Unitarian Easter

We Unitarians get our name from saying that God is one, not three, as the Trinitarians say. This raises questions about the status of Jesus. Was Unitarianism a reversion to Judaism? The early Unitarians identified as Christians. For them, Jesus was divine in a special way no one else has ever been. But Jesus wasn't God — only God was God.

Unitarians, going back to Faustus Socinus, in Poland in the late 1500s, emphasized Jesus' teachings and the moral example of Jesus life. The first Unitarians were Christians who emphasized Jesus' life, not his death. A couple hundred years later, Unitarians in New England in the early 1800s began describing themselves with the phrase, "the religion OF Jesus, rather than the religion ABOUT Jesus." It's not the magic trick of resurrection that is the important matter. It is the presence Jesus had, his compassion and his genius for parables and teaching.

By 1841, Unitarian minister Theodore Parker was saying that none of the miracles attributed to Jesus had any importance. We are the people who, for almost 500 years, have been putting Jesus' life, not his death, at the center. But Easter is all about his death. So, instead, Unitarian Universalist ministers like me at Easter have been wont to talk about Easter as a springtime celebration. The resurrection is the resurrection of life after the death represented by winter, we like to say. These basic UU Easter themes are so well enough established that it occurred to me that even an Artificial Intelligence program like ChatGPT could competently identify them. To test this, I went to ChatGPT and typed: "Compose an Easter sermon for a Unitarian Universalist congregation." It cogitated upon my request for about one second and then scrolled out this:

Dear friends, Happy Easter to all of you!

As Unitarian Universalists, we gather today to celebrate the renewal of spring and the resurrection of hope. This is a time of year when we witness the beauty of nature and the rebirth of life all around us. And as we gather on this special day, we also take time to reflect on the meaning of Easter and what it means for us as a community.

Now, I know that Easter is traditionally celebrated in the Christian faith as a day to commemorate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, as Unitarian Universalists, we come from a wide range of spiritual backgrounds and beliefs. So, today, I invite us all to explore the meaning of Easter in a way that is personal and meaningful to each of us.

For me, Easter is a time to celebrate the human spirit and the power of hope. It is a time to acknowledge the struggles and hardships that we face in our lives, and to remember that we have the strength and resilience to overcome them. It is a time to embrace the beauty and wonder of the world around us, and to find joy in the small things that make life worth living.

As we look around us today, we see the signs of spring all around us – the flowers blooming, the birds singing, the sun shining. These are the signs of hope and renewal that we celebrate at Easter. And as we celebrate them, we also remember that hope is not just a fleeting feeling, but a powerful force that can inspire us to create positive change in our lives and in the world around us.

So, let us all take a moment to reflect on the hope and renewal that Easter brings. Let us celebrate the beauty and wonder of the world around us, and let us find strength and inspiration in the knowledge that we are capable of overcoming even the greatest challenges. And let us go forth from this place with renewed hope and a commitment to making the world a better place for all. Happy Easter, my friends. May this day be filled with joy, hope, and renewal for each and every one of us.

ChatGPT Al has never experienced hope, or renewal — beauty or rebirth or celebration or joy. It has simply been fed billions of words of text and extracted the ones that statistically go with Easter and Unitarian Universalist sermon, and arranged them according to principles of grammar — and produced this bland but essentially accurate summary of how our tradition regards Easter. Today, let's dig deeper than that.

There's a story here — several stories -- that have something to tell us, whatever we hold the status of Jesus to be. An insightful and compassionate teacher was put to death. He died on a Friday, too late in the day to bury him. The next day, Saturday, was the Jewish Sabbath. Jesus and all his followers were good, observing Jews, so the body could not be properly prepared and buried on the Sabbath. They had to wait until Sunday for the burial. Until then, the body was placed in a temporary tomb — a small cave cut into the side of the hill. The door was a heavy stone disk that rolled on a track. What happened next is a matter of some disagreement among the writers of the four gospels.

READING

[Four READERS come up and on stage. Each goes to a separate microphone. One reader is labeled “JOHN,” another “MATTHEW,” another “LUKE,” and another “MARK.”]

JOHN: On Sunday morning Mary Magdalene went by herself.
MATTHEW: No. Two women, Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” went to the tomb.
MARK: No. Three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salomé went.
LUKE: It was at least four women: Mary Magdalene, who we all agree on; Mary the mother of James, as Mark said and maybe who Matthew means as “the other Mary.” There was also Joanna, and other women.
JOHN: She . . .
MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: They . . .
JOHN: took spices to prepare the body for burial.
MATTHEW: Yes.
MARK: Right.
LUKE: Just so.
JOHN: Mary went in the pre-dawn darkness.
MATTHEW: The women went when the day was dawning.
MARK: No. The sun had already risen.
LUKE: I’m with Matthew. They went when the day was dawning.
JOHN: When Mary . . .
MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: The women . . .
JOHN: Got there, she . . .
MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: They . . .
MATTHEW: They arrived just in time to see that “an angel of the lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.”
MARK: No, they found the stone already rolled back.
LUKE: I’m with Mark on this one. It was already rolled back.
JOHN: Me, too. It was already rolled back before Mary got there.
MATTHEW: The two women saw one angel, the one who rolled back and sat on the stone, and also some guards.
MARK: The three women entered the tomb and saw “a young man dressed in a white robe.” No mention of any guards.
LUKE: The group of four or more women entered the tomb, and did not find the body. “While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.” No guards.
MATTHEW: “The angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised.’”
MARK: It was the young man dressed in a white robe who said essentially those words.
LUKE: I’ve got that the two men in dazzling clothes said it.
MATTHEW: So the two women left the tomb and ran to tell the disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings! Go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
MARK: The three women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Some indeterminate time later, Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene, then to the disciples.
LUKE: The four or more women returned from the tomb and told the eleven disciples “and all the rest” what had happened. Later that day, Jesus appeared to two other women who weren’t in the group that went to the tomb, and these women didn’t recognize who he was at first.
JOHN: No, no. Mary Magdalene, alone, saw no one at all until after she returned from the tomb, and told two of the disciples that the body was missing. Mary and the two disciples returned again to the tomb. They still saw nothing but linen wrappings. The disciples left. Mary stayed, alone and crying. Only then did she look into the tomb and see "two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying." Then she turned around, and there was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him. She supposed him to be the gardener until he called her name.

[READERS depart]

Different numbers of women, different numbers of young men in white or angels, different encounters between Jesus and his followers. They were written by different authors at different times, to different audiences, for different purposes.

Mark's story is about encountering fear. Three women approach the tomb.When they see the stone rolled back, they are nervous. Is this some kind of trap? "As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed." (16:5) Is he secret police? Is he a Roman agent?
"But he said to them, 'Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here."' (16:6) These words do not reassure the three women. They turn and flee from this creepy guy.

"So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." (16:8) Mark's gospel represents the continuing fear of political repression faced by Jesus' followers.

John's story is about discerning our true nature and true place. Mary goes in solitude to see the empty tomb. No one is there. She returns from the tomb; speaks to some trusted others. Some of them went back with her to the tomb again, but then left her alone there, crying. Then she turns around, and there's the truth, right in front her, but she still doesn't get it. She thinks it's the gardener. But it is the truth, and it calls her name and in that moment she realizes it, realizes herself.

Matthew's story is about the courage to live into your truth in the face of enemies who oppose it. Some of Jerusalem's rulers catch wind of the news that Jesus' body has gone missing. They concoct a story, which they bribe the guards to affirm, that some of Jesus' followers came in the middle of the night and took the body away. People will tell you that there is no new life, no new truth for you to discover. "There is no transformation, no greater wholeness," they will say. But Mary knew better — and so do we, in our hearts.

Luke's story is not about our enemies but our friends. Mary goes to speak to the apostles about this frightening yet promising new reality she has discovered. "These words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." Says Luke (24:11). Liberation? Wholeness? It is an idle tale, our friends may think. But the truth of your life is not for your enemies to define, nor is it determined by your friends.

Four gospels, four quite different stories, all about a truth, this reality which you are prone to overlook, to mistake for the gardener, but which comes to you when you are alone — this truth that your enemies discredit and your friends find idle — this truth that might even make you persecuted — was personified as a man, Jesus of Nazareth — a teacher, a healer a prophet within the Jewish tradition -- a mystic, and a social radical. He taught a message of transformation — that we have the ability to transform our lives — by loving one another, by loving even our enemies, by living simply and not placing faith in money, material things, status, and power.

