Celestial Lands

One of the common responses to Unitarian Universalism that I found among my military chaplain colleagues is the belief that we UU’s have no morality… when in reality I have found that few people carry a heavier moral burden than the Unitarian Universalist. Even among UU’s I have heard it said that we have “Ethics, not morality”. I want to say at the outset of my exploring the idea of the moral burden that we UU’s carry that I know this is a topic upon which many UU’s may disagree… this is my contribution to what is (and should be) a continuing debate among our dynamic, changing faith.

I believe that few faiths, if any, call upon its adherents to carry a heavier moral burden than Unitarian Universalism does.

First, let me define what I mean by “moral burden”, as it is a pretty meaning-laden term. It is distinctly different from the term “morality” which to me implies a system, a code of morals… and I do not think that is what I am talking about. What I am getting at with the term “moral burden” is more a sense, a deep rooted and sacred feeling of responsibility. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, when Simon of Cyrene was required to carry Jesus’ cross, gets at the feeling of what I mean by a “moral burden” (MK 15:21). It is a weight of responsibility that you carry because you feel you have no other choice. Simon of Cyrene carried his burden because Roman soldiers gave him no choice, but we Unitarian Universalists carry our moral burden because the values and the principles that we hold require it.

As one fairly new UU church member once told me, life was easier before she became a Unitarian Universalist. There were so many things going on in the world that, because she did not know about them , she did not have to care about them. Now that “her eyes had been opened” (her words, not mine) she felt a crushing weight of responsibility, because she could not but care about those things, and feel that she should be doing something about each of them. Unlike Simon, however, we do not have to carry our moral burden alone… we Unitarian Universalists have one another.

I believe there is a somewhat unique blend of theology, of history, of values, and of principles that calls Unitarian Universalists to carry this moral burden in a unique way… and that combination is one of the reasons I am a UU. I want to touch on a few of those unique threads that twist together to make the cord that attaches us to our moral burden. They are: human agency, responsibility for good and evil, a theology of transformation, and our understanding of the individual and the community. These are just four of many threads, but for me they are the most profound. Perhaps you might identify some other threads in the cord of responsibility to our UU moral burden.

One of the most common theological themes I have found in my fellow Unitarian Universalists regards the belief that it is humanity that retains moral agency in the world, not God. Even for the theists among us, we often have a belief that either limits or negates whether God can act in the world. We do not attribute the moving and miracles of our daily life to the actions of God, but instead seek the sources of daily events in our own actions and in the actions of the people around us… or in the natural processes of this earth we inhabit.

When an earthquake causes devastation and suffering, as it did recently in Haiti, we Unitarian Universalists do not seek to blame God for it; we do not see it as divine punishment for any perceived wrongs. We understand it as an unfortunate result of the natural processes of this world, and also (in the case of Haiti) we remember the issues of justice and poverty that made construction in Haiti so shoddy. We then feel a burden to assist in the aftermath, and to find ways to address the justice and poverty issues that let the situation arise in the first place. Unitarian Universalists feel the burden for assisting as we can in the relief and recovery efforts because we know that, at least outside the human spirit, human assistance is all that can be expected. The Divine may provide us inspiration and strength, but it will be human hands that clear the rubble, that set up tents, that serve food.

This is the first strand of the moral burden of the Unitarian Universalist… the belief that if a difference is to be made, the effort for that difference must come from human hands. Those hands may not always be ours… it may be that some of our treasure can go to fund other hands. All too often though, it is our hands that our moral burden calls us to use to make a difference in our world. Those hands may be serving food, or they may be holding up a protest banner at injustice. Haiti is an example of when both the immediate need and the systemic need for our hands and our work are so very clear.

The weight of both of those cannot be alleviated or lessened by a belief that a Divine force will take part of the burden. For those UU’s who feel the kind of divine connection with what I call God, what we gain at most from that connection is some of the strength necessary to carry the burden, not a lighter burden. We UU’s carry a heavier moral burden than some of our friends of other faith traditions because we do not believe that God will carry it for us.

The second strand of the cord that binds the Unitarian Universalist to our moral burden for the world is similar to the first, but different in its focus. One of the most difficult theological questions that Unitarian Universalists have struggled with over the last twenty decades has been on the questions of the primacy of good and the existence of evil. There have been many different positions taken in this debate, and I will not claim that it has been decided. For the purposes of this article, I am going to argue from the point of view of my position in this debate: that good and evil do not exist as metaphysical realities, but rather are aspects of human valuation. In other words, good and evil come into existence by what we humans judge to be either good or evil.

The result of this theology of good and evil is that responsibility for what is good and what is evil in this world rests not on some metaphysical beings, but squarely upon the shoulders of humanity. The realization that we cannot blame the evil in this world upon some metaphysical “Satan” means that we humans bear responsibility for anything we value as evil. The same is true for God and what we value as good.

When we judge something, from our values, principles, and beliefs to be good, we then take upon ourselves the moral burden of sustaining, supporting, and expanding that which we have named good. When we judge something, from our values, principles, and beliefs to be evil, we then take upon ourselves the moral burden of alleviating, ending, or opposing that which we have named evil. When something we have named evil occurs in the world (be it of human origin or not) we do not have the luxury of excusing ourselves of responsibility for it by claiming that an evil force, such as the Devil, did it.

Each judgment of something as being either good or evil places a sacred responsibility for that something upon the moral burden of the Unitarian Universalist. Individually and together, we UU’s bear the moral burden of supporting the good and alleviating or ending the evil we see in the world.

The third strand in the cord that binds us to the moral burden we carry as Unitarian Universalists is a belief that together we really can carry the burden that is upon us. For many who face the weight of responsibility for (as in one UU prayer) saving the world, the weight seems too much to bear, and they retreat back into apathy, often even more discouraged than they were before. One of the binding threads of our faith is contained, I believe, in the famous quote by Margaret Mead:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

This quote is almost a creed of the theology of faith of the Unitarian Universalist, and I believe it may be the most common theological thread among us. I have spoken with many who explored our faith and chose not to commit to it, and often the reason was because we were always preaching, teaching and calling for action about things they felt they could never change. Amid an ever increasing understanding of the problems and dangers of this world, amid social and political injustice, amid the reality of inequality, and prejudice, what I find in Unitarian Universalists is a hopefulness that Margaret Mead captured.

It is the thread of this hopefulness, which I can only describe as a beautiful kind of faith, that is what I believe keeps many UU’s from laying down the sacred responsibility of their moral burden and moving to an apathetic stance in the world. This faithful hopefulness is not only what helps us to carry our moral burden, but also binds us to it… and perhaps binds us together more than anything else.

The last cord of this moral burden that I will try and articulate in this article is found in a different understanding of what I term the “flow of morality”. For this, I will need to refer to the faith of my childhood, growing up as a Southern Baptist.

The system of morality that I learned in my childhood church was one that centered on the individual. It was a morality that consisted of few general concepts, and many specific edicts. The individual was called upon to not smoke, not drink, to honor father and mother, to obey those in authority. It taught that I (personally) was a sinful being who only found forgiveness in the grace of God, represented by Jesus dying on the cross. I should give ten percent of everything I owned to the church, and I should follow all the commandments of the bible (or at least the ones I was told about). My entire morality centered on the “I”… on the individual.

