individual, institution, or organization. And those wonders of the internet world have a usefulness in terms of disseminating information. But, it is not presence, and most importantly, none provide the conditions for that “holy” kind of “Spirit” tied to face-to-face, human contact. There is a kind of hug that gives another permission to let go emotionally without fear that the chaos of unrestrained sentiment will swallow one up. There is a way to shake someone’s hand that gives to them an affirmation of self, of being looked straight in the eye and acknowledged, that no other form of human contact can conjure up. There is something about another individual calling us by name, and being with us to hear what our experience, and interpretation of our experience, is. It’s not rocket science or magic, but it is the healing presence of a “holy” kind of “Spirit” that is carried like an electric current, between two people and, in rare instances and in the best of ways, through gathered groups at certain times and places.

Liberal Education and Liberal Religion

2011-04-25T05:04:00.000-07:00

The similarities in “methodology” or approach between liberal education and liberal religion lure some to mistake one for the other. Thus, it is not uncommon for those in various traditions within liberal religion – as in my own Unitarian Universalism, for instance – to think it inconceivable that one could lift up liberal education and hold a “conservative” or “orthodox“ faith. But, the purview of faith and of education do not pertain to the same field of human nature and conduct. Ironically, I am finding it is not unusual in the academic world to wonder how one could be enmeshed in liberal education and be religious at all. The wonder is how they could be compatible let alone complimentary.

These observations merely lift up the uneasy relationship between faith and learning, the spiritual and the educational, in the world of the liberal. There is not that same ambivalence or confusion within scholasticism – liberal education’s rival – because the relationship between faith and learning is clear in terms of accountability. Scholasticism views learning and education as a servant of faith in that matters of faith shape what subjects are of interest and how they are to be pursued. Philosophy and science are the handmaidens of Truth, and Truth the yield of religion. Identify the interests of religion and the life of faith, and one will have found the direction any educational endeavor need take.

But the relationship between faith and learning within liberalism is different.

Every fact learned and theory pursued serves faith in building confidence and trust in existence by routing error, in the case of science; or exposing hubris, in the case of the humanities. The liberal, whether in education or religion, is always on the lookout for idolatry; that is, our ever-present tendency to latch on to some idea, concept, faith, or doctrine as if it were worthy of absolute faith, and is the final and complete word! It is as prevalent in education as it is in religion, this urge to orthodoxy. All things of this world, including religion and education and the products of each, are finite and limited and not worthy objects of ultimate allegiance. Liberal faith offers a confidence that only those within the scope and influence of the spiritual hold: that the Ultimate, God, will never be captured by our thoughts and concepts and interpretations. God is elusive to the ways of human knowing and believing. Every idea contains human self-interest. Yet, there is faith. Liberal religion carries along an assurance, unverifiable by means of education, that existence, for all its calamity, will be resolved at last. And, that it is God’s domain to resolve what needs be resolved.

Yet, both liberal education and liberal religion lift up one quality consistent to both: liberalis, freedom, broadmindedness, generosity, and tolerance. Education is valuable in proportion to its liberating affect upon the mind. Faith is valuable in proportion to freeing the mind and heart to live more generously with regard to one’s fellow human beings, and more broadly with regard to the way all existence and all living things have been created in Love. Whatever is the resolution that is the domain of the Ultimate, freedom is its aim.

Learning as a Spiritual Practice

2011-04-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

I teach at a University an Introduction to Liberal Education course, which is primarily a philosophy and hermeneutics course. It is a study of what kind of education is liberal, and what a liberally educated interpretive perspective is. We begin the semester with an overview of Critical Thinking and what it involves, and several sessions looking at what liberal means. Etymologically, the word “liberal” comes from the Latin, liberalis, meaning free, broadminded, and generous. When applied to the act of learning it is the freeing of the mind from error and superstition; instilling a broadmindedness towards one’s experience and the experience of others; and approaching relationships with a generosity that conceives of the purpose of human connection as a connection with an Other in such a manner as to understand, as best as is possible, their experience and the way it forms meaning to them. Critical Thinking is a component in this process in that it involves one in understanding one’s own assumptions, point of view, and context such that, being rooted in that, one can be liberated towards a “new being” arrived at by connecting with that Other.

Of course studying it requires one to employ the techniques and language of analysis to understand it. But, simply put, it is to know thyself as the prelude to “transcending the self” in creative connection whereby you learn something new, something you didn’t know a moment before. Thus, the self “expands,” becoming freer, more broadminded, more generous in the helpings of knowledge – intellectual and emotional – of self, others, and world. One grows. But, it is growth with a particular aim and direction. It is not towards the past, though understanding the past is a substantial part of it. It is towards the open future. It is not towards an identity derived from or located in yesterday, though knowledge of what and who one was before is crucial. It is towards the “new being” life can transform us towards. It is not towards certainty, but possibility, though often knowledge of certain things eliminates other competing things, as the products of science often show.

