I'm back from the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in St. Louis. The main thing I did there was write a journal for the official GA web site. (Of course that's not what I claim in the journal, but a journal that says "Today I sat in my room and wrote a journal" wouldn't have had much appeal.)
Like the rest of the GA web site, my journal didn't allow comments. I asked, and they weren't going to be moved on this. The Unitarian Universalist Association is still too afraid that somebody will post some off-the-wall comment, and then somebody elsewhere will say, "Over at the official UUA web site, they say ..."
So my compromise is to recap here what I said there, and you can comment as you like.
My pre-GA post is pretty light, and is mainly noteworthy for my statement of the Law of Temporal Perspective: "Any day sufficiently far in the future seems to contain infinite time." You can also see a picture of me in my short-haired beardless mode. This is the picture that has finally convinced me to have my teeth whitened.
On Wednesday I was still pretty light in my afternoon post. The picture here is from my drive down from my parents' house in Quincy, Illinois. Missouri Highway UU crosses Route 61 on the way to Bowling Green. I took a picture of the exit sign and intentionally misinterpreted it as an exit for that famous Missouri Unitarian landmark, the UU Bowling Green.
The late-night part of the Wednesday post talks about the reception that a group at the UUA had for UU bloggers, and what I wish we had talked about. This thread got picked up over at Philocrites.
Thursday I wrote about the Church of the Larger Fellowship worship service, which rocked. Two great ministers, a congregation that sings loud, and a choir performing part of a new cantata based on the UU Sources.
Friday contains a lot of little stuff. I flash back to the strangeness of worshipping with thousands of UU's at the opening ceremony Wednesday, wander around the Exhibit Hall looking for funny buttons and t-shirts, and point out that if Peter Laarman really wants to start a dialog with the religious right, he should stop calling them "Christofascists". At least in public. And then there's the strange sense of embarrassment that comes from picking up the UU-Men newsletter at their booth and realizing that I wrote the lead article; it's like I'm standing there waiting for somebody to look at my badge and say, "Oh, you're Doug Muder."
By Saturday I was comfortable enough writing the journal to get serious. The first entry is after listening to Bill McKinny talk. He's a UCC minister and the president of the Pacific School of Religion. His talk tied in with the Laarman/Sinkford workshop that I had covered the day before on the regular web site. This issue that struck me, and I think I'll do a separate post on that issue here soon, is what part UU's can play in the formation of a religious left to balance the religious right. The language of a religious left is going to be mostly Christian -- can we shout "Amen!" to that?
Then I posted about the Rebecca Parker workshop, for which I also did the event coverage. This got me rambling about another question that deserves its own post: UU's are such pessimists about where the country is going, but somehow I never hear them take that into account when they plan their personal lives. We can talk about the melting polar icecaps one day and get excited about buying a beachfront vacation home the next. What's up with that?
In my final entry Saturday, I got snarky for the one and only time in the GA Journal -- I don't think Deb Weiner at the UUA has read this far into my journal yet, and I wonder if I'll hear about it when she does. I couldn't take Mary Oliver's Ware Lecture. In my imagination, the committee that invited Oliver is entirely made up of elderly women saying, "Wouldn't that be lovely?" For balance, next year we should invite Michael Jordan.
Sunday I did a survey of what the other UU blogs were saying about GA. I'm sorry if I missed yours. Dan Harper got me going on the strain of being an introvert at GA.
Then I did a wrap-up where I enthused about my GA experience in general, promised to provide an outlet for comments on this blog, and expressed my intention to go to the next GA in Portland.
As I said, I'm sorry I couldn't accept your comments on the official site. Feel free to post them now.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Meet Me in St. Louis
This week I'm at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in St. Louis. I'm blogging my experience of the conference at the conference web site.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Going Home Again
On April 2 I got to do something I had often imagined: I preached in my home town of Quincy, Illinois. I grew up in Quincy, went to its Lutheran grade school from kindergarten through 8th grade, and graduated from its public high school. Quincy is an old Mississippi River port, and I have (at one time or another) walked or bicycled every inch of it.
For its size -- Quincy's population of about 40,000 has been more-or-less steady since the 1840s -- the town has more than its share of American history. Mormon founder Joseph Smith once appeared in court there in front of Judge Stephen Douglas. A few years later, Douglas debated the upstart senate candidate Abraham Lincoln in Washington Park. That day probably wasn't the first time Lincoln applied Jesus' line, "A house divided against itself cannot stand" to slavery. But I doubt many people in the crowd were expecting it.
In spite of the fact that I was preaching at the Unitarian church instead of the Lutheran church I grew up in, a lot of my personal history was represented in the room. My father (celebrating his 84th birthday that day) was making his first visit to a UU church. The congregation applauded him, and he was embarrassed and pleased at the same time. My best friend from the Lutheran grade school was there, as well as two close friends from high school -- and my wife Deb, of course.
Aware that not even Jesus had done well preaching at home, I had fretted about what to say. UU churches vary from liberal Christian to militant atheist, and I didn't have a good reading on this one; I'd only been there once. Plus, I didn't know how many of my old Lutheran friends might show up to wish me well, and I didn't want to gratuitiously offend either them or my father. (That's one of my rules: Never offend people unintentionally.) But I also wanted to say something, and not just mouth some ecumenical mush.
So the question was how to turn the potential diversity of the room into an opportunity rather than a challenge. And that's where my topic came from: If theists and atheists could really talk to each other -- not argue in circles or sit in polite and stony Midwestern silence -- what could they learn?
Meeting at Infinity: What Theists and Atheists Can Learn From Each Other
A talk by Doug Muder at the Unitarian Church of Quincy
Quincy, Illinois
April 2, 2006
Opening Words
The opening words are from the Roman historian Plutarch: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled,it is a fire to be kindled.
by C. S. Lewis
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
from Nathan Gardels' Interview with Salman Rushdie
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
One argument of his with which I've also had sympathy is this: In the Judeo-Christian idea, God created man in his own image and, therefore, they share some characteristics. By contrast, the Koran says God has no human characteristics. It would be demeaning God to say that [God has human characteristics]. We are merely human. He is God.
Ibn Rush'd and others in his time argued that language, too, is a human characteristic. Therefore it is improper - in Koranic terms - to argue that God speaks Arabic or any other language. That God would speak at all would mean he has a mouth and human form. So, Ibn Rush'd said, if God doesn't use human language, then the writing down of the Koran, as received in the human mind from the Angel Gabriel, is itself an act of interpretation.
The original text is itself an act of interpretation.
from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
We instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be unique.
Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.'
Now, you might think this would lead to some amazing discussions, the kind of conversations you can’t hear anywhere else. I don’t know whether you manage to have them here in Quincy or not, but in my experience such conversations are disappointingly rare. Most Unitarians, whether they believe in God or not, have learned to avoid the subject. It just starts arguments, the arguments are always the same, and no one is ever convinced. Why go there?
Last year I heard this riddle: Why do so many UU’s go to divinity school? Because they can’t talk about God in church.
I think this is unfortunate, because theists and atheists experience life differently, and learn some very different lessons from their experiences. Probably any particular bit of wisdom can be learned on either path, but some bits are easier to learn on one path than the other. Which is why I think that theists and atheists could teach each other a lot if they could only sit and talk calmly. Today I hope to give that conversation a nudge by pointing out how much there is to gain and how to avoid some common dead ends.
Theist, Atheist, Agnostic
Before going on, I need to dispose of the word agnostic. An agnostic, literally, is someone who doesn’t know, and claiming to be an agnostic is a polite way to drop out of those dull and unproductive debates. “I don’t know, you work it out among yourselves. Call me when you get it solved.”
But what, exactly, is the agnostic claiming not to know? For example, I’m agnostic about the capital of Bangladesh; I don’t know what it is. I’m agnostic about the existence of intelligent life in nearby solar systems. It’s a good question, but I just don’t know the answer. God is a different kind of question, because the word God means so many different things to different people. Whose God is the agnostic claiming not to know about?
Spinoza, for example, identified God with the natural workings of the universe, and left no room in his theology for miracles or responses to prayer. He didn’t think he was an atheist – his books are full of references to God – but everyone else in the 1600s thought he was. And in order to be agnostic about Spinoza’s God, you’d have to doubt the existence of the universe.
The C. S. Lewis poem points to an even deeper problem. It isn’t just that God has many different meanings, but that any God worth the name is actually beyond human conception. To Lewis, if you have a definition of God, you’re wrong. Because, unlike other words, God doesn’t point to an object or a concept, but rather points outside conceptual systems altogether. It is a word for something beyond words.
