Transcendence in Unitarian Universalism

What is "transcendence" in Unitarian Universalism? Through what developments does it come to us, and how is it still alive for us?

In Christian theology, God is both immanent (manifested and present in the material world) and transcendent (outside of and independent of the material world). These theologians, in their way, were wrestling with something real in human experience. Every situation we encounter is immanent (the objective and matter-of-fact descriptions of just what is there, filtering out our tendency to judge and evaluate) and transcendent (full of hidden possibilities for what it may become; manifesting and exemplifying the one-ness or integral whole of all; a window into wonder and mystery).

In Unitarian history, the Transcendentalist movement of the 19th century was a reaction against the dry intellectual abstractions of early Unitarian preaching. (This intellectualism was itself a reaction against the hyperemotionalism of the “First Great Awakening” [1730-1743] and, especially, the “Second Great Awakening,” [late 1700s to mid-1800s] – periods when large and highly emotive religious revival gatherings swept the colonies/young nation.) The transcendentalists, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself a Unitarian minister until leaving the ministry in 1832, sought a more heartfelt and less intellectualized religious expression. Emerson’s 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address shocked his audience with radical claims that: moral intuition was more reliable than religious doctrine; all humans have a divine nature; belief in the historical miracles of Jesus is unnecessary; and scripture must not be used to deny us our firsthand revelations of every day miracles. “Historical Christianity,” Emerson said, “dwells with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe.”

In his Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Emerson would refer to the “icehouse of Unitarianism” (1842), and “corpse-cold Unitarianism” (1846). He sought a more poetic, less reason-bound, truth, and invited us to imagine/perceive an underlying unity which transcended duality or plurality. He called this an “over-soul” and described it as “that great nature in which we rest . . . within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart.”

Transcendentalism emphasizes lived experience, the here and now, the natural world – that is, the immanent – but it emphasizes the transcendent qualities of this immanent reality. For Transcendentalism, the immanent is the transcendent.

Unitarian Universalism continues to this day to develop in the interplay between what might be called the truths of reason and the truths of poetry. We explore truths of reason in the insights of the natural and social sciences (both empirical findings and large-scale theories). We explore truths of poetry when we speak of oneness, all-embracing unity, and when we share words to evoke the mystery, awe, and wonder that is ultimately ineffable.

The Ground of Hope

“Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.”
- Radio DJ Casey Kasem’s signature sign-off

Hope can go bad. We can use hope to evade reality and escape into rosy fantasies. In the name of hope, people may dwell in a hoped-for future rather than living in the present.

Psychiatrist Scott Peck’s very useful book, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, gives many examples from his patients where evil and mental illness blur together. The evil/ill patients he discusses share a habit of attacking others instead of facing their own failures. When things go well, it’s just what they deserved; when things go badly, it’s always someone else’s fault. By contrast, an ideal of mental health would be just the opposite: when things go well, the healthy think with gratitude of all the others who made their success possible, and when things go badly, they examine what they might have done differently. Peck then defines mental health as “an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” The evil/ill tendency to blame others and credit the self is a refusal to face reality. The evil/ill prefer the comforts of the illusion of blameless virtue and undeserved victimhood to “a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination and honesty with oneself” (Peck).

When hope goes bad, it turns into the enemy of reality, honesty, truth. It beckons us to retreat into pleasant illusions of an imagined future – or succumb to temptations of visions in which other people have finally wised up and stopped standing in our righteous way.

When hope is ungrounded, it is merely another name for fear. What commonly goes by the name “hope” – hope for a specific result – is nonacceptance. This kind of hope is no more than fear of the world as it is, or the world as we are afraid it may become. "I hope the bill passes," or "I hope I get the promotion" is not substantively different from "I'm afraid of the bill not passing," and "I'm afraid of not getting the promotion."

