Fifteen Years Ago, Out West.

Immigration, part 1

It’s been great to have Cindy with us as a ministerial intern for the last two years. Fifteen years ago, I was a ministerial intern. My experience was a little bit different from Cindy’s.

LoraKim and I lived in El Paso then and my internship was with First Unitarian in Albuquerque. El Paso's population was 700,000 people -- three-fourths of them, by Census Bureau estimate, spoke a language other than English at home. From the roof of our house, we could look out over Juarez, Mexico, a city of 1.4 million.

For the internship, I took a bus back to Albuquerque, where I had a bicycle and a city bus system for getting around. In the pre-dawn dark on Wednesday mornings, I’d depart on the five-hour ride to Albuquerque, and after dark Sunday night I’d get back to El Paso for a couple days home.

Every week going up, the bus pulled into a Border Patrol checkpoint. An agent boarded the bus and went through checking papers. Sometimes some of the passengers were taken away. I never had to show any papers – never even had to show an ID. Week after week, month after month, I got this reminder about my privilege. Each week it made me a little sadder.

It was in the 7th month of the internship, when this had been going on every week for more than half a year, when, after one such episode, I fished my journal out of my bag. This is what I wrote:

80 miles north of El Paso
on I-25 headed for Albuquerque
my bus pulls into a Border Patrol checkpoint.
Weekly, I participate in this ritual.
The green clad agent steps aboard.
"If you are a US citizen, state the city and state of your birth
If you are not, show your documentation."
As far as I can see, the green agent and I
are the only Anglos on this full bus.
Border Patrol makes her way down the aisle,
frowning at papers of varying size, shape, color,
sometimes also asking for separate ID, sometimes not.
My head bows under the world's weight upon this spot.
This posture cues me to whispered prayer.
"May there be an end to invidious distinctions
including those based on whether our mothers,
when we first peaked out from them into the world,
were north or south
of a line
a few politicians and generals drew
more than 150 years ago.
May I find ways to help bring
justice from my unjust privilege.
And blessed be all of us on this bus, including the Border Patrol agent,
as we all struggle to realize the fullness of our humanity."
She gets finally to me on the backmost seat.
This week no one has been hauled off.
I look up from clasped hands in lap
For a flicker our eyes meet.
My voice says, "Richmond, Virginia."
This only is asked of me, no papers, no ID.
Pale skin and the right sort of accent clinch it,
if I will but utter the name of a holy city.
Virginia is much farther away than Mexico.
Of Richmond, I know nothing.
We moved from there when I was two.
Doesn’t matter.
What I'm saying with those two words is:
I am on your team, Agent Green Jump Suit.
Never mind Yahweh's call for a preferential option for the poor.
Never mind Buddha's call to live compassion rather than fear.
Never mind the unitarian commitment to the unity of us all or the universalist commitment to universal community.
"Richmond, Virginia," I say, like Peter saying, “I don’t know him.”
Peter denied his teacher, then saw in one dizzy flash what he had done, saw
What I also now see:
We who long to be merely good,
Are revealed, rotten with complicity with the empire.
The world’s brokenness and mine are one.

That’s what I wrote. Looking back, the weekly bus ride on the way to my internship was one of the important lessons of that internship. It showed me my unfair privilege over and over until I began to see it.

A year later, I was at a detention facility for immigrant minors and met Yency. Yency came up from Honduras in 2004, at age 17, riding the "train of death" through Mexico. The 2009 documentary film "Which Way Home?" chronicles what that's like. This trailer will give you some idea of what Yency experienced:



I hope you'll also take 3 mins for these clips from the film (all different content from the trailer):



For the story of how Yency came to be a part of our family, SEE HERE.

When the final accounting of my life is to be offered, and the question asked, “Did you answer the call of love?” all I will have for an answer is, “sometimes.” That was one of those times. Something “other” landed at my shores – tired and poor and yearning to breathe free, homeless and tempest-tossed – and LoraKim and I were graced to find within ourselves the capacity to say, “send us this one. We will lift what lamp we can.”