Following his model and his teachings is transformative. Jesus lived and taught about a new social order — what he called "the Kingdom of God" — what we might call the Kin-dom of God, or Beloved Community — a society based on love and compassion. People thus transformed become agents of transformation of their communities and of the world, realizing the Kindom of God on earth.

This, then, is a Unitarian Universalist Easter message: Our community can be a community of transformation. That's how we realize the Kindom.

The caption of the cartoon on the front of your Order of Service reads, "As Leon unfurled the piece of paper, he knew he would never again play charades with ministers." On the paper, for him to try to find some way to act out, are the words, "substitutionary atonement."

Because I am a minister, I found this hilarious. And then I began to notice a really good point here: You can't act out substitutionary atonement! It's an unlivable theology. What is "substitutionary atonement"? It's the account of Easter that, somewhere along the line, you probably learned. It goes roughly like this:

The Easter story tells us that Jesus' suffering on the cross is redemptive. He suffered and died that we might have life (i.e., he substituted for us in order to atone for us). Real love manifests as complete submission and selfsacrifice. God required of Jesus -- and may sometimes require of us -- passive acceptance of violence.

That's a very common interpretation of the Easter story. I don't think this is really the message of that story. In charades, as in life, you need to show something -- be active. Easter is about transformation, not passivity; self-realization, not self-sacrifice.

I don't believe people come to church to stay the same. I don't think that anyone joins a faith community and enters into congregational life as a conservative strategy for maintaining their status quo. If we wanted to stay the same, we could just stay home — just stay in that, well, tomb. The Easter message is to be risen, to be resurrected, to be transformed.

A congregation must be about facilitating and bearing witness to one another's personal transformations. A congregation must be about transforming its members, transforming itself, and transforming the world around it. I don't believe you're here to stay the same. Of course, you're not here to deny who you are, either. The transformation is not about rejecting yourself. The transformation — or call it the resurrection — is about becoming more fully who you are: you transforming into you.

At work in this process is the interplay between what you have in common with the others of your community and what is unique to you. We have shared Unitarian values, and we encourage each other in living up to them. Becoming who you are is, in part, a matter of getting better at exemplifying the values we share. It's also, in part, recognizing and living into the truth that only you see — as, in the Gospel of John, Mary, in her aloneness, comes to recognize Jesus.

This is no easy thing, becoming who you are. But why isn't it easy? Why should it be hard? Nurtured by learned and shared values, supported by the love of family, friends, community, should not becoming who we are be a flourishing as natural and abundant as the flowers in spring? It's hard because we carry shame. We are afraid. We have, in various ways and in varying degrees, been silenced from the full expression of who we are.

You want to know what Easter is really all about? Here's what Easter is really all about: it's about making the courageous choice to break the silence, tell your truth, rise up out of shame. It's about bearing witness to the stories of others as they seek to break silence imposed by perhaps greater fear and shame. This, finally, is where the Easter story takes us. The death from which we may rise, from which we can help others rise, is specifically an entombment in fear and shame.

Look, crucifixion was designed to inflict optimal physical pain, dragged out over many hours. The executioners sometimes even gave wine mixed with morphine to the victim, not to ease his suffering, but to keep him from passing out from pain so as to have to endure it longer. More than that, crucifixion was designed to humiliate. The person was stripped naked — lifted up to public view, gasping, fully exposed, utterly powerless. At the moment of death, his bowels would loosen, for all to see. It was violence, as extreme as the Roman imagination could conceive, designed to instill fear, and to make anyone associated with the victim feel ashamed of themselves. For some of Jesus' followers, it worked. Theologian Ron Rolheiser writes:

"Many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn't connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph."

In their fear and their shame, they fell silent about the promise of a new social order, a Kindom of God. Others, though — women, at first — broke silence. They broke silence first to simply lament what had happened. Giving voice to our lamentation is the beginning of reclaiming our own dignity and worthiness in the face of our loss. They broke silence to remember, to say a name, against all the shaming, fear, and humiliation that would bury it in silence. They broke silence to begin to tell stories that represented that the hope found in this man's teachings lived on. They broke silence to transcend fear and affirm community, to overcome violence by sustaining hope.

Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock write in Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire:

Crucifixion was used against the underclasses and slaves and was regarded as so shameful that even victims’ families would not speak of it. It functioned to fragment communities, tearing the fabric of even the strongest bonds of connection and commitment. The Passion narratives broke silence about the shame and fear that crucifixion instilled. To lament was to claim powers that crucifixion was designed to destroy: dignity, courage, love, creativity, and truth-telling. In telling his story, his community remembered his name and claimed the death-defying power of saying his name aloud....

The Passion stories brought testimony before a higher court of appeals than the bogus trial of Jesus they indict. The purpose of such writing is assuredly not to valorize victims, to praise their suffering as redemptive, to reveal ‘true love’ as submission and self-sacrifice, or to say that God requires the passive acceptance of violence. Such interpretations mistakenly answer the abusive use of power with an abnegation of power. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, in marked contrast, asserted that the answer to abusive power is the courageous and decisive employment of the powers of life – to do deeds in Jesus’ name....

To break silence whenever violence is used to shame, instill fear, fragment human community, or suppress those who advocate for justice is life-giving. Just as Jesus, in John’s Gospel, stood before Pilate and said, ‘you have no power over me,’ the Passion narratives defied the power of crucifixion to silence Jesus’ movement. In doing so, they placed before his movement the choice to tell the truth and live by ethical grace. They said life is found in surviving the worst a community can imagine, in lamenting the consequences of imperialism, and in holding fast to the core goodness of this world, blessed by divine justice and abundant life.

They transformed humiliation into the strength of connection and in so doing resurrected life from death. Against all violence to body or to spirit, against all fear and shame endured by us and by others, against all the protective strategies we ourselves devise to be safe, there is rising to accept and affirm and speak who we are.

There is yet the possibility of transformation into who we are, unobscured by fear or shame. There is yet the possibility of justice, an end to violence, a new social order, a Kindom of God. Here is a livable theology, a teaching that we can act out. Here is the message and the hope of Easter. Someday, maybe A.I. will say that. But only we can mean it.

How We Feel

READING

from psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book, How Emotions are Made. Dr. Barrett tells this story:

“Back when I was in graduate school, a guy in my psychology program asked me out on a date. I didn’t know him very well and was reluctant to go because, honestly, I wasn’t particularly attracted to him, but I had been cooped up too long in the lab that day, so I agreed. As we sat together in a coffee shop, to my surprise, I felt my face flush several times as we spoke. My stomach fluttered and I started having trouble concentrating. OK, I realized, I was wrong. I am clearly attracted to him. We parted an hour later – after I agreed to go out with him again – and I headed home, intrigued. I walked into my apartment, dropped my keys on the floor, threw up, and spent the next seven days in bed with flu.”

For Dr. Barrett, this is an illustration of how we create emotions by interpreting our bodily states. In this case, the initial interpretation was over-written with the strong evidence that her bodily state was not, after all, attraction, but the onset of flu. Usually, we have no reason to second guess our initial interpretation. Dr. Barret writes:

“An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensation mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world. In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. If a swarm of buzzing bees is squeezing underneath your front door while your heart is pounding in your chest, your brain’s prior knowledge of stinging insects gives meaning to the sensations from your body and to the sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations from the world, simulating the swarm, the door, and an instance of fear. The exact same bodily sensations in another context, like watching a fascinating film about the hidden lives of bees, might construct an instance of excitement....Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions....With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.”

SERMON

Four weeks ago, in the sermon called, “Believing, Really Believing, and Talking to Your Car,” I mentioned that psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that emotions are constructed. There are, she says, two main biological continua. There's the pleasant to unpleasant continuum, and there's the high arousal to low arousal continuum.

For low arousal and pleasant, think of blissful calm. For high arousal and pleasant, think of something really fun and exciting. For high arousal and unpleasant, think of being very scared or anxious. For low arousal and unpleasant, think of being bored.

The rich and subtle texture of our emotional lives is then a matter of using learned concepts to interpret our biological states in socially recognized ways. Today, I wanted to go back to that earlier point and say a bit more about that.

Our emotions are a huge part of what we are. What are they, where do they come from, what do they mean, what are we to do with them?

