Moved To A Renewal of the Spirit Rev. Roberta Finkelstein November 27, 2001 Have you ever been asked to explain Unitarian Universalism? And when you start to talk you are met by a blank or confused stare? People seem to think that understanding another faith is a matter of pigeonholing it based on a classification system that deals with core beliefs and sources of authority. Unfortunately, Unitarian Universalism is darn hard to pigeonhole with this system. Core beliefs? For most major religions, these are found in creedal statements. “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.” “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.” “I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth . . .” We are a non-creedal faith; the core beliefs in our pews cover a rich and varied theological spectrum. “Huh?” our earnest questioner might reply. “You all believe different things?” Then there is the question of source of authority. Often it is a book – the Torah, the Koran, the Gospels. Sometimes it is a leader deemed worthy of following either because they are blessed with charisma, or ordained or otherwise called out as being trustworthy and powerful. For Unitarian Universalists, the people who believe all different things, the authoritative source of or faith is yet another spectrum – a set of wells from which we draw religious truth in varying degrees depending on our individual inclination. As a movement we articulate six sources which represent a rich treasure-trove of resources for our religious work. This is the first in a series of sermons about the sources of our faith as they are expressed in the Statement of Principles and Purposes which is part of the by-laws of the Unitarian Universalist Association. You can find it on the frontispiece of your hymnals. This Statement is not a creed. No assent to it is required before you can call yourself a Unitarian Universalist. Our creedlessness is an expression of our historical commitment to freedom of thought and to diversity of belief. The particularly UU genius of this Statement of Principles and Purposes is it gives substance to our theological diversity without violating that historical commitment. It does this by naming individual experience as the first authoritative source for our beliefs! “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” There are four distinct and important parts to that statement. The first is the naming of direct experience as a legitimate source of authority in religion. This is the legacy of our forebears in the Radical Reformation. The Radical Reformers, today’s Baptists and Unitarian Universalists, were adamant that religion is something that must be freely chosen by each person. They advocated, as a result of this belief, adult baptism. This may not sound radical to you, but the implication of adult baptism was that a person might choose not to follow the religion of their father, or their king! So radical and frightening was this idea that many of the practitioners of adult baptism during the Reformation were put to death as heretics. In a twist that only the deeply religious would be capable of, these folks were not burned at the stake along with their so-called heretic comrades. They were drowned in the rivers in a cruel parody of adult baptism. And yet the principle of freely and personally chosen religion survived and came to fruition in our free faith, among others. It more fully flowered in the minds and hearts of the American Transcendentalists, most of whom were Unitarians. People like Emerson, Channing, Fuller, and the vast array of literary lights of the Transcendentalist movement developed this idea of the possibility - or, for them, the obligation - to seek out encounters with the holy and mysterious in nature, in conversation with colleagues, and in prayer. “Grow your own soul!” they urge us, their words still living and breathing life into our religious movement today. To claim individual and personal experience as an authoritative source of faith is not only the genius and the luxury of our free faith. It is a privilege that people died for, and an obligation that we inherited from people who made it their life work. Let us not, therefore, take it lightly, The second important message I hear in this source statement is captured in the phrase “transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures.” This is not a rejection of the use of reason. It is a corrective to our susceptibility to over-intellectualize our religion and thus miss opportunities to acknowledge the existence of the transcendent. Unitarian Universalism still affirms and celebrates the rational mind. The freedom to choose means the necessity of using both reason and intuition in that choosing. What this statement reminds us is that there is a balance between the right and left side of the brain. This balance between rational and intuitive is essential to the human endeavor. It is the place where much creativity and much of religious experience comes to fruition. Acknowledging and embracing that need for balance is also the legacy of the Transcendentalists. They believed that the application of their considerable brainpower would bring them more than a collection of verifiable data; the mind engaged in the transcendental quest would also bring them to a deeper understanding of the human soul. The scientific method seeks to probe the mysteries of the universe in order to find the reliable