What broadening there was of this moral code to the community, to the nation, and to the world proceeded from this individual center. Communal morality then became the importation or imposition of this individual morality upon others, as individuals, in larger and larger contexts. The church then would only be moral if all the members of the church adopted and practiced the same individual morality. The nation and the world would only be moral when the individuals… all the individuals… adopted or had imposed upon them the same individual morality.

Now, there are many Christians who have moved from that individual morality to develop derivative cultural and national systems of morality that are not so individually focused… but in my perception those systems still proceed from this individual moral basis as their starting point and ideal, and are formed and shaped by that individual moral basis.

Unitarian Universalists proceed the other way with regards to global, national, communal, and individual morality. I believe we as a faith begin with an image and vision of global morality. We call it by different names: right relationship, beloved community, the “realm of God”. It is a vision not of how individuals should live their lives, but what a “world made whole” would look like.

It is from and in support of this vision of a world made whole that we then derive our moral systems at each of the other levels. All communal moralities are derived from this vision of a world made whole in how they support and promote that vision. Individual morality for Unitarian Universalists is not then the center from which all flows, but rather the ultimate derivation of what I as an individual can and must do to support, promote and some day achieve the vision of Beloved Community on a global scale.

It is no wonder that many who form their moral systems from an individual basis cannot see the morality of the Unitarian Universalist… they are looking in the wrong places. Our morality is formed not around individual commandments, but around a vision of, in the language I use, “the Realm of God”.

This is the fourth strand, and perhaps the heaviest in the cord that binds the moral burden of the Unitarian Universalist… saving the world. Without direct assistance from God, with responsibility for what is good and what is evil, and with the faithful hopefulness that we really can achieve it… we Unitarian Universalists carry with us the burden of saving the world. Of creating a world of justice and equality, of connection and interdependence, of hope and possibility. And, it is that hope and possibility that brings us to pick up such a heavy burden, smile and say with Jesus “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11. 30)

Yours in Faith,

David

I want to be very clear at the beginning of this article that it applies to the religious right, the religious center, and the religious left, and I’m going to focus on the religious left. This is something within human nature, not within specific religious traditions. If there is a difference in how this article applies across religious traditions, it is a difference of degree.

There is something in the human experience that calls us to desire certainty… to want to “know” something in its fullness, and to not have to continue to wrestle with doubt. Many humans seem to have an internal mechanism for certainty… and when that is shown to be impossible we often go to the other extreme… that nothing can be known at all.

Even we Unitarian Universalists are not immune to faith without doubt… it just tends to occur more on the ideological spectrum than the theological spectrum for us… though I’m going to focus this article on some of our theological “certainties”.

Many of you know that I love UU jokes. Partly this is because I think it is healthy to be able to hold a little irreverence for the things that you hold the deepest loyalty to… and also it is because that I believe a caricature of a thing is revealing about the core of that thing. I believe many UU jokes serve that role for Unitarian Universalism. Here is one of my favorites:

To have no doubts is fundamentalism.

To have some doubts is normal.

To have many doubts is a crisis of faith.

To have nothing but doubts is a conversion to Unitarian Universalism!

Now the joke is not literally true… to have nothing but doubts is not UU’ism, and it would be a hell of a way to live. I’m sure that fundamentalists have doubts about some things in their lives, whether they admit to it or not. I know that was true of the fundamentalist churches I grew up in. Humanity is never as clear cut as the distinctions above make it seem. That’s the point.

The deeper truth (lower case t) the joke points to is that we Unitarian Universalists recognize the importance of doubt, at least intellectually. I sometimes question how good we are at putting that intellectual and spiritual understanding of doubt into practice, but we are getting better… it is one of our “growing edges”. During my first few years as a Unitarian Universalist I made two profound realizations:

There are Unitarian Universalist Fundamentalists…

And I was one of them.

That realization helped me to begin to have a new, spiritual understanding of the concept of doubt. It allowed me to hold a new understanding for my Christian commitment to humility… not necessarily humility before others (something I have never done very well, though I try) but humility before ultimacy. The important lesson of doubt is not that we can know nothing, but that it is impossible to know everything. Certainty without ultimate knowledge (either knowing God perfectly or making yourself into God) is hubris.

There are many human attempts to make something that is limited represent ultimacy… so we can live in the illusion that it is possible for us to grasp all there is and remove all doubt. These attempts are not limited to any particular religious tradition. Believing a particular set of scripture to be “God’s Revealed Word” even when it is demonstrably the flawed work of human hands is one such attempt to transmute the limited into the ultimate. Believing that science and the scientific method can reveal all the “mysteries and secrets of the universe” when it is obviously limited by the senses and faculties of the human beings who practice it is another. Reducing God to idyllic forms and placing your faith for ultimacy in them, forms such as “Justice”, “Liberty”, “Truth”, “Love” or “Reason” are attempts to make the limited ultimate. I know this is the one I am most often guilty of practicing. I can always tell when I am trying to make such limited ideals ultimate, because I tend to capitalize those words.

I believe I am not alone in being drawn to this kind of certainty of ultimacy on the religious left. What I believe we need to realize is that it is our own version of believing the Bible is the “Word of God”.

I believe the corrective to each of these attempts to make the limited ultimate (be it scriptural literalism, scientific foundationalism, or idyllic formism) is to transform each of these not into a graspable substitute for totality (idolatry), but rather into a lived practice in our daily lives.

The corrective for exalting a scripture as the literal truth of God is to transform your relationship to that scripture into a dynamic dance… to give it the space not to speak as a commandment from on high, but a conversational reality whose meaning can shift as you shift, grow as you grow, and change as you change. It is to allow that scripture to work in your life in ways that transform, not command; in ways that draw-out, not condemn. It is to make a lived practice of dancing with the scripture… I will write an article specifically on this later as it is a much larger concept that I can capture in a paragraph.

The corrective for exalting Science as the literal truth of the Universe is to imbue into each act and practice of science that sense of wonder that Albert Einstein so often spoke of… to remember the metaphor of Einstein’s Library. It is to engage science not as discovery of truths… but as an ever evolving practice of wonder. For the same reason as before, I will write about this in more detail later… but you can see much of what I am speaking of in transforming science from ultimacy to practice in much of the thought of Einstein. He was the master of this particular practice.

The corrective for exalting idyllic forms is to make each of these a daily practice in our lives. Rather than seeking some metaphysical Justice, in what ways do you/can you create justice every day? Rather than pining after some metaphysical Love, what ways can do you/can you create love around you as you live? There are two parts to this process. The first is similar to “Precept Study” in Zen Buddhism. First we must look at our lives through each of these “Idyllic Forms”. To make Love no longer some substitute for ultimacy, we must very intentionally look at our lives through the lens of love: Where are we feeling loved? Where are we not? Where are we giving love? Where are we not? What kinds of love do we feel and give? What kinds of love do we reject? What kinds of love do we yearn for and do not have? What kinds of love have hurt us, or hurt those around us? What kinds of love have caused us to feel shame? What kinds of love have lifted our souls? Etc, etc.

Through this reflection, we not only make love real for us, we learn how we are practicing it already. Where we are responsible in our loving, and where we might not be. How our love affects us and affects others. Where our love may be harming others, or harming ourselves. We cease to think of Love as an unattainable metaphysical ideal and make it a real and living part of our daily lives.

We must do this kind of reflection for each of the different “Idyllic Forms” we find in our lives. Reason, Justice, Mercy, Faith, Liberty, Freedom, Equality… all of these and more would be used as lenses to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, of our lives, and of how we live with and affect those around us.

