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“Where
Are We” |
| Walking on a woodland trail
- walking and pondering, increasing the rate of my heart’s beating,
letting my feet follow an established path and and my thoughts roam freely
- is my most helpful meditation practice. Typically, three quarters of the
way through I arrive at some clarity, some answer to a question I did not
even know I was asking.
And sometimes, as I hike the trails at Brown Bridge Pond near our home, deep in thought, I will suddenly realize that I am not exactly sure where I am. Did I pass the turn already or is it up ahead yet? I stop for a moment, look for a recognizable landmark, and ask, sometimes out loud, “Where am I?” And this is in familiar territory! “Where am I?” It’s a question I’ve asked frequently in the last couple years. I ask it regarding my own life and spiritual journey. I ask it regarding the life and journey of this congregation. I ask it regarding the UU movement as a whole, and I ask it regarding religious liberals, in general. Where are we, now, in our journey? I invite you into your own pondering of the question. Where are you, on your journey? Where are we - as a congregation, as a movement, as religious liberals - at this moment? We seek out the spirit’s wholeness in the endless human quest... Like many adults in the past who found their way to Unitarian Universalism’s doorstep...I had left the church of my youth, dissatisfied, and more and more often, angry. I had stayed long after I let go of believing many of the churches teachings, because I loved the people, and the ritual and the symbolism and because I was so involved in the music, but finally the church’s official stance on homosexuality and the church’s refusal to allow women to be priests became more than I was willing to tolerate. I felt I could no longer compromise my personal integrity by remaining supportive of the larger institution. Like many before me, I breathed a glorious, deep and cleansing breath of fresh air and freedom when I arrived in this congregation. I nursed my religious wounds, marveled at the the newfound experience of journeying with open, kindred spirits, and I recoiled at anything that smacked too strongly of the church I had left behind. In essence, I defined our existence, primarily in terms of what we were not. We were “not the church that I left.” That was important to me, for a long while. It was important for me to heal, to salve my religious wounds, to feel safe here - but after a time, I felt a need for more. Defining myself, our congregation and our movement in the negative, by what we are not, was no longer enough for me. Though most of the younger person’s who arrive at our doors now have not had a negative experience of a childhood church,our congregation will continue to be an important place of healing for religious refugees who need safety and freedom and consolation, but we are ready to understand ourselves, as a religious institution, as more than an escape from our personal religious past. Of course, we have always been more than that, but I have this increasingly clear sense that there is a core understanding of what anchors, inspires, binds and compels us as a religious body, that we have yet to grasp and to claim with life transforming conviction. It does occur to me to ask myself whether, perhaps, I am projecting my own spiritual journey on everyone else around me, but I’ve been watching, and listening and feeling here, and I sense, in a way that is tangible to me, both the hunger and the possibility in our midst. So I set out to learn more. It turns out, that others have been here before us - and have drawn some maps. The people who study such things would tell us that we are exactly where they would expect to find us. I spoke, a year ago, about James Fowler’s identifying of stages of religious faith, patterns that he saw in people’s lifelong spiritual journeys. Stage 1, he describes as the faith of young children - for whom adults are the ultimate authority; for whom pattern, ritual and predictability are extremely important; and who revel in fantasy, imagination and a sense of magic. In Stage 2, from 7 or 8 to puberty, children work hard to sort out what is real from what is not real - Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy - the urgency of the task tends to make a young person a literalist. Symbols are one-dimensional, mythical material is either true or false, with no in-between subtleties. Gods are superpowerful humans in the sky and there is a strong sense of fairness and justice. Things are very black and white. Though some people never leave stage 2, Fowler says, and remain very rigid and dualistic in their thinking, Stage 3 is the norm for the majority of adults. Typically begun at puberty, Stage 3 brings
a softening of religious attitudes and an increased ability to handle
abstract ideas. Symbols and myths are no longer taken literally, but
become useful as tools, as a language for speaking about abstract
concepts. As in stages 1 and 2, a person still seeks outside authority -
in a diety, or in holy writings, or in a best-selling book or a seminar or
a guru or an expert who knows what to do - but now that outside authority