That’s why, for example, orthodox Jews aren’t allowed to say the name of God, but rather refer to God as ha Shem, the Name. That practice reminds them that even though they talk about God, they don’t really have a handle on him.
For the purposes of this talk, I’m going to use a pragmatist definition of theism and atheism that should do away with the need for the word agnostic, and so block that way out of the discussion: If you have in your head any concept of God, and if that concept influences your behavior, then you are a functional theist. If not you are a functional atheist.
In other words, in the course of your everyday life, does God come up? Do you make different choices, live differently, or handle your anxieties differently, because you think about God? That test should push most agnostics into one camp or the other. And it may push some self-professed theists or atheists into the opposite camp. A believer whose belief doesn’t affect his life comes out as a functional atheist, and an anti-believer who tries very hard to annoy God – he counts as a functional theist.
One thing I like about this definition is that it makes theism a matter of degree: Some lives are profoundly altered by a belief in God, while others are just influenced a little around the edges. Only those not affected at all count as atheists. But much of what I have to say about theists and atheists also applies to discussions between people who are theists to a greater or lesser extent.
Small Gods
So, assuming that you’re a functional theist, what of value might you learn by talking to a functional atheist?
First, as you try to communicate your concept of God to a doubter, you may notice that it has gotten small. In general, when you only hang around with people who agree with you, your concepts tend to shrink, like clothes that are washed and washed, but never worn. It’s the tension of opposition that keeps a concept stretched out.
The Christian writer Ruth Tucker tells of a friend who took her grandson out to play miniature golf. The sky looked threatening, but the boy announced that he would pray for God to hold back the rain until they had finished. That’s exactly what happened, and both the boy and his grandmother took this as evidence of the power of prayer. But Tucker wonders “if we really want our grandchildren or anyone else to have that image of God – one who holds back the rain for us to play golf. Is God then like a genie in a bottle, ready to do our bidding?”
To hear many fundamentalists tell it, God is a character in a book. He has a personality. He has moods, gets angry, and would do terrible things if cooler heads like Moses didn’t calm him down. And over the years he’s made so many promises and commitments – which he’s incapable of breaking – that he’s completely bound up. If we repent, he has to forgive us. If we believe and are baptized, he’s forced to take us to heaven. We’ve got God in a box. We’re the ones in control.
Compare than tiny notion of God to the one Salman Rushdie described: a God so great that his will and wisdom cannot be captured by any human language, one for whom even the original scripture can only be a human interpretation. The medieval Christian theologian William of Ockham put forward the notion of the radical freedom of God. Omnipotence, he taught, can’t be bound. You can’t bargain with it. You can’t make deals. Whatever you think you’ve been promised, God is free to do as He will.
That’s what a truly large God looks like. If you spend more time with atheists, their skepticism may keep your God from shrinking.
False Security
Atheistic concepts can shrink too. They settle, like the corn flakes that don’t fill up the box any more. Atheists are often too complacent about the potential of science to solve all the mysteries of life.
Sometimes when I hear atheists talk among themselves, it’s as if they’re back in the 1700’s, when Newton had all the basic laws of the universe worked out, and any question could be answered if we only had better instruments and could do longer calculations.
In one sense the optimism of that era was justified: Science has gone on to solve many mysteries. Many phenomena that once could only be explained by God’s whims now are understood as the workings of natural law. But that progress cost Newtonian science some of its most treasured concepts: time, space, and causality. Today’s science shows us a much weirder universe than Newton could have imagined. I doubt he’d be comfortable here.
Einstein lived long enough to be uncomfortable with the next scientific revolution: quantum mechanics, which brought randomness back into physics. “God,” Einstein protested, “doesn’t play dice with the Universe.”
And Bohr is supposed to have answered, “Albert, stop telling God what to do.”
The advance of science leaves no room for complacency. If science does unlock the most basic mysteries of life and human consciousness, it won’t just be a matter of learning a few more facts and tweaking the theory. Our current worldviews, no matter how scientifically sound they seem today, will be shaken to the ground.
If you hang around with believers, you may pick up an attitude of awe and humility in the face of the unknown. And that, I believe, would be healthy.
Depth: the Universal Problem
There’s a lesson here for both sides. Everybody who builds a worldview – whether they center it on God or not – has trouble getting the depth right. Your worldview has to be simple enough that you can function in it, and yet it has to be complicated enough to let you think about the real problems of life. That’s hard.
Knowing how hard it is, when intelligent theists and atheists contemplate each other’s worldviews, the immediate impression on both sides is that the other view must be too shallow. The theist imagines that an atheist world is just meaningless mechanism. The atheist imagines that the theist attributes every mystery to God’s will, and leaves it at that. In fact, everybody has trouble getting the depth right. You might compare notes on that.
Taking Theist Experience Seriously
Another thing theists and atheists might teach each other is the value of individual experience as opposed to abstract ideas. If you talk to believers, you’ll often hear a story like this: “For years I didn’t take religion seriously. And then one day I realized that God loves me and wants me to have a better life. Now, after years of struggle, I have that life.”
The content of the struggle differs from person to person. Maybe this believer had to give up drinking, while that one had to patch up a marriage or stop lying or focus on the kids. Some had to dedicate themselves to a social issue like peace or hunger. They did it for God, and life is better now.
You may object to this way of telling the story. You might point out that they could have done those things anyway, without God. But that’s not how it happened. And you’re never going to convince a person that the events of his own life didn’t happen or aren’t significant.
And so, all those atheist arguments about ideas – about the problem of evil and the contradictions in scripture – they just don’t hit anything. The theist may look bewildered and have no response, but you’re not persuading him.
Taking Atheist Experience Seriously
On the other hand, theists are too quick to project their experiences onto atheists. They imagine the atheist must have a god-sized hole inside him, that he must feel empty and hollow.
What if he doesn’t?
Oh, everyone feels discouraged or disheartened from time to time, but in the long run you’re never going to convince a person with a full life that he actually has an empty one.
And you know the conversion experience? That moment when you found God? How suddenly the world looked new and anything seemed possible? Believers need to understand that everybody gets that experience. It’s not specific to any particular religion. A lot of atheists had that experience when they dropped their concept of God. And so, you can testify until you’re blue in the face, but all you’re doing is reminding the atheist how good it felt to become an atheist.
Both sides need to understand this: Not everyone who disagrees with you is stupid or obstinate or hard-hearted or evil. Some people disagree because they have experiences that don’t fit neatly into your categories. You need to respect that possibility if you’re going to have a productive conversation.
When God Speaks
Nothing separates theists and atheists more than the phenomenon known as the voice of God. At certain peak moments, and sometimes even more often, a believer may feel the presence of a higher intelligence, commune with it, learn something about what it wants, and even hear it as an audible voice.
To the atheist, this is all insanity. Worse, he can take a step back and see many groups of people, all claiming to hear the voice of God, and all wanting to do completely different things. Often they kill each other in riots or wars, and it only seems a matter of time until two sets of believers square off with nuclear weapons.
It may seem like there’s nothing to talk about here.
If you’re an atheist, and one of your friends suddenly knows what God wants him to do – or worse, knows what God wants you to do – it’s a real conversation-stopper. Where can you go from there?
And from the other side, you’ve just had one of the most meaningful experiences of your life, and your atheist friend wants to check you into a mental hospital – what’s to discuss?
If the choices are either that you know the will of God Almighty or that you’ve gone stark raving mad, there isn’t much to discuss. But I want to close by suggesting a third possibility, something that reasonable people on both sides may be able to talk about.
Two Kinds of Epiphany
The word epiphany has two common usages. In religious settings, it means witnessing a manifestation of the divine. Hearing the voice of God, for example, is an epiphany. In secular settings, an epiphany is a sudden realization, an a-ha! or eureka! experience. I want to suggest that these two usages have more in common than we usually think.
Let me explain. My first career was in mathematics, which may be the oldest intellectual tradition on the planet. It goes back at least as far as Egypt and Sumer, and the earliest human writings were probably tally marks to help people count. Whenever you have a tradition like that, where many people work on a common enterprise over centuries, they create structures of thought that are finer and grander than individuals can think up for themselves.
And there are moments – I’ve experienced them myself and seen them in my students – where a piece of that fine, grand tradition explodes into your consciousness. In an instant, after hours of apparently fruitless effort, the student suddenly understands not just what I’m saying or what the book is saying, but what mathematics is saying. Suddenly, the student has his own relationship with mathematics, and may even tell me how I could have expressed the idea better.