There is a fear and a hatred in the land. Fifteen years ago it had already been growing for some time, and since then it has gotten worse. As people of faith we are called to oppose it, to answer the call of love, to know our unjust privilege, and to seek ways to exchange it for the much greater rewards of connection and solidarity and siblinghood.



* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Immigration"
See also
Part 2: Immigration: The Theology, The Facts
Part 3: Immigration, Hospitality, and the Foundation of Liberty

Gender Identity: Continua and Ambiguities

LGBTQ: Language and Justice, part 3

We’ve seen the meaning of “man” and “woman” shift. It used to be that we thought of the biology as the fixed essence. There are two sets of reproductive organs, and someone with one set is a woman and someone with the other set is a man. The social roles might be malleable – the kind of dress and hair styles, the accessorizing, and the shoes, and the sorts of roles and behaviors associated with “man” and “woman” could evolve. These were secondary aspects of the meaning.

We’ve seen a reversal of the primary and secondary meanings. Now the meaning of “man” is primarily to present in the way recognized as a man – to look and dress and act in mannish ways, And the primary meaning of woman is to present as a woman – to look and dress and act in the ways recognized as womanish. The biological equipment is a secondary association – and one that modern medicine has made malleable.

Why did we change how we understood these words? Same reason we changed how we understood "planet"? Because we learned something. In the one case, we learned there were dots of light in the night sky that weren’t stars. In the other case, we’ve learned that there’s something very important about the formation of a gender identity that’s in the brain and might or might not correspond to a given set of reproductive organs.

We’ve also learned that though our language is binary – man, woman – reality is on a spectrum. This has led me to see myself in new ways – brought to light aspects of my self-understanding that had been hidden.

I present as a man. I'm content to dress in the culturally recognized male ways, and walk into the men's bathroom, and all of this is quite easy for me because male is the gender I was assigned at birth. But I don't really care -- or, at least, I'm inclined to suppose that I don't. If, in some bizarre, improbable scenario, I were compelled to present as a woman, I wouldn't regard that as so terrible. It would certainly be a hassle to learn and get used to all the details of clothing and grooming -- and if it included being subject to harassments to which women are subjected, then it would be more than a mere hassle. But it wouldn't feel like a deep and fundamental violation of my basic nature. There's a gender identity continuum, and I'm somewhere in the fuzzy middle, a tad on the male side. That is, that's my best guess. If I actually were compelled to present as a woman for any extended period, I might discover that, in fact, my gender identity matters to me more than I now imagine. (I've reflected on this at: "What If I Don't Have a Gender Identity?")

On the other hand, I'm pretty definite about my sexual orientation: I'm straight. On gender identity, I'd put myself somewhere on the "male" side of the middle third. On sexual orientation, I'd put myself more clearly toward the "straight" end of the spectrum. Other people might be just the reverse: quite definite on their gender identity, but rather fuzzy, bisexual, or "bi-curious" about their sexual orientation. Others might be in the fuzzy middle on both, or very clear about both. We're all somewhere on the gender identity continuum, and somewhere on the sexual orientation continuum.

(It occurs to me that a curious consequence of where I place myself is that, when it comes to prospective mate attraction, other people's gender matters to me more than my own does. This does seem strange, but there it is.)

The LGBTQ movement has brought attention to these continua and, as a result, a lot of people like me have introspected about where we are on them. I've examined myself in ways I otherwise would not have done. All of us -- whether LGBTQ or not -- have been helped by the LGBTQ movement to understand ourselves better, to know better who and what we are.

