A Unitarian Christmas

As I've been learning UU history, one of the surprises has been how much Unitarians contributed to the traditions of Christmas in America. Unitarians wrote "Jingle Bells" and "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear". A Unitarian brought the decorated-Christmas-tree tradition to New England. And then there's Charles Dickens, who was so impressed with Channing and Emerson during his American tour that he went home and joined a Unitarian church there.

My December online column for UU World promotes the view that this is more than just a collection of did-you-know items. Christmas got substantially re-imagined in the 19th century, and Unitarians were right in the middle of it. What had been a sectarian birthday-of-the-Christian-savior (with some pagan holdover traditions) became a holiday about universal values like peace, compassion, and renewing the connection to family and friends. And not until then did Christmas really take off as a holiday, surpassing Easter to become "the most wonderful time of the year."

Dickens' A Christmas Carol is an obvious big factor here, but also look at Edmund Sears' "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear". The interesting question is: What came upon a midnight clear? Not the birth of Jesus, but the song of the angels: "Peace on the Earth, good will to men." That's a universal message, not a sectarian Christian message.

The lesson I draw from all this is that UUs shouldn't be shy about celebrating Christmas. It's our holiday as much as anybody else's; we did a lot to make it what it is.

I wanted to put these ideas across in some cute, non-preachy package, so I wrote the column as a tongue-in-cheek present-day Christmas Carol, where a UU learns the true meaning of a Unitarian Christmas. (My favorite character in this is Marley, a humanist who is clearly embarrassed to be a ghost. In Dickens it's Scrooge who is in denial about Marley's ghostliness, but in my version it's Marley.)

Anyway, UU World's site doesn't have a comment feature, so feel free to leave comments here.

How Can You Stand Not Knowing?

I did a sermon of this title on November 23 at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois and then again on December 7 at First Church Unitarian Universalist in Athol, Massachusetts. I was going to put the full text here on the blog, but the Quincy web site does such a good-looking presentation that I might as well just link to it. They also have a podcast version, which I think is the first time I've been podcast (or podcasted or whatever the past tense is).

While I was preparing the sermon, friends would ask me what it was about. I consistently stumbled over the explanation. I referred to it as "my afterlife sermon", which set up the expectation that I was going to give my theory of the afterlife. That's not what it's about -- which is good, since I doubt that such a sermon would be all that meaningful or transformative, either for me or for the people who heard it.

Instead, "How Can You Stand Not Knowing?" explores why an I-don't-know position on the afterlife is so hard to sell as a genuine religious alternative. In general, even people who aren't sure what's going to happen when they die aren't all that eager to join a church that isn't sure either. Why is that? What are they expecting from religion that they don't think a church can deliver without a clear vision of the afterlife?

I start in the readings with two wildly contrasting views:

• MacBeth's. Here the denial of an afterlife leads to the nihilistic conclusion that "Life ... is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
• Forrest Church's. Church is a well-known UU minister who has terminal cancer. He doesn't claim to know what will happen when he dies, and yet he is facing death with an enviable serenity. The reading is from his talk "Love and Death" to the UU General Assembly in June. (In the sermon I also briefly mention another UU who died well without referencing a vision of the afterlife: Randy Pausch, whose "Last Lecture" has been seen by millions.)
  

The main point I make in the sermon is that a person's vision of the afterlife ripples backwards through his or her vision of life. The unreflective, it-goes-without-saying way of life in America today is based on a traditional Heaven-and-Hell vision of the afterlife. If you just drop that afterlife vision and don't change your approach to life, you're going to run into problems, as MacBeth does. But Church can have a more positive approach to death because he has been living with a different view of life.

The bulk of the sermon, then, is spent listing all the things that a Heaven-and-Hell view does for a believer, and describing how an agnostic vision of life has to be different if it's going to achieve comparable results. The key image here is the contrast between a worldview that is supported by guywires attached to Heaven, versus one supported by a foundation dug into the Earth.

Hope you like it. Love to hear your comments.

My Pagan Side Comes Out

Monday my latest column, Assembly of a Lesser God, appeared on the UU World web site. It's about the intentional construction of god-forms, which comes from my pagan/magickal background. That's a side I haven't shown in UU World before, and I'll be interested to see (1) if anybody notices, and (2) what kind of reactions it draws.

I intentionally did the column with a light touch, starting out by talking about Rita the goddess of urban parking. That will allow people to laugh the whole thing off if they need to. But there's a serious idea in there, sort of a post-humanist approach to worship.

The conclusion I've drawn over the years is that evolution, for whatever reason, has made us a believing, worshiping species. And whether we approve of that decision or not, we're stuck working with the mind we have. Belief and worship are powerful tools for organizing thought and behavior. If others get control of those tools, they can make us dance like puppets. But if we're careful, we can learn to pull our own strings.

It's not like I invented this idea. (It's pretty orthodox chaos magick, actually.) But it's not nearly as well-known in UU circles as I think it ought to be. And I suppose it's controversial that there could be a "post-humanist" approach to anything -- an approach that reclaims religion not by ignoring humanist thought, but by using it.

Anyway, I post this here as an attempt to get some more direct, immediate feedback than I can get through UU World. React away.

How I Spent General Assembly

I was on the team that covered GA for the UUA web site. Here are all my links:

GAdding About: My GA journal

And I covered these talks:

A Ministry of Love in Fearful Times -- Forrest Church, Rob Eller Isaacs, and Sarah Lammert. The says it pretty well. We live in a culture of fear, and the ruling party exploits that fear for its own advantage. How should we strike a balance that will let us face the real dangers without letting ourselves be manipulated?

Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow -- Forrest Church. This one is definitely worth your time. Church has terminal cancer and says he is expected to live "months". It's rare to be able to watch a religious leader talk frankly about his own death, and rarer still when that leader deals squarely with the uncertainty of it all. Church isn't telling himself he's going to a better world. He's just going.

Valuing ALL Families -- an Interfaith Community Witness -- multiple presenters. This is a rally across from the Fort Lauderdale City Hall. We're supporting the rights of two types of families usually ignored: families of same-sex couples and families of undocumented immigrants. Both have a particularly hard time in Florida.

Starr King School's President's Lecture -- Eboo Patel and William Sinkford. Patel is the author of Acts of Faith and the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core. He has a Muslim/UU dialog with UUA President William Sinkford and some young UU activists. Patel's method has to do with people telling each other their stories, and so I learned something I never knew about Bill Sinkford: His parents were passing for white when he was born, and he didn't find out he was black until he was 7. My article isn't up on the web yet; I'll update later. It's Event #4045.

A Faith for the Few? Class and Unitarian Universalism -- Mark Harris. Event 5014; another one where my article isn't up yet.


In addition to the stuff I covered and wrote about, I went to the Ware Lecture by Van Jones. Jones is a great speaker; the video is worth watching. (Sinkford does an introduction and then Jones comes on at 4:15.)

Here I Am in Fort Lauderdale

Once again I'm blogging for the UUA web site during the UU General Assembly, which is in the oppressively humid locale of Fort Lauderdale this year.

You can keep up with my adventures here.

Some Assembly Required: Bedford version

A sermon delivered by Doug Muder at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts April 27, 2008

My favorite route home from college used to take me through the small town of Ripley, Illinois. I always smiled when I drove past the sign for the Ripley Church of God. Because every time, the same irreverent phrase went through my mind: Believe it or not.

These days something similar happens whenever I pass an Assembly of God church. You know what phrase pops into my mind then? Some assembly required. I picture a bunch of people with a God kit and an enormous set of directions, trying to figure out how to make the omnipotence fit together with the benevolence.

I suspect that’s not really what they do in Assemblies of God. But it’s not a bad metaphor for what Unitarian Universalists do. Our religion doesn’t come to us as a finished product; some assembly is required. As George Marshall wrote: “Don’t come to a Unitarian Universalist church to be given a religion. Come to develop your own religion.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphors for Unitarian Universalism, because I believe that’s what goes wrong when we try to explain our faith to friends and guests and newcomers. No matter how precisely we define our terms or state our principles, if people arrive at this church with the wrong metaphors and analogies in their heads, they’re not going to make much sense out of what we say.

Take that Marshall quote: develop your own religion. What could that possibly mean? Are you supposed to climb Sinai and meet God face-to-face? Proclaim yourself the Messiah? What?

I think that line works best if you interpret develop as what happens in an old-fashioned darkroom. Expose your religion to the right light and the right catalysts, and gradually its unique image will become clearer and clearer. In that sense, this church is good place to develop your religion.

*

When newcomers arrive with the wrong unconscious metaphors in their heads, they tend to ask yes-or-no questions where both answers are bad. Raise your hand if you’ve heard this one: Can UUs believe anything they want?

How do you answer that? Well, UUs have freedom of belief. No creed. No dogma. So the answer you want to give is “Yes. At this church you can believe anything you want.”

But that doesn’t sound like a serious religion at all, does it? “What do I want to believe today? I think I’ll believe … that I can fly! Wouldn’t that be nice? Yes, I think I’ll believe that today.”

And a newcomer thinks: “Maybe these privileged, white, suburban intellectual types can get away with that kind of religion. But my life is harder than that. I need a real religion, not something whimsical.”

*

So what went wrong there?

The question Can you believe anything you want? assumes a bad analogy. You see, freedom of belief is unfamiliar to people whose only experience is in creed-based religions, so they understand it through an analogy to freedom of speech. And there the either/or makes perfect sense: If no one is telling me what to say, then I can say whatever I want. Up is down. Two plus two is five. I haven’t changed a bit since I turned thirty.

I can say all those things; but I can’t believe them. You see, believing anything you want isn’t a religion, it’s a mental dysfunction.

That’s not what we’re doing. As UUs we have freedom from authority, not freedom from reality. Better to describe it like this: Your life – whether it has been easy or hard or somewhere in between – has taught you certain things. It doesn’t matter whether those things are in some creed or scripture, and it also doesn’t matter whether or not you want to believe them. You just do. And the freedom this church offers is that you can admit that you believe what you really do believe.

*

Here’s a metaphor I remember from growing up as a Christian: Church is where you study for your final exam. Judgment Day is coming. There will be questions. You’ll need answers. So you go to church.

Metaphors like that have a way of shaping your perceptions, even after you think you’ve forgotten them. And people who bring a final exam metaphor to a UU church are going to be confused. Because we don’t give them answers: Is there a God? Is there an afterlife? Should they be worshiping something or praying to somebody? “Those are good questions,” we say. “You should work on them.”

But if a final exam is coming, that response isn’t very helpful. Imagine coming to the cram session for your history final, and the teacher won’t tell you when the Civil War ended. And each student seems to have a different answer: 1820 ... 1865 ... 1910 ... Tuesday. And it doesn’t bother them. They sit there and contradict each other and everybody seems happy.

That’s how we look to a newcomer who’s thinking about a final exam. Afterlife? This person believes in reincarnation. That one expects to see her loved ones in Heaven. Somebody over there thinks death is final. And maybe we argue, but we’re not trying to enforce some agreement. We’re not looking to throw anybody out. We even teach each other’s children. How does that work?

