TALKS, 1978-93: ANOTHER SAMPLER
Herewith, some excerpts, selected by Rose Hoshiko and Dave Christensen, from the Sunday services over the past fifteen years to supplement those given in the Silver anniversary history.
Contributors in alphabetical order:
A.I. GerhardsteinFaith is something we all need -- whether or not we recognize it as such. We must live our lives on the basis of decisions made with incomplete knowledge. We need some kind of unifying structure on which to organize our lives, a system of values that enables us to select and seek out certain experiences while ignoring or rejecting others. A faith can inspire us to great endeavors and provide solace when our hopes and efforts fail.
At the same time faith is more than the clinging to an unchanging creed or set of dogmatic beliefs. It must be a process of constantly testing our beliefs against the new experiences and problems we encounter in life. Yet we need to strike a balance between a rigid adherence to what might be an error and a facile acceptance of every new idea that comes along.
-- Edward L. Adams, "A Humanist Faith," Jan. 20, 1985, p. 1.
May we serve the cause of building diversity in our churches, our worksites and in our neighborhoods. May we each personally reach out to at least one individual who is racially different from ourselves and build a meaningful relationship with that person. Let's do this in service to our pledge as Unitarians to promote fairness and love: and in service to the duty we owe ourselves to discover the richness of loving diverse people.
-- A.I. Gerhardstein, "Racial Physics: For Every Affirmative Action There Is An Equal And Opposite Reaction," Nov. 15, 1992, p. 7.
What about Unitarian-Universalists? Our denomination for a century and-a-half has always been in the forefront of major social concerns -- public schools, public health, women's rights, children's working conditions, care of the sick in the Civil War, and you can name many more. More recently, there have been civil rights, Viet Nam, nuclear freeze, abortion:: issues that touch very closely to some of the powerful and urgent concerns of our time. Throughout most of this century and-a-half, most other churches were more concerned with traditions and the general idea that you get your rewards in heaven. If one were to characterize us somehow, it would be that we have always been a church of the "here and now."
-- David Christensen, "Liberation Theology and Unitarianism," Aug. 18, 1985, p. 6.
Is Unitarian-Universalism a religion for adults only, adults who have been willing to discover its essence as they mature and raise questions and doubts about the superstitions and beliefs of most other religions, perhaps even of the religion with which they grew up? If it is true that children cannot really be taught UU-ism, we as a denomination or religion have a problem that is akin to religious cults that practice celibacy. If our religion is one that becomes understandable and attractive to mature adults who have dared to question their religious heritage, how can we help our young children understand an open ended, non-dogmatic, constant search approach to religion? Other children with whom our children talk have quite definite answers from the Bible, their parents, their Sunday School teachers, etc. What do we give, or what can we give, to our children to help them understand, and perhaps want to follow, our religious point of view?
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All we can do in the here and now is to be true to ourselves and to our hard won religious beliefs. We can maintain our homes and our family relations as fair and open as possible and encourage our children to talk out their doubts and questions. . . . When they are a bit older . . . they will begin raising basic philosophic questions and find their own place and develop their own religious point of view. . . . We can hope they will evolve a UU point of view which will enrich their lives just as it has all of ours.
-- David Christensen, "Ivory Tower Religion? -- Religion of the Future?" Nov. 20, 1983, pp. 3, 6.
We believe that all adults and young people deserve the opportunity to develop a philosophy of their own, to reflect on their beliefs and to join a religion of their own choice, or not join any. We believe, therefore, that everyone should have a "RELIGION BY CHOICE, NOT BY INHERITANCE!" (Might we say that each of us is "pro-choice" when it comes to religion?!) Because of our creedlessness and openness, some in more fundamental churches may think of us as a band of heretics. But considering that the word "heretic" derives from a Greek word meaning "able to choose," we can accept that label enthusiastically.
--David Christensen, "Revisiting Our Unitarian Principles," Aug. 25, 1991, p. 3.
