A Loving Faith

As you know, I am fairly new to this craft of ministry and to the art of preaching so as part of my learning process, I spend a certain amount of time online checking out the sermons of other UU ministers. I don't read every single one, of course, but even the titles and topics are very instructive about the interests and concerns of a minister and his or her community. A fascinating thing is that one of the most common sermons I see, delivered yearly in many cases, is essentially called, "What do Unitarian Universalists believe?"

I find this an intriguing and possibly unique phenomenon. Any religion that involves speaking and teaching at all, and most of them do, takes the time to lay out and discuss its basic tenets, but in the majority of cases the basic beliefs – about God, the world, human beings, and so on – are mostly assumed and the preaching is interpretation, bringing those basic beliefs to bear on one's life in the world. In other words, a unifying statement of belief, a creed, that is reliably at the center. A Lutheran sermon called "What do Lutherans believe" might be very short actually. It's probably printed right there on the front page of the hymnal.

The path of Unitarian Universalism, however, as we proudly know does not rely on official creeds and inviolable doctrines. And so about once a year it seems, the minister has to hit the reset button and attempt to tackle the thorny problem of articulating just what it is we do believe in. I've been told that this often annoys long-time members in the process, since they have, indeed heard that sermon before, but for the sake of the new folks – many of whom can't imagine a religion without creeds or doctrines – the preacher rolls up her sleeves and gives it another go.

My experience is that these sermons either simply describe the diversity of beliefs that are found among us in positive and embracing terms, which is a good and beautiful thing to do although it leaves the question unanswered; or they subtly shift topic, describe the values and attitudes and principles we have in common and leave the question of beliefs hanging.

The question of what is at the center is in the forefront of our movement right now. There is a widespread sense, particularly among the ministry, that if we can't find simple, clear ways to express the heart of our common religious life, we will continue to shrink in size and influence, and remain tragically forever on the margins of the American religious landscape. And I just don't want that to happen. I love Unitarian Universalism and I want to share it with the next 40 generations. We know we've got a good thing going here, but our theological diversity makes it so difficult to convey in an accessible and inviting way.

There is further evidence that this is a concern for our movement. The Commission on Appraisal, which is a denominational body that is periodically charged with taking a close look at ourselves and seeing how we are doing, attempted to tackle this question, in their report called Engaging Our Theological Diversity. They felt it was the most pressing issue that demanded their attention. For the most part, unfortunately, I think they fell into the same strategy I described previously. They spent a lot of time describing who Unitarian Universalists, noting the blessings and difficulties that come from our diversity, but, in the end, the best they could manage was a statement of agreements and tensions. Not a creed exactly — not even much of a statement of beliefs. The report is no small matter, and I commend the study to you and urge you to start a discussion group around it if you already haven't.

The question remains: why do the ministers struggle? Why was the Commission on Appraisal's report so tepid? Because I think the simple truth is this: you cannot say what all Unitarian Universalists believe.

That fact, however, does not mean that we are not bound together as an authentic religious people, it's just that belief is not what binds us. There is a new UUA bumper sticker that says: "Different beliefs. One faith." That strikes many people as an oxymoron. It may not be helpful. The claim is that it is our faith that binds us. The problem is that we use the words belief and faith interchangeably. What I'd like to now is pull them apart a little bit, courtesy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a great Harvard scholar. Most of his writing was on the difference between faith and belief. I must warn you in advance that I get $100 off my student loans every time I quote a Harvard scholar. It's part of the deal.

According to Cantwell Smith, belief refers to something propositional — a conviction or opinion or assertion — that may or may not be ultimately true. In a religious context these are things like the symbols we choose or our visions of what may or may not happen at that end of the world or what happens after you die or what the meaning various rituals are does prayer work are there angels.

As UUs we fully recognize the limitations of belief. That's why we don't have a common creed. We accept and celebrate the fact that there are — there just are — many paths to the truthful and the good. Even as we elevate the value of each individual's religious journey, we also acknowledge the limits of human perspective. We see the influence that culture and time and place have had on shaping beliefs, which suggests that there are few if any beliefs that can or should work for all people in all cultures, times and places. As a religious people we also observe, and thus assert, that a human being can live a meaningful, ethical, and satisfying life without "believing in God" — whatever that means. Theistic, pantheistic, panentheistic, polytheistic, non-theistic and atheistic paths — or some delightful combination thereof — can all offer potentially valid ordering principles for a good and meaningful human life. Our ability to hold this position comes from our humanistic and pragmatic ethics. We argue that the validity of any given theological perspective is measured in its ability to bring forth peace, liberty, justice, equity and compassion in our relationships with ourselves, our fellow beings and all of creation. To the extent that different theological perspectives yield these results, we deem them worthy, but always with recognition of limits.