*

We can’t address that kind of confusion purely on an intellectual level, with more precise definitions and clearer principles. If we’re going to communicate what UUism is really like, we need to make the unconscious metaphor explicit and challenge it.

So: If life is a class, what if it’s the kind of class where you work on a project rather than study for an exam? What if your life is something that you’re making, not something you’re going to be quizzed on? That changes everything. Now you don’t need a cram session, you need a workshop.

And if it’s a workshop where people use a lot of different ideas and different techniques – so much the better. When I get stuck, when something’s not working for me, I can wander around the workshop and see a lot of different ways of making a life. Humanists do it this way or that way. Christians have this extra tool. Here’s a little trick I picked up from the Buddhists.

Let’s push that metaphor a little further. If you’re an artist or a craftsman, only two things ultimately matter: First, the product, the actual thing that you’re eventually going to show the world. And second, the experience of making -- your sense of inspiration, the ecstatic feeling you get when you fall into your work and everything starts coming together.

Everything else only matters to the extent that it affects one of those two. For example, your beliefs about your craft have only an instrumental importance. If they don’t affect either the product or your experience of making the product, then who cares about them?

Follow that metaphor back to life. As you’re making your life, the two ultimately important things are: First, what you do, the objective actions that you take in the world. And second, how you experience your life. Are you just getting by, passing the time? Or is your life vibrant, exciting, meaningful?

Your beliefs about life – your theology and your philosophy – are secondary.

Let me say that again, because I think that it’s sufficiently unorthodox to be worth repeating: Theology, by itself, doesn’t matter. You believe in God or you don’t. You believe in an afterlife or you don’t. But the important things are what you do and how you experience it.

*

Now, to a newcomer all that may sound like a religion that I just made up. And certainly not all UUs would agree with everything I just said – that’s OK, they don’t have to. But these ideas are rooted an a long tradition.

The whole point of Universalism was to escape the final exam metaphor: Life is a class that everyone passes. Great Universalists like Hosea Ballou didn’t preach to gain converts for Heaven, but to spread the experience of God’s love here on Earth. One of the most important sermons in Unitarian history, Theodore Parker's “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” placed the whole scaffolding of orthodox theology – the Trinity, the atonement, the infallibility of scripture – in the transient category. What was permanent? The Christian experience: “Religious doctrines and forms will always differ,” Parker said. “But the Christianity holy men feel in the heart, the Christ that is born within us, is always the same thing to each soul that feels it.”

Another famous Unitarian, President John Adams, said, “I do not attach much importance to creeds because I believe he cannot be wrong whose life is right." As far back as the 1600s, Spinoza was picturing a congregation in which each person believes something a little different from his neighbor. He wrote: “Each person – seeing that he is the best judge of his own character – should adopt whatever beliefs he thinks best adapted to strengthen his love of justice.”

Let me sum that up: If you have beliefs that let you live with your eyes open, give you an enthusiasm or a deep satisfaction with your life, and inspire you to live kindly and to be a force for good in the world, then as UUs we are happy for you – whether we share your beliefs or not. We’re happy for you to belong to this church, and we’re happy for you preach from our pulpit, and we’re happy for you to teach our children. Because living comes first; believing is secondary.

*

Let’s do one more newcomer question: Could Hitler be a UU?

Now, the people who ask this question usually aren’t trying to compare us to Hitler. They’re just trying to find our boundaries. How far does our welcome go? Is anything over the line?

The most superficial version of this question is whether Hitler could attend a UU church. And there I think that -- as long as he behaved himself -- the answer is yes. I’m sure having Hitler in the room would make a lot of us uncomfortable. It would make me uncomfortable. But we’d be balancing that discomfort against another idea that comes out of our Universalist heritage: We don’t give up on people. We don’t assume that anyone is irredeemable. The likelihood that a Hitler could turn his life around may be very, very small. But to the extent that Universalists believe in miracles, those are the kinds of miracles we believe in.

The challenging question, though, isn’t “Could Hitler change into a UU?” but “Could Hitler stay the way he was and be a UU?” After all, people with lots of different philosophies can be UUs. There are Christian UUs and Buddhist UUs and atheist UUs. How far can that go? Could there be Nazi UUs?

There I think the answer is no. But explaining why takes us into another set of unfortunate metaphors.

The point of asking about Nazi Unitarians is to find a boundary. The questioner expects us to say “No, that’s over the line.” And then we’ll have to explain where the line is. The underlying metaphor is that a religion is a territory with borders to defend. And if you give the easy answer, if you say that Hitler couldn’t be a UU because he didn’t believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, you’re ratifying that metaphor. You’re turning the Principles into a creed and using them to draw boundaries. But that’s not what the Principles are for. The Principles describe the center of UUism, not its boundaries. And we keep restating our principles because our center moves from one generation to the next.

Eighty years ago, L. B. Fisher was already rejecting the territory metaphor. “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand,” he wrote. “The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all, we move. Or we are asked to state our position. Again, we can only answer that we are not staying to defend any position. We are on the march.”

A related metaphor is that a religion is a kind of museum. Certain divine truths were revealed to our ancestors, told to us by our parents, and now we preserve them unchanged for our children. And if our parents and grandparents have let those truths get corrupted, then we need to reach even further into the past to recover the purity that our faith had during its Golden Age.

That’s not us. Unitarian Universalism never had a Golden Age. We aren’t trying to get back to Eden, or the days of the prophets, or the early Christian community, or even Emerson’s circle of Concord transcendentalists. Because UUism is not a museum, it’s a laboratory. We’re not preserving the truths of our ancestors; we’re using them, experimenting with them, and trying to make them better.

