One of my favorite quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson is his proclamation: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know!"
These words have a twinkle of mischievousness in them, or so it seems, some 150 years after he expressed them; they seem mischievous because one must quote Emerson, for his exceptional spiritual wisdom and insight, and because he shaped a nation, a culture, and certainly our own tradition. At the same time, he challenges all future students of his thought with this statement. Don't quote me, or anyone, he says, but tell me what you know.
This captures beautifully an essential spirit of our Unitarian Universalist tradition, and one of the core sources of our way of being religious: a confidence that each human individual has the capacity to know truth, directly. Not all truth, but enough to be worthy of making a contribution to the wisdom of the whole, enough to be worthy of shaping his or her own philosophy of living, and enough to contribute a voice in community decisions.
Two weeks ago, I introduced what is to be a series on the foundations and sources of our faith. I placed in the leaflet the official list, so to speak, of the sources of Unitarian Universalism as they appear in our hymnal. I think that list bears repeating as an overall context. The Living Tradition from which we draw comes from many sources:
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;
Words and deeds of prophetic women and men, which challenge us to confront the powers and structure of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
Wisdom from the world's religions, which inspire us in our ethical and spiritual life;
Jewish and Christian teachings, which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
Humanist teachings, which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against the idolatries of the mind and spirit.
Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions, which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.
So our shorthand of this list would be: direct experience, the words and examples of prophetic women and men, universal teachings from the world's religions, Jewish and Christian teachings, humanist teachings, and earth-centered wisdom.
The first source on this list, direct experience, is what I want to focus on today. But as I go along, remember that it is just one piece of the puzzle, one approach to the religious life in an interlocking series of approaches. So if it seems extreme, just try to keep in mind that, taken over all, each part can be tempered by the other elements. And I hope, when we have explored all of them, that we will have a very comprehensive sense of this religious way of being called Unitarian Universalism.
In this sermon today, I want to share the formative thoughts of three individuals who shaped the American Unitarian stream of our tradition in particular: William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Sophia Lyan Fahs.
Among our Universalist forebears there have been many who drew powerfully upon their own direct intuitions of spiritual and moral matters, and believed in the human responsibility to do so. Universalists will also figure more prominently in future sermons in this series on the sources of our tradition.
But the very strong strain of individualism that now distinguishes Unitarian Universalism comes most vividly from the Unitarian side of the family. And, given so little time, that is where I'm going to focus today.
It seems important to mention that there is a much deeper history to the origins of individualism than what I can address here, with its two taproots reaching back into the Judeo-Christian Scriptures on the one hand, and the democracy and philosophy of ancient Athenian Greece on the other hand.
These two taproots fed the later upheavals of the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, giving birth to the Puritan movement that came to the shores of America, the New World. The Puritans of New England believed fiercely in having a direct relationship with one's God, through prayer and the reading of scripture. But Puritan communities were at the same time rigidly conformist.
There was a different kind of individualism that took shape through the Unitarian movement, expressed and encouraged by such creative minds as Channing, Emerson, and Fahs.
A moment ago we heard that foundational quote from Channing's sermon "Spiritual Freedom":
I call that mind free which discovers everywhere the radiant signatures of the Infinite Spirit, and finds in them help to its own spiritual enlightenment. I call that mind free which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light [from wherever] it may come, and which, [while] consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself. I call that mind free which acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles that it has deliberately [chosen].
We may not grasp how incredibly hopeful, broadminded, generous, and radical Channing's view of human potential was if we don't first realize what an entirely pessimistic and ungenerous view of human nature dominated Christian culture at the time.
The assumption of original sin was pretty much a given: Humanity had been ruined at the dawn of time by the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and therefore every human being, ever after, was born into the world carrying that same guilt and wayward tendency stamped upon their nature-every human being other than Jesus, that is.
The revivalists who swept across America in the 1700s preached endlessly of our wretchedness. They persuaded their listeners by instilling a deep, sweaty dread, and then offering only one blessed way out of it-the saving grace of Jesus. On our own, they said, we were incapable of doing anything but sin.