There is surely a place and a need for hopeful visions of a better future – for powerful dreams such as Martin Luther King’s. (There's a place and need for fear, too.) Hope, by its nature, wants to reach for the stars. To keep hope from going bad -- to hope within the context of "dedication to reality at all costs" -- we must also plant its feet in the ground of love of reality. Hope’s grounding lies in making peace with the possibility that the future may not be different in any particular way that you or I would call “better.”

Hope’s grounding is action taken here and now without knowing what effect, if any, the action will have. Hope is grounded in what the poet John Keats called “negative capability” – the capacity not to insist on a determinate knowable meaning. Grounded hope reminds us to hold our visions lightly, for they are projections of our ego needs, and the best of them can become despotic and demonic. A grounded activist knows, “I do this not to make the world different. I do this to be who I am.” When our hope is grounded in loving what is, we can be courageous, we can join the resistance (to injustice, oppression, sources of violence) with our hearts and our breath and our being, comfortable that we cannot predict what will come of it. Hope’s grounding lies in listening deeply, speaking truth, then letting go of attachment to outcomes.

Plunder-Guarding and Forever-Living

Dragons, we learn in the first chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit:

“guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are killed).”

When I first read that, I was in 7th grade. I didn’t see any logical connection between these two attributes -- plunder-guarding and forever-living -- of dragons. Do you?

I now think Tolkien was representing a wonderful insight, whether he was conscious of it or not. Dragons don’t just happen to guard plunder and live forever. They surely guard plunder because they live forever.

An increasingly sharp awareness of my own mortality began to grow on me some years ago, and with it came a sense of relief and liberation. Whew! I don’t have to figure out how to live forever – only right now. If, like a dragon, I would live forever unless killed, I think I’d have to devote all my energies to making sure I wasn’t killed. I’d be “guarding my plunder” with all my might. The gift of mortality – of knowing down in our bones that all things are temporary, including the motley hodge-podge of attributes I call my “self” – is that now we can relax.

Of course, we all know about death, right? But there are different ways to know this. We can know death by keeping it constantly in mind. Or we can know death by acknowledging the fact of it only when necessary and pushing it out of mind as much as possible. We can live in forgetfulness of what we know -- or we can face the fact of death with steadiness.

When we let our transience fall out of mind, then we slip into living in ways based upon the pretense of the possibility of permanence – the permanence of our things, our status, our self. Our lives become governed by the assumption – which we do not articulate to ourselves because its falsity would be self-evident – that these things will be permanent if they are only given sufficient protection. We become like a Tolkein dragon, guarding our plunder.

Faith: The Size and Strength Tests

Is your faith big enough?

Is it strong enough?

The size test: Most of us have faith – we trust – in certain people. When I say “big” enough, I mean: if those people, for some reason or no reason, weren’t there for you, is there something bigger – wider, more encompassing – in which you could trust that would sustain you through difficult times?

Cognitively, we know that the universe is one big system of interconnected parts. All the parts are changing. If I say I have faith in the system as a whole – reality in its widest sense, encompassing all things seen and unseen – I don’t mean that I expect things to turn out well (“in the long run,” whatever that may mean). My own concepts of “well,” “better,” and “good” are products of my time, culture, and finite brain. Even if I could see the future a thousand or a million years hence, I don't imagine my limited concepts would be adequate to assess it. Still, it feels right to affirm the process, even if I don’t know where it’s headed. Reality is unfolding in a way that somehow feels good, even when its products don’t correspond to my conception of “good.” In this sense, I have faith in the universe.

This faith I described meets the size test. It’s big enough to withstand whatever disappointments, betrayals, and losses may come my way. I'd assess my faith as big enough -- and that's not something that's been true throughout my life. But is my faith strong enough? I don't know.

The size test is mostly cognitive: what do we tell ourselves about our own largest context of faith? Cognition is important and helpful – but limited.