is rejected if it doesn’t measure up to the person’s ideals. Unlike earlier stages, stage 4 involves a conscious decision, often as a result of a crisis of faith, (My faith failed me when I most needed it) or a rational process (Things just didn’t make sense any more.) Stage 4 is a reactive stage during which we react negatively against where we just were as a stage 3 person. It’s one peak of the pendulum swing. Religious attitudes in stage 4 are marked by a strong skepticism, a heavy trust in logic, and a suspicion of what might be called the poetry and art of religion. A person finds all authority inside oneself and takes responsibility for one’s own commitments, beliefs and attitudes. Most of us who come into the UU church as adults, especially if we were born before a certain year, arrive at early stage 4. We’ve left something else behind, and good riddance! We are reacting to where we’ve just been. We often know what we don’t believe, but have trouble saying what we do believe. SALLY Mitchell, in another of her wonderful paintings, has represented this ability to define what is outside of our lines, more easily than what’s inside. There are two rings - one for Unitarianism and one for Universalism - that surround the symbol of the flaming chalice , the symbol for Unitarian Universalism. Outside the lines, Sally has painted all kinds of detail, but the space inside the rings remains blank. In stage 4, we often know what we don’t believe - we can describe in detail what is outside our lines - but we have trouble saying what we do believe, what’s inside our lines. I was indeed in that place in my journey when I arrived here. It’s tempting to think of these stages as separate and linear, as if we leave one stage completely behind and enter new territory, but in reality, it’s more like like series of concentric spheres into which we keep expanding. In stage 4, in reaction to our immediate past, we shove all of our previous faith stages aside, as if we’ve left them behind completely. It is in this spirit, in stage 4, that many UU congregations began. When I arrived in the late 80’s, that spirit was exactly what I needed in this Fellowship. In fact, over time, it allowed me, and others, and the congregation as a whole, I believe - to grow beyond the edges of stage 4, pushing out our edges - into stage 5...where we begin to understand, that we never really left all of the rest of our faith journey behind, and we start to return to pick up the pieces, to reclaim what is still valuable. To someone still in stage 4, this willingness to reclaim, looks suspiciously like a step backward into stage 3, starts to look suspiciously like a step back into the churches that we left. “Alarm! We’re getting to churchy!" In reality, it is a step forward across a threshold, that allows us to integrate all of our experiences to date, to understand that authority rests both inside and outside of us....allows us to permit complexity and paradox, to understand that we did not have the wrong answers in stage 1... or 2... or 3... or 4...., but unfinished answers............. We keep moving and growing. “...the spirit always restless in our minds and hearts.” We stand at a critical threshold in our collective spiritual journey, and the change in our ministerial leadership confronts us with an extraordinary opportunity - a necessity - to ask who we are and where we are now. As individuals, we are not all in the same place in our journeys, but more and more of us have traveled through stage 4 - we know who we are not, and we’re ready to move forward, to reach beyond our old edges, - to discover who we ARE and who we CAN BE in stage 5, which includes the other stages. This threshold spot is marked quite clearly on the maps. Others have been here before. The significance of this particular moment is heightened for us by the reality that we are straddling another important threshold at the very same time...a threshold related to our size. Again, others have drawn maps. They tell us that the dynamics in any group of human beings shift as the size of the group changes - any group. You’ll recognize from your own experience, that the feel of a conversation between you and one other person changes immensely when a third person joins you. That a dinner with 6-8 people is very different from a dinner with 17 people. There are various thresholds of numbers of people, beyond which, to be successful, members of the group must shift both how they conceive of themselves, and how they structure, how they organize the group. In family sized congregations, like we were for many years, the focus is inward, on each other, on maintaining a close knit community. Being together is the main reason to be together - the group’s identity is based on who is there. In pastoral sized congregations, like we were for much of Emmy Lou’s time with us (our previous minister), the focus is still inward, still based on who’s there, and revolves, in significant ways, around the identity of the minister, and the minister’s relationship to the congregation. Our identity has been based on WHO is here all these years, and now a core piece of that identity is gone. ...which actually helps us ...which Emmy Lou understood. We will now have to ask, “Who are we without her?” In program sized congregations, like we have already been becoming, the focus, of necessity, shifts outward, beyond our individual personalities...from WHO’S here, to WHY we are here . Our identity shifts toward a shared vision and purpose that ultimately, and ironically, offers a stronger bond than that of simply wanting to be together. Much like the faith stages, we’ve also been bumping up against the edges of a size stage. Things that worked well in the past, when we were smaller, started not working as well with this many people at dinner. The unavoidable need to shift our perception of who we are and and how we organize ourselves, has made this a challenging threshold to cross. Right now, we straddle it, with one foot on each side. We are labled by the map-makers, a MIDSIZED church: the size described as “awkward” - too big to be small, too small to be big - we want it all. We want the positive attributes of both a small pastoral church and of a larger program size church. We want the coziness, the intimacy, the spiritual comfort, the personal relationships with each other and the minister that a small church offers, AND we want the high quality, the choices, the institutional effectiveness, the inspiring preaching, and the spiritual challenge that a larger church offers. Wise people tell us that standing still is not one of our options. Churches of our size tend to either shrink back to a smaller, previous size, or move forward to something larger. The irony is that our dilemma comes as a result of our success. When we do what we do well, people want to be here. Our challenge, of late, has not been a decision about whether or not to get bigger, our challenge has been to act our size - and our spiritual age, to move from seeing ourselves as a group that exists primarily for