In every generation we’ve had great teachers like William Ellery Channing. And in every following generation we’ve had Samuel Mays to argue with them. That’s our tradition. It’s not a settling, boundary-defining, fortress-building tradition. It’s an evolving tradition, a tradition that keeps moving and changing.

And so, if you think of a religion as a territory with boundaries, Unitarian Universalism is going to confuse you. We’re not a walled city, we’re a caravan. We move; we are on the march. We aren’t defending lines in the sand, we’re traveling. We have all joined the caravan at different points. We carry different baggage. We progress at different speeds. But we’re on the road together, and we’re doing our best to help each other along the way.

Now, caravans don’t have borders. There are scouts running ahead, and some will be followed and some won’t. There are stragglers. There are outliers. Some people will turn in a different direction, and some will wander into the desert and get lost. You can’t draw a line around a caravan and say exactly who’s in and who’s out. But one thing you can say with some certainty is that the people you meet coming the opposite way are not part of the caravan. And while some of them may turn around and decide to join you, the ones that don’t turn around are not joining.

And that’s how I respond to the idea of Nazi UUs. We may not be able to say exactly where this caravan is going, but it has a history, it has a direction. For centuries, for as long as we’ve been on the road, we have been traveling in some very un-Nazi directions: towards greater freedom, more acceptance of difference, less violence, and an ever-wider circle of compassion.

Are those divine, unquestionable truths? Should we keep them safe in our museum. No. We continue to test them. We continue to experiment and improve and elaborate. And we keep moving. But if you want to undo that whole history, you’re not just pointing in a new direction. You’re asking us to go back and start over. It would be a new caravan then. It wouldn’t be Unitarian Universalism.

*

I’d like to close by coming back to a point I touched on earlier: the misperception that there is something whimsical and insubstantial about this faith. That it’s whatever you want. That we make it up fresh every morning, and maybe tomorrow, when you really need it, you won’t find anything at all.

Our history shows that we are anything but insubstantial. Look at the people who have lived and died in this movement. Look at the lives they have led, the causes they have fought for, the people they have helped. Theodore Parker used to preach with a gun in his desk, in case someone came to collect the fugitive slaves he was hiding. This is not a tradition of whimsical, indecisive, insubstantial people.

The illusion that there is nothing here comes from looking for the wrong things. If you come here looking for a museum, you won’t find it; this is a laboratory. If you come looking for answers to the final exam, sorry, we’re working on our projects. If you’re looking for boundaries and fortresses to defend them; we don’t have any. We’re a caravan; we’re on the march. If you’re looking for the Church of Believe It Or Not, look somewhere else. This is the Church of Some Assembly Required.

We are the heirs to a long and proud tradition, but it’s an evolving tradition. We come from a long line of people who refused to accept what they were taught and pass it down unaltered. All the great names in this tradition – Channing, Ballou, Emerson, Parker, and many others – we would dishonor their memory if we turned this caravan around and went back to the places they discovered.

And future generations of Unitarian Universalists would dishonor our memory if they stopped here and built a fortress and started defending its walls. Half a century ago, Brock Chisholm put it like this: “Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.”

And Theodore Parker said, “Progressive development does not end with us.” May that be as true in our generation as it was in his.

Unsung Hero: Arjuna Bhishma

Despite bearing the names of two legendary warriors, Arjuna Bhishma played a key but little-known role in the history of peacemaking.

Orphaned at an early age by a mother who died in childbirth and a father who perished fighting for the British army in Afghanistan, Bhishma was raised in the house of his uncle, who had abandoned the family's martial tradition, converted to a sect of pacifist Jains, and emigrated from India to South Africa.

The uncle saw promise in the young Bhishma, but also much that needed correction: Like his father, the boy was prideful, competitive, and given to violent bursts of temper. Such was the lot of mankind, the uncle believed, but through spiritual discipline a furnace of character could be built to contain those inner fires.

Bhishma was a diligent student. Despite his lack of aptitude for his uncle's pacifistic ways, he worked hard to master them. Inwardly, however, he could not help but question their value. In the world he saw around him, man dominated man and race dominated race. Society seemed predicated on violence and threats of violence. Economies functioned through competition and aggression. Unless entire generations could be taken from their violent, competitive households and raised by stern but peaceful foster parents, what was the hope of it?

In 1893, in response to a dream whose contents he never divulged, a Jain monk chose Bhishma, now in his 20s, to accompany him to the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago. Simultaneously puzzled, curious, and eager to see the fabled World's Fair that surrounded the Parliament, Bhishma accepted this mysterious summons. Leaving his young wife Lakshmi behind, he journeyed to America.

The Parliament was a revelation to Bhishma. Seeing people of all races and creeds conversing respectfully about their beliefs and sharing their practices with one another shook the young man's core assumptions about human nature and its possibilities. Perhaps the ways of peace could flourish in more than just isolated communities. Perhaps, someday, the world itself could be such a community.

And yet ... Bhishma need only look inside to see all forces that led to violence and war. He had not purged or purified his father's aggressive nature, but only contained it with arduous practices. Even if everyone like himself could be taught to do so, would not those forces inevitably, someday, somewhere, break out again? And once they did in even a single man, would not that man's violence break the shells of character that contained the violent natures of other men?

After the Parliament ended, Bhishma spent a day pacing the Chicago lakefront, turning the question over in his mind. He could see no answer. The vision of world peace that the Parliament had shown him seemed fatally unstable. No matter how well bottled, competitiveness and aggression would always break out again, and he saw no way for the contagion to be stopped.