Even the idea of a continuum may be too . . . well, linear. New York City officially recognizes 31 gender identities and expressions. They don't all fit on a single line going from "strong female identification" to "strong male identification." Here are the 31:

1. Bi-Gendered
2. Cross-Dresser
3. Drag-King
4. Drag-Queen
5. Femme Queen
6. Female-to-Male
7. FTM
8. Gender Bender
9. Genderqueer
10. Male-To-Female
11. MTF
12. Non-Op
13. Hijra
14. Pangender
15. Transexual/Transsexual
16. Trans Person
17. Woman
18. Man
19. Butch
20. Two-Spirit
21. Trans
22. Agender
23. Third Sex
24. Gender Fluid
25. Non-Binary Transgender
26. Androgyne
27. Gender-Gifted
28. Gender Blender
29. Femme
30. Person of Transgender Experience
31. Androgynous

(See article HERE. The flyer from the NYC Commission on Human Rights is HERE.)

I don't know the distinctions between all of these -- what would lead someone to identify as "Male-To-Female" over "MTF," or "Androgyne" over "Androgynous," or "Transsexual" over "Trans Person" or "Trans." The list simply recognizes a number of the terms that are current (Facebook gives 56 options). It's good to be aware of them -- and then let individuals themselves tell you which label feels right for them. While it's generally rude to cross-examine people about their self-labels, the context of the conversation might allow for respectful curiosity. Only a particular androgyne, for instance, can tell you why that term seems to fit them better than androgynous. People get to choose their own self-labels. The list will therefore need continual updating as people seek and find new ways of saying what and who they are.

It can be confusing. And the terrain is constantly shifting. We can’t really get a handle on the right way to think about it – because any way to think about it is one more temporary product of culture and language and power. The urge to find a clear resolution to the ambiguities is an urge best resisted.

Tell me what’s important to you. It might be your sexual identity, your gender identity, your racial identity, or it might not be. Tell, or don’t tell. It's up to you. And I might ask, or not ask. If I do ask, you can answer, or not answer, or say it’s not important to you, or tell me that you really don’t know what category you’re in. This is what answering the call of love looks like: the courage to be in ambiguity and shine a warm embracing light.

There may once have been good reasons for wanting to resolve the ambiguities of sex and sexuality. It may have even felt unbearable "not to know" -- and know instantly -- who was and who was not "automatically" in the category of potential mates for reproduction. With a little practice, though, we can be comfortable not knowing.

Answering the call of love requires neither a rejection of, nor an insistence on, any notion of identity, any definite meaning of a word. Answering the call of love requires the courage to take each ambiguous moment as it is; the courage of justice and the courage to love each person, wherever they are or present on whatever spectrum -- however and whoever he or she or ze or they is or presents.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "LGBTQ: Language and Justice"
See also
Part 1: Words and LGBTQ Justice: Introduction
Part 2: What Changed the Meaning of Marriage

"Oh, The Places You'll Go" Addendum

During this time of graduations and send-offs, Dr. Suess's "Oh, The Places You'll Go" is especially popular. It's also strikingly individualistic. It is addressed to "you," and describes "your" future as one of solitary challenges.

"You're on your own,"

it says on the second page. In the world of the book other people are scarcely alluded to, and when they are, they seem to exist only for the purpose of being bested:

"You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead. . . .
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.
Except when you don't . . . "

There will be bumps and slumps along the way -- and while

"un-slumping yourself is not easily done,"

there's no mention of friendship and the support of other people in helping us through those difficulties.

The illustrations feature "you" in barren cityscapes bereft of other people, heading out of town into an equally uninhabited countryside, and standing all alone at difficult and nonsensical choice points. (The nonsense, of course, is what is most delightful about Seuss, though when combined with prevalent solitude it comes across as rather bleak.)

The book mentions loneliness:

"All Alone! Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something you'll be quite a lot."

This loneliness will be scary, it says, but rather than urging the cultivation of friendships, as would seem natural, the book only says loneliness will make you not want to go on. But "on you will go," anyway.

The reward for your solitary perseverance is that "Kid, you'll move mountains." Why the mountains shouldn't stay where they were isn't addressed. There's no indication that your "success" would do anything to make the world any better.

The "jaunty, upbeat journey...encourages perseverance" (reviewer Robyn Raymer) but not relationship. It's all about success (which is "98 and three-quarters percent guaranteed"), and not about connection.