From that understanding we would then be called into living our lives with intention around those idyllic forms… because they would no longer by idyllic, they would be real and vibrant parts of our lives. If we have intentionally gained understanding of how we love and relate to others, we would likely then be called to intentionally practice that love in different ways. If we intentionally gain an understanding of were we experience inequality with others (where we are the oppressed and where we are the oppressor) we then would be called to intentionally practice how we relate to the world and to others in it in different ways. The same would be true for any of the idyllic forms we cease to make idyllic through intentional spiritual reflection.

This could become an intentional Liberal Faith (see the capital letters?) spiritual practice, and the intent of the article was to lay some of the foundation for this as a possibility. I could even envision a monastic order that found their “rule” in something similar to this… the continual self-reflection that then motivates a practice of living in the world “deliberately”… to borrow from Thoreau. And yet, recent movements in Liberal Faith as a whole, and UU’ism in particular, have sought to move right to the “living in the world” without the individual and communal critical reflection on what the “idyllic form” might really mean for us.

This is my core critique of the “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign. I perceive it as an attempt to make a practice of something we have yet to make personally spiritual… and as such it becomes another glorification of an “Idyllic Form” that we do not really understand, have less agreement on than we think, and do not understand how it relates to our lived lives. Before we can “Stand on the Side of Love”, I believe we need to deliberately understand love in our lives and in our spirits. That means finding ways to inspire individual reflective practice on love within our lives first, and from that move into the communal reflection, and then the forms of practice that the campaign is currently attempting. Otherwise, we run the danger of treating love as just another idol… another graspable substitute for certainty and ultimacy.

Yours in faith,
David

I do not often post my sermons directly to the Blog here at Celestial Lands, but something is moving me to share this one here this morning.  Perhaps because I have been so disappointed and depressed over some recent events in American Political History that this sermon, written a year ago, is also preaching to me today.  I am presenting it this morning at the Unitarian Church of Evanston, IL.   

“How Dare You People Bring THAT MAN Here!?!” shouted the man at the young taxi driver. “How dare you people bring THAT MAN here without our permission!?!”

Though it had been three years since “that man” had come, the young taxi driver knew instantly why he was being yelled at. It had happened before.

It started innocently enough. A young man working as a taxi driver after college picked up a fare. The man gave him an address on Greenwood Street in Evanston. The young taxi driver knew that address, because it was for the house that shared a parking lot with his Church, the Unitarian Church of Evanston. And so, without consulting a map, he drove his fare home.

When they arrived the man asked with some surprise how it was that the young taxi driver had known where to go without directions or a map. It was then the taxi driver admitted he attended the Unitarian Church.

“How dare you people bring that man here without our permission!?!” shouted the man, his face purpling with rage. It had been three years since the Unitarian Church of Evanston had hosted a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1962, but still the memory of that event was rough and raw for the yelling man.

“If we’d asked your permission, would you have agreed?” the young taxi driver asked.

“Of Course Not!” shouted the man.

With a smart-alec smile the young taxi driver said “Well, that’s why we didn’t ask!”

On October 31st, Halloween night of 1962 our church, the Unitarian Church of Evanston hosted a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. The event does not seem to have been advertised in the local papers. The church did not put up flyers saying it was going to happen. It had been arranged in part through the connections of a former minister of the church Rev. Homer Jack. Studs Terkel agreed to introduce Dr. King and to moderate the forum discussion. No recording of the event was made, and there was very little about it that I found in the Church’s Archives.

And yet, it was a profound and formative event in the life of this church. When I became this congregation’s ministerial intern, one of the first things I learned that had a real mythical quality was that Dr. King had once spoken here. As I spoke to several of the members of this congregation who were here that day, it became apparent that this was one of the two events from the time of the Civil Rights Movement that most shaped them… and no one remembered what he had spoken of in any detail.

By daring to invite Dr. King, this church created what was probably one of the largest interracial gatherings in the history of Evanston up to that point. Some told me that about 700 people, half of them white members of the church and community and the other half black citizens of Evanston had come to hear Dr. King speak. Black and white alike were sitting in these seats, standing in these isles, packed up the staircase and leaning over that balcony. All to hear Dr. King’s clarion call to racial equality and justice. You are in this room, this same room… take a moment to imagine it.

(Pause)

There were a few protestors outside, but the secrecy of the event meant there were fewer than you might expect. Packed shoulder to shoulder were Black and White, men and women, children and adults… all together in 1962. It was a moment of daring for all of the people who were involved…

“How Dare You People Bring THAT MAN Here!?!” shouted the closest neighbor to the church.

A few days later, one white female member of the church, who was there to hear Dr. King a few nights before, told her friend the store clerk at the local grocery what an amazing experience it had been to hear Dr. King. Immediately, all sound in the grocery store stopped, as everyone turned to stare in silence at her.

How dare you people bring that man here.

How profound it is to dare. How profound it is to dare to risk. How profound it is to dare to love. How profound it is to dare to dream. How profound it is to dare to hope. How profound it is to dare.

Through learning about this church’s involvement in the civil rights movement, I have found a new personal hero. His name was John O’Brien, and in 1971 he spoke in this church. He came to confess. A former Army Intelligence Officer, he came here to confess that he had been assigned to spy upon this congregation, on all of the churches in Evanston that were involved in the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. He had come to this sanctuary and written down names, he had thought of ways to distract the church from its work. He had arranged to have these windows behind me broken so the church would have to spend resources to replace them. He had helped decide who would be moved to concentration camps if marshal law was declared.

And over time, he had dared to ask himself the question of what was more important to him, following orders or obeying the Constitution. He chose to follow the constitution, and got out of the Army. He dared to testify before congress, and for this he faced character assassination, the loss of his income, possible arrest, and the scorn of everyone he had worked in Army Intelligence with, including my father. As his last act before removing himself from public life forever, John O’Brien came to those he felt he had wronged, and he dared to confess, in a sermon he presented from the pulpit of this church.

We do not have to look far to find such daring. One member of this congregation who was in Evanston during the civil rights movement dared to challenge his neighbors on their racism, when they chose to move to Winnetka instead of have their children attend the new integrated Evanston Schools.

Another member of this congregation dared to gather supplies from the Evanston community, and drive them down to the South each weekend, to Selma and Birmingham, Memphis and Montgomery, so the civil-rights protestors would have what they needed to print flyers, to have water, and to hand out pamphlets.

This church dared to invite other leaders of the civil rights movement to speak here, including James Baldwin, James Bevel, and Rev. Eugene Sparrow. They even dared to host a performance by Dick Gregory and the Freedom Singers.

This church as a whole dared to house an African American School for a period of time, until the Evanston Schools were fully integrated. UCE dared to hire an African American Music Director in the 60’s. UCE dared to challenge its minister to go to Selma after the death of Unitarian minister Rev. James Reeb at the hands of a white mob. Though ethical challenges would later bring Rev. Ross Allen Weston to leave this church, he accepted that particular challenge, and he went to march in Selma alongside hundreds of other Unitarian Ministers, and Dr. King.

If I were to pick a time in the history of this congregation during the Civil Rights Movement in which our church dared more than any other, it would be in the days that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Perhaps because Dr. King had spoken here, it seemed that it felt very personal to the members of this church that he had been murdered. Perhaps it was in the nature of the church’s brand new minister, the Rev. Charles Eddis to dare and to challenge authority… I do not know. I only know what happened. Rev. Eddis told me that it was one of the highpoints in his career as a minister.