During his wanderings Bhishma entered the Columbian Exposition, the vast White City of the World's Fair, now in its final weeks. He became entranced by a display of horseback riding by a tribe of aboriginal Americans, oddly called "Indians" like himself. Most interesting of all was the demonstration of "counting coup," a practice in which one Indian warrior proved his superior bravery and dexterity by quickly riding up behind an enemy and touching him with a brightly decorated coup stick, then riding away unharmed. In this way, an enemy might be shamed but not injured. It was a contest, but not a fatal one.

Suddenly Bhishma saw that this practice held the seed of a solution to his problem, if only he could develop it and teach it to the modern world. Given the right practices, aggression did not have to stay bottled up, but could be released without the bloodshed that motivated reprisal.

All during the voyage home, he turned this possibility over in his mind. The men of the 19^th (and soon the 20^th) century would not dress up in war paint and ride horses carrying ribboned sticks. What could be the modern equivalent of counting coup?

When he arrived home, his wife Lakshmi had prepared a meal for him: several vegetarian dishes and the pancake-like bread that Indians call nan. He took a nan from the stack and began tearing it into pieces, dipping each one into the vegetables and sauces as he explained his vision to Lakshmi.

Unlike many Indian wives of that era, Lakshmi was both educated and outspoken. Her mother had warned that her sharp tongue would keep her from finding a husband, but Bhishma had been charmed by this young woman who was so different from any other he had met. He had encouraged her to read and learn, and he rejoiced to have a wife who could share in his thinking.

"That," Lakshmi said when her husband finished describing his idea, "is the dumbest idea you've ever had."

Surprised and offended, Bhishma's long-contained temper burst out. The only available object was the nan in his hand, so he threw it at his wife, spraying green bits of palak all over her dress.

But Lakshmi was not easily intimidated into silence. She tore off another piece of nan and threw it back at him, then for good measure, grabbed an entire nan and struck him across the face with it.

Of course the soft bread did no harm, but Bhishma had never before felt so affronted. He grabbed a nan and struck her in return. In seconds they were chasing each other all over their home and whaling away at each other with soft pieces of bread.

Later, neither could remember who was the first to start laughing. But before long the food fight had turned into play rather than battle, and husband and wife eventually collapsed laughing onto the floor, the shredded nan still in their hands.

His long-contained aggression now released, Bhishma had seldom felt so light. As he lay laughing on the hard tiled floor, he realized that he had found what he was looking for. In a state of excitement, he lifted himself up and ran next door to describe his discovery to his neighbor, a young lawyer recently arrived in South Africa from Bombay: Mohandas Gandhi.

War and conflict, Bhishma told his neighbor, could be eliminated if everyone were taught the practice of nan violence.

Gandhi misunderstood completely.

UU World column: Unfinished With Christianity

My latest column "Unfinished With Christianity" is up on the UU World web site. This would be a good place to post comments.

Ego and Western Common Sense

Bertrand Russell once claimed that if he wanted to hear Aristotle's mistakes, all he had to do was listen to his housekeeper. Ideas, he thought, wafted downwards from the culture's most advanced minds, taking centuries or even millennia to settle in among the uneducated.

Lately I've been wondering how long it will take a set of ideas to make a shorter trip: From late 20^th century studies of the brain and its associated cognitive psychology to the larger educated public. Because when educated Western non-specialists talk about consciousness, and in particular about the kinds of questions raised by Eastern philosophies and spiritual practices, we still usually start from a "common sense" that to me seems rooted in a mistake philosophers made during the European Enlightenment of the 1600s.

If I had to sum up the Enlightenment mistake in one line it would be: Self consciousness is primary. Epitomized by Descartes' cogito ergo sum, the Enlightenment thinkers assumed that the rock-bottom of consciousness was the Self. Of course we know ourselves, they thought, and our knowledge of others is indirect, by analogy. I know how I feel when X happens, so maybe other people feel the same way.

One reason they made this mistake was that in those post-Luther but pre-Darwin days, you did not worry about how human consciousness arose: God made it. Consciousness could be a unique human spark completely unrelated to any other species' mental processes. You didn't have to explain how, if self consciousness was primary, a fly's tiny brain could support a sense of self.

But from a contemporary evolutionary perspective, self consciousness seems to arise very late in the game. It comes out of a more primitive form of consciousness that we might call situation consciousness. (All the terminology in this article is made up for the purpose of popularization. I'm not a cognitive scientist myself – just a fan – so I don't know what the standard usage is.) An event is happening and a reaction is called for. Imagine you're in a kitchen and a cookie is on the table. A self-conscious mental process would be something like: "I'm feeling hungry. Maybe I'll eat that cookie." But a situation-conscious process is more like: "Cookie. Eat." The situation-conscious mental field contains no I that has feelings and qualities and motives; there's just a situation and a reaction.

It's easy to imagine comparatively uncomplicated animals like reptiles or birds having some kind of situation consciousness, and maybe not having self consciousness at all. An animal could go a long way without self consciousness.

Built on top of situation consciousness is something we might call motive consciousness. Motive consciousness happens when you start to make a distinction between objects that obey purely physical laws and objects that have some form of volition or freedom. Hunting an animal is different from hunting an apple. If the apple slips out of your hand, it will fall to the ground and lie there; but if a rabbit slips out, it scurries off in some less predictable direction. A boulder rolling down a hill is very different from a tiger bounding down it.