There is not anything necessarily spiritual about this, but the hermeneutic can be spiritual. As one of the originators of my particular field, Religious Studies, once observed: “[Religion assumes] the forces which govern the world [are] conscious and personal, [not] unconscious and impersonal.” (J.G. Frazer) Or, to say it another way, existence, the world, the universe is designed in such a manner that the learning of a new thing about it can yield a liberating feel within human being, and we can feel more free, conceive of the next moment in a more broadminded way, and the sentiments unleashed by generosity can move us to altruistic aims that transcend self-interest and self-preservation. That is part of my spiritual reading, my spiritual interpretation. We are fitted to the Sphere, and it to Us. And there is an agreement we are born into, a Covenant of Being as it were, that as we find and build this place as our home, we find and build the Self and Others.

Prayer

2011-03-30T13:17:00.000-07:00

In my private spiritual practice prayer generally takes four various forms which can commonly be named thus: "Ooops" "Wow!" "Help" and "Thank You." Sometimes they are combined, as in "Help me" and "Thank you for listening." More often than not, though, they remain true to their form.

Ooops: O Most Holy God, beyond all designations and names, I beseech Thee to have mercy on me for the foibles I foster, the stupidities that claim me again and again, the shortcomings I welcome to command me, and the ways I maintain my transient and narrow affections as if they approve themselves to Thee. For my mistakes are as plenty as Your mercy is wide, and my will is as weak as Your love is strong and enduring. You save me from myself, and for this, and many other blessings, I am grateful. So Be It, Shalom, Namaste, Amen.

Wow!: I stand bathed in Your creation, O My God, and I am struck by more colors and sounds and fragrances and tastes than my senses can hold, and when I hold the hand of my beloved the thrill shoots through my fingers and straight to my heart, and I am in awe of it all. Your works buoy me up like the ocean can hold on its surface a vessel of millions upon millions of tons, and yet I am no vessel of great size and proportion, but a single soul adrift on that same ocean. I cannot contemplate the bottom of this sea or how far the nearest shore is or the distance to the nearest star above, but afloat on this terrible and beautiful sea, I can smell the crisp air and hear the call of the gulls and taste the wet salt and splash the droplets upon my brow and be refreshed. For this moment, O My God, the sea and I are One!

Help: I am lost. I feel alone. I am without. I feel alone. I am discouraged. I feel alone. I am angry. I feel alone. I am afraid. I feel alone. I am lost, without, discouraged, angry, and afraid I am alone. Hear my cry, when no one on this earth can. I need Your Love and Your Forgiveness, for I am stagnant, isolated, confused, inferior, guilty, shamed, in doubt and mistrust, and to live again I must be grasped out of this by a Love larger than me. Wrest me out of this condition, O God, by the scruff of my faded collar and restore me to new life in Thy Loving Purpose and Nobler Ways.

Thank You: Thank you, Dear God, for this good life, for the beauty of the new dawn and the light returning from the darkness; for the cool comfort of the evening breeze and the blessed joy of an unrepeatable gift. Thank you for the beauty and promise of this day; for the blessings of family and friends and the souls we do not know, but whose life upholds your Creation. I give thanks for hands that hold mine when I am hurting, that hold up my body when I am weary, and soothe my spirit when I need solace. I give thanks for a day I did not create, and the hope that lies in every moment of its trial and triumph. I give thanks to You, O God, for giving us Love that we might give love back to the world, and from the gift of this day build a greater life for all souls.

The Theological Value of Consent

2007-04-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

The first use of the written ballot on the shores of the North American continent was in Salem, Massachusetts in the early 17th century, when those European spiritual pioneers elected their religious leaders. It was an act emanating from the bond of affection, the covenant, that formed them into a spiritual community. The significance in terms of church governance, polity, is palpable. No longer would the church’s leadership be determined by an ecclesiastical hierarchy, but by the consent of the governed. “Christ’s Representative on Earth” – by which clergy were known then – would be chosen not by the diocese but the denizens, not through apostolic succession but by spiritual rights. It was the culmination of what had been hinted at in the Reformation. In essence the individual stood before God with no intermediary, and it was only a finite existence of limits and conditions whereby that immediate and direct relationship was compromised. The temptation was, and is always before us to elevate things of this finite world to infinite status, including the symbolic mediators of the sacred. Human consent and responsibility – free will – is an awesome and mighty thing perhaps because it is the evidence of something more.

The theological ramification is revolutionary, but it would take another two centuries until William Ellery Channing fully exposed it. Human beings bear a Divine Likeness, and it is through individual consent whereby that likeness is borne into reality. We call God Creator, and through human consent we emulate that creativity. Humanity gives shape to the world, creates meaning in existence, and can propel creation towards its fulfillment through this coarchy with the Ultimate. And, humanity can distort and disfigure creation through activities that compound the tyranny of self and others by aligning with the principalities and powers that diminish creativity and threaten to sever our relationship with the Spirit.

The theological value of consent is that it is the evidence in human nature of God’s image, and is expressed most fully when we consent to enter into and deepen loving relationships. But we do not commonly conceive of the theological value of consent, nor act as if it is the presence of God that it is. Nor do we, who live and move within a faith tradition that harbors the theology of covenant, understand consent as part of the path that is our spiritual identity and practice. We don’t talk about it that way and haven’t learned to read our lives that way.