The strength test. When the chips are down, we’ll need something more than cognition. We’ll also need a resilient limbic system. The limbic system generates our emotions and operates in ways often beyond conscious control. We’ll need the limbic system trained in the habits of faith: peace and an abiding capacity to sincerely love what is, whatever it is. The cognition learns quickly, but the emotions learn much more slowly. Moreover, the emotions aren’t very good at taking orders from the cognition: we will have limited success at trying to tell ourselves what to feel. Re-wiring the emotions may require therapy, and, in some cases (though probably not as many as we are often led to believe), may even need the assistance of prescription medications. One thing that helps all of us – whether we also go in for therapy or not – is spiritual practice. The daily exercising of faith strengthens the neurons that can’t be reached by rational thought.

Photo by the author

Deciding

“I’ve decided to be happy because it is good for my health.”
- Voltaire

What sort of “decision” is this? And if it’s just a matter of deciding, why hasn’t everyone decided to be happy?

June’s theme is happiness/joy – which fits with this season of graduation speeches. Such speeches often say what a great thing it is to “dream,” “dream big,” and “follow your dreams.” Well, OK. Sure, there’s a place for goal-setting. Let’s just not forget: the way to have everything you want is to want what you have.

In order to make “what you have” and “what you want” match, there are two strategies. Strategy A is to make a list of all the things that you want, and then set about doing whatever it takes to acquire everything on that list. You work to bring the “have” bar up until it meets the “want” bar. Strategy B is to lower the “want” bar until it meets the “have” bar. Which strategy will work best?

Strategy A is doomed to failure. You'll never have enough. Long before you ever acquire every item on your list, you will have added more things to your list. The “want” bar will always keep rising, staying ahead of the “have” bar. Strategy B, at first, may not look so hot either. How does one decide not to want stuff? Even if one has come to believe that wanting only what one has, letting go of desires for more, does conduce to happiness, can one simply decide to stop wanting?

The instant that it takes to say, “I now hereby decide to be happy” probably isn’t enough. It takes a little bit longer to psyche oneself into a good mood -- and even then, the effects tend to fade away in a few hours, even under good conditions. What's a body to do? Happiness eludes us when we aim at it, and it often sneaks up on us with big, warm hug when we’re paying attention to something else.

Fortunately, intentionally cultivating an openness to life’s joy is not the same thing as a grasping desire for something called happiness. We can undertake to orient ourselves toward happiness without thinking of it as a thing that we want. It’s the difference between opening to what’s there and acquisitively pursuing something that isn’t. So deciding to be happy is a matter of noticing that you are. In this psychic version of quantum mechanics, it comes into existence only when observed. Realizing (noticing) is realizing (making real).

Still, a single act of decision – to notice the enjoyability of the things in your life – is only a beginning. Yes, we can, in principle, with Voltaire, decide to be happy, but we simply won’t consistently make that decision unless we make another decision: to commit ourselves to a discipline of cultivating the habit of deciding to be happy. Such discipline is called “spiritual discipline.” What’s yours?

Mercy

In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Antonio offers a pound of his flesh closest his heart as guarantee of a loan. When the loan is not repaid, and Shylock claims his pound of flesh. Portia intervenes to tells Shylock he must be merciful.

Shylock retorts, “On what compulsion must I? Tell me that.”

Portia replies,

“The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

“Not strained” means we cannot be constrained to be merciful. Mercy can’t be compelled. If it’s compelled, it isn’t mercy. Mercy just happens, the way gentle rain falls on the ground. And when it does, it blesses both giver and receiver.

In this way, mercy is related to grace. “Grace” is a name for the fact that much of what is good in life is “free” – that we are rich in blessings not earned, deserved, or expected. If a blessing comes to you when you didn’t deserve it, that’s grace. If a punishment is lifted or consequence averted from you that you did deserve, that’s mercy. We all deserve worse than we get, as Portia goes on to say:

“in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.”

Mercy reminds us that justice and fairness – as important and necessary as they are – are not enough. Love and forgiveness take the name mercy when, as they sometimes must, they countermand the dictates of justice.

There are times when it is better not to save others from the consequences of their actions. Overprotectiveness is a misapplication of mercy. As Shakespeare tells us in a different play (Timon of Athens):

“nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.”