Now the whole purpose of this talk is to put before you a very simple idea, that we as Unitarians and as human beings set aside every year a day in our services to remind ourselves again of the horrible things of which the mind of man can conceive; the shooting, gassing, and burning in furnaces of twelve million human beings, both Jew and gentile; that we teach our children about it constantly so that they will never forget those who died only because one insane man managed for a few years to get total power in his country, and that he was voted into power by the people who were financed by the military-industrial complex. We must not forget, for when we do, when we forget the lesson of history, history tends to repeat itself.
--Libby Moore, "And What of Our Judeo Heritage?" Dec. 6, 1987, p. 7
. . . [I]t seems to me that even to normal, intelligent people Gandhiji's Satyagraha was a difficult principle to grasp. To most of us it was rather strange. Normally, somebody hits you, you hit right back -- unless he is much bigger than you. You are not supposed to come home crying that Johnny punched you; why didn't you punch him back? This is normal.
But Gandhiji was proposing that if you fight evil with evil, violence with violence, hypocrisy with hypocrisy, and so on, then you are not establishing a better code for conduct. You are no better. You are playing the same game. And you have no moral ground to complain if your opponent is better at it. But a superior morality cannot be a tactic to conquer by different means. It cannot be the goal to defeat the opposition, for victory and defeat are the two poles of the circle of violence, perpetuating the same low ethical order. So, can you turn the other cheek -- not in moral arrogance, not in hatred for the enemy, and not as a ploy, but in genuine faith that love is better and that love is possible. Can you fight without hate?
-- Jnan Bhattacharyya, "Gandhi: Violence and Exiles," Sept. 27, 1992, p. 2.
Humanism accepts with gratitude the heritage that comes from our evolutionary and historical past. Someone said that "we drink from wells we did not build." The goal of each present generation is to enrich the quality of individual and community life and to pass this heritage on to future generations. This earth is our now and future home. An ideal home is where people care about each other, where people learn to love and be loved, where each person has an opportunity to actualize one's potential and become one's own creative self.
-- Noble Kelley, "Religious Humanism," Oct. 6, 1991,p. 3.
We gather in this Fellowship because we know we need one another. We commit ourselves weekly to enrich the relationships between one another. Our deepest commitment, I believe, as Unitarians, is to what Henry Nelson Wieman called Creative Interchange. It is to achieve what Don Campbell spoke of last week -- directness of relationship, unmediated by bigotry or by what he termed "elitism" -- what I would call domination. The human community is central to our faith; we have no assurance of rewards (or punishments) in an afterlife; we have no personal God to whom we can turn when we abandon, or feel abandoned by, our community. Our sacred spaces are created in our relationships with one another.
-- Jane Adams, "Poverty in the Midst of Plenty," Mar. 22, 1987, p. 5.
Some Unitarians think we could get along very well without the concept of God; and for those who retain it, love of God is best manifested through love of our fellows. Others conceive of God wholly in humanistic terms as a set of inclusive ideal ends worthy of guiding our desires and choices and actualizable through our combined efforts and the support of our environment. Still others go along with Henry Nelson Wieman in conceiving God as the creative principle in the universe, not as a being who created the universe in the beginning but rather as the sum total of the forces making possible creative interchange in the world. Yet others, in keeping with William James, think of God as a powerful but finite force for good in the world, one who needs our help if the better is to win out over the worse. For that matter, since Channing, most Unitarians have tended to think of God as the perfection of goodness rather than of omnipotence.
I agree with James, at least to the extent of believing that our concept of God should not be an excuse for disclaiming our responsibility for making the world better and thus turning it all over to the deity. All of these ways of conceiving God are possible within the Unitarian framework along with some more traditional notions, and for me this very fact that Unitarianism does not require firm commitment to any one of these ideas of God is one of its attractions.
-- Lewis Hahn, "Of God, Human Nature, and Sermons," Jan. 25, 1981, p. 5.
I know nothing of personal immortality, yes or no, good or bad. What I am sure of is that both heaven and hell exist all over this world, here and everywhere, and that a cynical expectation that earthly hell is the stronger of the two, the common rule, is an expression of despair. If the only answer and antidote to such evil is the expectation of a new heaven after death, then this is despair written large and ultimate.