James Luther Adams, a Unitarian Universalist and one of the 20th century’s great theologians, pulled the brush aside on the path to our spiritual identity and practice, explaining how some concepts “become” religious concepts, words “become” symbols of something sacred:

“Human social existence requires the achievement of a means of communicating about social existence, a characteristic feature of which is the invention of concepts. Concepts do not come down from heaven; they have to be invented… [Theological] discourse… picks up a concept from ordinary experience and gives it a new and expanded meaning. A concept that originally applies to one aspect of existence is reinterpreted to explain the whole of existence. We call this process the radicalizing of a concept.” (The Prophetic Covenant and Social Concern, James Luther Adams)

Members of All Souls Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the church with whom I am in covenant as its minister, talk about “walking together” to describe the community’s spiritual life. Thus, the two words become invested with new meanings that bear upon the whole of existence and expand the possible experiences of God. Thus for me, being guided by the influence of our covenant, a stroll on a downtown street just isn’t the same again! Our spiritual forbear John Winthrop held that relationships forming spiritual community are as a “city upon the hill.” Thereafter, can your home congregation and hometown not be seen differently? Jesus likened the “kingdom of God” to a landowner hiring laborers for his vineyard, and invests ultimate meanings in “laborers” and in “vineyards” and the manner and consequence of "hiring."

Any ordinary thing in this world can be a symbol for the transformative capacities inherent in finite existence. That’s part of the history of our spiritual identity. Any ordinary thing can be a signpost for the liberating presence and possibility of Love. But our view is distinctive and enduring. The ancient Hebrews took the concept of a treaty between political entities and radicalized it into the concept of “covenant” to describe the relationship between God and the Hebrew people. And our spiritual ancestors used a covenant to gather a new community from a new relatedness proffering a new being, over against authoritarian structures of understanding and fellowship. It is part of the theological and spiritual yield of the Salem vote.

Our forbears made the first step in the exodus from authoritarianism by creating a bond of fellowship and affection amongst persons to be seen and understood as the spiritual and divine product it is. The consequence of that covenant was the possibility of freedom and the fulfillment of creation it can bring through human activity. The Catholic priest can serve mass alone. The Muslim can practice Salat by herself. The individual Jew is a Jew. But a Unitarian Universalist needs a congregation, a covenant, so much so that when she lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula hours away from any visible gathering of the faithful, the Church of the Larger Fellowship convenes regularly for worship in her mailbox!

Covenant is a concept taken from the various agreements we make everyday, from the willingness to kneel in prayer with someone we don’t know all that well, to the life partner we’ve chosen for better or worse, to the teacher to whom we entrust our child, to the boss or co-worker or employee we supervise. Agreements are ordinary things. But to us, certain kinds of agreements unlock sacred and holy dimensions to this life when their roots are in the expanse of human affection and their branches bud into the virtues of freedom. Or, as 20th century Unitarian minister Napoleon Lovely wrote, “The bonds of love keep open the gates of freedom.”

We take the ordinary qualities inherent to certain agreements - to covenants which are formed by affection and aimed at freedom - and we radicalize them. Equality and fairness make relationships spiritual, while inequality and disparity, the yield of authoritarian relationships, makes them profane. Mutuality, promises, roles and responsibilities, lines of authority, distribution of power - these qualities simultaneously contain an ordinary relevance and an ultimate meaning. Covenantal relationships prize persuasive discourse over coercive submission, the separation and balance of power, dissent and critique, and distinct individuality as necessary to and the aim of a relationship. The creation of holy bonds cherishes spoken discourse as a spiritual practice and “walking together” as a spiritual discipline. They involve God and human being together, a coarchy in the promise of creation’s future fulfillment in the liberation of all souls. A covenant of Being. A theology of covenant is our gift to the world. The spiritual life expressing that covenant is our gift to the world.

But of all these qualities, derived from relationships seen through the possibility of their sacredness, through covenant, it is individual consent that is the symbolic reflection in human nature of God’s creative intent and the arc of the moral universe. It the underlying spiritual nature of simple requests that beg the Ultimacy of human bonds: “Do you take this woman or this man in the bonds of a holy union?” “Will you pray with me?” “Can you sit with me for a while?” “Will you join the church and walk with this community?”

Individual consent is also what is most misunderstood and distorted by us. It is not to be belittled into personal preference, the self’s desires or needs or wants, the kind of “what-I-like-becomes-absolute-truth” disregard for covenant that claims a spiritual community is simply the largest number of possible private preferences fulfilled. Individual consent is not selfoatry writ large. It is not the oppression of absolute subjectivity. The devotion to self-interest that yields spiritual license is not the bonds of affection that give birth to freedom.