I used to think mathematics was unique, but recently I’ve been having the same experience reading legal decisions. At some point, you stop hearing the individual voice of this judge or that one, and start to hear the voice of the Law, the voice of the centuries-old legal tradition that the judge is trying to represent.
Here’s what this secular experience of epiphany feels like to me: I suddenly have thoughts in my head that are bigger and grander and even louder than anything I’ve ever thought on my own.
They sound a little like the voice of God.
Respect versus Reductionism
There’s a danger in observations like this. For generations, unbelievers have trivialized religious experiences by classifying them with similar secular experiences, usually disreputable ones. The visions of saints get lumped together with those of schizophrenics. St. Paul just had an epileptic seizure on the road to Damascus. And so on.
Believers are right to object to this treatment.
But at the same time, they shouldn’t be like William James’ imaginary crab, who is offended to be classified as a crustacean. It is possible to discuss the secular context of religious experiences respectfully. Religious objects may not be just human objects, but they are at least human objects. Cathedrals are at least buildings. Scriptures are at least books. The things we know about buildings and books are relevant to them.
Whatever else a religion may be, it is at the very least a tradition in which many people have been thinking about the same questions for a long time. Like mathematics. Like law. Religions contain some of those fine, grand ideas that are too big for anybody to create alone. And when you study a religion, those ideas can explode into your head in an epiphany.
But which kind? Are those loud, grand thoughts in your head a manifestation of God? Or are you having an a-ha experience about your religion? How would you tell the difference?
The Human Tradition
Admitting the possibility of a secular epiphany with religious content changes both sides of the discussion. It allows the atheist to admit that the believer may sane; that the epiphany may contain deep wisdom;and that it may indeed be one of the most significant experiences of a person’s life.
And if you are a believer, this possibility allows room for interpretation and thought. The higher intelligence you have communed with may or may not be God Almighty. Possibly you have heard the voice of your religious tradition, the collective intelligence of all those ingenious people who have believed before you. That is no small thing.
It does not trivialize your experience to accept that someone else may hear the voice of his religious tradition, or even the voice of his secular tradition. He may also have ideas in his head that are bigger and finer and grander than either of you could have invented.
His revelation may sound different from yours. This is not something to get angry about or try to suppress. This is a marvel. This is a wonder. This is something to sit and contemplate in humility.
When this possibility is acknowledged, suddenly there is more to this business of religion than geniuses and lunatics, more to it than true prophets and false ones. Your tradition and mine may each represent collective intelligences beyond our individual ability to encompass.
And yet God, if there is one, may be greater still. God may be greater than words and voices.
And if we – people of all religions or of no religion – can remain in heartfelt communion, if your revelation and mine can speak and listen to each other, then the streams of our separate traditions can flow together. And we create the possibility that somewhere down that stream, somewhere in the distant future, someone may have an epiphany of the human tradition that encompasses us all.
Closing Words
The closing words are by the British occultist Austin Osman Spare: “In a universe that defies description, all systems of belief can only be false.”
For its size -- Quincy's population of about 40,000 has been more-or-less steady since the 1840s -- the town has more than its share of American history. Mormon founder Joseph Smith once appeared in court there in front of Judge Stephen Douglas. A few years later, Douglas debated the upstart senate candidate Abraham Lincoln in Washington Park. That day probably wasn't the first time Lincoln applied Jesus' line, "A house divided against itself cannot stand" to slavery. But I doubt many people in the crowd were expecting it.
In spite of the fact that I was preaching at the Unitarian church instead of the Lutheran church I grew up in, a lot of my personal history was represented in the room. My father (celebrating his 84th birthday that day) was making his first visit to a UU church. The congregation applauded him, and he was embarrassed and pleased at the same time. My best friend from the Lutheran grade school was there, as well as two close friends from high school -- and my wife Deb, of course.
Aware that not even Jesus had done well preaching at home, I had fretted about what to say. UU churches vary from liberal Christian to militant atheist, and I didn't have a good reading on this one; I'd only been there once. Plus, I didn't know how many of my old Lutheran friends might show up to wish me well, and I didn't want to gratuitiously offend either them or my father. (That's one of my rules: Never offend people unintentionally.) But I also wanted to say something, and not just mouth some ecumenical mush.
So the question was how to turn the potential diversity of the room into an opportunity rather than a challenge. And that's where my topic came from: If theists and atheists could really talk to each other -- not argue in circles or sit in polite and stony Midwestern silence -- what could they learn?
Meeting at Infinity: What Theists and Atheists Can Learn From Each Other
A talk by Doug Muder at the Unitarian Church of Quincy
Quincy, Illinois
April 2, 2006
Opening Words
The opening words are from the Roman historian Plutarch: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled,it is a fire to be kindled.
Readings
A Footnote to All Prayersby C. S. Lewis
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
from Nathan Gardels' Interview with Salman Rushdie
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
One argument of his with which I've also had sympathy is this: In the Judeo-Christian idea, God created man in his own image and, therefore, they share some characteristics. By contrast, the Koran says God has no human characteristics. It would be demeaning God to say that [God has human characteristics]. We are merely human. He is God.
Ibn Rush'd and others in his time argued that language, too, is a human characteristic. Therefore it is improper - in Koranic terms - to argue that God speaks Arabic or any other language. That God would speak at all would mean he has a mouth and human form. So, Ibn Rush'd said, if God doesn't use human language, then the writing down of the Koran, as received in the human mind from the Angel Gabriel, is itself an act of interpretation.
The original text is itself an act of interpretation.
from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
We instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be unique.
Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.'
Sermon
A Unitarian Universalist church is just about the only place in American society where theists and atheists can meet, be open about their beliefs, and compare notes about their experiences. That’s because we don’t have an official doctrine of God – the institution doesn’t tell you what to believe.Now, you might think this would lead to some amazing discussions, the kind of conversations you can’t hear anywhere else. I don’t know whether you manage to have them here in Quincy or not, but in my experience such conversations are disappointingly rare. Most Unitarians, whether they believe in God or not, have learned to avoid the subject. It just starts arguments, the arguments are always the same, and no one is ever convinced. Why go there?
Last year I heard this riddle: Why do so many UU’s go to divinity school? Because they can’t talk about God in church.
I think this is unfortunate, because theists and atheists experience life differently, and learn some very different lessons from their experiences. Probably any particular bit of wisdom can be learned on either path, but some bits are easier to learn on one path than the other. Which is why I think that theists and atheists could teach each other a lot if they could only sit and talk calmly. Today I hope to give that conversation a nudge by pointing out how much there is to gain and how to avoid some common dead ends.
Theist, Atheist, Agnostic
Before going on, I need to dispose of the word agnostic. An agnostic, literally, is someone who doesn’t know, and claiming to be an agnostic is a polite way to drop out of those dull and unproductive debates. “I don’t know, you work it out among yourselves. Call me when you get it solved.”
But what, exactly, is the agnostic claiming not to know? For example, I’m agnostic about the capital of Bangladesh; I don’t know what it is. I’m agnostic about the existence of intelligent life in nearby solar systems. It’s a good question, but I just don’t know the answer. God is a different kind of question, because the word God means so many different things to different people. Whose God is the agnostic claiming not to know about?
Spinoza, for example, identified God with the natural workings of the universe, and left no room in his theology for miracles or responses to prayer. He didn’t think he was an atheist – his books are full of references to God – but everyone else in the 1600s thought he was. And in order to be agnostic about Spinoza’s God, you’d have to doubt the existence of the universe.
The C. S. Lewis poem points to an even deeper problem. It isn’t just that God has many different meanings, but that any God worth the name is actually beyond human conception. To Lewis, if you have a definition of God, you’re wrong. Because, unlike other words, God doesn’t point to an object or a concept, but rather points outside conceptual systems altogether. It is a word for something beyond words.
That’s why, for example, orthodox Jews aren’t allowed to say the name of God, but rather refer to God as ha Shem, the Name. That practice reminds them that even though they talk about God, they don’t really have a handle on him.
For the purposes of this talk, I’m going to use a pragmatist definition of theism and atheism that should do away with the need for the word agnostic, and so block that way out of the discussion: If you have in your head any concept of God, and if that concept influences your behavior, then you are a functional theist. If not you are a functional atheist.
In other words, in the course of your everyday life, does God come up? Do you make different choices, live differently, or handle your anxieties differently, because you think about God? That test should push most agnostics into one camp or the other. And it may push some self-professed theists or atheists into the opposite camp. A believer whose belief doesn’t affect his life comes out as a functional atheist, and an anti-believer who tries very hard to annoy God – he counts as a functional theist.