To make up for this lack, I humbly offer the addendum below. I welcome your further additions in the "Comments" -- in anapestic tetrameter couplets, if possible!

Doctor Seuss laid it out – the good doc got it right.
You will soar through bright days – and you’ll struggle dark nights.

What he failed to mention, no, he said not a word,
is you’re NOT on your own. That would be too absurd.

Life is for friendship, community, love:
The people, the beings, that you most think of.

He said you’d be lonely – that’s probably true.
You’ll feel heartsick, despairing, and anxious, and blue.
These feelings you’ll have tell you something that matters:
That friends make you whole when your heart is in tatters.

Oh, the places you’ll go, you won’t go alone.
(I’m not talking ‘bout Facebook, or swiping right on your phone)
The companions you’ll find, and the love that awaits you --
That's the besty-best part of where this life takes you.

Success feels nice, and failure feels sad –
Of both, you’ll have plenty, the good and the bad.
There’s Community, too – the folks who don’t see you
For mountains you moved, but for just how you be you.

Who you will be is such fun to be scheming.
WHOSE you will be is what gives it all meaning.

What Changed the Meaning of Marriage

LGBTQ: Language and Justice, part 2

Take the word “marriage.” In monogamous cultures – where official recognition extended only to couples -- marriage involved these five tightly-linked features:

1. the creation of a household of two adults,
2. sexual exclusivity to within that household,
3. the production of babies,
4. the raising of the children,
5. and the perpetuation of the parents’ genetic lines.

According to this traditional marriage paradigm, wherever you find any one of those features, you will also find the other four – most of the time. Marriage was our name for the package of those five features.

Critics of same-sex marriage objected to the re-defining of marriage. But the meaning of marriage has been evolving for some time. The previously inextricable features of marriage have been coming apart since long before the 2015 Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges decision required all states to recognize same-sex marriages -- long before 2003, when Massachusetts became the first state to recognize same-sex marriage – and long before 2000 when Vermont created civil unions with the same rights as marriage.

Adults can form a household together without producing or raising babies, and they can both produce and raise children without making a household together. You can have marriage without sex, and sex without marriage (which has always been fairly common but in recent decades has lost much of the stigma it used to have). You can have sex without babies – thanks to birth control, and babies without sex – thanks to in vitro fertilization. By adopting, you can raise children without propagating your genes, and by giving up for adoption, you can propagate your genes without raising children.

Divorce rates, birth control within wedlock, birth rates out of wedlock, adoption, sexless marriages of convenience, marriages of couples beyond child-bearing years, married couples that don’t live together, living-together couples that aren't married, surrogate motherhood and artificial insemination all serve to weaken the once-presumed-to-be-iron-clad connection between marriage and creating a household for the purpose of making and raising genetic children.

Those developments profoundly shifted the meaning of marriage. Once those changes had happened, the additional adjustment of recognizing same-sex marriages was practically nothing, as far as changing the word meaning.

We did have to refine the meaning of "husband" and "wife," and we faced a choice about how to do so. When only opposite-sex marriage was recognized, "husband" meant both "the male partner" AND "the spouse of a woman." "Wife" meant both "the female partner" AND "the spouse of a man." We could have decided that the more central meanings were "spouse of a woman" and "spouse of a man," but for most same-sex couples that felt odd. For the most part, same-sex couples intuited that the person's own gender was a more central meaning of "husband" or "wife" than the spouse's gender. As a result, two married men are both husbands and two married women are both wives -- though a few couples choose to use those labels differently. Some terms we need objective standards for defining -- e.g., "potable water," "Ebola virus," or "income inequality." Other terms don't require objectivity and we can allow individuals or couples to define them for themselves -- e.g., "baseball fan," "happy," "Republican" (or "Democrat") and, now, "husband" and "wife."

We have certainly seen changes in our understanding of the sense of the words lesbian, gay, homosexual. The brilliant French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault, pioneered new ways to think about and understand ourselves. His three volume History of Sexuality revealed how sexuality has been culturally constructed in Western civilization.

