Finding My Religious Home, Becoming a Community of Faith
Rev. Rod Debs
May 4, 2003
Storytime: “The Mouse Trap” A mouse looked through a crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife opening a package; what food might it contain? He was aghast to discover that it was a mouse trap!
Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning, “There is a mouse trap in the house, there is a mouse trap in the house.” The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, “Mr. Mouse, I can tell that this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me; I cannot be bothered by it.”
The mouse turned to the pig and told him, “There is a mouse trap in the house.” “I am so very sorry Mr. Mouse,” sympathized the pig, “but there is nothing I can do about it but pray; be assured that you are in my prayers.” The mouse turned to the cow, who replied, “Like wow, Mr. Mouse, a mouse trap! Am I in grave danger, Duh?” So the mouse returned to the house head down and dejected to face the farmer’s mouse trap alone.
That very night a sound was heard throughout the house, like the sound of a mouse trap catching its prey. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see that it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital. She returned home with a fever.
Now everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient. His wife’s sickness continued so that friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig. The farmer’s wife did not get well, in fact, she died, and so many people came for her funeral. The farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide meat for all of them to eat.
So, the next time you hear that someone else is facing a problem and think that it does not concern you, remember that when the least of us is threatened, we are all at risk.
Message:
Somewhere there are people to whom we can speak with passion
without having the words catch in our throats.
Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us,
eyes will light up as we enter,
voices will celebrate with us
whenever we come into our own power.
Community means strength that joins our strength
to do the work that needs to be done.
Arms to hold us when we falter.
A circle of healing. A circle of friends.
Someplace where we can be free.
–Starhawk
This morning, I would like to introduce myself to you, sharing how I came to Unitarian Universalism as my religious home, sharing how I have grown in Unitarian Universalism, and how this could indeed be the religious home of many people in our community.
Let me begin with an observation: I have often heard Unitarian Universalists say that visiting a UU church felt like coming home. I’ve heard it many times: “I was a UU, and I just didn’t know it.”
I first discovered Unitarian Universalism about twenty years ago. In 1975, I had moved from Ohio, to Binghamton, New York, in order to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. But I found that my program of study, Analytic Metaphysics did not seem to make any difference in the world. So I ended my study and got a factory job.
You know, they say that ministers never do an honest day’s work. Well, for ten years, I did real work for real low pay and no benefits, factory work. After years of philosophy and theology, I decided that I wanted to explore religion that was more than just doctines and beliefs, head-stuff, so during that time I associated myself with a Buddhist group and got involved in daily study and practice of Buddhism, chanting over an hour daily.
In the early 80’s, I was open to look for a new religious home. I was open because my circumstances changed: I had moved into a new community. I had changed jobs. I needed people I could identify with. OK, here’s the rest of the story. I had gotten kicked out of the Buddhist group for not approving their worshipful following of Sensei, criticism that grew out of my study of the Buddhist Scriptures. So I needed a social group. I needed a community of friends.
Think for a minute: Do you remember the first time you heard about Unitarian Universalism? I had been driving past the UU church in Binghamton, New York, for years with absolutely no interest in church. I think someone who knew my political sentiments in the 70’s, during the U.S. involvements in El Salvador, suggested that I might like the people there. Just a seed, a suggestion. Someone knew enough about Unitarian Universalism to plant the idea which I followed up on years later when the time was right for me.
Based on my past religious experience I really had no interest in church. My father was an Evangelical Friends minister, and I had grown up with dual Christian messages of love and judgement. In the holiness tradition of Sunday School, Gospel preaching, summer campmeetings and revivals, from the time I was a child I grew up believing in Jesus’ universal love. Some of you know very well what I experienced in Evangelical Christianity, but some of you may never have heard any of this. We sang:
Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world,
red, brown, yellow, black and white,
they are precious in his sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
That was one aspect of Holiness Christianity. We also sang songs of judgement, blood redemption, and spiritual perfectionism:
Would you be free of your burden of sin?
There’s power in the blood, power in the blood….
Are you washed in the blood,
in the soul-cleansing blood of the lamb?
Are your garments spotless, are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?
For those of you who didn’t grow up with it, I suppose it sounds very strange that being washed in blood could make one spotless clean, white as snow. Yet that’s what we sang! So after many years of Christian fear and guilt, after a Christian college degree in Music Education, I rejected Christianity and decided to study philosophy. I wanted, as my theater prof said, to get the monkey of religion off my back. And more than that, I wanted to be able to stand nose to nose with theologians and not just be an angry young man.
1n 1975, I received my M.A. in Philosophy from Kent State University with my thesis on Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionism. Then I moved to Binghamton, New York, for school, then for work, and I really had no interest in church.
I wonder how many more UU-types are out there who feel the same way I did?! I figured that UUs were just a bunch of atheists who didn’t have the courage to dump their church habit altogether. But a number of changes came together in my life—a change of location, a change of occupation, a change in my personal social life—and I had heard something about UUs, and so I was motivated enough to check it out—despite my disinterest in church as I had experienced it.
Like so many UUs, I felt at home with my first visit. Here I felt that I could bring my honest thought and reason to church, and that was OK! Here was a safe place to be who I really am, my religious sentiments, my critical analysis, my personal uniqueness, my whole self. I felt like I had found my home.