It takes wisdom to choose well when to let justice prevail and when, and how much, to temper justice with mercy. There are formulas for retributive justice and better formulas and methods for restorative justice, but no algorithm for the wise application of mercy. Indeed, that’s what makes an act merciful: it goes beyond formula or right. Still, we can learn from good examples. When apartheid ended in South Africa, their Truth and Reconciliation Commission wisely chose mercy over justice alone. The Commission granted amnesty to perpetrators who committed violence and crime during apartheid if those people shared the truth about what they had done. Mercy and truth, in that situation, was more important than justice to their country.

In the Middle East, so many wrongs have been committed by so many people, that there’s no way to punish all who have acted violently. If justice is a prerequisite for peace, we may never have peace in that region. Peace will require some justice – and a lot of mercy.

Questions: What role has mercy played in your life? When have you most memorably received it? When have you given it? When have you wished you’d given more of it?

Freedom: The Half-Won Blessing

"Bring out the festal bread and sing songs of freedom.
Shout with the slaves who fled, and sing songs of freedom.
Chains still there are to break; their days are not finished.
Metal or subtle-made, they’re still not diminished.”

- Hymn #220, Singing the Living Tradition

At Community Unitarian Church, our April theme is “Freedom,” which aligns with the Passover celebration. We celebrate the freedom we have – while also reflecting on the “chains still there are to break.”

Passover this year begins at sundown on Mon Apr 14. The celebration of freedom continues eight days, until the evening of Tue Apr 22. The first two days are full-fledged holidays commemorating the 10th plague, when the mystery beyond naming killed all the first-born of Egypt, but passed over the Israelites: hence, “Passover.” At this, Pharaoh released the Israelites from bondage. They immediately fled. Pharaoh changed his mind and went chasing after them. A week later came the episode of the parting of the Red Sea, commemorated the last two days of Passover, which are also full-fledged holidays. The middle four days are semi-festive.

Celebrate, then, and reflect on the blessing of freedom. In parts of the world, full-scale slavery is still going on. None of the members of CUC are enslaved in that full-scale way, and none ever have been. Even so, I would guess that there has been a metaphorical land of Egypt in your past in which you were bound and from which you now are free. Bring out the festal bread, and sing songs of freedom.

Yet freedom is the half-won blessing. Modern pharaohs live unchallenged. Chains still bind us – whether “metal or subtle-made.” Resentments, small or large, constrain us. A further Exodus awaits us still. And further truth, bright as a burning bush, cries to become known. We (we who are not under an unrelenting grind of oppression, not consumed wholly with mere survival) stand midway between full-scale slavery and full-scale liberation. The unfinished work of freedom lies before us. So bring out the festal bread and sing songs of freedom.

Redemption

“Redemption” is a popular word in sports discourse, in the context of which “redemption” seems to mean any success following after any failure. Since life is a continual process of little (and occasionally larger) failures interspersed with little (and occasionally larger) successes, “redemption,” in this sense is a very regular and recurring thing.

"Redemption" is also frequently invoked in popular culture. Six films, starting in 1930, 12 albums from as many bands, and even more single songs, have been titled, “Redemption.”

We speak of redeeming our honor, or reputation – by doing something particularly exemplary or by clearing ourselves of a charge against us. We speak of redeeming a coupon – by exchanging it for a product. You redeem your mortgage by paying it off, redeem your obligations by carrying them out, and redeem your possessions by recovering them.

“Redemption” comes from the Latin, rudimere, "to buy back." We can see that root concept at work in the various current uses of the word. In particular, the original usage primarily meant buying back one’s freedom. Slaves who could manage to raise enough money could buy themselves and become free.

Redemption is about emancipation, regaining our native freedom.

In Jewish theological history, “redemption” centrally refers to God redeeming the Israelites from various exiles: God buys them back and restores them to freedom in their own land, the land promised to them. From this idea of deliverance from exile grew the Christian concept of deliverance from sin.