In Britain, and much of Europe, prior to the 1880s, Foucault points out, “sodomy” meant any form of sexuality that did not have procreation as its aim. Using birth control – if that had been much of an option in 1880 – would have counted as sodomy. Analysis of the time reveals that the laws were directed against acts, not against a particular type of person. There was no understanding of sexual orientation as an identity – any more than we have an understanding of adulterer as an identity -- or, say, “person who parks in a no parking zone.” It was something some people did, but it wasn’t an identity.

It wasn’t until the later 1800s that “particular acts came to be seen as an expression of an individual’s psyche, or as evidence of inclinations of a certain type of subject” (Sullivan 3). Certain forms of sexuality moved from being seen as horrible acts to which anyone might succumb, to being seen as the expression of a particular type of person. As Sigmund Freud expressed and magnified the new way of thinking, sex was at the root of everything about us. Thus, “the homosexual” became a personage – a life form, a certain type of – Freud said -- degenerate whose entire character, everything about him, was corrupted by his sexuality. That hardly seems to us like progress. Yet, as traumatic and disastrous as that cultural phase was for many, it paved the way for our later attitudes. Once we saw sexual orientation as an identity – subject to treatment rather than criminal or moral judgment -- the ground was laid for the next step. Only then could culture move to seeing that this identity as not harming anyone else. From there to: not harming themselves either. And then: to being tolerated, to being accepted, to being welcomed, to being celebrated as a worthy and beautiful part of the diverse spectrum of human expression. That’s a huge change – a series of huge changes – all within the last 130 years or so.

Sometimes I hear the suggestion that we shouldn’t label people. They’re all people – why do they need to be labeled lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgender or queer? Because people want to be recognized for who they are. Some, perhaps, indeed, don’t want any such label, and if that’s their request, then let’s honor it. For many, however, being lesbian, gay, trans, or bi or queer is a part of their identity, and they don’t want their identity erased. They want to be seen as who they are, and don’t want this crucial aspect of their identity to be treated as irrelevant.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "LBGTQ: Language and Justice"
See also
Part 1: Words and LGBTQ Justice: Introduction
Part 3: Gender Identities: Continua and Ambiguities

Words and LGBTQ Justice: Introduction

LGBTQ: Language and Justice, part 1

Words, words, words. Loving words! Fighting words! Words both reflect and form the world we live in. Just to say something as simple, straightforward and objective as “the cat is on the mat,” is to endorse picking out from the flow of experience certain objects to call “cats” certain objects to call “mats,” and that the relation of “on” is something to which attention is worth paying attention.

The meanings are always changing. I’m going to talk a lot about words today as we celebrate LGBTQ people and their lives among us. If we grow more comfortable with the fact that words are always shifting around on us – sometimes rather slowly and sometimes with dizzying speed – then maybe we can use them better in creating a welcoming world of care and respect.

So let’s look at the nature of words.

Did you ever notice that every time we learn something, it changes the meaning of words? "Learn something,” this might be discovering something about the world. When we discovered that water was H2O, it changed the meaning of water – and of hydrogen and oxygen. These three terms were now interconnected as they hadn’t been before.

“Learn something” can also mean deciding to adapt some way of talking and thinking. Two of my favorite examples are from the history of science. "Planet" originally meant wandering star. Mars is in Capricorn right now, and Venus is in Gemini. In another month or so, Mars will have drifted over to Aries and Venus will be in Cancer. They are stars – but they wander.

Then we learned that Mars and Venus -- and Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn -- aren’t stars. Can we still call them wandering stars if they aren’t stars? We could have said, “OK, we have learned that there are no such things as planets, as wandering stars. Those things we thought were planets aren’t stars, so we have to call them something else.” We didn’t do that. Instead, we changed the definition of the word “planet.” And not just a little. We changed the essence of the definition: "planet" had been a STAR that wandered. We decided we would still call them planets, even though they aren’t stars.