Individual consent is involved in sacrifice, but not the sacrifice that gives up consent and individuality; rather, the sacrifice which, by giving consent to something larger then self, brings about the prospect of the New Being through the New Relationships grounded in Love. Individual consent - that human nature contains the capacity to give consent to enter loving relationships that are the foundation of freedom and human identity - most fully expresses our divine likeness. Consent is the evidence in human nature that we emulate the Creator by our own creativity. To live inside of relationships born of that creative affection is a special, powerful gift that transcends narrow allegiances that end with self; to walk with others in this way is to live in the closest proximity to what animates all of life. Spiritual community then becomes what it is suppose to become: the Free Church! God appears in the eyes of others who all have been made in that divine image, too! So the invitation to love God and your neighbor as yourself, becomes two different ways to walk in a common direction!

The Free Pew and The Free Pulpit

2006-12-04T07:04:00.000-08:00

In spiritual communities formed by a covenant to which individuals have consented, whose aim is freedom (and thereby, to “spiritualize” freedom), there are two “institutions” that symbolize two different facets of human nature in relationship to freedom: The Free Pew and The Free Pulpit. The Free Pew expresses how covenantal community that spiritualizes freedom, presents a “new view” of human nature itself, and thereby a view of the ontological makeup of the individual that “competes” with the conservative view of human nature represented in its quintessential form by Western orthodoxy before the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The Free Pulpit symbolizes how the existence of the covenanted community becomes a means for enlarging freedom and therefore, expands the possibilities in existence through creative novelty.

The church I currently “walk with,” All Souls Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, maintains there is no theological declaration needed to become a member of the church and share in its fellowship; the widest definition of the Free Pew. It is a spiritual discipline to maintain the Free Pew because it is terribly difficult to uphold; not to regard others first and foremost by their theological beliefs; not to conceive of religion primarily or exclusively as a set of beliefs regarding truth. It is even more difficult in a day when religion everywhere is swallowed up by political pronouncements and "certainist" ideologies, and the divisiveness and rancor they generate.

The Free Pew is a spiritual practice in conceiving of a new view of human nature. Each human being is created with the freedom of a differentiated self. Each “possesses the self,” is a living instance of individuality. Human beings don’t create the freedom the Free Pew symbolizes in this new view of human nature. This is the part that is hardest to understand. We have to discipline ourselves not to think we create it by our opinions, beliefs, or practices. Otherwise, we are only declaring that it is by the mood of any generation that freedom is created. Human nature is created free, and individuals possess an inherently emancipated individuality and a differentiated self-interest. This is what the Free Pew symbolizes, and what is theologically represented in the statement, “God creates us. We do not create ourselves.” Easy to describe, but difficult to maintain and understand.

The Free Pulpit’s aim also concerns freedom, but unlike its compliment, it is as difficult to explain as it is to understand and maintain. It is created and maintained as a socially created arrangement. It is the freedom human beings create in time; which means it is relative to a generation's faithfulness and understanding. The Free Pulpit is something more than what any generation, including this one, explicitly practices or implicity embodies. For example, the Free Pulpit does not mean the free access of the pulpit by anyone, that the pulpit is the “Open Mike at the Improv.” The Free Pulpit is guarded by the social arrangement of the covenanted community and its faithfulness to that covenant. It does not mean that the pulpit is this century’s version of the 19th century Lyceum or is the theological version of Toastmasters, where individuals “learn” to speak publicly or organize thoughts into a coherent manner. The pulpit “becomes free” over time through the bond established between a spiritual community and an individual called to serve as that community’s spiritual leader; an individual who must seek to lead by understanding what the Free Church tradition is and endeavor to have his or her life shaped by its disciplines. The spiritual community itself maintains the Free Pulpit by guarding its access through lending it only to one who, through a mutual agreement consented to, “walks” with that community in the authority given by that community, and not by any one individual or set of individuals who happen to inhabit that community at a particular moment in time. It is the product of a relationship over time. And, finally, the Free Pulpit doesn’t mean a person can say anything from it that he or she wants. That’s the most common misunderstanding of the Free Pulpit. It’s often confused with absolute verbal license, such that someone might mistakenly retort, “If a person can’t say anything from the pulpit it’s not free.”

A pulpit is free because it is the product of a spiritual agreement, a covenant, lived out over time. And a spiritual covenant is instituted as a bond of affection. Its foundation is love. And love here is distinguished from the vagaries of romanticism by the theological declaration that a covenant is a "Covenant of Being," that its origin is in God known as and through Love. A pulpit isn’t free because anything can be said from it, because that can be done from any pulpit. I’ve heard it said in contrast that you can’t say anything from pulpits in other churches without severe consequences; meaning, of course, that saying anything doctrinally blasphemous from an orthodox, creedal Christian church’s pulpit will have consequences for the speaker. But, there are consequences in every pulpit when anything is said. All relationships have consequences, whether or not they involve freedom; and especially relationships that do involve freedom because they involve consent and decision. Freedom doesn’t mean the absence of consequences. The Free Pulpit is not built on absolute verbal license. Spiritualized freedom is the yield of a bond of affection. It involves discernment by the individual who has been lent the pulpit by the community, shaped by the obligation that individual has to the bond of affection formed with the community. So a Free Pulpit is free because there exists a bond of affection between a spiritual community and a minister; a covenant that includes love and judgment, and which goes both ways. From this affection, freedom can grow from this mutuality and obligation into a possibility larger than our individual beliefs, our narrow self-interests, a Spirit that is liberated when together we aspire to and are called by an affection larger than any one of us.