--John F. Hayward, "Easter's Incredible Folklore," Mar. 31, 1991, p. 4.The inevitability of death highlights the preciousness of love, reducing everything else to lesser importance. Love alone makes life worth living, in spite of death and because of death. The possibility of love enables a person to accept the inevitability of death. It is better to live, love, and die, than not to have been born at all. If it were not for love and all its beautiful progeny of body , hand and mind, we would die as the beasts die, without question or prior anxiety. If it were not for the certainty of death, we would not appreciate the exquisite value of love, but like the beasts, we would love only in season and for purposes unknown. Thus both love and death have their peculiarly human and religious functions: though each seems to limit and oppose the other, somewhere above the heavens and beneath the earth, they are one, and the mystery of their oneness hints at their mutual support in human life.
-- John F. Hayward, "Encounter With Apollo," Oct. 30, 1983, p. 1.
Over against the urge to participate in community action and its politics is the dead weight of cynicism, the fear that each of us is helpless before the inexorable movement of world suffering and world tragedy. I have felt this kind of depression, this refusal to lay hold of the very exhilaration which participation brings. I have caught myself being secretly satisfied to be nearing the end of my life as I look ahead into a darkening future. I have feared for the young and have seen and heard their own fears for themselves. The task is monumental, the resources limited, and I see no final kingdom of rightousness in sight, either on earth or in heaven.
In seeking political influence directly by serving in public office or indirectly by supporting various charities, political action agencies, or candidates -- all this is like shooting arrows at a very distant target with no assurance that the arrows will ever reach the target, or hit it, or influence the future significantly even if a hit is made. Nevertheless, this long shot is precisely our covenant with American democracy. Our nation was founded upon our willingness to try to change the public sector for the better and not simply to devote all our energies to our own individual private sectors.
-- John F. Hayward, "Investing in Politics," Jan. 10, 1988.
Death is the end. Or -- death is the beginning. Or -- death is a transition from one form of life to another -- "the other door." It seems logical that not all of these can be true, but there is no agreed upon proof that would hallow one and negate the others. Rather, mankind has a number of "perspectives" on death -- assumptions about the ultimate reality that bring about the development of attitudes, which, in turn, influence behavior. So, what is an appropriate attitude toward death is fundamentally a matter of the perspective (or perspectives)from whence it flows. Understanding perspectives, then, is another way of comprehending why people Including ourselves) feel as they do.
Understanding is more than an intellectual process. Academic words can assist understanding, but, they certainly are not the only means of communication.. Consequently, this presentation is founded on the unproven thesis that songs and stories may constitute that extra "something" that allows the perspectives to "live" and be useable. No pair of songs or stories is likely to represent any perspective in its entirety; yet they may be better than none at all.
-- Robert D. Russell, "Some Perspectives on Death -- In Song and Story," Mar. 5, 1989.
We do all we can, offering our children what we believe to have value. We offer universal keys, the seeds of enduring values. It is up to our children to accept and incorporate what they can, when and how they are able. They must activate the germ of growth. They must water their fields with their own sweat and tears. They must stand out in the bright sun and stiff winds themselves. They must also be patient and give themselves whatever time they need. We can offer what we know, but it may not be enough, and it may not fit our children's needs in a changing world. . . . Religious education is slow but noble work and there are never too many sowers. As a parent, I honor and thank each of you for the time and the seeds you offer each of my four children.
--Nancy L.F. Davis, "Sowing Seeds Amidst Stiff Breezes," Oct. 16, 1988, p. 6.
Have good mothers changed? Yes and no. Times have changed. The challenges and dangers our children will face are less likely to be physical survival issues stemming from threats of nature.More likely, they will face difficulties arising from interpersonal differences: the politics of controlling pollution, relieving hunger, oppression, resolving conflicts at every level of the social order. It seems to me, what is best for my children is not to give them all of ME, but to help give them more of themselves; their own ethics and goals and strategies. Since I cannot predict the specific challenges they will face, I cannot prepare them to meet those challenges in a mechanical, lock step fashion. They will need to know how to learn, how to innovate, adapt, how to invent their own solutions, and most definitely, how to get along with fellow humans. And when they face their futures with confidence because they are skilled at clear, caring, creative communication, I will have been a "good enough" mother.