When word came to the city of Evanston that Dr. King had been shot to death outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee on April 4th, 1968 there was deep concern in the city government that violence might erupt, as it had on the South Side of Chicago.

When two young black men asked the city for a permit to march in honor of King the following Sunday, those fears increased.

The city government, seeking a way to have the march but avoid any violence, called all of the Evanston Ministers together, both black and white. The Mayor begged the ministers to become involved in planning and leading the march, to hold a group rally and worship service in honor of Dr. King. It was thought that if the ministers were there, the crowd might be less inclined to violence.

I don’t know what came over him, where his daring came from, but Rev. Eddis had found his moment. He raised his hand and when called upon he dared to say something like this to the mayor: “We’ll lead your march, but you need to pass that Open Housing law that the city council has been debating for so long”. It was almost blackmail, for Rev. Eddis and the other clergy had long been advocating for the city to pass the law that would make it legal for Black Families to move into white neighborhoods in Evanston.

The mayor said they’d look into it, or something else fairly non-committal. When the ministers came together afterward, they knew that they would have to do something more, especially Rev. Eddis and the Rev. Jacob Blake, the African American Pastor of Ebenezer AME Church.
So, they held the march and rally for Dr. King… and then they kept on marching. Each night, the members of the AME church and the Unitarian church and other Evanston congregations would march in support of the Open Housing Law. They would follow behind Rev. Blake and Rev. Eddis, a Black Methodist from Chicago and a White Unitarian from Canada, locked arm in arm, carrying a banner which called for housing equality.

They would begin at a church, march through the white neighborhoods, stop in front of the house of the mayor or a city council member, hold a rally, and then march to another church. Often they would march from a white church to a black church, or visa versa. For two weeks they dared to march each evening, always respectful, following traffic laws and street signs. They dared to take their children with them, black children and white children playing at marching together. They dared so much that the mayor was heard to exclaim from inside his home “We’ll pass your damn law!” while he was apparently holding a shotgun behind the door.

A member of the church who did not march watched out her window as her fellow congregants of our Unitarian Church dared to walk through her neighborhood calling for integration, and she said the feeling of that moment has never left her.

It was a moment of daring in the life of this congregation. Not only did they call for the city government to act, they lead the movement to force them to do so.

At one march on Easter Sunday, over 5000 people marched with Rev. Eddis and Rev. Blake through the white-only neighborhoods of Evanston. When the law was passed, the members of these two congregations dared to make the “V” for victory sign at the city council members, as if to add insult to injury.

How profound it is to Dare! How profound it is to take a stand, to challenge even at risk to yourself and your own interests. Some people left the congregation because of its stand. About ten years before Dr. King spoke in this hall the congregation had voted not to become involved in Civil Rights. It was too risky… so what changed? From where did this daring spirit come?

I have seen this congregation dare. How daring it was to invite a former Iraq weapons inspector and a former U.S. ambassador to come and speak to a crowd of almost 500 about what a disaster an Invasion of Iran would be. How daring it was to make public our stand against the war in Iraq. This congregation has not forgotten how to be daring.

How daring it is to regularly read the names of those killed in the current wars in public. How daring it is to hang a banner on the church for equality, to put a peace pole out in a time of war.

You dared to invite me to be your ministerial intern, when many other congregations might not have. I am a son of the south, white mixed with Cherokee, a military veteran, and a Unitarian Universalist Christian.
Not only did you dare to invite me to preach to you for that year, but you dared to look closely at your own assumptions about the military and those who serve, about Christianity, and about the South, and I am deeply honored by that daring audacity.

How dare you all bring that man here! How dare we? There is more I wish we could dare. There are many things I wish we as a denomination could dare.

I wish we could dare to ask ourselves the deep questions about why there were more African American members of our denomination in 1968 than there are today.

I wish we could dare to have the conversations about why some of our longer-term Unitarian Universalists are made uncomfortable by the presence of all these young families that are new to our movement.

I wish we could dare to change the way our denomination and our congregations think about money in these times of economic trial, and what it is our money supports when we invest it.

In the year that I was with you, we dared to bring into our midst the stories of the veterans among us, who for years have kept silent about that part of their lives… I wish we could now dare to reach out to the military families in the communities around our churches. There are more of them than you might think.

It is going to seem presumptuous of me, as I am not a part of the daily life of this church anymore… but I have been thinking about what I might wish this church to dare. Perhaps my dreams might inspire you, even if it is to find your own dreams of what you as a church might dare.

I wish this congregation could dare to ask why, over 40 years after the open housing law that our congregation marched for was passed, the map of where blacks in Evanston live and where whites in Evanston live looks almost as segregated today as it did then. In other words, I wish we would dare to look closely at how race and class are intricately linked in this very affluent city.

I wish this congregation could call attention to the racial bias shown by the Evanston Police, and the racial hatred and violence shown by the Chicago police around my own neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.

If I have a prayer for you, if I have a prayer for our church, if I have a prayer for Unitarian Universalism, if I have a prayer for the movement of Liberal Faith this morning, it is this:

Let us Dare.

Let us dare to challenge our own assumptions, prejudices and beliefs, so that we can learn from them and break their hold upon us.

Let us dare to challenge the pre-conceived notions all around us, about race, about class, about creed, about culture, and shout to this world that the whole is much more complicated than many of our traditions make us think.

Let us dare to risk, to speak out and garner our neighbor’s ire when we see injustice and racial inequality. Let us invite those who have dedicated their lives to the values and principles we believe in, not to speak to us, but to speak through our faith to the wider community. Let us dare to hope that we can make a difference. Let us dare to dream of what this world will look like when it has become whole, and share that dream with others as the center of our living faith. Let us dare to love, even those who disagree with us. Let us Dare.

How dare you people bring that man here?

Let us Dare.

So may it be, blessed be, and amen.

If you are looking for hope from me, today is not the day. For several days, I have debated whether or not to write about my feeling that this week might have marked the end of American Democracy… or rather, if some day in the future I might look back on this week and say, “Yes, that was when the myth of American Democracy was exposed”. I was driving in my car when I heard the Supreme Court had decided that corporations have First Amendment rights, creating a nearly unlimited right for corporations to spend money to directly influence American electoral politics.

I turned the radio off NPR, and put in my CD of the New Testament. I remember thinking, “Well, it’s not like my caring about politics has much of a point anymore, does it?” I hope I don’t stay in this mental and spiritual space, but after the Supreme Court decision, I feel like my rights as an American Citizen have been stripped away. For what value is an individual’s right to free speech when there is little to no hope of being listened to? At least, not by those who make policy in this country.

You can turn on the television, or even listen to the speech the President made regarding this Supreme Court decision, and hear the doom and gloom… you don’t need it from me. At least the President is good at finding some way to bring hope. I just don’t feel it at the moment. Like a prophet of old, I can see the ramifications of this decision spreading out before us as a nation. The composition of the Supreme Court is unlikely to change for at least ten years, and by that point the damage will be done. Politicians will realize that they have much more to fear in the next election from corporations than they do the American People. Corporations will realize that they no longer need to bribe candidates with donations… that it is much more effective to threaten them with opposition. Soon, corporations won’t even have to spend they money to control politicians… the threat that they could will be enough. Our political structures at all levels will become creatures of corporate interest. Individual Americans are, as of this week, no longer players in American public discourse. It will just take a while for us all to figure that out.