So I might say, "If believing in angels brings you down to the homeless shelter, may the sky be filled with angels." "If your sense, if your lived, felt sense is that the earth is a goddess and that leads you to fight pollution, Goddess be praised." That's belief.

For Cantwell Smith, faith, on the other hand, is, and I quote, "the motivating force behind different religious expressions whether they be in symbols, beliefs, rituals or scriptures." Faith is a mode of being, a way of responding to life. Faith somehow seems simpler to me than belief in a way, though, like most simple things, it's harder to talk about. We might call faith existential trust. Faith is still saying "yes" to life even when life seems to be saying "no" to us. Faith is much more personal and experiential than belief. Faith is an inner orientation to oneself, to other people and to the universe. Again in Cantwell Smith's words, "to have faith is to think and feel and act in relation to the transcendent." Not necessarily the supernatural, but to the reality of life that is undeniably larger than any one of us.

In his famous book, Dynamics of Faith, the great 20th century liberal theologian Paul Tillich, a Harvard scholar, convincingly argues that this faithful orientation, this urge to respond to life by having something in the center, something that we trust absolutely, is an innate function of the human personality. People cannot help but put something in the middle. Because reality is ultimately bound by change and uncertainty, we cannot help but evolve a faithful position toward something in order to make meaning of our lives. He called the center of faith our Ultimate Concern. What do we lean toward and into and from what do we draw our energy and our meaning?

In this culture and time and place it's very natural that the word "God", however diversely interpreted, will be the centerpiece of many expressions of faith because, in spite of the terrible misuse that it has endured, God is the primary and most widely shared symbolic word we have for what I light-heartedly call "The Great Big Thing". It is by no means the only word: the Tao, Nature, Buddha-Nature, the Interconnected Web, the Spirit of Life and so forth — these words are similar to God in their ability to express the deepest heart of the matter. We must be wary as we are finding this center; it is also true that there are many false gods that find their way into people's position of ultimate concern. There are very seductive false gods, like money or drugs. The most destructive may be the nation or the cult; the most insidious might be one's ego. And, it might be, (and here I'm playing with language) that perhaps the most dangerous and problematic false god is God itself. And I say that as one who believes in God.

The point is: we must be deeply cautious about what we make our ultimate commitment to. UUs are good at the cautious part; the problem is, the work of discriminating and clarifying our Ultimate Concern is very hard and it's very hard for us, in particular, because we're so individualistic. Sooner or later, if you want to share your faith, you have to use some set of language over another in order to express the faithful center. If you want to talk about it and share it with other people, if your faith has changed your life for the better and you want to invite other people to explore it themselves, you have to talk about it. And here is where Unitarian Universalism, has stumbled.

The default response of Unitarian Universalism has been to eschew that task; to pursue a "lowest common denominator" that seeks to include all people only through not specifically excluding anything. That's not a faithful center, as I understand it. What I hope to see our denomination move toward is the mathematical impossibility of the "highest common denominator." To do so however, we must abandon the project of putting belief at the center, and instead we put there faith: a faithful way of being, a way of life. I believe that for UUs this faithful way of being is best expressed by the second-most abused word behind God, which is, very simply, "love". "Love is our highest word, the very synonym for God," wrote our prophet Ralph Waldo Emerson.

We all acknowledge it. We all experience it. Love is rooted in our real lives. It might just be the best thing in our real lives. That doesn't seem like a belief — it feels self-evident.

Love is so complex, and experienced on so many levels. We love pizza; there is romantic love, the love of our children, the love we feel in community, the love of God. Perhaps most importantly for building enduring religious communities like this one, both religious and non-religious language can open the door to Love. We can say "God is Love," but we don't have to get at our faithful center. The non-dual nature of the Buddha-Mind could easily be called Unconditional Love, if we want, and so on. As long as we keep bringing each other back to the lived and felt experience of Love, no single form of expression need dominate, and we can all join in the chorus of praise to Love's power.