In order to interact more effectively with volitional objects, the mind needs some concepts that describe mental states. Concepts like motive arise together with concepts that describe emotions – not so that we can think about ourselves, but so that we can think about other motivated beings. The rabbit runs a particular way because it is afraid, it wants to escape. A rabbit who hasn't noticed us yet acts completely differently – and an apple doesn't seem to care at all. Like situation consciousness, motive consciousness is entirely external – there's still no I with an interior life, just a world with more complicated objects in it, demanding more complex patterns of reaction.

Motive consciousness can lead to social consciousness. Concepts like friend, enemy, mate, and so on arise. (Not the words, necessarily. I'm using language to point to mental states, not claiming that words are present in the states themselves.) In the beginning, even social consciousness can still be external. The friend is a very complicated object indeed, but it is still part of the situation, something to react to.

At some point, though, you can't model the behavior of others without looking through their eyes back at yourself. Friend is backing away because she sees that I am angry. Her behavior makes no sense without accounting for her assessment of me. So I have to start modeling my inner state as part of the situation. And I can't understand the social roles assigned to others until I understand what social role I myself have been assigned. Am I male or female? Weak or strong? Fast or slow? Admired or despised? That's self consciousness.

When you understand self consciousness in this way, you see how cumbersome it can be. Self consciousness is not something that is just given; it's inherently circular – consciousness turned back on itself, the mind becoming part of its own model. Some aspects of my self-concept I can read directly from sensory cues – I can tell if I'm excited from my breathing or heartbeat. But am I honest? smart? deserving? How do I sense that? I might be jealous or depressed for some while before I notice. Another person might be the center of my awareness for weeks before I realize: I am in love.

And once you see how odd and roundabout and kludgy self-consciousness is, those spiritual quests to overcome ego start to make more sense. Self consciousness has a lot of baggage, a lot of overhead. Sometimes that baggage is worth carrying, but sometimes it isn't and yet you can't put it down. That's what all that zen-of-tennis stuff is about. When a hard serve is coming at you, you don't have time to be a social being that everyone is looking at and forming opinions about. You don't need to picture yourself through the eyes of all viewers or defend yourself against their possible judgments. You need to be back in the most primitive situation consciousness. Ball. Hit. You need to lose yourself.

The point isn't to eliminate ego, or (worse yet) not to form one in the first place. Self consciousness is one of evolution's great gifts. Being able to picture yourself and your inner states in detail can be a major advantage. Self consciousness opens the possibility that you might decide to become a better person. Having the self-awareness to say, "I'm drunk, someone else should drive" might save your life. When you're negotiating what role you will play in your major relationships, you need to be able to predict which promises you can actually keep. People who can't do those things are crippled.

But when you're windmilling your arms to avoid losing your balance and falling down the stairs, you don't need to be aware of the fact that you look silly, or to feel embarrassed about it. That's self consciousness run wild.

So the point of spiritual practice isn't ego elimination, it's ego management: How much me does this situation really require? Less? More? Do I have the skill to turn the me-dial up or down as needed? That's the kind of mastery that a good spiritual practice teaches.

But it's all going to seem very mysterious until you lose that Cartesian assumption that Self is given and stop imagining that self-overcoming is either unnatural or superhuman. Quite the opposite: Self is achieved. Self is hard work. No-Self is a relaxation, not a strain.

Someday soon, I hope, that will be common sense.

Some Assembly Required

A service led by Doug Muder
at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois

February 3, 2008

Like most people who grow up in Quincy and move far away, but keep coming back, I’ve probably driven from here to Chicago every way there is. One of those ways goes through the small town of Ripley, where there used to be a little sign on Highway 24 – I don’t think it’s there any more – directing you to the Ripley Church of God.

One of my character flaws is that I lack a proper sense of reverence. And so, every time I passed that sign, the same irreverent phrase went through my mind: Believe it or not.

Something similar happens whenever I pass an Assembly of God church. You know what phrase pops into my mind then? Some assembly required. I picture a bunch of people with a God kit and an enormous set of directions, trying to figure out how to make the omnipotence fit together with the benevolence.

That’s probably not what they do in Assemblies of God. But it’s not a bad metaphor for what Unitarian Universalists do. Our religion doesn’t come to us as a finished product; some assembly is required. As George Marshall wrote: "Don’t come to a Unitarian Universalist church to be given a religion. Come to develop your own religion."

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphors for Unitarian Universalism. For the last year and a half I’ve been writing a newcomer’s handbook for one of the UUA publishing houses. Trying to look at our faith through the eyes of a stranger, listening to the questions newcomers ask, and thinking about the things they typically misunderstand, has given me a new appreciation for the importance of metaphor. We sometimes think that if we just defined our terms with absolute precision and stated our principles exactly right, then everybody would understand.

But no, they wouldn’t.

Because someone who walks in the door with the wrong metaphor, someone who tries to stuff us into the wrong box … well, they ask the wrong questions. And after you’ve asked the wrong questions, even the best answers might not help you.

*

Here’s an example. When you tell people that Unitarians are free from creeds and dogmas, they inevitably ask – I’m sure you’ve heard this one – “So, can you believe anything you want?” It’s a reasonable question from a certain point of view. Because if nobody is telling you what to believe, well then … you can believe anything you want, right?

Unfortunately for us, it’s one of those have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife questions. Because if we answer “no, you can’t” then it sounds like Unitarianism really does tell people what to believe. But if we say “yes, you can believe anything you want” then our religion sounds whimsical and not very serious at all. “What do I want to believe today? I think I’ll believe … that I can fly!”

A religion like that might be amusing, but how is it going to see you through hard times in your life?