One thing I like about this definition is that it makes theism a matter of degree: Some lives are profoundly altered by a belief in God, while others are just influenced a little around the edges. Only those not affected at all count as atheists. But much of what I have to say about theists and atheists also applies to discussions between people who are theists to a greater or lesser extent.
Small Gods
So, assuming that you’re a functional theist, what of value might you learn by talking to a functional atheist?
First, as you try to communicate your concept of God to a doubter, you may notice that it has gotten small. In general, when you only hang around with people who agree with you, your concepts tend to shrink, like clothes that are washed and washed, but never worn. It’s the tension of opposition that keeps a concept stretched out.
The Christian writer Ruth Tucker tells of a friend who took her grandson out to play miniature golf. The sky looked threatening, but the boy announced that he would pray for God to hold back the rain until they had finished. That’s exactly what happened, and both the boy and his grandmother took this as evidence of the power of prayer. But Tucker wonders “if we really want our grandchildren or anyone else to have that image of God – one who holds back the rain for us to play golf. Is God then like a genie in a bottle, ready to do our bidding?”
To hear many fundamentalists tell it, God is a character in a book. He has a personality. He has moods, gets angry, and would do terrible things if cooler heads like Moses didn’t calm him down. And over the years he’s made so many promises and commitments – which he’s incapable of breaking – that he’s completely bound up. If we repent, he has to forgive us. If we believe and are baptized, he’s forced to take us to heaven. We’ve got God in a box. We’re the ones in control.
Compare than tiny notion of God to the one Salman Rushdie described: a God so great that his will and wisdom cannot be captured by any human language, one for whom even the original scripture can only be a human interpretation. The medieval Christian theologian William of Ockham put forward the notion of the radical freedom of God. Omnipotence, he taught, can’t be bound. You can’t bargain with it. You can’t make deals. Whatever you think you’ve been promised, God is free to do as He will.
That’s what a truly large God looks like. If you spend more time with atheists, their skepticism may keep your God from shrinking.
False Security
Atheistic concepts can shrink too. They settle, like the corn flakes that don’t fill up the box any more. Atheists are often too complacent about the potential of science to solve all the mysteries of life.
Sometimes when I hear atheists talk among themselves, it’s as if they’re back in the 1700’s, when Newton had all the basic laws of the universe worked out, and any question could be answered if we only had better instruments and could do longer calculations.
In one sense the optimism of that era was justified: Science has gone on to solve many mysteries. Many phenomena that once could only be explained by God’s whims now are understood as the workings of natural law. But that progress cost Newtonian science some of its most treasured concepts: time, space, and causality. Today’s science shows us a much weirder universe than Newton could have imagined. I doubt he’d be comfortable here.
Einstein lived long enough to be uncomfortable with the next scientific revolution: quantum mechanics, which brought randomness back into physics. “God,” Einstein protested, “doesn’t play dice with the Universe.”
And Bohr is supposed to have answered, “Albert, stop telling God what to do.”
The advance of science leaves no room for complacency. If science does unlock the most basic mysteries of life and human consciousness, it won’t just be a matter of learning a few more facts and tweaking the theory. Our current worldviews, no matter how scientifically sound they seem today, will be shaken to the ground.
If you hang around with believers, you may pick up an attitude of awe and humility in the face of the unknown. And that, I believe, would be healthy.
Depth: the Universal Problem
There’s a lesson here for both sides. Everybody who builds a worldview – whether they center it on God or not – has trouble getting the depth right. Your worldview has to be simple enough that you can function in it, and yet it has to be complicated enough to let you think about the real problems of life. That’s hard.
Knowing how hard it is, when intelligent theists and atheists contemplate each other’s worldviews, the immediate impression on both sides is that the other view must be too shallow. The theist imagines that an atheist world is just meaningless mechanism. The atheist imagines that the theist attributes every mystery to God’s will, and leaves it at that. In fact, everybody has trouble getting the depth right. You might compare notes on that.
Taking Theist Experience Seriously
Another thing theists and atheists might teach each other is the value of individual experience as opposed to abstract ideas. If you talk to believers, you’ll often hear a story like this: “For years I didn’t take religion seriously. And then one day I realized that God loves me and wants me to have a better life. Now, after years of struggle, I have that life.”
The content of the struggle differs from person to person. Maybe this believer had to give up drinking, while that one had to patch up a marriage or stop lying or focus on the kids. Some had to dedicate themselves to a social issue like peace or hunger. They did it for God, and life is better now.
You may object to this way of telling the story. You might point out that they could have done those things anyway, without God. But that’s not how it happened. And you’re never going to convince a person that the events of his own life didn’t happen or aren’t significant.
And so, all those atheist arguments about ideas – about the problem of evil and the contradictions in scripture – they just don’t hit anything. The theist may look bewildered and have no response, but you’re not persuading him.
Taking Atheist Experience Seriously
On the other hand, theists are too quick to project their experiences onto atheists. They imagine the atheist must have a god-sized hole inside him, that he must feel empty and hollow.
What if he doesn’t?
Oh, everyone feels discouraged or disheartened from time to time, but in the long run you’re never going to convince a person with a full life that he actually has an empty one.
And you know the conversion experience? That moment when you found God? How suddenly the world looked new and anything seemed possible? Believers need to understand that everybody gets that experience. It’s not specific to any particular religion. A lot of atheists had that experience when they dropped their concept of God. And so, you can testify until you’re blue in the face, but all you’re doing is reminding the atheist how good it felt to become an atheist.
Both sides need to understand this: Not everyone who disagrees with you is stupid or obstinate or hard-hearted or evil. Some people disagree because they have experiences that don’t fit neatly into your categories. You need to respect that possibility if you’re going to have a productive conversation.
When God Speaks
Nothing separates theists and atheists more than the phenomenon known as the voice of God. At certain peak moments, and sometimes even more often, a believer may feel the presence of a higher intelligence, commune with it, learn something about what it wants, and even hear it as an audible voice.
To the atheist, this is all insanity. Worse, he can take a step back and see many groups of people, all claiming to hear the voice of God, and all wanting to do completely different things. Often they kill each other in riots or wars, and it only seems a matter of time until two sets of believers square off with nuclear weapons.
It may seem like there’s nothing to talk about here.
If you’re an atheist, and one of your friends suddenly knows what God wants him to do – or worse, knows what God wants you to do – it’s a real conversation-stopper. Where can you go from there?
And from the other side, you’ve just had one of the most meaningful experiences of your life, and your atheist friend wants to check you into a mental hospital – what’s to discuss?
If the choices are either that you know the will of God Almighty or that you’ve gone stark raving mad, there isn’t much to discuss. But I want to close by suggesting a third possibility, something that reasonable people on both sides may be able to talk about.
Two Kinds of Epiphany
The word epiphany has two common usages. In religious settings, it means witnessing a manifestation of the divine. Hearing the voice of God, for example, is an epiphany. In secular settings, an epiphany is a sudden realization, an a-ha! or eureka! experience. I want to suggest that these two usages have more in common than we usually think.
Let me explain. My first career was in mathematics, which may be the oldest intellectual tradition on the planet. It goes back at least as far as Egypt and Sumer, and the earliest human writings were probably tally marks to help people count. Whenever you have a tradition like that, where many people work on a common enterprise over centuries, they create structures of thought that are finer and grander than individuals can think up for themselves.
And there are moments – I’ve experienced them myself and seen them in my students – where a piece of that fine, grand tradition explodes into your consciousness. In an instant, after hours of apparently fruitless effort, the student suddenly understands not just what I’m saying or what the book is saying, but what mathematics is saying. Suddenly, the student has his own relationship with mathematics, and may even tell me how I could have expressed the idea better.
I used to think mathematics was unique, but recently I’ve been having the same experience reading legal decisions. At some point, you stop hearing the individual voice of this judge or that one, and start to hear the voice of the Law, the voice of the centuries-old legal tradition that the judge is trying to represent.
Here’s what this secular experience of epiphany feels like to me: I suddenly have thoughts in my head that are bigger and grander and even louder than anything I’ve ever thought on my own.
They sound a little like the voice of God.
Respect versus Reductionism
There’s a danger in observations like this. For generations, unbelievers have trivialized religious experiences by classifying them with similar secular experiences, usually disreputable ones. The visions of saints get lumped together with those of schizophrenics. St. Paul just had an epileptic seizure on the road to Damascus. And so on.
Believers are right to object to this treatment.
But at the same time, they shouldn’t be like William James’ imaginary crab, who is offended to be classified as a crustacean. It is possible to discuss the secular context of religious experiences respectfully. Religious objects may not be just human objects, but they are at least human objects. Cathedrals are at least buildings. Scriptures are at least books. The things we know about buildings and books are relevant to them.