I know, some have claimed this to be true before… but before at least a veneer of our politics being the venue of the people had to be maintained. That veneer allowed for a mass public response that assisted in the election of President Obama. I believe that this Supreme Court decision would make the last election impossible to repeat. I fear that we will have a couple of elections where corporate interests wage campaigns against any politicians who believe they are still responsible to the American People, and then the political establishment will come to terms with just who their masters really are.

I know, this article does not sound like me. I know I’m reacting emotionally. I know I’m not sounding very “rational” at the moment. I’m not feeling rational. I’m somewhere between shock, angry, fearful, and hopeless.

I will say this though… as I was driving around to see my hospice patients this week, listening to the Gospel of Matthew on my car CD player, several stories took on new and different meanings because of the mental space that I am in…

Especially the one where Jesus came in and threw the moneychangers out of the temple.

Yours in Faith,

David

I love it when the responses to an article prompt me to another article. One of my most respected teachers, Joshin Roshi, responded to my last article on the symbolic construction of reality by reminding me not to miss the forest for the trees… to not discount the direct experience of totality amid all of our human attempts to make sense of it. It is a point well made.

It is the space between those two… between direct experience of transcending unity, mystery, and wonder (see, words fail even here) and our human attempts to not only use language to express that experience, but also our human attempts to make private meaning from those experiences, that I believe rests much of human conflict and strife. We humans just do not seem to be wired to do the “experiencing” without then trying to do the “knowing”… and it is in our attempts at knowing that our pre-conceptions, prejudices, and constructed symbolic reality come into play.

As some of you may have read in my most concise representation of my theology to date, my theology begins with the kind of experience of (God, totality, oneness, kensho, etc) that Joshin Roshi points to. I believe Roshi is right when he claims that our human attempts at knowing that begin from authentic experience have the most meaning… and yet even from the same or similar experiences we humans come to vastly different meaning-sets.

I believe that what I call “God”, that experience of oneness and totality that has snuck up on me from time to time (watching a beautiful sunset, reading Isaiah 41 during a stressful time, watching a child being born) I have also learned to experience intentionally through meditation, through quieting my mind, stepping a little away from my constructed self, and giving myself permission to simply be. When I either attempt to place myself in this spiritual space, or find myself in that communion with totality unexpectedly… this is what I think of as prayer. Those moments, brief though they are, when I feel myself in the presence of the totality that I name God… those moments are for me the root behind all forms of communion. One of the first times I remember sensing myself in the presence of this oneness was a childhood experience of kneeling, taking a wafer and a cup of grape juice, and partaking of them to the words “do this in remembrance of me”.

And yet God, prayer, meditation, presence, communion… all of these symbols are part of a meaning-set that I have placed upon the experience itself. They arise from the experience as I encountered it, based upon my life history, my training, and my pre-conceptions. They say far less about totality/oneness/God than they say about me.

God is not found through meditation. Who I am in the presence of God is.

Many others have placed different meaning-sets upon the experience of the totality that I personally name God. I believe that the same universal wholeness can be sensed through Islamic prayer, through Tibetan chanting, through speaking in Tongues or through Evangelistic rapture… among many other forms. What differs in each of these is not the reality of a totality experienced, but how the individual experiences that totality and what meaning-sets they place upon that experience.

Now, I’m not going to claim that all human religious thought arises from the “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder”(as we UU’s put it in the six sources). Nor am I going to claim that all human attempts at meaning arise from authentic experience of anything… I think we humans are amazingly adept at making meaning from just about anything, including our ability to make meaning from prior meaning from prior meaning from prior meaning. My own theology is an example of making meaning from meaning… for it arises from the authentic experience of totality but then is influenced by the meaning-sets of many others.

What I will claim is that there is a certain depth, a sacred nature to the meanings we have created the closer they get to the experience from which they arise. The knowings about my relationship with my wife that I hold most dear are the ones most closely related to my direct experiences of her love for me. Yet the space between those knowings and the experiences they relate to must be respected, or we are in danger of replacing the wonder of the experience with the meanings we have made from them. To lose the space between what we know about the experience and the experience itself is what I regularly refer to as idolatry. It is the impulse that my understanding of totality becomes that totality… and it is the most dangerous theological fallacy that we humans fall prey to.

Roshi, thank you for inspiring these thoughts in me. Gassho.

Yours in Faith,

David

In the discussion of a recent article of mine on the growth of the myth of a post-racial America, it became clear to me that the article depends upon a particular understanding of the nature of reality as we human beings have constructed it, and that I had never articulated the line of thought on which it is based. Since this conception of reality and of human nature is a fundamental building block upon which much of the rest of my theology, cosmology, and sociological understandings are built, it is probably necessary for me to lay this foundation before I can make significant arguments in defense of the article itself.

The basic premise of the article in question did not seem to be challenged… that the idea that America has moved beyond race as an issue is indeed a myth. Rather, the question that became contentious was whether or not all human beings carry with us pre-conceptions about race each and every moment of our lives, and that those pre-conceptions affect many of the interactions, decisions, and choices of our lives. For some, this appears to be a liberal version of a “Doctrine of Original Sin”, and while I admit I have seen it operate that way within our liberal faith movement (just as Global Climate Change can operate as an end-times revelation for some of us), my own understanding of human nature does not attach this kind of negative valuation to it.

The objection was surprising to me because I forget not everyone understands what it means to be human in the way that I do. You see, there is no part of human knowledge that is not in itself a mass of pre-conceptions, including my own theology. We human beings can only relate to the universe we inhabit through our own pre-conceptions… or rather through the symbols that we can conceive.

I begin from an un-provable assumption: The universe is vaster than the human mind will ever be able to conceive. I do not take this to be a weakness to my argument, because I also accept that all human arguments ultimately rest on un-provable assumptions. I cannot prove the existence of God, nor can I prove beyond all doubt that my wife loves me. I cannot prove the sun will rise tomorrow, or that what I think of as the color blue is the same as what you think of as the color blue. Human knowledge rests on a whole series of ultimately un-provable assumptions. I posit that the primary reasons for the un-provable foundations of all of human knowledge is that the universe is limitless and the human capacity for knowing is limited. I do not foresee a time or space in which the universe will be limited or the capacity of humanity will be limitless.

Therefore, human knowledge will always remain imperfect, incomplete, and a merest shadow of all that is, was, and will be.

Not only will human knowledge always be incomplete and imperfect, but that knowledge will be experienced and perceived differently by each human being, based upon how much of human knowledge they carry with them, what attitudes they have about that knowledge, and in what order that knowledge came to them. The atom has a very different meaning-set for someone who has dedicated their life to ending nuclear weapons than it does for someone who has dedicated their life to discovering cold-fusion. My wife and I share a life together, and yet her experience of our love is very different than mine.

The fourth point I will posit (the second being the limited nature of humankind and the third being the variability of human experience) is that, in my experience of myself, in my experience of others, and in my understandings of human psychology, humanity has developed a way of functioning in the midst of being limited creatures in a limitless universe in which human knowledge is limited and variable… and that is by creating symbols.

One of the greatest examples of the use of symbols to mitigate the limits and variability of human knowledge is language itself. Human beings learned to allow the symbol of a sound to represent a reality that cannot be perfectly grasped. Language is about much more than the communication of information. The symbols we call words are actually nothing more than a ball-park approximation of what they are meant to express.