patterns on which it operates. The transcendentalist method seeks to probe the mysteries of the universe in order to find the mystery that lies beneath every identifiable pattern. Sometimes that looks an awful lot like chaos theory. We are reminded that there is something greater than us – the whole that is truly greater than the parts. And we are touched by that awareness in moments of awe and humility. As we explore the implications of the human experience of transcending mystery and wonder, we may become more sensitive to the fact that our own particular way of experiencing life – the Western, left-brained, linear way – is not the only way. All cultures, we are reminded, share the human experience of encountering the transcendent, of being surprised and gratified by the complexity of life on earth. All cultures share the experience of mystery and awe, of yearning to be in communion with the transcendent. In different parts of the world it may be expressed differently, but it is still part of a common human experience. If we probe beneath the surface of the various approaches to the search for ultimate meaning, we find that common human yearning. How badly we need that reminder at this time in our history, when we are forced by events beyond our control to understand other cultures, other religions, other ways of experiencing the world. And so we come to the third part of the source statement, the phrase that beckons us to our growing edges. What we experience – with our own eyes, ears, fingers, minds, and hearts – in order for it to be a truly religious experience it must move us! If we are not moved by what we see and hear and feel, then we are in danger of being exactly what our religious foes have accused us of being over the years: navel-gazing elitists who are more interested in an academic debate than a deeply lived life. The truth is that the genius of our faith – the centrality of personal experience – is also what makes it so difficult. Why? Because it means that for true Unitarian Universalists, religion is not a spectator sport! It is up to you, every one of you, to be open to experiences of transformation. An early 20th century Universalist, when asked what his faith stood for, replied, “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand. The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all; we move.” And that brings us to the final idea expressed in this first source. We move – but not in random directions. We move towards a renewal of the spirit and towards those forces that create and uphold life. This is important. This is how we fend off the accusation that Unitarian Universalism is meaningless because ‘you can believe anything you want.’ The great latitude of beliefs in this and every other UU congregation is evidence that there are many different ways to move towards the forces that create and uphold life. But we Unitarian Universalists do not embrace or move towards those things that are life-destroying, spirit-dampening. So let’s imagine together what it might be like to truly live out of our first source. First of all, before you can be moved by an encounter of mystery and wonder, you have to be aware of that encounter. There must be time in your daily life when you are able to pay attention to the universe. To listen, look, feel, and respond. Second, you must be willing to be changed: stunned by unexpected beauty, rendered speechless by the enormity of unexpected pain, catapulted into action. You have to be present to life in all its glory and agony. If Unitarian Universalism were against the law, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Ultimately, the only assessment of your ability to seek wisdom from this first source, your own experience of transcendent mystery and wonder, will be in the way you live it out in your lives. It is up to you. And since it is up to you, I’m going to let you finish this sermon for yourselves. I invite you now to contemplate in silence what it would mean for you to be moved to a renewal of the spirit. How would your life change in the days ahead if you were to allow yourself to encounter mystery, to feel awe, to heed the call to work in concert with the forces that create and uphold life? You’ve each written your own personal close to a sermon about the centrality of personal experience. The next time you are asked to share your faith with somebody else, remember what you wrote today. Remember that you are the ultimate source of authority for your faith. We don’t have an authoritative book, a creed, or a priestly class to give credence to our religious lives. All we have is ourselves and each other, and those who chose this path before us. So we gather our experiences together, and we create our religion. And together we pray that our religion, will move us to demonstrate to a hurting world that the forces that create and uphold life are desperately seeking to work through us and for us. When we allow that to happen, all will stand in awe. Benediction These words are from Rev. Forrest Church: Each of us, of course, must assume responsibility for awakening. Others may be responsible for our being born, but what we make of our lives, how deeply and intensively we live, is our responsibility, and ours alone. Part of being born again, in a Unitarian Universalist way, lies in waking up to the fact that all of life is a gift. The world does not owe us a living, we owe the world a living – our own.