Consider, for example, a feeling that you may have had, though you didn’t have a name for it. Lisa Feldman Barret describes it:

“Imagine the feeling of reaching into a bag of potato chips and discovering that the previous chip you ate was the last one. You feel disappointed that the bag is empty, relieved that you won’t be ingesting any more calories, slightly guilty that you ate the entire bag, and yet hungry for another chip.”

So: a mix of feelings: disappointment yet relief, a hint of guilt, yet desire for more. Dr. Barrett gives this made-up emotion a name. She calls it chiplessness.

What makes an emotion is that we learn to interpret our body states with a category. We use those categories to interpret other people’s feelings as well as our own – so the categories constitute a social reality. If you have feelings of love, well, you wouldn’t know that feeling was love if you didn’t have lots of examples from other people. So, chiplessness becomes a real emotion to just the extent that it becomes a social reality – that we learn from each other to understand our body states with that category.

The empty potato chip bag is the paradigm, but the emotion applies in other cases. Any time you are enjoying something that comes to end and you’re disappointed and relieved and a little guilty because you think maybe you’ve been enjoying it more than you should – yet you’re desirous of more, that’s chiplessness. If you’ve ridden the roller coast at a given amusement park hundreds of times, and you get there one day and the ride is closed for repairs -- you’re disappointed, yet a bit relieved because you’re a little guilty about the way you’ve been a touch over-enthusiastic about this ride – yet there’s still a part of you that did want to ride it. So you’re feeling chipless. Or, you come to the end of the last episode of a series you’ve been binge watching. You’re relieved that you got all the way through it, yet at the same time sorry that it’s over. You suspect maybe spending all that time on this show may not have been the best use of your time, yet you hope there’s going to be another season. You’ve got that chipless feeling.

If you interpret your experience with this category a few times, it won’t be long before you’re adept at it. And now it’s a real emotion – as real as happiness, sadness, anger, or fear.

You might be thinking this new concoction is surely a mix of more elemental emotions. The feeling that something is bittersweet is a combination of bitterness and sweetness. The feeling of “awe,” says the Oxford Dictionary, is “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.” Even supposedly opposite feelings can be mixed – like happiness and sadness at the same time. If you saw the 1997 Roberto Benigni film, “Life is Beautiful,” in which a father tries to keep his child’s spirits up while they are in a concentration camp, then you probably got a strong dose of happiness and sadness at the same time. The masters of literature evoke the various mixing of emotions as their stock in trade, as in a 1960 New Yorker column by John Updike about witnessing the baseball great Ted Williams’ last at-bat. Updike wrote:

“No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.”

Emotions can certainly be mixed, but let’s examine this idea that mixtures are ultimately made up of elemental, primary emotions. The supposed primary emotions are generally identified with some list such as fear, anger, sadness, happiness, and disgust. Those are the five internal characters inside the psyche of eleven-year-old Riley in the 2015 Pixar movie, “Inside Out.” When I’m encouraging people to identify their emotions and separate the emotion itself from judgment and evaluation – I start with the basics: mad, sad, glad, and scared.

How are you feeling? I might ask. And I might hear, I feel wronged, or neglected, or cheated, or abandoned, or betrayed, or let down. Those are judgments. If you say you feel disappointed, that’s getting closer, but in a given context it’s likely to be tinged with judgment about another person’s conduct rather than your own emotion. So to be helpful in identifying the emotion I might ask, are you mad, sad, glad, or scared? From there, we can begin learning how to fine tune our identification of emotions. Under the general rubric of sadness, one might discern discouragement, distraughtness, resignation, helplessness, hopelessness, misery, despair, grief, sorrow, or anguish – each of which is distinct. Anger might be fine-tuned as annoyance, frustration, exasperation, argumentativeness, bitterness, vengefulness, or fury. Gladness might be fine tuned as sensory pleasure, rejoicing, compassionate joy, amusement, relief, pride, wonder, excitement, or ecstasy. And so on.

Psychologist Paul Ekman did a number of cross-cultural studies in which he showed people photos of facial expressions. Ekman’s work led him to the conclusion that there were six emotions that were innate and universally recognized in all cultures: mad, sad, glad, and scared, plus disgust and also surprise. Another source lists eight primary emotions, leaving out sadness, but including distress and anxiety, as well interest. Despite ongoing ambiguity about the precise list of what the primary emotions are, various writers confidently declare that “primary emotions are universal and innate.”

Turns out – according to Lisa Feldman Barrett and a growing number of researchers whose evidence I find pretty persuasive – that none of these are universal or innate. None. What is universal and innate -- in the area of feelings – are those two axis: low arousal to high arousal, and pleasant to unpleasant. That’s the biology that is indeed basic. It’s basic to all vertebrates and possibly to many invertebrates. Everything else, it turns out, is cultural and learned. We had to learn how to interpret ourselves and each other as angry or scared – and we learned it basically the way we learned a few minutes ago to interpret ourselves sometimes as chipless.

The classic facial expressions that Ekman thought were cross-culturally universal – Surprise --- Anger --- Disgust --- Happiness --- Etc. Those are stereotypes and they are problematic in the way that stereotypes generally are. In the attempt to abstract or summarize, they misrepresent the complex reality. Ekman’s photos weren’t of people who were feeling the emotion supposedly pictured. They were people who were told to show an assigned emotion, so they displayed the stereotype. In reality, people who are angry have all kinds of facial configurations. Maybe sometimes you quietly seethe. Other times you might be scream and shout – which would look more like an open mouth than a very tight-lipped closed mouth. If professional actors made faces like the ones pictured above, we’d think either that their character was being campy, or that they were ham actors. In real life, if you saw someone with stereotypical “surprise" face --- or the "fear" face --- or any of them, you’d be more likely to think they were mocking the feeling than that they were authentically feeling it.

Careful studies measuring facial muscle movements find that there is no facial configuration and no part of a facial configuration that all angry people display or that only angry people display. Sometimes those pursed, tight lips are just someone thinking hard about something.

When we dig a little into Paul Eckman’s methodology, we learn that when he showed his pictures like these to people in remote cultures, he didn’t just say: What’s this person feeling? He presented the question as multiple choice: Choose the word that best matches the face. And the options were limited to Eckman’s six. They might not have been the emotions that in that culture were the most central or primary. Members of a culture in which chiplessness was central and primary to their way of understanding themselves, if there were such a culture, would not have found chipless an available option.

Moreover, in cultures that didn’t speak English, Eckman had to use translations of the English words, even if close matches to the English word didn’t exist in the other language. The !Kung people of the Kalahari don’t have any word for Fear. They certainly feel the heightened adrenaline from an immediately imposed danger, and they will flee from it, and we would characterize them as afraid, but that’s not how they think of themselves – and since part of the experience of fear is recognizing “this is fear” – they don’t have the experience that we have.

“Utka Eskimos have no concept of ‘Anger.’ The Tahitian have no concept of ‘Sadness’.” (148)

You might think, as one writer put it, that: “A smile is recognized in all cultures as a signal of happiness and social welcome.” Actually, no. Here’s what Dr. Barrett says about that:

“For one thing, ‘Happiness’ is usually the only pleasant emotion category that is tested using the basic emotion method, so it’s trivial for subjects to distinguish it from the negative categories. And consider this fun fact: The historical record implies that ancient Romans did not smile spontaneously when they were happy. The word ‘smile’ doesn’t even exist in Latin. Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages, and broad, toothy-mouthed smiles became popular only in the eighteenth century as dentistry became more accessible and affordable.”

Classics scholar Mary Beard adds:

“This is not to say that Romans never curled up the edges of their mouths in a formation that would look to us much like a smile; of course they did. But such curling did not mean very much in the range of significant social and cultural gestures in Rome. Conversely, other gestures, which would mean little to us, were much more heavily freighted with significance.”

Thus, Barrett concludes,

“So far as I know, no emotion concept is universal, but even if one were, universality itself does not automatically imply a perceiver-independent reality.”

Take, for example, magical little people – called nymphs in ancient Greece, leprechauns in Ireland, brownies in Scotland, fairies in Celtic legend, Menehune in Native Hawaiian folklore, trolls in Scandinavia, Aziza in Africa, Agloolik in Inuit culture, Mimis in Aboriginal Australia, Shin from China, Kami from Japan. Even if magical little people were part of every single human culture on earth, that wouldn’t mean they were a perceiver-independent reality like atoms, rocks, and trees.