As we learn, we redefine our words to reflect what we know.

Another example is the word “atom.” It means “indivisible – cannot be divided.” Whatever else we might know or learn about those tiny objects, that they could not be divided was their one essential attribute. Then we found out we could split them. Did we say, “Oh, those things aren’t atoms. They aren’t indivisible, so we can’t call them atoms”? No. We did not say that. We kept right on calling them atoms, and just changed our definition – changed our understanding of what the word meant.

I mention these examples to say that sometimes it isn’t just peripheral connotations of words that change – the way that, in my lifetime, the word “clown” changed from being something not at all scary to, now, something that is often scary. No: these are cases where the central essence of the thing was re-defined right out of it.

And no one – as far as I’ve been able to find – cared. If Galileo was ever met with outraged voices saying, “You can’t redefine planet,” I haven’t been able to locate an indication of it. When scientists announced they had split the atom, no one protested they were violating the sanctity of the language. There was some concern that they might have been violating the sanctity of nature, but no worries about language.

Actually, I did happen to witness one case of an objection to a tweak that scientists made in the meaning of a word. The word was “accelerate,” which Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 defined as “To make quick, to hasten, to quicken motion; to give a continual impulse to motion, so as perpetually to increase." But scientists needed the word to refer the rate of change in velocity, whether speeding up or slowing down. My mother, a physics and chemistry professor, posed a question to my sister and me one evening at the dinner table when I was, maybe, age 12. “If you throw a rock into the air, straight up – perfectly vertical – it will reach its topmost point, and then start to come straight down. At that instant at the top, is the rock accelerating?”
My father, an English professor, interjected, "No. For just an instant it's not moving at all."
“At that instant it is stopped,” agreed Mom. “But it’s still accelerating. Acceleration means that its velocity is changing, and the rock’s velocity is changing throughout its trajectory – on the way up and on the way down.”
“No,” said my father, “that is not what 'acceleration' means. You scientists don’t get to change the English language.”

So, OK, yeah, sometimes there’s some objection along the way. Yet the process rolls along -- words change their meaning as we learn more about the things they point to. As we learned more about motion, we saw that all regular changes in velocity were mathematically describable, and we needed the word “accelerate” to refer to all such changes, not just to speeding up. So, my father notwithstanding, scientists changed the language.

When it isn’t just science, but central institutions of society that are at stake, there’s liable to be more uproar over definition shifts.

NEXT: Evolving meanings of "marriage"

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "LGBTQ: Language and Justice"
See also
Part 2: What Changed the Meaning of Marriage
Part 3: Gender Identities: Continua and Ambiguities

The Price We Pay

Who Are These People? part 3

There’s Jeff Foxworthy joke, and he can tell it because he identifies himself as a redneck. He says the last words of most rednecks is “Hey, y’all. Watch this.”

Those who whose vision and courage wholly guides them are essentially saying that, too. "Hey, y'all, watch this." Socrates, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, Michael Servetus, Katherine Vogel, Harriet Tubman, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Che Guevera, Rigoberta Menchu, Mother Teresa, Stephen Biko. Hey y’all. Watch this.

If we do watch -- if we take a careful look at what they are doing and represent -- we are likely to be awakened to new depths and possibilities of human life. We are likely, thus, to be redeemed from a life constrained into more narrow concerns. All our many failures to be all that we wish we were may be atoned for by the knowledge of what we can be. “Lives of Great [ones] all remind us, we can make our lives sublime,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

So, yes, I believe in Universal atonement. The doctrine as I accept it has certainly evolved as the conversation rolled from Ballou's time to ours, but I see an essence there that is the same doctrine. It’s like poetry. The poetry of the early 21st century is different from the poetry of the early 19th century, or of the 17th or 15th centuries, or of the ancient Greeks. Yet we can see the poetic truth in earlier forms and styles. Theology isn’t science. It’s more like poetry. Theology can certainly be informed by science – just as poetry can -- as when our sense of transcendence, of wholeness, and interconnection is triggered by reflections on scientific findings in their very broadest context of meaning. We can see the poetic truth in earlier forms and styles of theology too – if we are willing to lay aside dogmatic axes to grind, stop being literal and superficial, and see through to the deeper truth behind, say, a 19th century account of atonement.