Our only hope of rescue from the inevitable horror of hell would come through total surrender to the Savior, who saved us not because we were good, but because he was good, not because we were worthy, but because he had been a worthy sacrifice to appease an angry God.
There certainly were, at the time, various theologians who challenged these grim ideas. Channing read them all and yet found them all lacking in one way or another. He could not sign on completely to anyone else's views. But he let their best ideas stir his own inner searching.
He had an instinctive confidence and optimism regarding the essential nature of humanity. While he saw human wretchedness everywhere, he saw it more as a problem of deprivation than as a lack of innate human capacity for good.
Gradually he developed his own moral system. He believed that, to live a truly religious life, we must first trust what we find within ourselves innately, our human nature; second, take hold of these innate faculties-most especially, the faculty of mind, which is the hallmark of the human being's kinship with the Divine; third, cultivate bravely and eagerly the mind's expansion; fourth, seek always to uphold the precious dignity of human beings-our own dignity and that of others, because we are part of God's good creation; and fifth, believe that the human is NOT a lowly wretch, driven always to degrading appetites, but is capable and called to evolve developmentally. Through internal effort (what he called self-culture) we can grow and blossom into benevolence, sympathy, full humanity, and understanding.
Incidentally, Channing saw Jesus as a teacher of this path of self-development. He understood Jesus to be demonstrating the full potential of human dignity, compassion, and union with God. For Channing, Jesus was a model for a spiritual maturity, not an escape hatch through which one could crawl and be saved without personal development.
The key, for today, is Channing's notion that we must, first and last, trust the light within, first and last listen to the inward oracle, and then discover around us the radiant signatures of the Infinite Spirit, drawing help from them in order to progress toward our own enlightenment.
This same sentiment is echoed later in Emerson's Transcendentalist teachings:
Let us learn [what is revealed in] all nature and thought: that the Highest dwells within us… As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we cease and God begins. There is a deep power in which we exist and whose beauty is accessible to us.
A power whose beauty is directly accessible to us! Remember, we are talking about the human capacity for direct apprehension of spiritual reality and moral truth, an experience more immediate and authentic than what is fed to us by human authorities or mediated by scriptures, doctrines, or rules.
Emerson believed that each person had to follow the curve of his or her own faith toward a discovery of his or her own form of worship.
To offer a metaphor, for the artist, a path of experiment and play and self-directed learning is what enables the artist to discover his or her work. You might ask yourself if there is a medium, a kind of work or play that you do, that helps you to discover yourself. So too, in religion, a path of experiment and play and self-directed learning is what takes the seeker toward his or her God.
Emerson found himself dismayed by what was passing for religion in the churches of Boston-even liberal and Unitarian ones. So lifeless did he find the preaching there that he lamented at one point: "On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church." For Emerson, true Christianity was founded upon our innate human nature, not upon doctrines or even upon the Bible.
True Christianity was a faith in the infinitude of the human being. It was about discovering the extent of consciousness itself, and living a courageous and original life. To be a Christian was to seek and grow toward an experience of the God-self within and to walk and act and love from that awakened state. Instead, in Christian churches Emerson found uninspired and leaden catechesis, he found nitpicking morality, he found imitators.
When he delivered his famous Divinity School address in 1838, now considered one of the great seminal discourses of our tradition, he ended by saying to the fresh young ministers beginning their service:
Let me admonish you to go alone, to refuse the good models, even those who are sacred to the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil…Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity."
Emerson wouldn't approve, but I'm going to quote him one more time. This passage reveals an approach to compassion and justice based upon personal encounter and through the use of creative imagination:
We cannot fully enter into the conceptions of what is just without putting ourselves, in imagination, completely into the situation of another, so as to perceive how he would see and feel, and thus understand what should be done for him, as if it were to be done for ourselves.
So, it's not by learning abstract principles or laws we are directed toward just action, but again, by experience. If we can fully encounter the suffering of another, a just response can be guided spontaneously from within.