We’re not saying emotions aren’t real. We’re saying they’re cultural. They’re very real – like money – which also isn’t a perceiver-independent reality, but which depends on the social agreement of a given society. Other than those two axis of arousal and pleasantness, everything else in the area of emotion depends on having the concept, and concepts are learned features of a culture.

Not all cultures have the emotion concepts of English-speaking cultures. Instead, they may have others. Of course, cultures sometimes borrow from each other, the way that English speakers borrowed – examples I’ve mentioned before – schadenfreude and weltschmerz from the Germon and ennui from the French. Here are 17 others we might consider appropriating:
From Italian: fiero: the enjoyment felt when you have met a challenge that stretched your capabilities
From Yiddish: naches: feelings of pride in the accomplishments, or sometimes just the existence, of your offspring or mentees
From Dutch: gezellig and voorpret. Gezellig is a specific experience of comfort with friends. Voorpret is pleasure felt about an event before the event takes place – a delighted anticipation
From Greek: stenahoria: a feeling of doom, hopelessness, suffocation, and constriction.
From Korean: jeong: happiness specifically from attachment to a close friend.
From the Ilongot of the Philippines: liget: exuberant aggression involving intense focus, passion, and energy while pursuing a hazardous challenge with a group of people. (Sounds similar to recently developed emotion concept in our culture that we call putting your game face on.)
Also Filipino: gigil: the urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable.
From Norwegian: forelsket: an intense joy of falling in love.
From Dansih: hygge: a certain feeling of close friendship.
From Russian: tokka: a spiritual anguish.
From Portuguese: saudade: a strong spiritual longing.
From Spanish: pena ajena: sadness over another person’s loss, or discomfort or embarrassment on someone else’s behalf.
From Japanese: arigata-meiwaku: the feeling that someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them, and which may have caused difficulty for you, but you’re required to be grateful anyway (Doesn’t that sound very Japanese? The culture is its concepts, and the concepts for the way we feel – plus the physiological sensations we are interpreting – ARE the emotion.)
Also from Japanese is age-otori: the feeling of looking worse after a haircut.
Other cultures mix and match emotion categories differently: For the Ifaluk, of Micronesia, fago: depending on context, can mean love, empathy, pity, sadness, or compassion
From the Czech: litost: torment over one’s own misery combined with the desire for revenge.
We might want to revive twitterpated from the 1942 Disney movie, Bambi. Twitterpated, like chipless, is a made-up emotion – but they’re all made-up. That's Barrett's point: all emotions are made-up by members of a given culture.

Your emotional life is cultural habits of interpretation of, and projection onto, your awareness of your body states. As we work through the meaning of this new understanding of emotion it’s going to have wide implications. It’s going to have legal implications. Like, we can’t tell what remorse is. Remorse is a cultural product, and some cultures have very different expressions for it, or don’t have the concept at all. So the notion of remorsefulness in criminal sentencing is problematic – yet juries decide sentences in part on whether they think the defendant feels remorse. Dzokhar Tsarnaev of Chechnia, the suriving bomber of the 2013 Boston Marathon bomb, was sentenced to death in 2015. “Tsarnaev spoke words of apology, but when [jurors] looked at his face, all they saw was this stone-faced stare.”

If Lisa Feldman Barrett is right, then

“jurors do not and cannot detect remorse or any other emotion in anybody ever. Neither can I and neither can you....That might be someone who is a remorseless killer, but a stone-faced stare might also mean that someone is stoically accepting defeat, which is in fact what Chechen culture prescribes for someone in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's situation.”

There’s solid reason to believe Dzokhar Tsarnaev committed the acts of which he was accused. There is no basis for saying that he was remorseless -- or that he wasn't.

There’s a lot more to say about how to understand emotions, but let me leave you with two take-aways. One: learn more emotion concepts. Emotional granularity – having a higher vocabulary of emotion words – is healthy for you. Yes, they are all cultural concepts, but it’s good to have a large toolbox of cultural concepts. The ability to speak and think with greater precision is a brain efficiency for navigating your reality – and we humans have created a fantastically complex social reality for ourselves, so your brain needs all the efficiency it can get.

Second, whatever you’re feeling, you don’t have to take it so seriously. And particularly don’t take seriously your interpretation of what you think other people are feeling. Talk to people and ask them about what they’re feeling – don’t assume. Emotions are social, so be sociable with them and about them.

Blessed be. Amen.

The Ontological, The Semantic, and the Tribal

Stephen Colbert Interview with Paul Simon, The Late Show, Thu Mar 14, 2024:

SC: Are you yourself a man of faith?
PS: I would say, yes. Well, let me put it another way. I think we’re in an unbelievable paradise on Earth and life is so mysterious a mystery. In the rest of our galaxy there’s really no other life. We don’t know what’s going on. So, life is incredible. So, I think, what a great job you did, God, with this planet. Excellent. And the universe. Paul Simon, hat’s off to you, God. Fantastic universe!
SC: So your faith is an act of gratitude.
PS: An act of gratitude. But then I think, if the explanation for our creation is not “there was a creator,” but there is another explanation, I am no less grateful, and I’m no less in awe of everything. It’s not going to change my morality. I’m not going to think bad is good now, and good is bad, because I feel when it’s good and I feel when I do bad. So, in the two choices between: Is there a creator, or is there another explanation, I like the creator story. That’s where I am with that. You?
SC: I was convicted of my atheism for many years, and then I was overwhelmed by an enormous sense of gratitude for the world. [What you said] resonates for me because this enormous heartbreaking gratitude – even for heartbreaking things -- because the world is beautiful but the beauty isn’t always happy things. Joy is greater than happiness, and happiness is not the ultimate goal. Sublime is the goal. So that feeling that even comes in grief – grief with you is an act of love, so we can both be sad and yet there is joy there because of our ability to share our love in that moment and heal and care for each other – that feeling, that even in that there can be something beautiful, led me to an enormous, overwhelming, uncontainable sense of gratitude, and it had to go someplace, and that led me back to my relationship with what I now call my God.
PS: Yeah. I understand completely.

This is a sermon about the Unitarian Universalist fourth source. The living tradition we share draws on many sources, of which we enumerate six, and the fourth one is:

“Jewish and Christian teachings that call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbor as ourselves.” (see all six HERE)

This is also a Muslim teaching. So in the midst of Ramadan, with Easter and Passover approaching, I wanted to look at this.

God is a bit of a contentious topic among Unitarian Universalists. Some of us resist any use of the word or concept. For others of us, some conception of God is a touchstone for making sense of life – for discerning meaning and hope amidst this confused mix of beauty and tragedy we call life.

Last week I told you about a tussle in Unitarian History that started in 1865 and lasted about 30 years. We have always rejected having a creed. And then some Unitarians were like: “I love being creedless. By the way, I’m not a Christian.”

And other Unitarians were like: “When we said we were creedless, we kinda meant that everyone was free to work out for themselves the specific details of their relationship to Jesus. We never imagined anyone would go so far as to not be Christian at all.”

Then the first group, called the radicals, was like: “Well, we’re going that far.”

And the other group, called the conservatives, was like: “OK, but you’re not a Unitarian.”

And the radicals were like: “But I am a Unitarian. Unitarians are my peeps. I love our churches – the sermons, the hymns, the choir, the classes and study groups, and those dinners that we are just now beginning to call ‘Pot Luck.’”

Finally, after about 30 years, the conservatives were like: “yeah, all right, fine.”

That was round 1 – which sets us up this week to hear about round 2. About 20 years went by and in the middle of the 19-teens, we started up the whole cycle again – only this time, instead of being about nonChristians, it was about nontheists. Some Unitarians were like: “Still love being creedless. By the way, I don’t believe in God.”

And other Unitarians were like: "When we agreed that Unitarians didn’t have to be Christians, we never imagined anyone would go so far as to not be theist at all.”

Then the first group, called the humanists, was like: “Well, we’re going that far.”

Again, it was our more Western congregations at the forefront, but “Western” by now was a bit further west than Pittsburgh. The Unitarian Humanist movement got its start right here in Des Moines, when this congregation hosted the 1917 annual meeting of the Western Unitarian Conference. That’s where this congregation’s minister, Rev. Curtis Reese, met the Minneapolis minister, Rev. John Dietrich. Reese and Dietrich got to talking and discovered that each had been working on the idea of religion without God – which they would decide to call humanism.