The questions for us, then, are:

• In what ways do we find ourselves exiled from the inheritance of joy and belonging that is our birthright? 
• To what do we find ourselves in bondage? 
• What is the price to pay for liberation, for return into our own, for realizing ourselves? 

Every reader will have a different way to answer that question. Maybe we feel stuck in a dead-end job. Or in an abusive relationship. Maybe we are entrapped by the detritus of our own material success – bound by our “stuff” and consumed by desires to protect it, maintain it, simply keep up with it all, or, God forbid, get more of it. We may thus be in exile from the life of simplicity and freedom.

One of the key distinctions in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is between “demand” and “request.” The NVC way is to make requests, not demands. The difference has nothing to do with how politely it is expressed. A demand need not carry implicit or explicit threat. The difference between demand and request has to do with how you’ll feel if the answer is “no.” If you can calmly accept not getting what you were requesting, then it was a true request. If you are, at any level, upset by a “no” answer, then you had some “demand energy” in your asking.

Wherever your demand energy is, that’s what you’re having a hard time letting go of.

Whatever you’re having a hard time letting go of, that’s what you’re in bondage to.

The path of redemption, of liberation, is the discipline of freeing yourself from the chains of your own demands.

Religious Authority

"Religious Authority"? Do Unitarian Universalists have any? UUs place a lot of emphasis on the authority of individual conscience. We have no authoritative creed, nor any ecclesiastical counsel that declares what a faithful UU must believe – for, after all, for us, one’s religion isn’t about what one believes. (It’s about the ethics and values that guide one’s life, the community to which one commits, and the experiences one has of transcendence.) We are not only creedless, but canonless. That is, we do not particularly privilege, for instance, the 66 books of the Protestant Bible among sources of spiritual insight and wisdom. In being creedless, UUs are joined by such other heirs of the Protestant Reformation as Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and Churches of Christ. In being canonless, however, UUs are distinct among the heirs of the Reformation -- and, indeed, among the heirs of Abraham.

While we have no closed canon of religiously authoritative texts, we do have an open, evolving and loosely-defined tradition of thought. Sources from ancient sages to Transcendentalist writers in the 19th century to contemporary ecospiritual writers inform our Unitarian Universalist tradition. You’ll find their names in the index of authors in the back of our Singing the Living Tradition hymnal. These are “religious authorities” for our tradition – voices of wisdom that we UUs collectively celebrate. For now. The next edition of our hymnal will doubtless add some new names and remove some of the ones currently cited.

Our liberal religious tradition has insisted for centuries that no one turns over the authority of her own conscience to anyone else at the church door. Yet your, and my, individual conscience isn’t always trustworthy. This isn’t because any other single source is reliably more trustworthy. It’s just that there is such a thing as path toward deeper wisdom, and there are such things as guides along that path – not guides that tell you what to think or do but that offer pointers for how individual conscience might work a little better – better for you, better for the world (if, indeed, there’s a difference – a proposition which grows increasingly untenable along the path of deepening wisdom).

Synchronicitously, our Community Unitarian Church decreed a religious authority for itself just in time for “religious authority” month. The authority that we decided to be guided by is our mission: to nurture spirituality, foster compassion, and engage in service to others.

At a recent UU forum, the question was raised, “Who owns the congregation?” Most of us immediately think of the members as the owners. In that forum, however, a beautiful point was made: the mission owns the congregation. The mission brings the members together; the mission is the reason the members joined; and the mission is what the members are there to serve. In the liberal religious tradition, we make our own authority, which is quite different from having none. Having made, or found, our authority, we must now heed it.

Newsletter Column 2014 Jan

Thank You, Earth

At Community Unitarian Church, next month's theme will be “Creation.” In January, the invitation will be to explore the spiritual basis for environmental care and activism.

The spiritual basis of anything begins with gratitude, that most fundamental of all spiritual virtues and the ground from which all the others grow.