As we move onward in our exploration to the amazing Sophia Fahs, we will find these ideas echoed again.
Fahs lived a tremendously fruitful life from 1876 to1978-102 years. She did not start out as a Unitarian. It was not until she was in her fifties that she and the Unitarians thankfully found each other. Had that meeting come sooner, she would have found her emerging vision of religious education boosted by the words of Channing, expressed many decades before her time:
The great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own…
Sophia Fahs made an enormous contribution to our current approach to religious education by promoting experience-centered methods. She taught that we must foster children's innate capacities, their sensory curiosity, their natural self-awareness. Don't just tell them a story about the Great Giver of water, but let them touch and taste water, have them look at a drop of water under a microscope and see the life teeming within it.
Connect religious stories and ideas with the experiential sense of earth, fire, wind, the growth of seeds and the birth of animals; the development of human beings though walking, running, climbing, writing, playing. Help them become directly acquainted with the real-and with the Power within and without them everywhere. They become aware of the amazing miracle they carry with them always: their bodies-their senses and feelings, a pair of hands, eyes and ears, and a mind to question and to understand.
Fahs believed that one of the most unfortunate things a teacher can do is lead the student to believe there is only one appropriate response to a given question or reality. She said, "Different possible solutions should be imagined, possibly several of these experimented with. The solution finally chosen [should] be decided on the basis of all these factors"
This philosophy is crucial to our life in religious community as Unitarian Universalists:
Our individual, subjective knowing is enhanced by diversity of other knowings. By being an intentionally pluralistic community, truth can be perceived differently by a variety of vantage points, and together, we come to greater understanding of reality.
A doctrinal approach to truth always seeks uniformity of understanding-a catechism stamps the same idea into all minds, to create a uniform collective.
The liberal approach, on the other hand, seeks to widen understanding by encouraging a community of difference; like a kaleidoscope, the many particles of individual perception begin to coalesce into a more complex yet unified whole.
So, at this point I want to gather up some of the keys:
Our tradition is one that values, that has confidence in, the power of the individual person to perceive for himself or herself what is real and true. We are encouraged to use this direct engagement of our own minds, emotions, and bodies with life, in order to create for ourselves an original, personal path. At the same time, we are part of a community of seekers, a community of faith, and by allowing our individualities to meet one another, and to exchange and even challenge perceptions, our personal and collective understanding of reality is expanded. This collective encounter is what guards us against getting lost in our own personal trips and fantasies.
This way of being religious, the Unitarian Universalist way, is not easy. It is work. We are not given answers. We must find them. It asks us to be active and personally responsible for our religious and moral lives.
After the service, we're going to have some more conversation about what's been going on with the ministry, with me, with you, and then you will each be entrusted to call upon your inner voice, and upon your shared and collective understanding, to make a decision.
That is our way: self-awareness … bravely seeking new and original ways … openness to ever unfolding understanding from wherever it may come … heeding inner guidance … taking a stand … yet also letting our knowledge be tempered and refined by the insights of others … and out of all this, carving a true and authentic path.
As we close this sermon, I want to leave you with one of the many wonderful poems by Walt Whitman, expressing his passionate love for the independent American spirit, and his praise for the human being, the everyman and everywoman, who is the locus of all that can be known.
"For you" by Walt Whitman:
The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are,
Those who govern are there for you, it is not you who are there for them;
All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
All music is what awakes from you
when you are reminded by the instruments;
The sun and stars that float in the open air,
The apple-shaped earth and we upon it;
Our endless pride and outstretching, unspeakable joys and sorrows;
The wonder everyone sees in everyone else,
and the wonders that fill each minute of time forever;
It is for you whoever you are -
it is no farther from you than your hearing and sight are from you;
It is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest.
We consider bibles and religions divine --
I do not say they are not divine;
I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still;
Will you seek afar off? You'll surely come back at last,
In the best known to you, finding the best, or as good as the best --
Happiness, knowledge,
not in another place, but this place;
not for another hour, but [for] this hour.
May it be so.