Just as a couple generations before, there were attempts to adopt a statement that would rule out these nontraditionalists. The controversy was heated, but no statement was ever passed, and the furor eventually petered out. What was ultimately persuasive was not any argument in a Unitarian periodical or from a Unitarian pulpit, but the simple fact that humanists and theists really could sit side by side in our pews and committee meetings, stand side by side in social action projects. And at our potluck dinners, the green jello salad, wobbled the same and tasted the same whether brought by a humanist or a theist.

We are a people that have learned – yet must periodically re-learn – that "We need not think alike to love alike." And: "people with different beliefs can come together in one faith."

With that background, I want today to look at the ongoing status of the difference between our "theists" and our "atheists." What sort of difference is it? The disagreement sometimes seems to be ontological: that is, the parties advance competing claims about the nature of reality and what reality does and does not include. Sometimes the disagreement seems to be semantic: that is, the parties advance competing claims about what words do, or may, mean. Mostly, though, it seems to me that this issue is neither ontological nor even semantic. It’s tribal. The parties affirm the existence or nonexistence of God in order to signal their identity and group loyalty. I think it’s important for us to notice that.

When tribal identity is at stake we become rigid, inflexible, dogmatic about "speaking correctly" -- and this is just as true for those who call themselves "atheists" as for those who call themselves "theists." When our tribal loyalty is not at stake, almost all of us, are flexible, creative, open, and charitable in the ways we use and respond to nonstandard language. The question then arises: What's more important, defending our tribal identity or connecting with other people where they are?

Let me illustrate. Some years ago, I was well into adulthood and my own children were teenagers, and we were all gathered with my parents for Thanksgiving. My Mom regaled the table with a story from my childhood, of which I had no recollection of either the events in the story or of ever having heard the story before. Mom said that once, when I was about five years old, we visited some fair or carnival where I saw helium balloons for the first time. I pondered this amazing thing, and asked: “Mom, why do they go up?”

Mom, rational scientist physics professor that she was, answered me, “Why wouldn’t they go up?”

“Things go down,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” said Mom. “Why do they go down?”

“Because of gravity,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, the balloons go up because of levity.”

And this satisfied me.

When, years later, I heard this story at the Thanksgiving table I did NOT think, “Egad, my mother lied to me!” After all, why not call it levity? She might have tried explaining that helium is less dense than air, which means helium has less mass for a given volume, and that gravitational attraction is proportional to mass, so gravity’s pull on the air is stronger than on helium, pulling the air down, which pushes the less-dense helium upward, and, according to Archimedes' principle of buoyancy, the weight of the displaced air is equal to the buoyant force, so, with the weight of the helium within the area of the balloon being less than the weight of the displaced air, the buoyant force pushing up on the balloon is greater than the gravitational force pulling down. Mom knew I wasn’t ready to follow such an explanation – so she gave me this word, “levity” as a sort of placeholder. With wisdom and quick wit, she used language to connect with me where I was, rather than to leave me behind. I delight in this family story -- not because Mom’s answer was false, but because it is, really, true. I love knowing again what apparently I was first taught at age five but forgot: There is a force called levity that makes things rise.*

People have different stories to make sense of our world. Some stories about reality feature a creative force that is person-like in that it knows and it wants. Other stories tell of a creative force that kind of has knowledge and desires – in a rather metaphorical sense. Still other stories depict the forces of the universe creating and destroying utterly without anything that could be compared to knowledge, intentionality, or purpose, even metaphorically speaking. Besides different opinions of what does or does not exist out there (the ontological questions), we have different viewpoints for how words may reasonably be used (the semantic questions).

In my experience and study, the core uses of the word ‘God,’ I would argue, are to point to any or all of the following:

• community-forming power;
• love;
• the greatest source of beauty, mystery, or creativity;
• the widest or deepest inspiration to gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe;
• origin;
• any ultimate context and basis for meaning, value, ethics, or commitment;
• the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed;
• the cosmos.

My semantic argument is that these are the most important meanings -- the essence, if you will -- to which people, regardless of their religious persuasion, have pretty-much-always been referring when they said ‘God.’ Many who speak that word would also include "person-like creator." But many would not, so I regard "person-like creator" as nonessential.

That’s my semantic claim. Others disagree with me about that. They counter-claim that the word ‘God’ unavoidably implies a person-like creator.

Four weeks ago, if you remember, in a sermon about Blessing, I said that theology is a kind of poetry. It’s not a kind of science or natural history. As poetry-making and poetry-hearing beings, we need to use words creatively, to sometimes treat a peripheral association as a central meaning and ignore the meaning that had often previously been central. I hope that we can get increasingly good at honoring each other’s different experiences of what’s real (different ontological positions) – and that we can also get increasingly good at honoring different semantic positions and different styles of poetry and metaphor.

That has sometimes been hard for us. Why? Here’s why: tribalism. There is an awful lot of religion that is neither about a sense of what’s out there, nor is about a sense of the proper use of words. It’s just about: "Whose team are you on?" Tribal loyalties get in the way of honoring and respecting different experiences about what is real, and different poetic inclinations for choosing words. We have a hard time simply accepting our differences when those differences symbolize what team one is on – and when team membership requires being opposed to certain other teams.

We do need our tribes. After all, another word for “tribe” is “community” – and we need community. And loyalty to our group is, by and large, a virtue. A healthy community, though, will affirm and support some ethics and values beyond tribe loyalty, and will facilitate and help integrate one's transcendent experiences of interconnection and peace. An unhealthy community gives most of its energy to nursing a shared sense of who the enemy is.

Where there are no tribal loyalties at play, we humans are generally pretty flexible about adjusting our understandings of words. For example, one of my former in-laws referred to her refrigerator as "the Frigidaire." She would say, for example, “There’s cake in the Frigidaire.” A glance at the manufacturer’s label revealed that her refrigerator was actually made by Amana. But even at my most churlish, teen-aged self, I was not inclined to say, “No, it’s not in the Frigidaire, it’s in the refrigerator, which happens to be an Amana.” Would you say that? Me neither. (Especially not when there's cake being offered!)

We simply adjust to different ways of using words. If Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha” wants to call Lake Superior “Gitche Gumee,” we let it. Or consider Lewis Carroll's poem, “Jabberwocky.”

"‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe,
all mimsy were the borogoves,
and ye mome raths outgrabe.”

Many of the words are made-up. You can call the poem “nonsense,” but it isn't meaningless. The sound and rhythm and context they create for each other invite us into a world of imagination, and most of us can go with that. Tribalism, however, makes it difficult to extend the same flexibility and charity to language about God.

To illustrate how attitudes about “God” work, consider the ways that some of us find our genial adaptability stiffening dogmatically when it comes to grammar. I, for example, occasionally find myself wrestling with my own grammar dogmatism. I am sensitive to the differences between “lie” and “lay” and between "disinterested" and "uninterested," and I am capable of wishing that other people were, too. Where does this come from? It’s about my own tribal -- and class -- loyalties. It has seemed a betrayal of my grandmothers, parents, and beloved English teachers to allow myself to relax the guard against the barbarians at the gate dangling modifiers and saying “less” when they mean “fewer.”

Those adults we admire were the upholders of our class identity. The adults who sought to instill in me good grammar were teaching me to be faithful to my socio-economic class. The hidden message of prescriptive grammar instruction is: Don’t sound like those people – the lower classes. Grammar will be emotionally important to me precisely to the degree that my class identification is emotionally important to me.

So there’s the question: Do I want to go for separation, or for connection? We face linguistic choices – whether to say “ain’t,” or to call a rising balloon “levity,” or use the word “God.” As you make those choices, do you want to go for separation, or for connection?

For me, I don’t want to be a Grammar Nazi. I’m trying – though sometimes not succeeding – to not be. Connection is more important than separation. If I truly don’t know what you mean, I can ask. It’s not like speakers of upper-class English are really, on average, any clearer.

Neither am I going to be a Nazi about the word “God.” If that word allows for connecting with other people around the shared meanings of community-forming power; love; the greatest source of beauty, mystery, or creativity; the widest or deepest inspiration to gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; origin; any ultimate context and basis for meaning, value, ethics, or commitment; the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; the cosmos -- then I’ve decided that connecting with others is more important than separating from them based on the fact that I conceive of God’s knowing or desiring more metaphorically than they do. Connecting is more important than separating.