So I read Ballou at two levels, both for the significance he had to his own time and for the meaning he still offers to ours. And the former paves the way for the latter, for Ballou altered the course of Universalism forever. He did so in two ways.

First, he was a unitarian: “unitarian” with a small u, since Unitarians had not yet formed a separate denomination. Saying Ballou was a unitarian means that, in addition to believing in universal salvation, another one of his doctrines just happened to be that the trinity idea was insupportable. Prior to Ballou, Universalists were trinitarian universalists, but Ballou agreed with Unitarians that God was one, not three. Before the 1961 merger of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church in America could happen both sides had to be ready. And the Universalists had been made doctrinally ready a century and a half before by Hosea Ballou.

Ballou’s other major contribution to Universalist thinking was about hell. For prior Universalists, everyone goes to heaven – but not right away. There was a hell, though it was temporary. We endured a purgatory period of punishment of duration proportionate to wickedness -- before passing Go, collecting $200, and advancing to the pearly gates. For a few years Ballou waffled on that question, but he finally came to the view that heaven was immediate for everyone.

This was a big controversy. People within and outside the Universalist church said: if there were no punishment at all, we’d have complete licentiousness. If there is no price to be paid for sin, you will have total moral anarchy. Without fear of retribution, people will sin freely, wild sex, drunken orgies, social decay, “cats and dogs living together” (that’s a line from the movie Ghostbusters).

The story is told that Ballou “was riding the circuit of the New Hampshire hills with a Baptist minister one afternoon. They argued theology as they traveled.”

The Baptist minister said, “If I were a Universalist and feared not the fires of hell, I could hit you over the head, steal your horse and saddle, and ride away, and I’d still go to heaven.”

Ballou replied, “If you were a Universalist, the idea would never occur to you” (Richard Gilbert, Building Your Own Theology: Introduction. 2000. 64)

What Ballou was saying – what we still say – what I learned as a child at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta – is not that we don’t pay the price for our sins. We do. We pay the price for small-souledness. We pay the price for every thoughtless deed that diminishes the light from the spark of divinity within us. We pay the price for not loving ourselves, and our neighbor as our selves. We pay the price for not recognizing kinship, and we pay the price for not accepting difference. We pay the price. But that price is paid here. It is paid in this life. Hell is an earthly phenomenon, and it is those who cannot see beyond themselves and their own narrow self-interests who are imprisoned in the hell of their own making.

This is the teaching that comes to us from father Ballou.

He saw for himself. And he helped our other forebears see for themselves, and they helped intellectual descendants see for themselves, so that we here now can help each other in the ways that we do to see for ourselves. “Our own lives expanding, our gratitude commanding, his deeds have made immortal his days and his years.”

Who are these people? Who are we? We are the inheritors of a long and a deep and a rich tradition of free and thoughtful people making together religious community.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Who Are These People?"
See also
Part 1: Hosea Went Universalist
Part 2: Atoning For Us All

Atoning for Us All

Who Are These People? part 2

Hosea Ballou came to a moment when his resistance to universalist arguments finally crumbled -- a conversion experience that may have started as intellectual and grown into a commitment of the heart, or may have started as an niggling inchoate intuition for which intellectual rationale subsequently developed.

Many Unitarian Universalists today can relate to what that moment must have been like. Most current Unitarian Universalists reached a time in their adult life when they said, “That’s it. There are things I am still struggling with; my quest, my spiritual journey, does continue, but I am a Unitarian Universalist. It’s what I am. My lot is cast with these people.”

For many of these UUs, the very next thought was: “Oh, my, how do I tell my parents?”