So let me express my gratitude for Creation:

Thank you, Earth. Thank you for air. The sunshine: morning rising beauty of hope; evening setting grace of gratitude. My brain processes the light that comes from the sky as blue – I’m not clear on why or how a bunch of neurons does that. I have a slightly better grasp on why snow is white, and no clue at all why chlorophyll is green. I don’t know why blood is red, either -- that vivid aliveness motion inside me, and us -- nor why flower blossoms are so variously, brightly colored. I just know the blue sky, winter’s white snow, and spring and summer’s green grass and trees are home.

Thank you, Earth, for ants, worms, beetles, spiders, jellyfish, squid. Thank you for fish: shiny, darting. Thank you for reptiles: tortoises, bright little lizards, and the alligators I left behind in Florida. Thank you for birds, and the unignorability of the fact of flying. Because they are, and I am they, I, too, fly. Thank you for other mammals, the things with hair and milk-making bodies: foxes and alpacas and orcas and rabbits.

I imagine living on a space station: the view, so deep; the black, and vast starfields, filling me with infinity every day. But it takes ground to be grounded. I was made to be among your colors and life and limited horizons, Earth. Even when it is dangerous, too hot, too cold, too rainy, too dry, I was made for you, Earth. All the 7.7 millions of animal species, all the three hundreds of thousand plant species, all the fungi, protozoa, and chromista, they were made for you, too, and by you, out of dirt and water and sunlight.

Did you make snakes able to be thankful? Have blue jays gratitude? Lobsters? Maybe they are always grateful – and what they aren’t able to be is not thankful. This is a wonder to me, who am sometimes ungrateful and who other times, like today, am sky-blue thank you and leaf-green thank you and blood-red thank you and snow-white thank you and mud-brown thank you.

Grateful feels good, Dear Earth, and you offer so much for which. Sometimes I forget. Then I remember again.

Newsletter Column 2013 Dec

God

The theme for December is “God.” Among Unitarian Universalists, this topic can be incendiary (appropriately enough, perhaps, given the story of how Yahweh appeared to Moses). Here’s a beginning of my thoughts on this big topic.

It’s poetry. When we talk theology, we’re not talking science. We aren’t giving testimony in a court of law. We aren’t talking history. Rather, we’re speaking poetically. When we say “blanket of snow” we probably don’t really think the snow is a blanket -- blankets are warm, and snow is cold. Poets might tell us, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (Eliot), or that they saw “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” (Ginsberg). When we read a poem, most of us adopt a congenial and charitable willingness to open ourselves to the possibilities of meaning and insight. We don’t fret about whether Eliot really should have been a pair of claws, or whether Ginsberg’s hipsters really burned for connection. Why wouldn’t we approach lines like, “In the beginning God created the heaven and earth,” and, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” with the same openness? Because:

It’s tribal. A lot of people are invested in a tribal identity centered in their religious language. The fans of Whitman’s or Tennyson’s poetry have not formed a powerful coalition justifying objectionable public policy with dubious interpretations of certain lines from their favorite poet. If they did, we might lose our ability to engage those lines with our former open, curious, and generous disposition. Frankly, the language of “God” is a central part of the rationale of people intent to limit women’s reproductive freedom, deny equality to LGBT folk, challenge the teaching of evolution in our schools, and generally make the world over in their own image: mean and intolerant. Many of us have had negative experiences with one or another such tribe, and that experience, understandably, makes it difficult to regard their language as helpful, or even harmless, poetry. Moreover, we Unitarian Universalists have our own tribal identity to support, and sometimes it can seem attractive to distinguish ourselves as the people who won’t use the words “those people” use. I get that.

Still, my hopes lie with the possibilities of employing overlap of meanings in order to build bridges of connection and common cause with people of good will who are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Hindu. I think we can use the word “God” to reference shared, poetic, and helpful meanings: 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 – and even, possibilities for relating to the flow of coincidences as if it represented the workings of agency.

Yours faithfully,
Meredith

Newsletter Column 2013 Nov

Covenant and Democracy

The themes for November are Covenant and Democracy. These are the themes at the center of our way of being together.