*

When yes and no are both the wrong answer, that’s a clue that some misbegotten metaphor is hiding in the background. What’s hiding in this question is an analogy between freedom of belief and freedom of speech. In speech, the either/or really works: If no one is telling you what to say, then you can say whatever you want. But belief actually doesn’t work that way. I can say whatever I want, but I can’t believe whatever I want. No one can. I want to believe that I haven’t changed a bit since I turned 30. But I can’t.

What Unitarianism offers is freedom from authority, not freedom from reality. Our beliefs don’t come from our wishes, they come from our lives. Your life has taught you certain things. Maybe those things aren’t written down in a book or stated in a creed. Maybe no one has ever given you permission to believe them. But you do. And the freedom of this church is that you can admit that you believe what you really do believe.

*

Here’s a metaphor I remember from growing up in a different religion: Church is where you study for your final exam. Again, there’s a logic to it. Judgment Day is coming. There will be questions. You’ll need answers. So go to church. They'll tell you the answers and keep repeating them until you have them down.

Metaphors have a way of sitting in your unconscious and influencing how you perceive things, even if you don’t realize that you’re using them. And if you come to a Unitarian church with the final-exam metaphor in your head, it’s not going to make much sense. Because we don’t give you the answers: Is there a God? Is there an afterlife? Should you be worshiping something or praying to someone? A Unitarian church will tell you that those are good questions and encourage you to work on them. That’s about what you should expect from a church where you have to develop your own religion.

But what good is a church like that? Imagine coming to the cram session for your history final, and the teacher won’t tell you when the Civil War ended. And the other students give all kinds of different answers: 1820 ... 1865 ... 1910 ... last Thursday. And it doesn’t bother them. They sit there and contradict each other and everybody seems happy.

If you bring the final exam metaphor to a Unitarian church, that’s how it looks. Afterlife? This person believes in reincarnation. That one expects to see her loved ones in Heaven. Somebody over there thinks death is final. But they all seem happy here. They don’t try to get each declared heretics and thrown out. They teach each other’s children. How does that work?

*

You can’t explain it without changing the metaphor. What if life isn’t the kind of class that has a final exam? What if it’s more like an art class? What if your life is a work of art that you are constructing day by day? Picture it. Here we have a work in progress: A Life. By … you.

How’s it going? You want to talk about it? If you get stuck you might wander around the studio and see what the other artists are doing. Their projects are different, but something might strike you. You might pick up something you can use.

And let me show you this other work in progress: Humanity. By – all of us. What do you think? It needs work. It’s still pretty ugly in some places. But I think it’s got potential. You want to pick up some tools and help out?

*

That change in metaphor changes all kinds of things. In art – or in any class where you’re trying to make something – only two things really matter:

• The product. The actual piece of art that the world gets to see.

• Your experience as an artist. The sense of inspiration. The ecstatic feeling you get when you fall into your work and everything starts coming together.

By contrast, your beliefs about art are not nearly so important. Unless they affect the product or your experience, why do they even matter? Imagine walking into an art class where nobody is making anything, they’re just reviewing answers for the multiple-choice final exam. What good is that?

Follow that metaphor back to life. The two really important things are:

• What you do. The objective actions that you take in the world.

• How you experience your life. Are you just getting by, passing the time? Or is your life vibrant, exciting, meaningful? Are you finding that place of fullness that we were meditating about?

Your beliefs about life – your theology and your philosophy – are secondary. They matter to the extent that they affect what you do and how you experience it. But in themselves they aren’t important.

Let me say that again, because I think that it’s sufficiently unorthodox to be worth repeating: Theology, by itself, doesn’t matter. You believe in God or you don’t. You believe in an afterlife or you don’t. But the important things are what you do and how you experience it.

*

Now, to some people this may sound like a religion that I just made up. And certainly not all UUs agree with what I’ve just said. But these ideas are well rooted in our heritage. The whole point of Universalism is that life has no final exam – everybody passes. Great Universalists like Hosea Ballou didn’t preach to gain converts for Heaven, but to spread the experience of God’s love here on Earth. And one of the most important sermons in Unitarian history, Theodore Parker's “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” placed the whole scaffolding of orthodox theology – the Trinity, the atonement, the infallibility of scripture – in the transient category. What was permanent? The Christian experience: “Religious doctrines and forms will always differ,” he said. “But the Christianity holy men feel in the heart, the Christ that is born within us, is always the same thing to each soul that feels it.”

President John Adams, that good Unitarian from First Parish in Quincy, Massachusetts, said, “I do not attach much importance to creeds because I believe he cannot be wrong whose life is right." As far back as the 1600s, Spinoza was picturing a congregation in which each person believes something a little different from his neighbor. He wrote: “Each person – seeing that he is the best judge of his own character – should adopt whatever beliefs he thinks best adapted to strengthen his love of justice.”

To sum up, if you have beliefs that let you live with your eyes open, give you an enthusiasm or a deep satisfaction with your life, and inspire you to live kindly and be a force for good in the world, then as a Unitarian Universalist I am happy for you – whether I agree with you or not. I’m happy for you to belong to my church, and I’m happy for you preach from our pulpit, and I’m happy for you to teach Unitarian children. Because living comes first; believing is secondary.

*

Let’s do one more newcomer question: Could Hitler be a Unitarian?

Now, the people who ask this question usually ask it very nicely. They aren’t comparing us to Hitler. They’re just trying to find our boundaries. Is anything over the line? (Of course, Hitler is dead and even if he were alive he wouldn’t be walking around free. But let’s ignore that and take Hitler as a stand-in for anyone who has done some great evil.)