Here’s a telling story:

“One Sunday afternoon as young Hosea sat in the corner of the kitchen, Maturin his father asked, ‘What is that book you are reading?’
Hosea answered, ‘A Universalist book,’
‘I cannot allow a Universalist book in my house,’ declared the father.
So Hosea walked out to the woodshed,” and, knowing his father would be watching him, in plain sight hid the book “in the woodpile. After Hosea had gone to bed Maturin went to the woodpile, and discovered that the forbidden book was the Bible.” (Scott 61)

Hosea scrimped and saved his pennies and, at age 19, bought himself one term at Chesterfield Academy.

“He got his money’s worth, absorbing so much from his studies that at the end of the term he was granted a certificate that declared that he was prepared to teach school.” (Scott 61)

In September 1791, at age 20, he attended the General Convention of Universalists in Oxford, Massachusetts. Universalism had gained a foothold in communities on the Atlantic coast, and Hosea had the chance to hear those preachers speak.

Hosea heard the call, took to preaching. In his day there were many preachers who earned most of their living doing something else. Hosea would teach all week and preach on Sunday. His fame spread. He got ordained.

At age 25 some colleagues began to be a little concerned. He showed no signs of getting married. As far as anyone could tell, he had never had a love affair. His colleague universalist minister Caleb Rich explained to Hosea the hazards of an unmarried minister, and even produced a woman for Hosea: Ruth Washburn – amazingly both intelligent and willing. The marriage was long and happy and produced eleven children. (Perhaps eleven was the quota in those days?)

Through his preaching and his writing, Ballou reshaped Universalist doctrine. Ballou’s 1805 book, A Treatise on Atonement, is a major landmark in the development of our thought. His editorship of the Universalist magazine – creatively titled The Universalist Magazine – gave us our identity for more than a generation.

In addition to being Unitarians, we today are Universalists. We are Universalists, walking in Hosea Ballou’s footsteps, not to try to be like him, but to be who we are – to let each of our unique little lights shine. We are Universalists not because we believe what Hosea Ballou, or any other predecessor, believed. We are Universalists because we are the latest participants in the conversation that is Universalism – the conversation that Hosea Ballou reshaped with his powerful ideas. It is as participants in that unbroken dialog, that continuous conversation which in this country extends back 240 years, that we are who we are, not by adherence to any article of belief advanced in that conversation. We are Universalists because we today speak with each other continuing the ongoing conversation in which Ballou in his time so eloquently spoke. And we understand ourselves by understanding how we got here, how this conversation came to constitute us. We learn to see for ourselves, more independently and more confidently, by hearkening to the echoes of voices from our past.

In his Treatise on the Atonement Ballou addressed Christ’s act of atoning for our sins by dying on the cross. The Calvinist doctrine proclaimed limited atonement. Christ’s act atoned for only a few – the great majority of humankind was doomed to hell. This included, the Calvinists felt sure, all the nonCalvinists and even probably most of the Calvinists. Ballou’s point, like the other Universalist preachers, was that Christ’s atonement atoned for us all.

And I can agree with that.

Insofar as Jesus knew what he was risking, and did it anyway, insofar as Jesus saw for himself and dared to speak of what he saw despite the danger, then his brave compassion, which earned him crucifixion, redeems us, all of us. Insofar as Socrates’ saw for himself and refused to shut up about what he saw, insofar as he continued to urge others to also come take a look, then his civil disobedience for the cause of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, which earned him a bowl of hemlock, redeems us, all of us. Insofar as Katherine Vogel in the sixteenth century saw for herself and spoke out saying God was one and not three, insofar as she would not recant, knowing the penalty, then her theology, which earned her fiery death at the stake, redeems us, all of us. For every act of imagination and vision and courage redeems the species that is capable of producing it. By such acts we are lifted out of our petty, small-minded, mean tendencies and we are shown of what we, too, are capable. Such acts speak to us, if we will listen, and they say, “Hey you, human being, look what your humanity has in it to do.”

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Who Are These People?"
See also
Part 1: Hosea Went Universalist
Part 3: The Price We Pay