-- Nancy Davis, "On Being a Good Mother in the Modern World," May 10, 1987, p. 3.
What about the theological dimensions of therapy itself? Surely one cannot talk about matters which are most personal and intimate without also talking about matters that are theological. If the search for meaning is as important as, or even more important than, the search for power and pleasure, then even in the therapeutic milieu we are dealing with the search for the ultimate. Whether the therapist acknowledges it, or even chooses to ignore it, the theological dimension is there. Besides, we are all called upon to play God once in awhile, and it is very hard to play God without at least groping for our relationship with the ultimate. To paraphrase John Donne: "No person is an island, entire of itself . . . every person's death diminishes me because I am involved in human kind. Therefore, never ask whose time it is to deal with the ultimate; it may well be yours."
-- Kenneth C. Starbuck, "Reflections of a Therapist," Nov. 4, 1984, p. 4.
I used to be an optimist about the future of American democracy and the human situation in general; but I am not so sure anymore. Maybe I am seeing things more clearly now; maybe I am just running out of steam. Anyway, as I look back over the "nightmare decade" I have to note that in polls taken during that period as many as 52% of the American people, and, of course, most of the American Senate, for many years, not only tolerated McCarthy but actually egged him on. And I cannot forget that when the Senate finally spanked him the reasons given were that he had disregarded Senate rules and had slandered a fellow senator. They could not muster a majority to vote censure on the basis of his having violated basic principles of American democracy and human dignity. Even at that, 22 of his colleagues voted against this mildest form of censure and 36% of the American people, after censure, still approved of McCarthy and his methods.
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Any optimistic assessment of the future of American democracy, which to me ideally means liberty, fraternity and equality in all areas of human activity, must rest upon the provision of an enlightened educational program for all youth directed to the enhancement of both intelligence and fundamental moral values, something that I believe can be done only through dedicated, collective effort in a common school system. That system, together with many other elements of our democratic way of life, is already crippled by that same ultra-conservative group that backed McCarthy. The most optimistic idea I can leave you is that there is yet time to return to sanity and that the younger generation, to whom we must bequeath this and other problems, may do better in these matters than we did.
--Willis Moore, "McCarthyism Then and Now," Aug. 28, 1983.
At present large numbers of people in our society are satisfied neither with the older religiously inspired myths, no matter how interpreted, nor with the philosophical systems constructed to take their place; and they are lonely in the universe. The current feeling of alienation from the universe still reflects the age old suspicion based on human frustrations, hardships, tragedies, and defeats, with only minimal victories, that the universe is unfriendly to humanity; but it is a feeling now powerfully reinforced by considerations drawn from the modern scientific picture of the world. This picture, with all the prestige of science behind it, is of a great material system operating in terms of physical, chemical, mechanical processes, operating, in fact, in such a ruthless, heartless way that it seems a miracle that the tender, fragile process we call life could have appeared at all. Moreover, cold, computer-like thinking tells us that this life, of which we are a small part, is in its totality a sort of accident, of no real cosmic significance, doomed from the start to early and total disappearance from the scene. The logical feeling reaction to such apparent cosmic insignificance is utter and final loneliness.
I suggest a radical sort of naturalism which, I believe, will make possible the first big step in the direction of the desired feeling of kinship with the universe. This naturalism insists, with many mystic poets of the past, that what we are directly aware of in ourselves is the universe as known by a part of itself, perhaps thus, the very essence of it. The world as we know it initially and most intimately is color, taste, odor, tone, pleasure, pain, and so on, and only secondarily and by abstraction the structures depicted by the scientists. It therefore follows that no picture of the universe can be authentic which does not include, perhaps even give ontological priority to, that warm human matrix where all experience begins. What I am proposing is a restructuring of the cosmic picture to make the universe look more like a home, to allow us to see ourselves as in it, and of it, as products of and active participants in its processes, and finally, as elements destined by our nature to return to it,
-- Willis Moore, "Loneliness: Common and Cosmic," Apr. 12, 1981.A widely voiced objection to this naturalistic moral system is that the masses of the people will not take seriously, will feel no commitment to, a moral code that has no all-seeing and all-powerful Deity backing it up. The response here is that the natural consequences of better and worse behavior are as inescapable as the wrath of a supernatural supervisor. Natural sanctions are, in fact, even more rigid, more nearly certain, than those traditionally attributed to God. After all, a Deity, in theory, can occasionally be persuaded to make an exception to His rules, whereas nature cannot.