Let’s take the word “Rose”. Now a rose is a flower, a particular kind of flower. More than this, it is a category of flowers. These flowers come in different colors, they come in different sizes. Two roses that look almost identical might be from different strains, and have different characteristics of hardiness, of texture, of lifespan. Even if someone knew every last variety of rose blooming today, how could they also conceive of every type of rose that ever existed, or every type of rose that might be developed someday.

Even this understanding would leave out all the different meanings that a rose might have in a culture. In our culture, the rose means love, but it can also mean grief. The blue rose was once the symbol of secrecy, and the white rose can mean anonymous love. Yellow roses have some meanings that only Texans understand… and yet the young Chinese woman who once stood before some tanks in Tiananmen Square was called “The Yellow Rose”.

Add to this that millions of women in western culture have been named “Rose”… including my Great Grandmother. It is also a color, a scent for perfumes, and the name for the taste of a particularly nasty chocolate candy I once ate…. And you barely begin to scratch the surface of all of the meanings, knowledge, patterns, and beliefs bound up with this one, four lettered symbol in a single language from a particular set of human cultures.

And then think of all of the different possible meanings, interpretations, and understandings of every single word I have written in this essay… or has ever been written in any single language and read by any single human being who ever attempted to read and write… and you begin to see the complexity that is behind the symbols we so blithely use and assume that everyone understands them the same way we do…

I made such a point of this involving the complex symbolism of language in order to try and be as clear as I can before I make my next point… as with language, human beings can only relate to the universe through such symbols.

It is here that the argument I made in the previous essay begins to merge with this essay. Often we express the symbols by which we limited beings relate to a limitless universe and a limited understanding of one another in the symbols of words, but not always. Our feelings are symbols (or feelings as messengers, in common CPE parlance). Our attitudes are symbols. Our values, stated or unstated are symbols. Each of them is a short-hand representation for realities that are too complex to express in their fullness, and also too complex for each of us to understand in their fullness ourselves.

These value symbols, attitude symbols, feeling symbols, are also understood and encountered differently by each and every one of us. How I encounter the symbol of my value of the inherent worth and dignity of every person will be different from how you encounter my value of inherent worth and dignity of every person.

I hope I have made the universe and all of our human reactions within it seem a jumbled up, impossible mess. I hope I have made it seem as if there is no hope that any of us will ever be able to communicate anything to anyone, how all hope of any kind of knowledge is lost, and how we are all lost in a morass of our own misunderstandings and drowning in not-knowing. I hope I have created that impression so that my next point can seem a little more profound than it really is…

We human beings are experts at “making-do”.

The development of a symbolic understanding of the universe is in essence that “making-do”, and it is a large part of what I think makes humanity beautiful. I will never fully understand what you might mean by the word “Rose”… but I can get close enough to make it work. I will never fully understand what my wife means when she tells me she loves me… but I can get close enough to know it is similar to the feeling-symbol I have for her. I will never understand the complexity of what my physicist friend calls “string-theory”… but I can get close enough to nod intelligently at parties.

There is another human symbol-set that I have not yet discussed (along with many other symbol-sets, like mathematics), and it is the one that I was pointing to in the article that was the impetus for this article… and that is the symbol-sets of pre-conceptions… particularly pre-conceptions about our fellow human beings.

All of the complexity that I highlighted with the word “Rose” can be multiplied by six billion when it comes to the words person and human. It would probably be easier to hold the entire complexity of all the stars in the milky-way galaxy in your mind than the entire complexity of every human alive today. Add to that the entire complexity of every human who has ever lived or ever will live… and you reach nearly the same limitlessness that the universe itself exhibits.

Yet among humans there are patterns, and we can begin to grasp those. We can see that humans come in different colors, different shapes, different genders, different ages, different sexual orientations, and different abilities. Humans also hail from different cultures, different countries, different continents. Among each of these different categories there are some broad similarities that we can begin to grasp… even when it is impossible to grasp the differences of each individual in their wholeness.

Perhaps at one time human communities were so small that each individual human could limit the number of other humans they might encounter in their lifetime to a number that they could encounter in something close to their wholeness, though I doubt it. That certainly is not true for the overwhelming majority of humanity today. We simply do not have the capacity to encounter each human being we come into contact with as a unique and separate individual, even if it were possible to take the time to encounter each person in their fullness. And so, we fall back upon the method of “making-do” that has served us for all of our history… we create symbols. In this case, we create pre-conceptions about the humans around us.

Notice that I am not particularly condemning the human use of the symbols of pre-conceptions as wrong or negative… the use of this kind of symbol for a complexity we cannot conceive is simply a part of being human. I called it beautiful and often it is. It is what allows us to function in a world that is too complex for us to fathom. I said in the previous article that all human beings carry pre-conceptions about race, and I meant it. What I mean in its fullness is that all human beings carry pre-conceptions about everything and everyone we encounter in this world. We learn symbolic pre-conceptions at the same time we learn symbolic language. It is simply a part of who we are.

Its been a long essay… and I promise I will come to a close soon… but there is one last point I need to make… and that is what we do with these pre-conceptions. What value we place on them, whether they serve us in positive ways or whether they become negative and destructive depends not on whether or not we have pre-conceptions, but rather upon how we relate to them. I believe there are three primary ways that we human beings relate to the pre-conception symbols we carry with us.

The first is when we place so much importance on the validity of our pre-conception symbols that we cannot encounter any variance from them. This type of engagement with a pre-conception symbol is what is often symbolized by the word prejudice. When it is connected to the power to enforce the pre-conception, it becomes racism, sexism, ageism, etc… Theologically, allowing the symbol to replace the complex reality that the symbol is only supposed to imperfectly represent has a word-symbol of its own. The bible calls it Idolatry. This is the heart of all forms of fundamentalism, for fundamentalism is the denial of complexity.

The second is a bit more subtle… and that is when we either pretend that such pre-conceptions do not exist, or that whatever pre-conceptions we might have do not affect how we relate to the world. This denies how almost all (if not all) of what it means to be human is bound up in our symbolic nature. Everything we do as human beings we do through symbol, for the symbols are all we can grasp. To pretend not to have any pre-conceptions is simply to be willfully blind to our nature. Whether this manifests as denial or apathy, it also has a biblical word-symbol… hypocrisy.

The third form of engagement is the one that I believe that liberal faith is called to, and that is a continual practice of awareness. This form is one in which each individual is called to continually deepen their own awareness of the pre-conception symbols they carry, and how those pre-conception symbols affect their interactions with others and the world. They use such symbols with caution, aware that they can only be symbols… never the reality. This form of engagement calls upon the practitioner not to remove pre-conceptions… but to be aware of them, and to be willing to alter them as their experience changes.

And if I were to give it a biblical word-symbol, I would give it one so full of meaning that it can almost never be translated… I would call this one “the Realm of God”.

Yours in Faith,

David

When I visited the Smithsonian Museum of American History over the summer, there was one transition between exhibits that disturbed me deeply. It was not the content of either of the exhibits, but rather that one led directly into the other. As I was coming out of the exhibit on slavery in America before the Civil War, I stopped in the hallway, shocked at the audacity of the statement the museum had chosen to make by what the next exhibit in the hallway was…

It was an exhibit of photos from the inauguration of President Barrack Obama.