Whatever else a religion may be, it is at the very least a tradition in which many people have been thinking about the same questions for a long time. Like mathematics. Like law. Religions contain some of those fine, grand ideas that are too big for anybody to create alone. And when you study a religion, those ideas can explode into your head in an epiphany.
But which kind? Are those loud, grand thoughts in your head a manifestation of God? Or are you having an a-ha experience about your religion? How would you tell the difference?
The Human Tradition
Admitting the possibility of a secular epiphany with religious content changes both sides of the discussion. It allows the atheist to admit that the believer may sane; that the epiphany may contain deep wisdom;and that it may indeed be one of the most significant experiences of a person’s life.
And if you are a believer, this possibility allows room for interpretation and thought. The higher intelligence you have communed with may or may not be God Almighty. Possibly you have heard the voice of your religious tradition, the collective intelligence of all those ingenious people who have believed before you. That is no small thing.
It does not trivialize your experience to accept that someone else may hear the voice of his religious tradition, or even the voice of his secular tradition. He may also have ideas in his head that are bigger and finer and grander than either of you could have invented.
His revelation may sound different from yours. This is not something to get angry about or try to suppress. This is a marvel. This is a wonder. This is something to sit and contemplate in humility.
When this possibility is acknowledged, suddenly there is more to this business of religion than geniuses and lunatics, more to it than true prophets and false ones. Your tradition and mine may each represent collective intelligences beyond our individual ability to encompass.
And yet God, if there is one, may be greater still. God may be greater than words and voices.
And if we – people of all religions or of no religion – can remain in heartfelt communion, if your revelation and mine can speak and listen to each other, then the streams of our separate traditions can flow together. And we create the possibility that somewhere down that stream, somewhere in the distant future, someone may have an epiphany of the human tradition that encompasses us all.
Closing Words
The closing words are by the British occultist Austin Osman Spare: “In a universe that defies description, all systems of belief can only be false.”
Monday, March 20, 2006
Humanist Spirituality: Oxymoron or Authentic Path to Enlightenment?
Yesterday (March 19) I gave a talk on this topic to the Humanist Society of Massachusetts at the Phillips Brooks House at Harvard University. The text seems a bit long for this format (around 6,000 words -- 12 pages printed), so instead I offer this link to the PDF file.
In the talk, I reject the idea that Humanism leaves no room for spirituality, and offer Stoicism as the basis for an authentically Humanist spiritual vocabulary and practice. Along the way, I explode a number of myths: that quantum mechanics is mystical, that the spiritual East stands in opposition to the rational West, that you can’t state a simple criterion for separating good spirituality from bad spirituality, and that Stoicism is necessarily cold.
I invite you all to read the talk and leave comments below.
In the talk, I reject the idea that Humanism leaves no room for spirituality, and offer Stoicism as the basis for an authentically Humanist spiritual vocabulary and practice. Along the way, I explode a number of myths: that quantum mechanics is mystical, that the spiritual East stands in opposition to the rational West, that you can’t state a simple criterion for separating good spirituality from bad spirituality, and that Stoicism is necessarily cold.
I invite you all to read the talk and leave comments below.
Friday, March 03, 2006
The Born-Again Experience: a secular account
Christianity – especially conservative Christianity – can’t be understood without accounting for the born-again experience. The potency of conservative Christianity comes from the life-changing experiences it can induce, not from the reasonability of its theology, the inherent sense of its dogma, or the virtues of its leaders. Someone whose life has been changed for the better will accept whatever worldview promises to maintain and build on that change, and will happily explain away any logical inconsistencies and paper over any institutional flaws.
Liberal religion shoots itself in the foot if it pretends that the born-again experience is just a myth or illusion. To the people who have experienced it, the born-again experience may be the most important single event in their lives. When you tell them it didn’t happen, you’re just telling them that you have no idea what you’re talking about. And if your argument against their religion ignores the experience, it is irrelevent.
Conservative Christian leaders gain credibility because they can explain this powerful experience within a worldview that grants it an appropriate degree of importance. In my opinion they use that credibility in destructive ways, but they’ve earned it. Instead of denying the experience, liberal religion needs a better, cleaner explanation, one not encumbered by theological and social baggage that comes with conservative Christianity.
Such an explanation needs to start with a description of the problem that the born-again experience solves.
The Ego/Shadow problem
Being human, we all have certain character flaws that are fairly obvious to anyone who really knows us. I have them, you have them – everybody does. Those flaws cause us to screw things up. We miss the opportunities to do the good things we might have done. We do bad things that cause other people distress. When we think about those things, we feel guilty, ashamed, and unworthy.
So mostly we don’t think about them. We certainly don’t talk about them. Instead, we develop an Ego complex: a telling of our story in which we are good people and all the bad things that have happened really weren’t that bad or were somebody else’s fault. The Ego may not be the hero of this story, but it certainly is a sympathetic protagonist.
And it’s fictional. It has to be, because (no matter how honest or well-intentioned we are) life is not a story and a person is not a character. When you think of your life as a story and identify with the main character of that story, you’re creating fiction.
That’s the normal human condition: a surface description of ourselves as good people (the Ego), balanced by an unarticulated, mostly unconscious knowledge that we’re making it all up. Some part of our being (maybe a large part) is left out of this I’m-a-good-person story. In Jungian terms, the Shadow.
Not talking about the Shadow doesn’t make it go away. It continues to be part of us, and to do things that the Ego story has a hard time accounting for. The more we need to portray the Ego as totally good, the less convincing our story becomes. The dissonance created when we tell this less-than-credible story is always at least mildly disturbing, and can be downright debilitating.
Some people have a worse case of Ego/Shadow duality than most, especially if their flaws are more obvious or they have less of what it takes to face those flaws consciously. Addicts, for example, tend to have a really bad case. Alcoholics, compulsive gamblers – they cause a lot of pain to the people close to them, and they have no genuine confidence that they can solve their problems by facing up to them. Maintaining the separation between the Ego and the Shadow can start to feel like a survival issue: “If I really admitted how awful I am, what choice would I have but to die? How could I claim I deserve to live?”
And so, the worse my semi-conscious sense of guilt is, the harder I work on maintaining my Ego.
The insufficiency of will power
The idea that I would have to die if I recognized my true faults is part of the same illusion that formed the Ego to begin with. The Ego, basically, is an explanation of why I deserve to live. But life isn’t something I earn, it’s just something I have. (The Christian notion that life is a gift of God may or may not be true, but it works psychologically.) Deserving and living don’t even play on the same stage. Deserving is a judgment about the past, while living happens in the present. Deserving is about our story, living about ourselves. No matter what you’ve done up to now, you could simply live in this moment and choose to do the best with it that you can.
But the conscious decision “I’m going to live in the moment and do the best I can” does not by itself heal the Ego/Shadow duality. It’s like deciding “I’m going to lose thirty pounds” or “I’m going to quit gambling.” It sounds great, and you may feel completely sincere when you say it, but who is really making that pledge – the complete human being who is you, or the fictional main character of your Ego story? Is this an expression of your true will, or just dialog?
In most cases it’s dialog. The Ego is pledging to defeat the Shadow once and for all, not to heal rift that created the duality to begin with. In order to work, a decision like this has to come from your whole being; and if your whole being is split, how can the two halves get together to make a decision?
In order to heal the split, you have to step outside your Ego. And since you consciously believe that your Ego is your Self, it seems like you have to look outside yourself for salvation.
The power of love
The easiest way to overcome the Ego/Shadow duality is through healing love. Even if I can't acknowledge the existence of my Shadow and face my faults directly, I may still be able to face a reflection of those issues in someone else’s eyes. If I can realize that some other person loves me, and if I can accept that they see my flaws, then I can begin to acknowledge my Shadow through them. The healing begins, then, as a process of projection: I accept the possibility that my flaws do not annihilate my worthiness, because I can imagine both of them existing together in the mind of the person who loves me.
In order for this process to work, the lover has to have certain qualities – or at least I have to believe s/he does. (The actual healing, naturally, has to happen inside me, not inside the other person. And so the key facts are in my imagination of the other person, not in the actual person.)
Now imagine the perfect healing love. Take Love, Insight, and Worth and extend them to infinity. What do you get?
Jesus.
In the Christian worldview, Jesus is the most worthy being in the Universe: the only begotten Son of God. He doesn’t just have insight, he’s omniscient: He sees and knows and remembers everything about me – even things I don’t recognize or remember myself. And he expressed his love in the most tangible way possible: He chose to suffer and die so that I wouldn’t have to spend eternity in Hell.