The most superficial version of this question is whether Hitler could attend a UU church. And there I think that as long as he behaved himself, the answer is yes. I’m sure having Hitler in the room would make a lot of us uncomfortable. It would make me uncomfortable. But we’d be balancing that discomfort against an idea that comes out of our Universalist heritage: We don’t give up on people. We don’t assume that anyone is irredeemable. The likelihood that a Hitler could turn his life around may be very, very small. But to the extent that Universalists believe in miracles, those are the kinds of miracles we believe in.

The challenging question, though, isn’t “Could Hitler change into a Unitarian?” but “Could Hitler stay the way he was and be a Unitarian?” There are, after all, Christian Unitarians and Buddhist Unitarians and atheist Unitarians. Could there be Nazi Unitarians?

There I think the answer is no. But explaining why takes us into another set of unfortunate metaphors.

The point of asking about Nazi Unitarians is to find a boundary. The questioner expects us to say “No, that’s over the line.” And then we’ll have to explain where the line is.

The underlying metaphor is that a religion is a territory with frontiers to be defended.

Eighty years ago, L. B. Fisher was already rejecting this metaphor. “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand,” he wrote. “The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all, we move. Or we are asked to state our position. Again, we can only answer that we are not staying to defend any position. We are on the march.”

A related metaphor is that a religion is a kind of museum. Certain divine truths were revealed to our ancestors, told to us by our parents, and now we preserve them unchanged for our children. And if our parents and grandparents have let those truths get corrupted, then we need to reach even further into the past to recover the purity that our faith had in some earlier age.

That’s not us.

There never was a Golden Age of Unitarianism. We aren’t trying to get back to Eden, or the days of the prophets, or the early Christian community, or the Caliphate, or the Reformation, or even the 1950s. We have had some great teachers in our movement, people like William Ellery Channing and James Luther Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But none of them gets to have the last word. Because as brilliant as they were, their words were human words, just like ours. The conversation goes on.

You see, Unitarianism is not a museum, it’s a laboratory. We’re not preserving the truths of our ancestors; we’re using them, experimenting with them, and trying to make them better.

And Unitarianism is not a walled city whose borders you can trace on a map. It’s a caravan. We move; we are on the march. We aren’t defending lines in the sand, we’re traveling. We have all joined the caravan at different points. We carry different baggage. We progress at different speeds. But we’re on the road together, and we’re doing our best to help each other along the way.

Now, caravans don’t have borders. There are scouts running ahead, and some will be followed and some won’t. There are stragglers. There are outliers. Some people will turn in a different direction, and some will wander into the desert and get lost. You can’t draw a boundary around a caravan and say exactly who’s in and who’s out. But one thing you can say with some certainty is that the people you meet coming the opposite way are not part of the caravan. And while some of them may turn around and decide to join you, the ones that don’t turn around are not joining.

And that’s how I respond to the idea of Nazi Unitarians. We may not be able to say exactly where this caravan is going, but it has a history, it has a direction. For centuries, for as long as we’ve been on the road, we have been traveling in some very un-Nazi directions: towards greater freedom, more acceptance of difference, less violence, and an ever-wider circle of compassion.

Are those divine, unquestionable truths? Not at all. We continue to test them. We continue to experiment and improve and elaborate. And we keep moving. But if you want to undo that whole history, you’re not just pointing in a new direction. You’re asking us to go back and start over. It would be a new caravan then. It wouldn’t be Unitarian Universalism.

*

I’d like to close by coming back to a point I touched on earlier: the misperception that there is something whimsical and insubstantial about this faith. That it’s whatever you want. That we make it up fresh every morning, and maybe tomorrow, when you really need it, you won’t find anything at all.

Our history shows that we are anything but insubstantial. Look at the people who have lived and died in this movement. Look at the lives they have led, the causes they have fought for, the people they have helped. Theodore Parker used to preach with a gun in his desk, in case someone came to collect the fugitive slaves he was hiding. This is not a tradition of whimsical, indecisive, insubstantial people.

The illusion that there is nothing here comes from looking for the wrong things. If you come here looking for a museum, you won’t find it; this is a laboratory. If you come looking for answers to the final exam, sorry, we’re working on our projects. If you’re looking for boundaries and fortresses to defend them; we don’t have any. We’re a caravan; we’re on the march. If you’re looking for the Church of Believe It Or Not, look somewhere else. This is the Church of Some Assembly Required.

We are the heirs to a long and proud tradition, but it’s an evolving tradition. We come from a long line of people who refused to accept what they were taught and pass it down unaltered. All the great names in this tradition – Channing, Ballou, Emerson, Parker, and many others – we would dishonor their memory if we turned this caravan around and went back to the places they discovered.

And future generations of Unitarian Universalists would dishonor our memory if they stopped here and built a fortress and started defending its boundaries. Half a century ago, Brock Chisholm put it like this: “Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.”

And Theodore Parker said, “Progressive development does not end with us.” May that be as true in our generation as it was in his.

Collecting My UU-FAQ

Back in 2005-2006 I did a series of pieces I called the UU-FAQ. It was the beginning of some thinking that I'm trying to put into a book now.

But I got so involved in the book project that I never did what I intended: collect the UU-FAQ links together in one place. Anyway, here they are:

I: Creedless Religion
II: UU Principles
III: Covenants
IV: Hyphenated UUs
V: God, Miracles, and Prayer
VI: Death
VII: Right and Wrong
VIII: Politics.

There's a bunch of stuff I'd probably say differently now, but (in the interest of getting something done) I've decided not to tinker with it. Comments welcome.