To me, the message this transition of exhibits screamed was obvious… “yes, slavery was bad… yes, racism and racial tension were bad… but it is all better now because we elected a black man to be President”. I stood in that hallway, dumbfounded, unable to move for long enough that people began to look at me to see if I was okay. I think at least one African American woman who passed me thought I was a white male racist who could not accept a black man had been elected President. It struck me that the message that my conscious mind had rebelled at had been subtly accepted by the subconscious minds of the tens of thousands who had crossed that threshold between exhibits as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

There is a myth that is taking root in this country, specifically among white Americans, that we are now a “Post-Racial” country. That myth is taking root in the political right as well as in the political left… if for very different reasons. On the political left, the myth of a post-racial America is an excuse to throw transformative energy and passion into the many other crisis and problems our world faces today… from war to global warming to the colonial oppression of the IMF. On the left is it the myth of “problem solved, what’s next?”

On the political right, the myth is just as insidious, if a bit more obvious. It manifests as the belief that white Americans have compromised all they need to compromise, and perhaps need to “push-back” against how much power they have “given up” already. We see this in the current prevalence among these communities of the concept of “reverse racism”, and of the racism masked in political terms that is being directed by the radical end of the political right against the most prominent black man in America.

In my essay to the UUA Ministerial Fellowship Committee on Anti-racism/ Anti-oppression, I made a claim that is at the center of my understanding of human nature and issues of race… that each and every one of us, throughout all of our lives, carries racial pre-conceptions with us every day. These pre-conceptions are operative in our subconscious mind as well as our conscious mind, and they affect the decisions we make, the attitudes we hold, and the patterns and institutions we build every moment of every day of our lives.

There is an ironic twist to one of the ways I hear the myth of a post-racial America expressed often, and that is when someone (on the right or the left) claims that they are “color-blind” when it comes to race. The ironic twist is that they are right… they are blind to the way that the color of those around them affects their attitudes and behaviors. To be color-blind in our culture is simply to be blind. This is true not just of white Americans, or black Americans, or Americans on the political right or the political left. Each and every one of us carries with us racial pre-conceptions every moment of every day of our lives. When we either ignore those pre-conceptions (pretend to be color-blind) or worship those pre-conceptions as an idol (become actively racist) those pre-conceptions operate then as prejudices.

The way out of these two trapping-patterns is to accept that each of us carries racial pre-conceptions every day, and to actively explore how that fact affects the decisions we make, the attitudes we hold, the patterns we create, and the institutions we build. I am a little different than some of my colleagues in that I believe that the primary work of anti-racism begins with the individual person deeply coming to know themselves. Everything else must build upon the foundation of individuals becoming self-aware of the racial pre-conceptions they carry, and how that affects who we are and how we are with each other and in the world.

I know this myth that America has become post-racial because I once believed it myself. It is an easy myth to believe for white Americans, because it feeds into so much wishful thinking. It becomes an excuse to wipe away countless generations of institutional and cultural sin, without having to really do much for our atonement. I have also begun to believe that there is a connection between this desire to believe in the myth of a post-racial America and the theological stance of many Christians that forgiveness is by Grace alone… the belief that having God’s forgiveness precludes the need for any human atonement… and that God’s forgiveness is available for the asking (or granted just by being “saved”).

The practical affect of this theology is that one can excuse one’s self from responsibility for one’s worldly actions, because one has been granted divine forgiveness through prayer. When Brit Hume suggested that Tiger Woods convert to Christianity from Buddhism to gain forgiveness for his extra-marital affairs, he was illustrating this theological point that divine forgiveness trumps human atonement… and that it is easier to receive divine forgiveness than to make human amends.

I believe that this theological stance, which runs through both conservative and mainline Christian thought, rests at the core of the growing myth of a post-racial America. I know it rested at the core of my own desire to believe that my country had moved beyond race… that I was “forgiven” for my own countess subtle and not so subtle racism over the years. For myself, the reality of racial segregation that I encountered living on the South Side of Chicago proved to me the falsity of this myth. We are still a segregated country… just now that segregation is enforced not by laws, but by economics. We have created a different structure to support our institutional racism.

As a Universalist, I believe that while our salvation beyond this life is assured… that each of us experiences the afterlife equally… our salvation in this world is in our hands. Divine forgiveness never precludes the need for human atonement and human amends. On racism, the only way we can truly atone and make amends, each of us for all of us, no matter our racial heritage, is to become profoundly aware of ourselves and our own racial pre-conceptions, and to see how our years of blindness has build a culture based upon those unconscious pre-conceptions and prejudices. That work will never end… and it is only by that work that we could begin to make a reality of this myth so many are desperately wanting to believe today.

Yours in faith,

David

Most times I take a position on an issue when I write an article for Celestial Lands. This time, I am torn. I know the reasons that I chose to complete at least the base educational requirements for becoming a Board Certified Chaplain by the Association of Professional Chaplains (APC) prior to reporting to my first assignment as a military chaplain. Many of those reasons have to do with my own goals for professional competence and preparedness before moving into this ministry. It is my hope that, by September, I will have completed 5 units of Clinical Pastoral Education (a CPE internship and a CPE residency) and I hope to have received “Associate Chaplain” status from the APC. In my first two years of service as a military chaplain, I hope to complete the requirements for full board certification from APC.

And none of that is required for me to become a military chaplain. Military Chaplaincy requires a religious studies, divinity, or theology degree from an accredited school of at least 72 hours, an endorsement from a recognized chaplain endorsing body (often a denomination, but not always), a passed National Security background investigation, and that the candidate pass the physical and intellectual requirements for military service. There are some other screening requirements, (such as not having bankruptcies, age, etc.), but there is nothing about having completed any particular civilian training in the practice of chaplaincy as a ministry.

The most common answer to that is that you are supposed to learn such practice in seminary… and if anyone can actually justify that the practice of chaplaincy ministry is taught at a seminary I would be surprised. There is a reason that, in the civilian world, a long-standing educational program (CPE), separate from seminary or theology school, is long established. There is a reason why the largest Chaplain Association, the APC, requires CPE as a part of its certification process. I have attended a seminary in which almost half of the student body is preparing for some kind of chaplaincy or community ministry, and that school did very little for me in the way of the practice of chaplaincy ministry. Not a negative on the school… for they understand that an academic environment is not the right place to learn chaplaincy… for that you need a clinical setting.

As if someone prepared to be a medical doctor without ever stepping into a hospital.

Yet, I know that not all denominations or faith communities that provide military chaplains agree with some of the philosophies and ethics of the Association of Professional Chaplains or Clinical Pastoral Education. In my conversations with members of those faith traditions, three specific objections are commonly raised… that CPE and APC position on evangelism/proselytization is contrary to the evangelical mission of their faith. Second, many feel that the amount of self-realization/self-discovery that CPE requires is not necessary for their understanding of the practice and role of ministry. I have also heard a few of my colleagues object to their being responsible to an organization outside of their denomination for their practice as a chaplain.

It will not be at all surprising that I disagree with each of these objections… and yet I want to respect the different faith traditions and values that are behind them. On the evangelism/proselytization issue, the military chaplaincy is required by the constitution and by federal law to be a pluralistic ministry. I personally have an issue with the current military policy that military chaplains can “evangelize the unchurched” primarily because I have yet to find a decent definition of what is meant by “unchurched”. CPE teaches one how to conduct authentic ministry in a pluralistic setting, and APE ethics requirements prohibit proselytization as a practice of chaplaincy ministry. In my opinion, abiding by APC standards would be very close (if not the same) to abiding by my interpretation of the constitution on this issue. Many of my colleagues disagree with that interpretation.