When loyalty isn’t at play, as when reading Lewis Carroll’s "Jabberwocky," it’s relatively easy to practice the gentle arts of flexibility and charity. I’ve come to understand that whether or not I want to insist that “God” necessarily must imply an entity with awareness and intentions is mostly about my tribal loyalty, just as my grammar pet peeves are.

Can we Unitarian Universalists engage in a process we identify as discerning what God is calling us to do? Can we have conversations about the question, "How do we serve God?" Yes, we can. In talking about serving God, we would be talking about serving life, and good, and the flourishing of all beings, while also reminding ourselves of the finitude and corrigibility of our own conceptions of life, good, and flourishing – which is just what I think Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus are talking about when they speak of serving God.

When we say, as we do in the fourth source of the living tradition we share, that we are called "to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbor as our selves," we are saying that the moments when we have felt the greatest belonging and connection inspire us to want to help our neighbors also feel connected and know they belong – which is what I think it truly means to respond to God’s love, whether or not God is conceived of as a person-like entity, and regardless of how metaphorical that conception is.

If I have a chance to connect with you, whoever you are, then connecting with you is usually more important than separating myself from you. If you and I have each felt mystery, wonder, and beauty come together with peace, compassion, and the softening of ego defenses -- if we have opened our hearts to love -- then we have a shared commonality that transcends both your dogmatic opinions about God and my dogmatic opinions about how wrong your dogmatic opinions are. That shared commonality in the moment matters more than my urge to insist on asserting my tribal identity.

It turns out that I can still oppose mandatory school prayer, support mandatory inclusion of evolution, favor reproductive rights, legal recognition of same-sex marriage, abolition of the death penalty, and public programs to take care of all our people -- and talk about God. I can talk about the impetus of the universe as God’s call for us to improve our understanding, respect our differences, serve life and freedom, and share God’s “preferential option for the poor.” Willing to employ "God talk" judiciously, I can be more effective than I ever could by a fastidious refusal to invoke the one word that, more clearly than any other, conveys a sense of spacious mystery tugging us toward the better angels of our nature.

Moreover, I find my wholeness and healing growing the more I perform the imaginative exercise of pretending that the world might be whispering to me, calling, inviting me to love if I but listen. Listen: it is God’s love calling me to respond by loving myself and my neighbor as my self. It is God’s love lifting me up -- as levity lifts a child's balloon.

May it be so for all of us.

- - -

*Actually, if Mom had said, "because of buoyancy," instead of "because of levity," she'd have been telling the straight-up truth, but I'm guessing that she intuited that "buoyancy" would prompt me to ask more questions whereas something about the parallel sounds of gravity and levity would feel more satisfying to me. After all, I was a Unitarian five-year-old with a lot of questions, and when I was five, my sister would have been one, so I imagine Mom, with two small kids and an academic career, sometimes felt beleaguered.

Who Are We Now

We are Unitarian Universalists. We are a people of passion and intelligence – of moral imagination, creativity, and engagement.

We are a people NOT of creed; we are creedless. In this regard, we are not unique. We
this in common with, oddly enough, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is officially creedless, as is the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). We go a little further in declaring not only that we have no creed, but that, for us, religion itself is not about what one believes.

What do Unitarian Universalists believe? We believe that religion isn’t about believing. So what is it about? One answer that might occur to you is: Religion is about how you live. It’s about the ethics and values that guide your life. And that’s true. I’d say religion is about three things, and the first one is how you live, the ethics and values that guide your life. Second, religion is about community – the people you come together with, and share rituals to affirm your community connection. And third, religion is about experience – the experience of awe and wonder, of mystery, transcendence, oneness – the experience of simultaneous intimacy and ultimacy.

Believing – holding certain declarative sentences to be true – may be a part of one’s approach to religion, but it is optional. What is essential are moral values, community, and direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder. Beliefs are an incidental, peripheral, and ultimately unnecessary aspect of religion, of spirituality.

We are a people not of creed. Now, I need to be clear, having no creed doesn’t mean you can believe anything you want to. It does mean we respect freedom of conscience – that you can believe what your conscience requires without fear of censure. This distinction between believing what you want to and believing what your conscience requires is important. What you want to believe might be what is easy – a theology that is superficially attractive, doesn’t require much thought or creative work. You might want some belief that you can hold and gaze upon like a pretty crystal: beautiful and static. But hearing and heeding what your heart, mind, and conscience dictate requires effort.

Forty years ago, I was 24 years old, a graduate student at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and I was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Waco, Texas. Members of this congregation, Paul and Jane Derrick, were also then members of that Waco fellowship, as was one Neecie Vanston, who was elderly then, and has since passed on. Neecie came up to about the middle of my chest. She was a long-time and dedicated member of that fellowship. She had been part of the small group that founded the Waco UU Fellowship back in the 50s. I was newly returned to the fold after having been unchurched since high school, and I didn’t understand that distinction between the easy and lazy believe-anything-you-want-to and the disciplined quest to discern your own heart and mind’s dictates.

One Sunday in Waco, during our holiest sacrament -- the coffee communion after the service -- I made the mistake of blithely blurting, “We’re Unitarian Universalists. We can believe whatever we want to.” Neecie overheard that remark. And she turned around. I will never forget it. It was a religious moment. “You think I believe in what I do because I want to?” she said. “I believe this because I have to. You think here, in Waco, Texas my life wouldn’t be a lot easier if I could be a Baptist? But I can’t. My conscience won’t let me. If this were about what I wanted to believe,” Neecie continued, “about what I found it convenient and easy to believe, you wouldn’t see my face here on Sunday morning.”

That was the day I learned that Unitarian Universalism is not about believing anything you want to. It does mean each of us is free to believe what we find we have to – because our conscience won’t let us believe otherwise.

We are a people not of creed. We are also a people not of canon. We have no canonical bible. Of all the words and writings offering insights, telling the story of who we are as people, of how reality is – powerful words of wisdom and inspiration – we do not select a few of them to designate as our holy scripture while all else is apocrypha or supplement or commentary, or else entirely secular. For Jews, the canon is the 39 books of the Tanakh, and especially the 5 books of the Torah. For Catholics, those 39, plus 7 more, plus the 27 books called the New Testament, making 73, are canonical. The Orthodox Bible adds 6 more books, for a canon of 79 books. When the Protestants came along, they pared back to just 66 books: the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible, plus the 27 New Testament books.

We Unitarian Universalists are canonless as well as creedless. We look to all the world’s traditions for wisdom and insight, and are ever open to new work that we may find limns the ineffable, reaches for what cannot be grasped, or points us a way. Our canonlessness more radically separates us from other Western faith traditions than our vaunted creedlessness does. We are a people neither of creed nor of canon, but of covenant. We are bound, and bound together, not by common belief, nor by common scripture of study, but by a common promise. Covenant – in the religious sense – is not like a contract, where if one party doesn’t live up to their part the other side doesn’t have to live up to theirs. Covenant continues to bind us even when we break covenant.

To live the way of covenant is to be constantly breaking it, to be constantly failing, and to be constantly called back, or called forward, to the promise of our promise. The covenant continues to call and to compel, to beckon us toward the promise of a life constituted by promising, no matter how many times we may have broken or will break our vow. The eternal covenant, the timeless covenant is this promise to promise to each other – the covenant to be in covenant. More than that, and isn’t eternal.

As soon as we articulate – select language to express -- the content of our covenant, our promise to each other, then those words derive meaning from a particular time and place, an unfolding history, an evolving culture. Each generation must undertake anew the tasks of soul searching and of word smithing to shape in words the soul of the promise we discern in ourselves – for each generation, though formed and shaped by previous generations, must also understand its uniqueness and the unique time in which it finds itself.

In 1865, we Unitarians, although understanding ourselves as creedless, were struggling to articulate a covenant without harkening back to creed. The first National Unitarian Conference approved a statement saying that we "disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ" devoted to “the service of God and the building-up of the kingdom of his son." Even then many of us objected to articulating our promise to each other as a promise to uphold beliefs. But it took a generation for us to work out that what we really meant was – in the language of that generation -- “love to God and love to man.” We might translate that as something like love of this infinite creation and its infinite creativity, and love of each other. We had moved from defining content of belief to stipulating our core verb: love.