its own sake (in which we can define ourselves by who is here and/or by what we are not), to finding a common vision and shared purpose that points outward as well....to WHY we’re here beyond creating our own circle. And we are not alone... This is very much what I saw and heard at General Assembly in June - the annual gathering of UU’s from across the country and beyond. I sensed both the hunger and the possibility in our midst there, as well. Individuals, congregations, and the leadership of this entire movement are asking similar questions and expressing a similar hunger to move beyond what we are not...to discern and to celebrate what we are and what we can be....to integrate what we have learned in all of our journey’s stages... The emergence of stage 5 was all over the place. Our larger movement, it seems, stands in the middle of a threshold as well... ..and not for the first, nor the last time in our journey. The Rev. David Bumbaugh, in an address to the ministers of the district, told a piece of the Universalist story. In a time when Protestant churches taught of the innate depravity of human beings, and the vengeance of an angry God, Universalists preached the message of a Loving God who welcomed all into his kingdom. What a glorious, deep and cleansing breath of fresh air that must have been for people. “Universalism expanded out of its base in New England and New York state with such momentum,” Bumbaugh said, “that it seemed to many observers that it must carry all before it.” But what happened, over time, is that the mainstream Protestant churches gradually began to preach a similar message. “Universalism was confronted by a quiet, growing identity crisis: What happens to religious radicals when the world in general embraces, or at least stops repudiating their central message?” The question became especially clear in the 1890’s, when the Universalists sent missionaries to Japan, “to proclaim a gospel centered upon correcting the teachings of the Christian church regarding eternal punishment...” The problem was, that the Japanese did not have any “attachment to the doctrine of hellfire and damnation” to correct. Bumbaugh said, “It forced Universalists to confront the question of whether Universalism had a mission beyond that of correcting the false teaching of other Christians.” After subsequent decades of decline in their numbers, Universalists began busily responding to the demanding but exciting challenge of redefining themselves, a process that was unfinished and sidetracked, Bumbaugh said, when the Universalist Church of America merged with the American Unitarian Association in 1961 - 3 years before Mary Anne Force and Janice Park founded this congregation in Traverse City. We are indeed” searchers in the soul’s deep yearnings, like our forebears in their time.” Redefining appears to be part of the cyclical nature of our story. We are part of a larger movement that is always in motion. Thresholds everywhere! We’re just getting it right in one direction, when gravity pulls and swings us in another. Like our Universalist forbears, whose hearth embers we carry in our minds and hearts, we are called to discern our saving message in these times. Maybe it is, like the universal salvation of our ancestors, an antidote to current rigid theologies and ideologies that we are called to offer the world. Unlike our Universalists forbears in the early 20th century, I do not have any sense that our liberal religious message is about to be adopted or co-opted by the majority of churches. We appear to be in no immediate danger of having our message usurped, thereby rendering us irrelevant ...at least not from that direction. But perhaps that’s not the edge where our relevance is in question. I wonder if our modern day equivalent of being Universalist missionaries in Japan is in relation to the secular realm. What saving message do we have for people
who DON’T go to church? re we different from a really good club?
As usual, I have many more questions than answers. To me, no matter how we choose to look at it, no matter which map we use, this question of identity is our current threshold. It is a critical and wonderful threshold. It is the threshold to which our spiritual growth AND our numerical growth have simultaneously led us after 40 years of journeying. We have been bumping up against and pushing out against our edges for several years. We are ready to understand ourselves as more than simply what we are not and more than what we were or have been We are ready to discern, what now anchors, inspires, binds and compels us as a religious body, ready to claim with life-transforming conviction a saving message that we can offer the world outside our small circle. We know that the move across this threshold, as with all thresholds, will bring with it a rise in our anxiety, but ours is no caravan of despair, and with this threshold crossing comes a rise in our energy and excitement as well. I can feel it. Others can feel it. It’s not that we had it wrong before, it’s that our journey was not finished - is never finished. As UU minister Tom Owen-Towle writes, “UUism is fluid, unsettled, growing... a movement. ... Everything matters because nothing is carved in stone... We draw our conclusions in pencil, not indelible ink.” That doesn’t mean we don’t draw conclusions. There is a solid, powerful, morality that grounds our liberal religious thought. Though our propensity to write in pencil looks wishy-washy to someone who writes in ink or carves in stone, it gives us the chance to keep revising, keep fine tuning our understanding. We have the chance to keep figuring out what’s inside our theological lines that calls us to extend our reach out beyond our social lines, to keep figuring out what defines us without confining us. Standing now upon the threshold, facing futures yet unknown, this morning, I have sense of where we are - and even of who we are -but as to who and what we will become and where we are going, these are questions we will need to dig into together. Where are you? What do you see? What do
you feel? It’s going to be a challenging and exhilarating journey... |