I did experience disillusionment. I came here with certain expectations of religion in general. I thought religion was about belief and that Unitarian Universalists simply have liberal religious beliefs as opposed to conservative beliefs. It was quite a shock to discover that there is a wide range of personal identities among UUs including diverse religious and political views! In my religious home, I wanted everyone to agree with me. I assumed that rational thought would lead everyone to the same rational conclusions as I held about religion and social policy. It took some real growth and change on my part to come to accept that I can feel at home here even when everyone doesn’t think like I do. As Francis David said in the sixteenth century: “We need not think alike to love alike.” As our Statement of Principles in the UUA Bylaws conclude:
“Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision. As free congregations we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.” (UUA Bylaws)
I had no idea that it was actually very important that we have a great diversity of human perspectives, past experiences and religious sentiments. I had to grow into appreciating pluralism!
Back to my story: I joined the UU Church in Binghamton, New York, in 1982, and right away I began preparing for UU ministry. I joined a committee! I became chair of the Social Action Committee. I chaired the Annual Canvass one year. I attended services and took Adult RE classes—that was a winning combination! I joined Toastmasters public speaking club and counted my “um”s. I met my spouse, Jeannette, a long time UU leader, and we started a family.
Then with our two-year-old daughter Katrina, we relocated to Boston, where I was accepted to Boston University School of Theology as a Founders’ Scholar. I needed to become a UU minister, and let me tell you why. Some say it is a “calling.” It was more like a burr under the saddle of my life that I had to deal with. As you know, you can find meaning in UUism without becoming a UU minister. But I had a burr under my saddle, and that burr was Evangelical Christianity.
I didn’t like ministers. I didn’t like religion. I felt a constant discomfort with my experience of “illiberal” church and family and co-workers. My discomfort with illiberality had become a chronic condition. The tension lifted on my very first visit to a UU church. I was home. Here it is OK to use critical reason or intuition. Here I can have questions, doubts and personal insights. Here I can also affirm the positive elements from my unique religious journey.
Today, some of our neighbors and co-workers, our family and in-laws are gripped with the grating images of love and blood. Most (graciously) don’t talk about it. I think many Christians in the U.S. are cultural Christians who believe, but either don’t belong or simply don’t participate in their church community. The burr-under-the-saddle may not be the feeling of most cultural Christians, but I think there is a widespread aversion to church involvement even in the most Christian of communities. People believe in God and may even be saved, but they don’t want to be, as they say, “fanatical” about it.
We UUs who have stepped out of the dominant Christian church culture, at our worst, have been anti-church, giving sharp expression to our disaffection with Christian guilt and fear, as well as with the dogmatic patriarchalism of Christian institutions. At our worst, we are religion-bashers. But at our best, Unitarian Universalist congregations have been healing agents, helping one another distinquish among and separate images of love and blood. At our best we support one another including those who affirm Jesus’ example and teaching of loving kindness as distinct from magical beliefs and blood redemption. We encourage one another in the personal religious journey working out a faith that is more authentic than doctrinal beliefs.
Yet there is something more that Unitarian Universalism offers besides religious authenticity. Unitarian Universalist congregations offer a home where we can also stretch and expand our spiritual imaginations as we support and encourage one another in our different religious perspectives. Finding a religious home for ourselves is not the end of it. Learning to be homelike with others is the rest. This is a community of faith, where we keep faith with one another and grow through affirmation of our plural perspectives.
It seems to me that the growing edge among us UUs is this ability to become more homelike with others as well as enjoying the affirmation of being at home here ourselves. Frankly, the UU congregations that are stuck on themselves, wither and die. It is the growing edges of our religious home, the strange and unnerving growing edges that add the excitement and challenge, and keep us from falling into illiberal liberalism.
Francis David’s saying, “We need not think alike to love alike” is not to be misunderstood as a silly syncretism where UUs simply smile and embrace every fanciful notion like religious dilettantes. Wholeness is not to be found in either extreme of critical rejection nor uncritical acceptance of plural religious sentiments. Wholeness is to be found in authentic engagement, taking seriously both the other and one’s own honest perspectives. Rather than frivolous assent or reactionary rejection of strange religious views, to keep faith with one another means to engage plural perspectives, seriously seeking out what it is in them that is useful or meaningful or true. To be homelike with others we need to seriously engage our diverse religious perspectives without frivolous acceptance and with restraint of our tendencies to discount or pass judgement on what doesn’t seem right to me personally. Becoming a community of faith is the endless growing edge of Unitarian Universalism.
And what is more, each of our individual faith journeys is wrapped up in this effort to keep faith with people of other perspectives, and this is why. We are not of one mind within ourselves. Within each one of us, plural sentiments exist. As we grow to restrain both negative judgement and frivolous assent, engaging the value to be found within others’ views, we are more open-hearted to discover and explore mixed feelings within ourselves. By taking seriously others’ views, I learn to take seriously my own inner diversity, neither pandering to self-serving rationalizations with irresponsible assent, nor rejecting elements of value in my own buried intuitions out of hand. Quaker Parker Palmer said this way:
The greatest gift we receive on the inner journey
is the certain knowledge
that ours is not the only act in town.
The inner journey and the outer journey of keeping our own integrity and keeping faith with one another are a single whole. In its definition, the function of religion is to bind us together in that wholeness, a shared journey of religious exploration. Mark Morrison-Reed wrote:
“The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others…. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.”
So let me close as I began, and though it may make some uncomfortable to hear it, these words are by a pagan, a modern day witch, Starhawk, and I hope that fact does not close us off to the vision she articulates of finding one’s home in a community of faith:
Somewhere there are people to whom we can speak with passion
without having the words catch in our throats.
Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us,
eyes will light up as we enter,
voices will celebrate with us
whenever we come into our own power.
Community means strength that joins our strength
to do the work that needs to be done.
Arms to hold us when we falter.
A circle of healing. A circle of friends.
Someplace where we can be free.
–Starhawk