If you can imagine those three properties fully, the born-again experience happens. It can happen in an instant, like a thunderclap: Your Ego and Shadow both get projected onto a perfect being who unifies them. By looking at yourself through the eyes of Jesus, you can see yourself as both flawed and worthy. You can acknowledge the guilt of your past without being overwhelmed by it in the present. And you can face the future as a flawed-but-worthy person, taking one step at a time.
Your sins, in other words, are forgiven.
But is it real?
At this point, the Believer and the Unbeliever start an argument. The Unbeliever says: “This can’t work because Jesus isn't real. I mean, maybe there was a man named Jesus who lived a long time ago, and maybe he even was crucified like the story says. But he didn’t rise from the dead, so he can’t love you because he’s not alive. Moreover, he’s not the only begotten Son of God and isn’t omniscient. So this whole thing can’t work because it’s based on nonsense.”
And the Believer counters: “But it did work. My sins are forgiven and I have a new life. So Jesus must have risen from the dead and be alive today. He must be the omniscient Son of God. It must all be true.”
Both of them miss an important point: The Ego and the Shadow are fictional characters. They exist in the imagination. The rift between them exists in the imagination. The healing really happens, but the place where it really happens is in the imagination. The Believer has been healed by imagining a being who has the three qualities of love, insight, and worthiness in infinite quantities. Whether such a being really exists may still be an open question, but the healing would have worked regardless.
Two challenges
And so, I believe I have explained the born-again experience without explaining it away. The Unbeliever is still faced with a challenge: In some situations, believing only what is provable may not be the most effective way to live; you may need to take an imaginative leap in order to be healed. The Believer who has taken such a leap may have made it to a desirable place, and it’s not obvious how you can follow.
But the Believer is also faced with a challenge: The explanation given by some particular sect or minister is not the only one possible, and not the only one that accounts for your experience. Your healing is real, your new life is real, and you are correct to think of the experience as one of the most important things that ever happened to you. But that doesn’t mean you have to accept all the theological and institutional baggage that comes with fundamentalist or pentecostal Christianity.
Liberal religion shoots itself in the foot if it pretends that the born-again experience is just a myth or illusion. To the people who have experienced it, the born-again experience may be the most important single event in their lives. When you tell them it didn’t happen, you’re just telling them that you have no idea what you’re talking about. And if your argument against their religion ignores the experience, it is irrelevent.
Conservative Christian leaders gain credibility because they can explain this powerful experience within a worldview that grants it an appropriate degree of importance. In my opinion they use that credibility in destructive ways, but they’ve earned it. Instead of denying the experience, liberal religion needs a better, cleaner explanation, one not encumbered by theological and social baggage that comes with conservative Christianity.
Such an explanation needs to start with a description of the problem that the born-again experience solves.
The Ego/Shadow problem
Being human, we all have certain character flaws that are fairly obvious to anyone who really knows us. I have them, you have them – everybody does. Those flaws cause us to screw things up. We miss the opportunities to do the good things we might have done. We do bad things that cause other people distress. When we think about those things, we feel guilty, ashamed, and unworthy.
So mostly we don’t think about them. We certainly don’t talk about them. Instead, we develop an Ego complex: a telling of our story in which we are good people and all the bad things that have happened really weren’t that bad or were somebody else’s fault. The Ego may not be the hero of this story, but it certainly is a sympathetic protagonist.
And it’s fictional. It has to be, because (no matter how honest or well-intentioned we are) life is not a story and a person is not a character. When you think of your life as a story and identify with the main character of that story, you’re creating fiction.
That’s the normal human condition: a surface description of ourselves as good people (the Ego), balanced by an unarticulated, mostly unconscious knowledge that we’re making it all up. Some part of our being (maybe a large part) is left out of this I’m-a-good-person story. In Jungian terms, the Shadow.
Not talking about the Shadow doesn’t make it go away. It continues to be part of us, and to do things that the Ego story has a hard time accounting for. The more we need to portray the Ego as totally good, the less convincing our story becomes. The dissonance created when we tell this less-than-credible story is always at least mildly disturbing, and can be downright debilitating.
Some people have a worse case of Ego/Shadow duality than most, especially if their flaws are more obvious or they have less of what it takes to face those flaws consciously. Addicts, for example, tend to have a really bad case. Alcoholics, compulsive gamblers – they cause a lot of pain to the people close to them, and they have no genuine confidence that they can solve their problems by facing up to them. Maintaining the separation between the Ego and the Shadow can start to feel like a survival issue: “If I really admitted how awful I am, what choice would I have but to die? How could I claim I deserve to live?”
And so, the worse my semi-conscious sense of guilt is, the harder I work on maintaining my Ego.
The insufficiency of will power
The idea that I would have to die if I recognized my true faults is part of the same illusion that formed the Ego to begin with. The Ego, basically, is an explanation of why I deserve to live. But life isn’t something I earn, it’s just something I have. (The Christian notion that life is a gift of God may or may not be true, but it works psychologically.) Deserving and living don’t even play on the same stage. Deserving is a judgment about the past, while living happens in the present. Deserving is about our story, living about ourselves. No matter what you’ve done up to now, you could simply live in this moment and choose to do the best with it that you can.
But the conscious decision “I’m going to live in the moment and do the best I can” does not by itself heal the Ego/Shadow duality. It’s like deciding “I’m going to lose thirty pounds” or “I’m going to quit gambling.” It sounds great, and you may feel completely sincere when you say it, but who is really making that pledge – the complete human being who is you, or the fictional main character of your Ego story? Is this an expression of your true will, or just dialog?
In most cases it’s dialog. The Ego is pledging to defeat the Shadow once and for all, not to heal rift that created the duality to begin with. In order to work, a decision like this has to come from your whole being; and if your whole being is split, how can the two halves get together to make a decision?
In order to heal the split, you have to step outside your Ego. And since you consciously believe that your Ego is your Self, it seems like you have to look outside yourself for salvation.
The power of love
The easiest way to overcome the Ego/Shadow duality is through healing love. Even if I can't acknowledge the existence of my Shadow and face my faults directly, I may still be able to face a reflection of those issues in someone else’s eyes. If I can realize that some other person loves me, and if I can accept that they see my flaws, then I can begin to acknowledge my Shadow through them. The healing begins, then, as a process of projection: I accept the possibility that my flaws do not annihilate my worthiness, because I can imagine both of them existing together in the mind of the person who loves me.
In order for this process to work, the lover has to have certain qualities – or at least I have to believe s/he does. (The actual healing, naturally, has to happen inside me, not inside the other person. And so the key facts are in my imagination of the other person, not in the actual person.)
- Love. The other person has to really love me, and not just be pretending. The love has to be visible, obvious, and tangible, so that I cannot deny it.
- Insight.The whole point of the Ego story is to fool people (especially myself) into thinking that I’m lovable. If the person who loves me isn’t very insightful, s/he may have been taken in by my story. And that makes it more important than ever to keep the story going, so that s/he doesn’t see the Shadow and realize how wrong s/he has been to love me.
- Worth. The healing won't work if the other person loves me because we’re both losers. If my lover deserves nothing better than my Shadow, or if loving me is simply part of his/her pathology – then the love is not healing.
Now imagine the perfect healing love. Take Love, Insight, and Worth and extend them to infinity. What do you get?
Jesus.
In the Christian worldview, Jesus is the most worthy being in the Universe: the only begotten Son of God. He doesn’t just have insight, he’s omniscient: He sees and knows and remembers everything about me – even things I don’t recognize or remember myself. And he expressed his love in the most tangible way possible: He chose to suffer and die so that I wouldn’t have to spend eternity in Hell.
If you can imagine those three properties fully, the born-again experience happens. It can happen in an instant, like a thunderclap: Your Ego and Shadow both get projected onto a perfect being who unifies them. By looking at yourself through the eyes of Jesus, you can see yourself as both flawed and worthy. You can acknowledge the guilt of your past without being overwhelmed by it in the present. And you can face the future as a flawed-but-worthy person, taking one step at a time.
Your sins, in other words, are forgiven.
But is it real?
At this point, the Believer and the Unbeliever start an argument. The Unbeliever says: “This can’t work because Jesus isn't real. I mean, maybe there was a man named Jesus who lived a long time ago, and maybe he even was crucified like the story says. But he didn’t rise from the dead, so he can’t love you because he’s not alive. Moreover, he’s not the only begotten Son of God and isn’t omniscient. So this whole thing can’t work because it’s based on nonsense.”