Whatever we might believe, our promise to each other is to love together: love each other and the reality in which we find ourselves. Then in 1887, William Channing Gannett laid out “Things Commonly Believed Among Us.” We notice, on the one hand, that he’s still trying to capture what we’re about in beliefs, but on the other hand, he takes it back by saying it’s not what we all believe, or what one has to believe to be a Unitarian – it’s just what is commonly believed among us. In that tension, Gannett, and the Western Unitarian Conference that adopted his statement that year, were essentially articulating the covenant of their time. That statement said it was common among us to hold that:

• what is primary is loving the good and living the good, counting nothing good for self that is not good for all,
• this is done only through working together,
• reason and conscience are our authority,
• we honor all inspiring scripture, and revere all teachers of truth, righteousness, and love,
• we and our world are growing and evolving,
• good and evil are their own recompense and heaven and hell are states of being,
• the self-forgetting and loyal life awakens union with things eternal.”

In 1887, Gannett said this was commonly believed among us. No Unitarian had to believe it, or particularly resonate with that language, but every Unitarian did need to understand that they were throwing their lot in with a people who commonly believed this way. In that way, what Gannett gave to his generation was essentially an articulation of our covenant -- not a creed, since adherence to it was not a requirement, but a covenant, since being a Unitarian meant promising to support a community that was generally inclined to favor what Gannett had said.

After 1887 the flow of generations did produce their own articulations of our covenant. But none of the various articulations of covenant has ever been the whole truth of the people we are. Not the whole truth.

Here at First Unitarian of Des Moines we also express our covenant in our mission: to grow ethically and spiritually, serve justly, and love radically. That’s also an expression of covenant. But First Unitarian Church of Des Moines was a congregation held by covenant long before we adopted our current mission statement, or the one before that. And Unitarian Universalists have been a people of covenant from long before 1985 when we adopted our current set of principles, and before William Channing Gannett’s statement of 1887.

After all, the expression of the covenant is not the covenant. The word "moon" is not the moon. The expression of the covenant is some set of words. The covenant itself is the mysterious force that holds us together and is ultimately beyond words. The covenant of love, of fidelity to one another, the sacred promise to walk together – the whole truth -- is eternal. The ways that we give expression to that eternal must fit the particular culture and time.

In 1961, when Unitarians and Universalists came together to form the Unitarian Universalist Association, our initial documents included a set of principles. One generation later -- right on schedule -- we engaged a process to re-write them. So, four generations – about 100 years – after William Channing Gannett’s 1887 statement, Unitarian Universalists adopted our current denominational covenant. I’ll recite it.

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: The inherent worth and dignity of every person [or: every being] Justice, equity and compassion in human relations Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations A free and responsible search for truth and meaning The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

By the time this was approved, I had moved from Waco and was living in the Atlanta area. I don’t recall hearing much about it at the UU Congregation of Atlanta, and I didn’t pay it any attention. I think most UUs at the time didn’t regard the specific wording of the UUA’s article II bylaws as very important. But over the course of the next 10 or 15 years, the principles started to catch on among us. More and more of us started referencing them, and learning to recite them – as I just did.

The seven principles started showing up in the literature and the pamphlets and hand-outs and wallet-size cards of more and more of our congregations. It took a while, but the seven principles got into our hearts. They got into mine. Did they get into yours? Can you recite them? If you’re new here, I’ll give you a pass – you’re off the hook -- but if you’ve been around for 10 years and can’t recite the seven principles, why not?

Another generation went by, and that brought us to the late aughts. For two years, our congregations were enjoined to discuss possible revisions to our Article II by-laws, which includes the principles, and submit ideas to the Commission on Appraisal. I remember leading classes and meetings about that at the congregations I was serving at the time, back in 2008 and 2009. The Commission received the input and produced a proposed revision, which came before the General Assembly in 2009 in Salt Lake City for initial approval. Initial approval would have sent the proposal to the congregations for a year of discussion, with final approval subject to vote of the 2010 General Assembly.

The proposed changes in the principles themselves were slight. There would still be seven of them. The third principle was shortened from

“acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations”

to simply

“acceptance of one another and encouragement of spiritual growth.”

The fifth principle was similarly shortened from

“the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large”

to simply

“the right of conscience and the use of democratic processes.”

The seventh principle changed

“respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part”

to

“reverence for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

The other four principles were not changed at all.

A more substantive change was proposed for the preamble to the seven principles. It would have changed from:

"We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote:"

to

"Grateful for the gift of life, we commit ourselves as member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association to embody together the transforming power of love as we covenant to honor and uphold:"

The proposed changes to the sources section was much greater – it would have replaced our six sources with three descriptive paragraphs.

Moreover, the proposal added a paragraph after the principles, and then added a section on inclusion to replace a section on anti-discrimination with a fuller expression of commitments to antiracism and multiculturalism.

I was there in Salt Lake City, 2009, when moderator Gini Courter called for the vote on the Article II bylaws change -- and the yellow voting cards were held aloft by those in favor, and then by those opposed to the proposed revision. It looked like the same number on each side. So she called again for the Pro to raise their voting cards, and this time the GA counters systematically went down the rows tallying the votes, and then the same was done for the Con. When the final tally was in, 573 delegates had voted to send the proposal to the congregations – and 586 voted not to.

I voted for the revisions, but the stronger feelings in the room tended to be on the Con said – and most of it was related to the change in the sources. A few years later, however, in 2013, we did adopt that new section on inclusion – what you see on your blue hand-out as the current section 2.3.

And in 2017, we tweaked the second source from “words and deeds of prophetic women and men” to “words and deeds of prophetic people.”

But now a more substantial change from the language adopted now almost forty years ago is before the denomination. The covenant is eternal. The words we choose to express the covenant must address the needs of the time – while also honoring our heritage.

Seven values replace the seven principles. They are represented as a flower, with love at the center and the six other values as the petals. If you haven’t been able to learn the seven principles, you’ll find it easier to learn the seven values: love, interdependence, pluralism, justice, transformation, generosity, equity.

The proposed version appears to be longer, because each of those seven values has two or three sentences about it – but the part you meaningfully learn to recite is actually shorter: love, interdependence, pluralism, justice, transformation, generosity, and equity.

Our current principles don’t have the word “love” anywhere. In the late 19th-century, we Unitarians resolved a dispute we’d been having by declaring that what our religion actually boiled down to was simply “love to god and love to man.” Today we wouldn’t say “man” and maybe wouldn’t say “god” – but we understand that the crux of the matter then was love. It is what we’ve always been about – and I think it feels good to put that back in the center.

And if you are devoted to the seven principles, and can recite them, then they are still available as a handy way to give a summary of what Unitarian Universalism is all about. They aren’t going away. For that matter, William Channing Gannett’s words from 137 years ago have never gone away, and are to this day not a bad way to summarize what we’re all about.

As each Unitarian Universalist generation finds its Unitarian Universalist voice, the past articulations don’t go away. They move into being the nourishing ground on which we can stand to proclaim our voice to a new day.

Choose Abundance

The issue of miracles was a defining point in Unitarian history. Prior to the Civil War, in the 1840s, Unitarian minister Theodore Parker created a stir by saying Jesus did not perform the miracles that most Westerners at that time interpreted the gospels as saying Jesus did perform. Theodore Parker’s preaching career spoke to many topics, most of which were lost on his critics who only heard one thing: Rev. Parker denies the miracles. This is the tradition we inherit.

The tradition we inherit also includes an older wisdom, which Unitarians and Universalists have been rediscovering and reclaiming -- that “the true law of life,” as a different Parker – Parker Palmer -- said, is the miracle “that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around.” Expand the circle, and it will be full.

Each of the four gospels of the Christian Testament includes a version of the "loaves and fishes" story: five loaves, two fish, and five thousand people were fed. What happened? The story may, of course, have been fabricated from whole cloth, but that hardly matters. What is it a story OF? Fictional or not, what does it illustrate? Our historical identity has grown out of denying miracles, but I don’t think we need to keep doing that. I want to say there was a miracle there. Maybe there wasn’t anything we would call supernatural. There wasn’t, in a phrase from theologian Daphne Hampson, “an interruption of the causal nexus of history and nature.” Yet it was a miracle. It may not have interrupted the causal nexus of history and nature. But it did interrupt the mind’s chatter about its needs and fears. It interrupted obliviousness and allowed people to notice wonder and beauty – the abundance that life presents in each moment. It’s a story that still has the power to interrupt the ego’s defense mechanisms and call us to neighborliness – call us to expand our circle.