If Not Metaphysics Then What

2006-10-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

From what we suppose about the earliest fruits of the religious impulse it yielded metaphysical designs. Perhaps the religious impulse was intermingled with humanity’s fear of its demise amidst an unpredictable and dangerous natural world. Perhaps that fear found itself in an uneasy alliance with humanity’s innate curiosity. Whatever it roots, it eventuated in combining humanity’s sensitiveness to passing between the sacred and the profane worlds, with speculations as to the “true order out there.” Ancient Judaism eventually saw the universe as originating from a “unity,” hence its monotheism, carved out of the polytheisms of its various milieus. We know now that its monotheistic, unitary view of existence was a gradual process, which included the assimilation of local deities into one “Lord of History.” Christianity emerged out of Judaism with a metaphysical bent and over the centuries constructed models of how “the universe was structured.” God’s will and God’s plan were proposed, defended, corrected, and reconceived. Heaven and Hell were mapped, and the qualifications for citizenship drawn up. Perhaps this was because from its beginnings Christianity was infatuated with the end of time and Jesus’ radical reordering of society’s structures from Rome’s “human” order to the Kingdom of God. But this metaphysical thrust continued to develop, culminating in the most elaborate and sophisticated of all designs, the universe as constructed by the medieval scholastics and popularized in Dante’s classic Divine Comedy with its three-tiered, multi-leveled cosmos.

Western religion’s metaphysical character continues to our day when religionists argue with scientists over the origins of the universe, evolution of life on the planet, and the rise of human being. Modern science has not challenged religion’s metaphysical explanations as much as shown them to be an emperor without clothes. God, as the creator and origin of the universe it is religion’s role to describe, has to be re-thought because religion as a metaphysical explanation of the “true order out there” no longer holds. The religious impulse must evolve in its fruition from explanation to something more. God’s will and God’s plan cannot be used with any confidence again as referring to any knowable explanatory structure.

If, though, religion’s aim is not to explain but to find deeper ways to connect (a covenantal understanding), then metaphysics becomes the speculation it truly is; no more and no less. Science, as in cosmology for example, becomes an aid in helping us understand the layers of connection that link the present with the reasoned speculations about original time and future possibility. And God becomes a way to describe the forces immanent in existence that lend themselves to providing a deeper mutuality within creation. Or, in other words, God becomes that Spirit that moves amongst human beings in such a way that they realize their deeper connection with one another and with existence; a shared destiny amongst creation. The “Holy Spirit” moves always, but when it is received and shared by freely choosing human beings it yields a deeper love. “Love thy God with all thy heart, all thy mind, and all thy soul” is an invitation into a deeper mutuality with others and with creation, an ever-present possibility in all cultures and times. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is choosing to live here and now in a “Kingdom of God that is at hand,” ordered by the connective tissue of the Spirit. And once an individual dwells there, metaphysical explanations become the secondary speculations which at best they are.

A Covenantal Theology or Relational Spirituality Part 2: The Measurement of the Spiritual Life

2006-07-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

When I was a student minister in 1981 I officiated at my third wedding and had an epiphany. The couple had chosen “The Wedding Song” for a musical interlude while lighting a “unity” candle, which they did simultaneously from two distinct tapers that each had in hand. They did it almost at the exact point when the singer crooned, “And a man shall leave his mother and woman leave her home/They shall travel on to where the two shall meet as one.” They blew out the individual tapers and the single, unity candle burned alone.

I had been married three years and knew the misconception. Two don’t become one. The individuality, the separateness, the differentiation that makes two distinct human beings doesn’t evaporate when married. It doesn’t happen in any relationship born of vows and declarations of faithfulness. Or, to say it another way, when a religious covenant is formed the identities of the covenanted parties remain distinct. In my experience, when a covenant is formed, as it is in marriage or any declaration leading to a union of love, there actually are three entities. In a marriage, there is the woman, the man, and the married couple. The author of “The Wedding Song” should have written, “They shall travel on to where the two are transformed into three.” Or, as I say to couples now when we talk before the religious service commences, you are about to participate in a mathematical impossibility where one plus one equals three!

We have noted something that is grossly evident in our time, although it is part of previous eras as well: The way in which human beings today avoid a realistic view of human nature, forget or ignore our fallibility, declare they possess “God’s Truth” or know “God’s Will and Ways,” and then almost gleefully inflict untold horror on others who do not believe as they do. We have noted how this propensity towards idolatry, rampant in our time, can easily leave one in despair, spiritually beleaguered. Many liberal religionists have responded to this despair by renouncing religion, declaring God dead, and leaving behind religious language and the life of faith for philosophical pursuits. Is there or is there not a God?, a philosophical question, hounds the liberal religionist because today there is no evidence of a God being believed in that is worthy of human conviction. There is no Truth that doesn’t lead to someone who holds a competing Truth being killed. The liberal religionist has countered the rant that is religion today with a rant against religion. But, it’s still a rant.