And the Believer counters: “But it did work. My sins are forgiven and I have a new life. So Jesus must have risen from the dead and be alive today. He must be the omniscient Son of God. It must all be true.”
Both of them miss an important point: The Ego and the Shadow are fictional characters. They exist in the imagination. The rift between them exists in the imagination. The healing really happens, but the place where it really happens is in the imagination. The Believer has been healed by imagining a being who has the three qualities of love, insight, and worthiness in infinite quantities. Whether such a being really exists may still be an open question, but the healing would have worked regardless.
Two challenges
And so, I believe I have explained the born-again experience without explaining it away. The Unbeliever is still faced with a challenge: In some situations, believing only what is provable may not be the most effective way to live; you may need to take an imaginative leap in order to be healed. The Believer who has taken such a leap may have made it to a desirable place, and it’s not obvious how you can follow.
But the Believer is also faced with a challenge: The explanation given by some particular sect or minister is not the only one possible, and not the only one that accounts for your experience. Your healing is real, your new life is real, and you are correct to think of the experience as one of the most important things that ever happened to you. But that doesn’t mean you have to accept all the theological and institutional baggage that comes with fundamentalist or pentecostal Christianity.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
The UU-FAQ VIII: Politics
I’ve heard that Unitarian Universalism is an optimistic religion. What does that mean?
In the late 19th century, Unitarianism and (to a lesser extent) Universalism were radically optimistic about the course of history. Many Unitarian professions of faith listed “the progress of mankind, onward and upward forever” as one of the key principles of the religion. This optimism was based not just on science and technology, but also on the unprecedented wealth created by industrialization, the recent abolition of slavery virtually everywhere, and the spread of literacy to the masses. In view of these startling advances, it was not hard to imagine that perennial problems like poverty, war, and injustice might soon be overcome as well.
The 20th century was hard on this kind of optimism. While technology and science did indeed progress onward and upward throughout the century, developments in other fields created room for doubt about the direction of history. The Great Depression caused many to question whether economic progress is inevitable or will ever eliminate poverty. The atomic bomb opened the possibility that we are heading towards an apocalypse rather than a paradise. Worst of all, the genocides of the 20th century undermined the case for humanity’s moral progress. In the face of the Holocaust or the killing fields of Cambodia, can we really claim to be morally superior to our ancestors? And if not, then why should we believe that future generations will be any better than we are?
Today, Unitarian Universalist optimism is more restrained. Few would argue that Heaven-on-Earth is humanity’s unalterable destiny, but UUism is still optimistic in two important ways. The great majority of UU’s would agree that:
*Life can and should be enjoyed. This world is not a vale of tears through which we must pass on our way to a paradise after death.
*Human beings can and should make the world better. We need not and should not wait for a higher power to solve our problems for us. We do not believe that any human problem is forever beyond the reach of human action.
More importantly, Unitarian Universalism is still a forward-looking religion rather than a backward-looking one. We do not have a fixed vision of some golden age or Eden in the past. Instead, we have an evolving vision of what humanity can become.
I’ve heard UUism described as a "liberal" religion. Does that mean conservatives aren’t welcome?
The term liberal religion has been around for centuries, and isn’t connected to the way liberal and conservative are used in politics. This sense of the word liberal is related to the word liberty, and means free. A liberal religion is one that respects the individual conscience and does not demand submission to a central authority or set of dogmas. Reformed Judaism is another example of a liberal religion, and various Protestant denominations – Congregationalists and Methodists, for example – are referred to as liberal Christians.
What makes this confusing is that members of liberal religions in the United States have a statistical tendency to be politically liberal as well. But the distinction is meaningful and worth understanding: The UU commitment to individual conscience is a core value, something we couldn’t change without completely abandoning our identity. The tendency of UU’s to be politically liberal, on the other hand, is at least partly a matter of circumstance. In a different era, the major political issues could break differently and a majority of UU’s could be conservative.
The fact that political conservatives are a minority among UU’s does not mean that they aren’t welcome. While Christian Right conservatives are rare in UU circles, economic and libertarian conservatives are not uncommon. There is no reason why a UU cannot support conservative values like limited government, strong national defense, the free market, and a preference for the private over the public sector. Conservative UU’s have their own UUA-affiliated organization, the Conservative Forum for Unitarian Universalists.
In some congregations, political liberals are such a vocal and visible majority that political conservatives may feel isolated or unwelcome. This is unfortunate. The ideal UU church is a place of diverse opinions and lively discussions – not an echo chamber.
So UU churches aren’t political?
There is no political dogma that everyone is expected to support, but many individual UU’s are very politically active and bring that activity to their UU community. If you spend much time at a UU church, other members will frequently ask you to sign petitions, write letters, attend rallies, and so on. “No” is a perfectly acceptable answer, and you are free to promote your own petitions, letters, and rallies even if they oppose the positions taken by other members.
Sometimes you will hear politics from the pulpit. UU ministers tend to have strong political convictions and are not shy about saying what they think. (For example, UU minister and former UUA president William Schultz is now the executive director of Amnesty International.) But, unlike ministers in some religions, UU ministers have no special authority and you should not be intimidated by them. Many UU churches have a “talkback” tradition – a discussion after the Sunday service in which anyone can comment on the sermon, or even disagree with it completely. In general, UU ministers are intelligent, well educated, and well read – but so are a lot of other people; that doesn’t mean you have to agree with them.
Similarly, the annual UU General Asssembly passes resolutions, many of which take political positions. Though a position endorsed by the General Assembly is certainly worth considering, these resolutions are not in any way binding on individual UU’s. If you like, you may continue your own political activity (or lack of activity) as if nothing has happened.
Do the UU Principles have political implications?
They wouldn’t mean very much if they didn’t. However, the Principles are general goals, not detailed political agendas or lists of candidates. Even people who support the UU Principles whole-heartedly may disagree about how goals like “world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all” are best achieved.
In general, the Principles push us to expand our radius of compassion. And so UU’s usually are on the side that favors extending human rights to more people. Historically, that has meant supporting women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and the civil rights movement (though none of these positions were unanimous). Today, for example, large majorities of UU’s support gay rights and oppose torture.
Our commitment to individual conscience also leads most UU’s to support the separation of church and state. Consequently, UU’s often wind up opposing the agenda of the Christian Right.
But even if the Principles do have political implications, they are not a creed. The member congregations of the UUA are pledged to affirm and promote these principles, but they are not binding on individual members.
In the late 19th century, Unitarianism and (to a lesser extent) Universalism were radically optimistic about the course of history. Many Unitarian professions of faith listed “the progress of mankind, onward and upward forever” as one of the key principles of the religion. This optimism was based not just on science and technology, but also on the unprecedented wealth created by industrialization, the recent abolition of slavery virtually everywhere, and the spread of literacy to the masses. In view of these startling advances, it was not hard to imagine that perennial problems like poverty, war, and injustice might soon be overcome as well.
The 20th century was hard on this kind of optimism. While technology and science did indeed progress onward and upward throughout the century, developments in other fields created room for doubt about the direction of history. The Great Depression caused many to question whether economic progress is inevitable or will ever eliminate poverty. The atomic bomb opened the possibility that we are heading towards an apocalypse rather than a paradise. Worst of all, the genocides of the 20th century undermined the case for humanity’s moral progress. In the face of the Holocaust or the killing fields of Cambodia, can we really claim to be morally superior to our ancestors? And if not, then why should we believe that future generations will be any better than we are?
Today, Unitarian Universalist optimism is more restrained. Few would argue that Heaven-on-Earth is humanity’s unalterable destiny, but UUism is still optimistic in two important ways. The great majority of UU’s would agree that:
*Life can and should be enjoyed. This world is not a vale of tears through which we must pass on our way to a paradise after death.
*Human beings can and should make the world better. We need not and should not wait for a higher power to solve our problems for us. We do not believe that any human problem is forever beyond the reach of human action.
More importantly, Unitarian Universalism is still a forward-looking religion rather than a backward-looking one. We do not have a fixed vision of some golden age or Eden in the past. Instead, we have an evolving vision of what humanity can become.
I’ve heard UUism described as a "liberal" religion. Does that mean conservatives aren’t welcome?
The term liberal religion has been around for centuries, and isn’t connected to the way liberal and conservative are used in politics. This sense of the word liberal is related to the word liberty, and means free. A liberal religion is one that respects the individual conscience and does not demand submission to a central authority or set of dogmas. Reformed Judaism is another example of a liberal religion, and various Protestant denominations – Congregationalists and Methodists, for example – are referred to as liberal Christians.