This objection involving the absence of a Deity in the system, runs a little deeper than noted above. The world picture suggested by naturalism usually omits something human beings seem to need. As so far described, moral rectitude is simply a matter of correct calculation. Now, we seem to want not just to be right, but to experience additionally, appreciation of our behavior as much as a child yearns for the warmth of parental approval. It may be that this felt lack is an unjustified reversion to childhood feelings; or it may be the effect of that lingering remnant of supernaturalism mentioned earlier. I should like to keep open the possibility, however, that in the awareness of what fellow-feeling is at its best we have a window into a nature which is, in some sense, appreciative of action harmonious with itself and capable of a response we can describe as cosmic concern for what human beings do.
-- Willis Moore, "Naturalism and Moral Code," Feb. 18, 1979, p. 7.
When we talk about what the courts do, or don't do, when we talk about the reputation of the law, we are really talking about how courts treat the Bill of Rights and how we react to that treatment. The new zealots, either from a lack of knowledge of history or a fatal commitment to order at all costs, would have us abandon the first eight amendments to the Constitution.
For a security-first society, the problem with the Bill of Rights is that it was written to protect those accused of crimes, not for the generality of society, not even for the victims of crime. There are other laws and rules to protect victims, but there is a growing degree of resentment that the Founders of this nation would protect alleged criminals and not their purported victims.
It is this apparent paradox which gives power-hungry politicians and single-minded, single-issue extremists a chance to build up popular support to tear down the underpinning of our legal system. Because a judge cannot or will not respond to criticism during the pendency of a case, if at all, judges can be, and are, falsely accused of coddling criminals when, in fact, they are doing nothing more than their job in coddling the Constitution.
-- Judge Richard E. Richman, "The Reputation of the Law," Mar. 17, 1985, p. 9.
It may be presumptive for me, a non-theologian and a person who has not read or thought deeply about religion or philosophy, to ask and attempt to answer, "Is abortion a religious question?" I consider my religion to be Humanism, a deep and abiding faith in human beings who, given the right circumstances and education, will do what is right. I am an agnostic who does not believe in a supreme being who directs our lives, nor in any kind of a hereafter. I believe and care deeply for our democratic faith and our democratic constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. Because of my beliefs, I am a Unitarian, which allows me to believe these things and talk about them in a religious context, but it does not sanction my trying to impose my beliefs on others.
-- Lillian Adams, "Is Abortion a Religious Question?", Oct. 1, 1989, p. 1.
. . . [W]hen we update our evolutionary perspective by beginning at the beginning with molecules, we can see possible guidelines. One is that attraction between individuals is more natural than repulsion; amity has a longer evolutionary history than hostility. One other is that we do not come from an unbridled permissiveness. Evolution, when defined by retracement experiments, has been a narrow path, an almost straight and narrow path. Our best opportunity for survival may be to return to that path and its rules for existence. However, like other ideas about morals, this one may be dictated by human conditions, and it needs to be tested with great care rather than accepted easily.
-- S.W. Fox, "Evolution Is From Within," Apr. 7, 1991, p. 4.
I was asked by the Program Committee to speak about the various religious beliefs held by individual Unitarian Universalists. I chose to approach the=e matter historically, which is the only way I could do it that would really interest me and which might, as a consequence, interest you who listen..
As I tried to suggest in the title, I think that living things, including organized groups such as churches, do not remain as they were at their births or inceptions, but constantly change. Changes may be slow or rapid, but are never total. We may try to forget or to ignore our pasts, but we cannot escape them for we carry much of our pasts into the present with us and what we now are is almost entirely determined by what we were..
-- Wilbur McDaniel, "We Are What We Have Become," Sept. 7, 1980., p. 1.