A covenantal theology or relational spirituality offers something different.

If a religious covenant, when formed, continues the distinct existence of the two entities involved in the relationship, then it is a misconception to claim that the thoughts and beliefs of one are understood completely and held absolutely by the other. Or, as the poet wrote, “love’s function is to fabricate unknownness.” To “love God,” is to recognize first and foremost the distinction between God and me! And second, it is to declare that this relationship is a ‘third entity,” something that I participate in, but is greater than just my own self-interest.

How is it greater? In part, human self-interest is towards order, predictability, sameness, a conformity of one moment to the next and a familiarity that gives continuity to identity. Religions who claim God is Truth, and in the next declaration claim to know that Truth, reveal this inclination. “Jesus the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow” is a bumper-sticker declaration of it. God, the Unmoved Mover, to be adored as absolute and complete in every way, is a more formal theological way to express a similar view. But what if one’s relationship with God involved being grasped by something entirely distinct from self-interest, and being “lured” towards a transformation out of the self’s security in its desire for order, predictability, sameness, and conformity and familarity, and towards something more. What if faith is about risking the self here and now? What if faith involves a lunge towards novelty, a newness of self and world? If God is Love, then what if being in covenant with God is a way of saying I am being called to expand the breadth and depth of my love for other human beings beyond what my self-interest deems comfortable and my culture affirms is proper and correct and practical? What if being in covenant with God means I am being held accountable individually for extending a larger sense of love to others than what self-interest would warrant; and that I am obligated to hold my society and myself accountable for extending justice beyond what is in the civic self-interest, and that societally that accountability is measured by how just and loving we are to the least among us?

In other words, in a covenantal theology or a relational spirituality the measurement of the spiritual life is in terms of transformation. Will you change? Will you risk becoming a "novelty" that you are not now? Are you transformed out of your current understandings, rooted as they are in self-interest, and towards a larger love and greater justice? Will you help your culture to change, to offer the novelty of affection towards those not now in its purview or embrace? Is your culture transformed out of its societal and culture self-interest, measured by a larger love and greater demand for justice for the least amongst us? For the disenfranchised and impoverished? A liberty and justice for ALL?

A covenant, a relationship, formed by love is measured by the way we consent to be transformed by affection, into greater affection.

Perceiving the spiritual life in covenantal ways, as a relationship between an individual and God, and the spiritual community as a group formed for a spiritual purpose by a religious agreement, a walk together, requires of the individual and the group a willingness to be “led in the ways of the Spirit” which transforms entities – individuals or groups – out of self-interested complacency and into the spiritually vibrancy of an ever-expanding love and an expectation of liberty and justice for all souls.

But if the measurement of the spiritual life, covenantally and relationally understood, is in terms of transformation, a liberation of one from one’s current myopia in self-interest, and towards something greater, then the life of faith becomes the ultimate risk. Not of losing the afterlife, but of changing oneself in this one. You lose yourself as conceived of in self-interest, to find yourself in a matrix of greater affection (which, of course, is also involved in self-interest, so the transformation is to go on again and again, never ending growth into affection!). Jesus called this greater love and this expectation of liberty and justice for all, the Kingdom of God, and in the same breadth he is reported to have declared that it is at hand. That land exists at this moment hidden in the forms of existence our eyes catch as they now see. To immigrate to this kingdom requires nothing as easy as physical relocation, but something far more difficult. A change of heart, mind, and soul!

We can step into that land and live inside of a covenant with God any time as long as we have breath; therefore, it can be called a covenant of grace. But this third entity, the covenant, when entered into by one will change one towards loving deeper and broader than before, and expecting and working towards liberty and justice for those society has forgotten and culture despises; therefore, it can be called a regenerating religious experience.

O God, if it be thy will that I should live through this day, through the evening, to breath again tomorrow, give my eyes to see thy ways, ears to hear thy call, a heart to receive thy love, a will to extend and declare that larger love to others, and a courage to be transformed in the larger likeness of your affection; that I might better walk a path with others towards thee.

A Covenantal Theology or Relational Spirituality, Part 1: The Goal and Aim of the Life of Faith

2006-07-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

What if the goal and aim of the life of faith is NOT finding the Truth? NOT finding the Truth that is God, nor discovering the One True Faith, nor finding the Truth and believing in that Truth and holding to that Truth against all other contenders? What if the goal and aim of the life of faith is NOT about Truth at all, and faith is not about believing the Right Things in the Right Way?

What if the goal and aim of the life of faith begins with this simple acknowledgement: As human beings we are so filled with self-interest and fallibility that we will mistake our own preferences for Truth, our own incomplete understandings for Truth, and we will ascribe our own distortions of the good, the right, and the true to God. It is what is so poignantly portrayed in the second creation story in the Book of Genesis. Human beings are fallible and finite. We cannot know God’s ways because they are God’s and not ours. God and man are not the same. We walk in a garden we did not create.