“Spirituality,” if it means anything, means this: awareness of the reality of abundance. It means clarity that what you have, what you are, where you are, is enough. It’s one thing to know this in your head – to know it cognitively. It’s another thing to live that truth with every breath and every step. That’s hard to do. It does not come naturally to us who are acculturated to modern society, and it involves more than cognition. Spirituality is quite a handy word for this capacity for not-merely-cognitive perception of abundance.

The abundance is there. We have but to expand the circle of our consciousness to take it in. Abundance is the true law of life. Abundance abounds. All the world’s religions teach this.

In the Jewish tradition, the scriptures say it over and over. God is good, God provides, God is faithful. In Genesis, God lovingly brings the entire world into being, and provides human beings with everything they need. "Be fruitful and multiply," God says, and the fruitfulness overflows. The Book of Psalms sings again and again about all the gifts God gives us. Psalm 104, just to pick one example, says:

"You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills, giving drink to every wild animal;
the wild asses quench their thirst.
By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation;
they sing among the branches.
From your lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to use,
to bring forth food from the earth,
and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine,
and bread to strengthen the human heart.
The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has its home in the fir trees.
The high mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks are a refuge for the coneys. . . .
O Lord, how manifold are your works!
| In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures. . . .
These all look to you
to give them their food in due season;
when you give to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things."

Predominant is the picture of God, the generous provider, the faithful parent -- always giving, supplying our needs. The Jewish tradition is emphatic in saying God loves us extravagantly and wants to provide for us, richly and abundantly. That’s the Jewish way of recognizing that life is inherently abundant.

The Buddhist tradition teaches letting go of desires. Why? Because we have all we need, abundantly. Wanting things to be different obscures from us awareness of the ample riches that are present to us right here, inalienable from us, we have but to notice them.

Taoism’s emphasis is on the Tao, which is usually translated as “the way.” The Japanese word for Tao is “michi”, which means “abounding.” It is abundant everywhere.

Despite the teachings of the dominant religion in our culture, and despite the teachings of every other major world religious tradition, we have a hard time accepting it. We spend much of our lives in the grip of a delusion: the delusion of scarcity. We should acknowledge that scarcity is real for the many who are struggling to meet basic needs. Real poverty is not addressed by telling the poor that their deprivation is a delusion when it isn’t.

Yet the scarcity mindset – the pervasive feeling of not having enough – can beset us when we do have enough, and can make us behave in ways that make it a self-fulfilling prophecy – by making us ungenerous, unwilling to share, which cuts us off from community. An abundance mindset can help us see problems in a different light, which can prime us to cope with them better – and can draw us into community where abundance becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Walter Brueggemann, Christian theologian and Hebrew Scripture scholar, wrote an essay: “The Myth of Scarcity.” Brueggemann says:

“The majority of the world's resources pour into the United States. And as we Americans grow more and more wealthy, money is becoming a kind of narcotic for us. We hardly notice our own prosperity or the poverty of so many others. The great contradiction is that we have more and more money and less and less generosity.... Though many of us are well intentioned, we have invested our lives in consumerism. We have a love affair with ‘more’ -- and we will never have enough. Consumerism is not simply a marketing strategy. It has become a demonic spiritual force among us.”

Brueggeman says the US has cornered more than three-quarters of the world's resources, but we want more, always more. And the more we have, the less satisfied and the less secure we feel. That's how powerful the myth of scarcity can be: it can take the wealthiest people on earth and make them greedy and mean, unable and unwilling to share.

“The ideology devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures.”

The ideology of consumption requires us to buy the myth of scarcity – for if we buy that, then we’ll be driven to buy lots of other stuff. What would it look like to live the truth of abundance instead of the myth of scarcity?

Here’s a parable from an unknown author that shows what it might look like:

An American businessman was at the pier of a small, coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “Only a little while.”

The American then asked, “Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, senor.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA, and eventually New York City where you would run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But senor, how long will this all take.”

“15-20 years.”

“But what then, senor?”

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.”

“Millions, senor? Then what?”

Triumphantly, the American replied, “Then you would retire! You’d move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your grand-kids, take siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

As Parker Palmer said,

“We create scarcity by fearfully accepting it as law, and by competing with others for resources as if we were stranded on the Sahara at the last oasis. [But] the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around.”

As Parker Palmer also told us,

“Abundance is a communal act . . . Community not only creates abundance – community is abundance.”

And as Walter Brueggemann noted:

“Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.” (Brueggemann)

So, to return to our question, what happened with Jesus and those thousands in that deserted place? Neighborliness happened. Neighbors gather, community happens, and abundance flourishes. That’s the kingdom – the kin-dom -- of god Jesus was talking about: public life reorganized toward neighborliness. A crowd of people in the grip of scarcity thinking had gathered to hear Jesus teach. They had secreted away for their own use food for themselves. Under the influence of this remarkable teacher, they began to open up, began to sense the intrinsic abundance of the life they breathed, and the universe in which they swam. From that sense of boundless provision welled up an urge to share of this manifest plenty of which they were suddenly so acutely aware. From the bottoms of bags and folds of clothes came forth food to share. From the divinity within them, the divinity that is always there, lying too-often unnoticed, came forth this food. So, yes, it came from God – from Goddess, from Buddha nature. It came from God, which we call by many names, one of them being neighborliness.

As Parker Palmer exegetes:

“The disciples, asked to feed the crowd, are sure that food is scarce; Jesus performs a ‘miracle’ to reveal how abundant food is even when there is none in sight. In this story, as throughout his active life, Jesus wanted to help people penetrate the illusion of scarcity and act out of the reality of abundance.”

Parker Palmer relates this story about the miracle of abundance in community, the kin-dom of God that is realized in neighborliness. Palmer was a passenger on a plane that pulled away from the gate, taxied to a remote corner of the field and stopped. The pilot came on the intercom and said, “I have some bad news and some worse news. The bad news is there’s a storm front in the west, Denver is socked in and shut down. So we’ll be staying here for a few hours. That’s the bad news. The worse news is that we have no food and it’s lunch time.”

Now, this was back in the days when any flight of more than a couple hours included a meal – so there was an expectation of lunch people had been counting on. Everybody groaned. Some passengers started to complain. Some became angry. But then, Palmer said, one of the flight attendants did something amazing. She stood up and took the intercom mike and said, “We’re really sorry folks. We didn’t plan it this way and we really can’t do much about it. And I know for some of you this is a big deal. Some of you are really hungry and were looking forward to a nice lunch. Some of you may have a medical condition and really need lunch. Some of you may not care one way or the other, and some of you were planning to skip lunch anyway. So I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. I have a couple of breadbaskets up here and we’re going to pass them around and I’m asking everybody to put something in the basket. Some of you brought a little snack along—something to tide you over—just in case something like this happened, some peanut butter crackers, candy bars. And some of you have a few LifeSavers or chewing gum or Rolaids. And if you don’t have anything edible, you have a picture of your children or spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend or a bookmark or a business card. Everybody put something in and then we’ll reverse the process. We’ll pass the baskets around again and everybody can take out what he/she needs.”

“Well,” Palmer said,

“what happened next was amazing. The griping stopped. People started to root around in pockets and handbags, some got up and opened their suitcases stored in the overhead luggage racks and got out boxes of candy, a salami, a bottle of wine. People were laughing and talking. She had transformed a group of people who were focused on need and deprivation into a community of sharing and celebration. She had transformed scarcity into a kind of abundance.”

After the flight, which eventually did proceed, Parker Palmer stopped on his way off the plane and said to her: “Do you know there’s a story in the Bible about what you did back there? It’s about Jesus feeding a lot of people with very little food.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know that story. That’s why I did what I did.”

Unitarian Universalists know that story too. We Unitarian Universalists have fashioned a wiser understanding of the miraculous. The uninterrupted causal nexus of history and nature is replete with the miracle of community – the miracle of abundance.

One more illustration of this point is the illustration that comes from congregational life. It’s the miracle that Unitarian Universalists enact every time we agree to serve on a committee, every time we help out cleaning up the grounds, every time we teach an RE class, every time we fill out a pledge form. Everybody puts in, and everybody takes out. It’s a wonderful, awesome miracle of the creation of community and thereby the creation of abundance.