If we think of Love in the sense of unconditional acceptance it becomes a path that can lead to ever-deeper insight and growth. Love helps us affirm a world of astonishing complexity and diversity, woven together in a deeper harmony. Love gives us this ever-opening door into the energetic field of relationship into which we are born and into which we will be absorbed. James Luther Adams, the great Unitarian Universalist theologian and ethicist (and, I'm sorry to say, taught at Harvard for a while) said, "It is the first tenet of the free person's faith that our ultimate dependence for being and freedom is upon a creative power and upon processes not of our own making." We didn't invent Love: it was given to us.

If love is our Ultimate Concern, then we are called to a very challenging, but also profoundly rewarding way of life. We are called to make Love manifest in a manner unconfined by any single set of beliefs. That's really hard! Here we're being invited to do a very difficult task. Not to ossify the self and its opinions and assertions, but to ever expand the self, and to constantly test our opinions and assertions in the purifying fire of Love. Unitarian Universalism is not the easiest religion in the world; it might be one of the hardest.

We need, each of us, to seek and to name and to cultivate those moments of awareness or action when Love is flowing through us. How do we share it? By speaking a language of Love, by acting the part of Love, by cultivating Love within us. It must be expressed in here in our loving relations, but also in how we carry that love out into the world in the form of justice so that it doesn't become mere sentiment. We are not talking about sentiment here: we're talking about power.

That's the beautiful thing about Love. You can give it endlessly and it never runs out. Chapter 81 of the Tao de Ching says, "The more you do for others the more plenty is yours, and the more you give to others the more abundance is yours." That's faith in Love Power!

Furthermore, our faith must be expressed in a variety of different languages, some of which are overtly religious and some of which are not. Our faith must be expressed rationally and systematically, but also poetically and with great feeling. We need to affirm a creative and fluid understanding of language as we offer our own clear view of the purpose and meaning of life. Our job is to lift up the wisdom of all the world's religions and to elevate and preach their common message, so that this gift of Love that we seek to give the world can be heard by all people, can be fed and maintained by the whole host of human belief systems. The point is not to interminably protect our individual points of view, although that is sacred. The point is to constantly use the dialogue of individual views to uncover what's underneath. Language is forever inadequate. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The God/Love that be described and argued about is not the eternal God/Love.

If I'm talking to a theist, I'll express my faith in Love in theistic terms; if I'm talking to a Buddhist I'll talk in Buddhist terms. It doesn't matter: our job is to express the supremacy of Love. If someone's imagining a God who favors some narrow-minded people over everybody else, I'll talk about a God who gives generously to all creation, who supports all life, who only seeks healing, and reconciliation and love. You don't even have to believe it, to speak this way, because it's not about belief, it's about faith.

It is worth remembering and sharing the universality of the golden rule. It's worth spreading the word about the ideals of community and generosity that are the heart of Islam. It is worth reminding those who use Jesus as a bludgeon and a wedge that he is quoted as saying, "the summation of all the Law and Prophets is to love God, and love your neighbor as yourself," and that these were essentially the same thing.

Do we have a unique UU version? How about love life with all your heart and mind and love your neighbor as yourself? Whatever other grand thought and belief spins out to support that kind of direct living, whichever Law and Prophets that we as individuals need to sustain that faithful response to life, SO BE IT, as long as the saying yes, the opening of the heart, the growing and giving of Love, that we hold in our center.

All I know is, when I set down beliefs and just faithfully allow the love I feel in me and in the world around me to come forth, headache-making internal conflicts about the supposed hole at the center of Unitarian Universalism disappear. My life teaches me that Love is real. My faith is that it cannot be defeated and that it must be shared. My actions and experience teach me that that very faith is the most powerful and effective basis for action in the world. Furthermore, my belief, yes belief, is that Love will win — that all earth's people will unite, that all earth's people will heal, that all earth's people will be made whole. That is the promise of Unitarian Universalism. It is good news that can, shall, and must be shared and spread throughout the world. We Unitarian Universalists occupy a perfect position to serve as ambassadors and mediators among and between all the world's faiths, but will only be able to accept that mission when we acknowledge that it is a deeply religious calling that takes great faith. Our place is not to protect the world from religion, but to make it safe for its truest expressions in healing, justice-making, personal growth, and right relationship. In other words, to faithfully live the religion of Love.