What if the goal and aim of the life of faith began with a realistic estimate of human nature, the nature that is shared by ALL who walk or have walked this earth? It is how the disciples are portrayed in the Gospel of Mark. Centuries later we deride them as being dull-headed and slow when it came to seeing "the Truth," but maybe in reality we are all characters in this kind of story. To walk on this earth is to see through a glass darkly, unable to know what Truth is. Or, to say it another way, none has a “God’s eye view” of things. What if the goal and aim of the life of faith began with the spiritual declaration: “I do not understand Your ways, O God.”

Then, it would be impossible to declare that the life of faith is completely or even primarily about either searching for or discovering the Truth because, armed with a realistic estimate of human nature, we would have to admit we are not able to disentangle the Truth from the self-interested fallibilities we are susceptible to. The unwillingness to admit this is especially in evidence today when people will inflict untold horror on others in the name of Truth. Today the way religion motivates human beings to treat others leaves one in despair. How can the Truth that is God, when believed in, lead one at worst to murder others, and at best assume a posture of absolute certainty concerning whom God favors with salvation and condemns with damnation? Religion today eschews a realistic estimate of human nature and builds a Tower of Babel upon a foundation of human conceit. Can religion be rescued from its own arrogance and humanity from wallowing in its own hubris?

Not unless the goal and aim of the life of faith is conceived of in a different way. The goal and aim of the life of faith is not completely or primarily about Truth and believing the Right Way.

Jesus identified the Great Commandments as love to God and loving neighbor as self. Love is a kind of relationship, and a particular kind at that. What if the goal and aim of the life of faith begins with considering the nature of relationships; relatedness, connection, ties, bonds, tethers, all those qualities that emanate from what unites us and links us and joins human beings to God and one other in the most ennobling and transformative ways? And reasoning from this, to conceive of a life which we are then called to enact faithfully. One might call this a covenantal theology or a relational spirituality.

The first observation might be this: In order to be in a relationship there needs to be two distinct entities. The same cannot be “related” to the same when they are synonymous. This ontological reality is referred to above in recounting our distinction from God as mythically embodied in the Garden of Eden creation story. Yet, it is the nature of relationships that by coming into a connection with one another each distinct entity influences the other. It’s like my father and me. We have a relationship because we are distinct. Yet, because we are related too, we share some things and have influenced each other; by blood, by shared experiences, by the way our life destinies involved obligation and consent, and even as he has been dead now for 15 years, transcends the grave (anyone who has had a loved one die knows the relationship does not end with physical absence and, in many ways, becomes even more intense!). This is one quality of Jesus’ use of the “Father” metaphor to refer to God; not as Lawgiver, or First Cause, or Repository of All Truth, all metaphors that have their uses. But, “Father” implies the distinctiveness of two entities that nevertheless have an intimate relatedness, a similarity of a kind characteristic of relationships. The two of us are different, yet related.

By virtue of our createdness, that we did not create ourselves, we are born into a relatedness with God that causes us to ask, “In what way do we resemble divinity?” We ask this in many forms. What is the right thing to do? What is the good life? What are my ultimate obligations to self and others? How do I live uprightly? We even ask, What is truth?, of course, and it is our asking of all of these that is evidence that we are seeking the way in which we resemble whatever it is that created us; the nature of what it is out of which we came. These are what might be called the “higher” questions, the “exalted” sentiments, the “loftiest” values, or most “elevated” ideals and principles. It is enough to say that we human beings are not only animals, but also possessing of a reasoning, imagining consciousness such that we ask questions that are transcendent, about something more.

We are creatures who seek to know how it is that we resemble our Creator. And the question of how humanity resembles divinity is echoed in the first creation story in Genesis, the compliment to the second, which declares human being to be made in the image of God. Image does not wipe away distinction. And an “image” is a lesser version of the real thing, which, to the undiscerning eye, can easily be mistaken for the thing reflected. But an image is "familiar" to the original. Being in part an image begs transcendence, and lures us towards thinking upon a relationship with God and how that relationship might rightfully shape our living. How can we, in broader and deeper ways, be shaped more and more like what we resemble?

And the curious thing is that in searching for our resemblance to our Creator, we find the way in which we are distinct as well. Freud was right in one way, that the religious search is the search for the Father, or the Mother, or the Parent Creator. But, to those who live the life of faith conceived of out of the idea of covenant, the aim is not explanation or reductionism so much as it is to discern right relationship. That is, becoming a human being who is in a right relationship with self, others, and God. Thus, the goal and aim of the life of faith emanates from this question: “How do I love God and neighbor as self?”

What is a Religious Covenant?

2006-06-23T05:47:00.000-07:00

Twentieth century theologian Martin Buber described human being as the promise-making, promise-breaking, and promise-remaking creature. We have an animal’s body, an intelligence artificially mimicked, and a consciousness of our existence and surroundings that we have come to see is shared on a lesser scale with other species on the planet. We are connected to other creatures and facets of creation in a web of relationships that make us part of the organism that is earth. Yet, there are unique, distinguishing characteristics. One such part of human nature that becomes a mechanism for our capacity to shape existence creatively in this: We make agreements. We promise.