Covenant. While we acknowledge and respect faith traditions in which members connect and bind themselves together through a shared creed, we are also clear that this is not the Unitarian Universalist way. We are a people of covenant, not creed, and it is covenant rather than creed by which we are connected and bound together. The content of the covenant is expressed in various ways, one of the most prominent of which is our seven principles: “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote...”

Our principles don’t declare that we believe any particular doctrine or creed – we just covenant to affirm and promote these ideals. The seven principles, however, are fairly recent in our history: they were produced in the mid-1980s. Before the seven principles, we had other ways to articulate our covenant. And if CUC adopts a mission statement then that, too, will be a covenant. Ultimately, however, the idea of covenant goes beyond any words that we might choose to express it. Beyond one or another articulation, there is simply a covenant to walk together.

While “covenant” has a legal meaning in some contexts (as for instance, in property law, where it refers to conditions tied to the use of land), in our faith tradition, covenant is not a legal term. A covenant is not a contract. In a contract, if one side breaks the contract, the other side doesn’t have to continue to keep its side of the bargain. A covenant, however, is a promise that continues to hold, howsoever often broken. No matter how many times you or I fail to support one another in the ways we have promised to do so, the covenant continues to exist, calling us back to repair the relations damaged, to honor anew what has been dishonored, to recommit to walking together in a relationship made sacred by our promised intention that it be so.

Democracy. Our fifth principle is “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” We do our best to respect the rights of conscience for those who may be outvoted. Still, the fact remains that sometimes opinions are divided and only one of them will prevail. The great spiritual lesson of democracy is humility. We’re all sometimes outvoted, and the system depends upon our ability to let go of our attachment to our own opinions enough to allow the majority-supported policy to go forward. Here there are (at least) two dangerous temptations to avoid:

First, don’t try to undermine the policy because you’re so sure it’s wrong. Remember that you might be the one who’s wrong. If you truly can’t take that possibility seriously, then console yourself with the thought that allowing the majority to make this mistake will be the best way for them to learn their error.

Second, don’t assume that, just because the majority has outvoted you, you “haven’t been heard” and are “excluded.” Neither being heard nor being included requires that a majority agree with you.

These are tough lessons, and wherever too many of the citizens are too deficient in that humility, democracy falters. Churches and other voluntary associations are the essential workshops where we learn the democratic skills. When a populace loses interest in showing up to hash out decisions at church committees, or PTA, civic club, or party chapter meetings, the strength of its democratic virtues (listening to others, accommodating diverse viewpoints, understanding how good people may disagree, etc.) wanes . . .

With predictable results.

Faithfully,
Meredith

Newsletter Column 2013 Oct

Evil

Is there really such a thing as evil? Certainly, there is such a thing as harm. People do sometimes do harm to others. And there are such things as oppression and, more generally, injustice. If we have the concepts sociopathy, negligence, malicious intent, damage, oppression, and injustice, do we really also need a concept named “evil”?

The argument for dropping “evil” out of our conceptual repertoire – the way that 18th-century scientists dropped “phlogiston” from their conceptual repertoire – would include taking note of the harm the concept does. “Evil” masquerades as an explanation. By calling something evil, we cast the illusion of having explained it and thereby undermine calls for real explanation. Moreover, labeling a person or institution “evil” strongly suggests that the only feasible response is to destroy it. Usually, a more nuanced response will work better.

So maybe we would do well to drop the concept “evil.” This would change nothing about the world’s myriad and deep suffering, but it would compel us to invoke different – and probably more helpful – concepts for thinking about that suffering.

Maybe.

On the other hand, when I recall what I know of Dachau and Treblinka, when I remember the photographs taken in the early years of the 20th-century of the smiling white faces and apparent party atmosphere at lynchings, I doubt whether any term but “evil” can intimate the moral horror I feel. When I feel that revulsion and grope to understand it, I remind myself to look into my own heart. There is no evil out there that isn’t also inside me. There is no human greed, fear, or obliviousness of which I do not also share a measure. For me, then, the quest to understand evil begins with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s observation:

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

Good question, Alex. Let us begin there.