On the issue of self-discovery not being a necessary requirement for a practice of chaplaincy ministry, I can only say that I could not move into this ministry without it. Personally, this is the reason why I chose to do a CPE residency when nothing required me to do so. Every time I see or hear a story about a chaplain “burning out” in combat or having a “crisis of faith”, I wonder whether that chaplain has had any CPE training. I think of it as beginning a practice of preventative maintenance for chaplaincy… not only will CPE help you learn the rough places in your spirit, life, and soul… but it will give you a handle on how to work with them, how to smooth them, and how they affect how you are as a person and a minister. I’m not saying that chaplains with some CPE never burn out or have crises of faith, but I am saying that they have at least been exposed to the tools to recognize the signs of these early, and have an idea how to walk through them… because they have done so in a controlled environment prior to going into a deployment.

On the third issue of to whom we are responsible, each military chaplain already agreed to be responsible to someone and something outside of their denomination, when they took their oath to the people of the United States and to the U.S. Constitution. Now, I have had a few of my colleagues say that they did not really feel bound by that oath, because their allegiance to their faith tradition was paramount and they just said what they had to say to be allowed into the military to proselytize, but I think those individuals are the exception, not the rule. If you took the oath in good faith, you have already broadened your responsibility… and have chosen to balance between multiple poles of responsibility.

As I said, my opinion on whether military chaplains should take CPE and abide by APC standards is clear… and I am not claiming that as my point of tension. My point of tension on this issue is whether agreeing to and abiding by such standards should be a requirement of serving as a military chaplain. Must military chaplains meet the same levels of standards as required by most civilians operating in the same field? My tension lies in the difference between “should” and “must”.

There is a precedent for the “must” among the other two branches of Professional Degree Officers. Military Medical Doctors are required to pass the same medical certification requirements (including boards) that their civilian counterparts are required to pass. Judge Advocate General (JAG officers, or military lawyers) are required to pass the BAR exams. A military doctor and a military lawyer are qualified to enter into the civilian branches of their field when they leave the military. That is not true of military chaplains in large degree. Most civilian chaplain positions, (at least in medical fields) require some form of APC (or its Roman Catholic Equivalent) certification for serving as a chaplain.

And yet… many of the most common faith traditions among the military chaplaincy as it exists today have deep theological and philosophical objections to the requirements of such certification.

So, I don’t know… I just don’t know.

Yours in faith,

David

The recent media attention that Fox News personality Brit Hume drew for himself by suggesting that Tiger Woods find his way out of his current marital and image problems by converting from Buddhism to Christianity, because Christianity offers a “better” (perhaps easier) form of forgiveness, has gotten me thinking about salvation and atonement. Particularly, it has begun me thinking about how many religious traditions try to “advertise” their faiths as offering some kind of practical benefits… and even, as in this case, suggesting that one can “trade up” to a religion that better suits your needs.

In other words, it is the promotion of these religious traditions as commodities.

It is not surprising that this is a factor in how we relate to religion in our current American culture. We are so formed by capitalism that there are few parts of our lives that escape from its ideology. We see this trend of “Join our religion for what it can do for you” not just in the kind of Evangelical Christianity that Hume is professing, but also in schools of Yoga that focus on how that faith practice will give you “six-pack abs”, or schools of Buddhism that offer to help solve emotional and psychological problems. We see it in Christian churches of the prosperity gospel, which tout that belief will lead to worldly gains. We see it in schools of Islam that offer fantastic rewards in the afterlife for sacrifice in this life. We even see it in Unitarian Universalism, when we put together ad campaigns detailing the wonderful benefits of liberal religious community, rather than the commitment to giving a gift to the world by leading a prophetic life.

I know that in our society we have created a meme where the only form of promotion we understand is of the “What will you do for me” variety, but I believe that this form of thinking has serious effects on religious traditions that form their identity in full or in part from this kind of self-promotion. What religious tradition each of us is called to should be a matter of deep conviction, of values, and of practices that feed our souls and call us to a deeper relationship with ultimacy. When we seek to expand the call to our tradition among others, it should be for the same reasons. The primary question our religious traditions should ask of us is what we have to give, not what we want or even what we need.

I believe it is a cheapening of the message of Jesus of Nazareth when you portray the reasons why someone should become a Christian as what benefits they might reap from such a profession of faith. The Jesus I know would ask his followers what their faith called them to give, not what it calls them to take.

For it is in what we give, to others and of ourselves, that we find atonement and salvation.

Yours in Faith,

David

We have closed another year here at Celestial Lands, and I want to thank all of those who read and send me comments, both in public through the blog and in private through my email. I keep this website because it is important to me… it is a place for my spiritual practice of writing; it is a repository of ideas; it is how I track my own philosophical and theological transformations… it is many things.

And I am slow to realize that it has been important to others besides me. I want to thank each of you this year who came up to me after a sermon, or sent me an email (and in one case a snail mail letter) telling me how something I had written had been important to you. I know that not all of those who read the articles here feel confident enough to post online, and that is okay.

Last year was a time of my realizing how important this public practice of writing was for me. This year has been a time of realizing how important some of these articles have been for others. For all who contacted me this year, I am humbled.

As I look back over the last year, the articles I am most proud of were those that explored theological ideas such as theodicy and evil, the series that explored why I am a liberal and not a progressive, and exploring what it means to be a “Unitarian of the Holy Spirit”. I was pleased by how well I was able to walk the line on political activism that I have to walk, standing as a military officer while still moving as a UU minister, including the article on Iran and American Exceptionalism. I believe I met my goal to keep a firewall between my writing here and my experience as a hospital and hospice chaplain, though through consulting with my clinical and CPE supervisors I may be able to relax that firewall just a little bit in the coming year.

Some of the responses to articles have been deeply inspiring. I want to thank my High School friend and now conservative Christian minister for some real engagement on our theological differences. Though neither of us came closer to the other’s positions, I will say that the engagement deepened me in mine, and I thank him. I want to thank everyone who engaged with me in the discussion of progressivism, as well as in the discussions of the nature of evil.

This year also saw an increase in my writings on specific military issues… from the experience of visiting the war memorials in Washington DC to an article on why we cannot allow our soldiers to begin thinking of themselves as mercenaries. That first article generated more hits than any other this year, in part because for two days it was one of the most linked to articles from “Army Knowledge Online” the main U.S. Army Website. I found that out when my Chaplain Supervisor in the Army let me know how much the Deputy Chief of Chaplains liked that article, and how it was being discussed by the Chaplains who have eagles and stars for rank. I am also proud of the article for UU parents and loved ones of a young person considering joining the military.

Of all of the military-related parts of Celestial Lands this year, I am most proud of my photo-essay of the Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists who are buried at Arlington Cemetery. I will forever treasure the two Saturdays I spent walking that sacred ground… and I doubt that anyone who watches it can ever again say that we UU’s don’t serve in the military with distinction. At least two of the markers I found on those days belonged to UU ministers who are personal hero’s of mine.

In the year to come, I plan to continue to explore ideas of the self and of identity. I hope to explore the meaning of ministry and its place in the larger society. I want to explore where in the human soul rests the need for conflict, that uncontrolled leads to war. I hope to continue to re-engage the Deist community, and perhaps broaden what it means to be a Deist again. All of this and so much more is bubbling for the next year in the Celestial Lands. I hope you journey with me.

Yours in Faith,

David