We bind ourselves to one another beyond blood ties, ethnicity, tribalism, and nationalism through voluntarily made agreements. We consent to transactions all throughout the day. We buy groceries and at the checkout counter complete an agreement with the owner with money, “promissory” notes. We drop our children off at the local school and engage in an agreement with one another as to how to raise democratic citizens, the “promise” of the future. We come home to partners whom we love in a way different from all others by virtue of having tendered vows with and to them, “I do hereby promise…” Agreements not only form the contours of our lives but they give meaning to our days and prepare us and others for the events life brings.

A covenant is an agreement between persons created by a freely given promise. A religious covenant is one where the agreement includes transcendent, symbolic meanings as an addition to the promise. A covenant is not a contract. A contract too is an agreement based upon promises, but it is bound by the parameter of reciprocity. When parties to a contract agree, it is for an exchange upon which if one party reneges, the agreement is voided. The judgment needed by the parties is defined by whether the contract has or has not been satisfied; that is, whether it is positive to the self-interest of the parties involved as they understand their own self-interest. Not so with a religious covenant. A religious covenant is an agreement that is bound by the parameter of forgiveness. When it is broken, both parties exercise judgment in assessing the nature of the relationship created by the agreement, with the knowledge that the agreement depends upon forgiveness for its continuation. Self-interest is present but it is not the sole or primary criteria for the success of the religious covenant because it is recognized by the parties involved to possess a meaning larger than what the parties alone bring to it or can know themselves. A religious covenant creates meaning and thereby enlarges creation because it is a tie that is maintained by affection and strengthened by the willingness of the parties to bear the burdens of another, towards an unknown future. Therefore, it is formed by a love and devotion shared by human beings. And the “aim” of a religious covenant is not the satisfaction of self-interest as the parties perceive it to be so, but transformation. The covenantal relationship depends upon the parties realizing it has an effect larger than what they alone can determine or surmise. Therefore, it has the element of faith to it.

In religion a covenant becomes a promise entered into by human beings whereby there is created a spiritual “people” who see their future bound up with one another. In my Unitarian Universalist faith tradition the covenant is described as a promise by spiritual seekers “to walk together,” as the form and discipline of the communal spiritual life. The promise does not necessarily suppose theological agreement nor depend upon conformity, as is the case in faith communities formed by creeds and formalized theological doctrines. But, the agreement does depend upon the maintenance of customs and practices; that is, behaviors and expectations of relationships that keep the agreement intact, deepen it for the persons involved, and maintain is transformative capacities, its transcendent and religious quality. The aim of the walk is to share a destiny with others in the faith that it is through the fulfillment of affectional bonds that human beings are transformed towards becoming freer and freer creations; that is, that individuality, and the freedom of the fully functioning self, comes into being through the transformational nature of the bonds of love.

By being the nature and basis of religious community formation, covenantal ties create a kind of community and an understanding of religion and the spiritual life that is foreign to much of what passes for religion today, with its emphasis on a Truth that is absolute and exclusive, and procured and possessed. You might ask a practitioner of the covenantal path a question that does not relate to his or her form of the spiritual life: “What does your church believe?” The answer might sound confusing, because in this form of the spiritual life, churches don’t “believe” things, individuals do. It is the aim of covenantal communities formed in this way for spiritual purposes, to liberate and cultivate the spirit; that is, to declare a unity and freedom of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls as the direction towards which the covenanted community is “walking together.”

Dr. Brent A. Smith, Minister
All Souls Community Church (Unitarian Universalist)
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Why a Duck?

2006-06-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

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

The Mission (aim and purpose) of This Blog

2006-06-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

The Mission (Aim and Purpose) of this Blog

This site presents spiritual ideas and theological concepts and ruminations as derived from my experience within religious communities formed by covenants; and whose chief aim as communal agreements are to shape the individual’s spiritual life as a disciplined endeavor to walk in the ways of God as they are made known through freedom. These ideas, concepts, and ruminations are themselves the products of years of practicing my faith life within the Unitarian Universalist tradition through ministering to and with churches in that heritage. Unitarian Universalism is a faith tradition that combines two distinct but old and related faith traditions, Unitarianism and Universalism. Both of these traditions have their historical roots in Christianity, are non-creedal and non-doctrinal in nature, are “liberal” theologically; that is, are shaped by a long history of understanding God as the origin and aim of the liberty of the mind to think without doctrinal restrictions, and the liberty of the heart to mirror the generosity of God’s own affectional nature by extending a love to all souls. The mission of this blog is, like the aim and purpose of liberal religious faiths like Unitarian Universalism and the spiritual communities formed to manifest them, to liberate and cultivate the spirit. The inspiration for this is all the people I have known who have lived the life of the free spirit in spiritual community, and who are the hope of the world. The mistakes and misinterpretations in content are mine.

Dr. Brent A. Smith, Minister
All Souls Community Church (Unitarian Universalist)
Grand Rapids, Michigan