What makes this confusing is that members of liberal religions in the United States have a statistical tendency to be politically liberal as well. But the distinction is meaningful and worth understanding: The UU commitment to individual conscience is a core value, something we couldn’t change without completely abandoning our identity. The tendency of UU’s to be politically liberal, on the other hand, is at least partly a matter of circumstance. In a different era, the major political issues could break differently and a majority of UU’s could be conservative.
The fact that political conservatives are a minority among UU’s does not mean that they aren’t welcome. While Christian Right conservatives are rare in UU circles, economic and libertarian conservatives are not uncommon. There is no reason why a UU cannot support conservative values like limited government, strong national defense, the free market, and a preference for the private over the public sector. Conservative UU’s have their own UUA-affiliated organization, the Conservative Forum for Unitarian Universalists.
In some congregations, political liberals are such a vocal and visible majority that political conservatives may feel isolated or unwelcome. This is unfortunate. The ideal UU church is a place of diverse opinions and lively discussions – not an echo chamber.
So UU churches aren’t political?
There is no political dogma that everyone is expected to support, but many individual UU’s are very politically active and bring that activity to their UU community. If you spend much time at a UU church, other members will frequently ask you to sign petitions, write letters, attend rallies, and so on. “No” is a perfectly acceptable answer, and you are free to promote your own petitions, letters, and rallies even if they oppose the positions taken by other members.
Sometimes you will hear politics from the pulpit. UU ministers tend to have strong political convictions and are not shy about saying what they think. (For example, UU minister and former UUA president William Schultz is now the executive director of Amnesty International.) But, unlike ministers in some religions, UU ministers have no special authority and you should not be intimidated by them. Many UU churches have a “talkback” tradition – a discussion after the Sunday service in which anyone can comment on the sermon, or even disagree with it completely. In general, UU ministers are intelligent, well educated, and well read – but so are a lot of other people; that doesn’t mean you have to agree with them.
Similarly, the annual UU General Asssembly passes resolutions, many of which take political positions. Though a position endorsed by the General Assembly is certainly worth considering, these resolutions are not in any way binding on individual UU’s. If you like, you may continue your own political activity (or lack of activity) as if nothing has happened.
Do the UU Principles have political implications?
They wouldn’t mean very much if they didn’t. However, the Principles are general goals, not detailed political agendas or lists of candidates. Even people who support the UU Principles whole-heartedly may disagree about how goals like “world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all” are best achieved.
In general, the Principles push us to expand our radius of compassion. And so UU’s usually are on the side that favors extending human rights to more people. Historically, that has meant supporting women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and the civil rights movement (though none of these positions were unanimous). Today, for example, large majorities of UU’s support gay rights and oppose torture.
Our commitment to individual conscience also leads most UU’s to support the separation of church and state. Consequently, UU’s often wind up opposing the agenda of the Christian Right.
But even if the Principles do have political implications, they are not a creed. The member congregations of the UUA are pledged to affirm and promote these principles, but they are not binding on individual members.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Is Feminine the New Normal?
This morning the female student minister at my Unitarian Universalist church told a heart-warming story of how her previous church had welcomed a woman in distress. The woman’s partner had died three weeks before, and she came to this church looking for the kind of community support she could not find anywhere else in her life. At the door the greeter recognized her as a newcomer and started a conversation, during which the whole story spilled out. Some empathic parishioner was found to sit with her through the service. Afterward she was introduced to other sympathetic members, who let her cry when she needed to and supported her in letting her emotions out. Having been met with this kind of acceptance and compassion, the woman joined the church and was last seen singing in the choir.
This positive example of seeking support and finding it was contrasted with congregations where it is necessary to “wear armor.” In congregations like this, everyone pretends to have life well under control and engages in all sorts of do-good projects to help unfortunate others -- who of course resemble ourselves not at all.
I understood the point our student minister was making, and in fact I sympathize with it. We UU’s do have paternalistic tendencies, and we sometimes project our own pain onto distant others rather than deal with it in the first person. But I had trouble listening to the point of the sermon because I couldn’t get past the story. My wife has survived two different cancers over the last ten years, and has come close enough to dying that I could easily identify with the story’s recently bereaved woman.
And I thought: I hope to God no one treats me that way.
Because no matter how politically or socially liberal I may be, I am a man, and I deal with my emotions in a masculine way -- alone, or in front of at most one very trusted person. When hurt, my greatest fear is not that my pain will go unrecognized, but that having once plunged into the overwhelming depths of pain, I will never come back up. I fear being so broken that I will never stand up again and take my place in the World.
I think that's pretty normal for a man.
And so, if I am ever bereaved, my showing up at church will be a sign that I think I’m done processing my emotions, at least for now. It means that I believe, or at least hope, that I’m ready to take up my role again in some limited form. I’m going to show up with a few extra plates of armor that day, and be glad to have them. My goal will be to have more-or-less normal interactions with people, ones that don’t revolve around my woundedness and inability to function.
People who want to support me that day can do so by creating social situations that are easy to handle. Let’s talk about sports or the weather or whatever cute thing your kid did this week. I’ll be like a racehorse newly recovered from a leg injury. I’ll want to trot around the track gingerly and make it back to the stable without incident. Help me out. Don’t create any special opportunities for me to cry. If I break down, I’ll have failed in my mission. And the more people who see me fail, the longer it will be before I dare to come out again.
Contrast the minister’s feminine story with this masculine story from the Neal Stephenson novel Cryptonomicon. Goto Dengo is a Japanese soldier who has survived a series of disasters, each of which killed nearly all the soldiers around him. Though he did nothing wrong, he feels dishonored by his very survival. Rather than dying an honorable death like his colleagues, he now recovers helplessly in a Catholic hospital in the Japanese-occupied Philippines.
The Filipino priests and nuns who staff the hospital have been forbidden to proselytize, but Goto Dengo feels that merely by caring for him in his helpless condition, they are forcing him into Christianity. How? Because their care dishonors him. His Japanese religion requires him to maintain his honor, but he sees Christianity as a religion for “low people” -- people without honor. Now that his honor is gone, he fears he will have no choice but to become a Christian.
Does that story feel foreign to you? Good, it was supposed to. The moral I want to draw from it is that people who are different from you may need a different kind of care. Merely being good to them according to your own lights may not be good at all. In particular, the emotional process that seems caring and supportive and healthy to a woman may be exactly what a man does not need from his church.
Last summer I read the book Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow. Murrow is a Christian, and his book examines a paradox: Why does a church founded by men, whose ministry is overwhelmingly male, attract about twice as many women as men to most of its activities? He finds a self-reinforcing cycle, in which the church’s message, environment, and activities are geared for women because they’re the ones who show up. (This matches my experience programming UU adult education classes. My wife once joked that the reading course I was leading was my “night out with the girls.”)
Murrow’s book is populated with many semi-fictional characters, including the Christian couple Greg and Judy. Judy loves their church, but Greg hates it. Partly, it’s the way the message is pitched. “Greg,” Murrow writes, “has no desire to fall in love with a wonderful man, even one named Jesus.” Hearing this message preached by a man every Sunday does not make it any more palatable. Worse, the whole church environment is stacked against Greg. The skills their church needs and rewards are typically feminine skills that Judy has but Greg doesn’t. “To really [succeed] at Judy’s church, Greg would need more than a conversion experience; he’d need a personality transplant.”
Murrow characterizes the men who fit in well at churches as feminized:
"Men’s ministry so often falters for this simple reason: it’s actually women’s ministry for men. When Christian men gather, they’re expected to relate like women and to enjoy the things women enjoy. Men’s ministry is built around the needs and expectations of women -- or more precisely, the soft men who show up for men’s ministry events. So the men’s retreat features singing, hugging, hand holding, and weeping. Men sit in circles and listen, read, or share. We keep our conversations clean, polite, and nonconfrontational. While there’s nothing wrong with men doing these things, it feels feminine to a lot of the guys. So they stay home."
Murrow is describing Christian churches, which are bastions of the Patriarchy by UU standards. At the Boston General Assembly a couple years ago, I attended a panel discussion on UU men’s groups. Someone in the audience commented on the difficulty men’s groups had addressing standard male topics, like sports. One of the panelists had an answer: A UU men’s group could discuss how it felt to be the last kid picked.
That’s great. Just fabulous. Hey, guys! Were you always the last kid picked? You ought to be a UU! We’re all losers too!
A couple years before that, the Massachusetts Bay District organized a meeting to promote the new Small Group Ministry program for UU churches. The male minister of a church in Maine told us how the program had revolutionized his church and could revolutionize the UU movement. Like the men’s ministry Murrow describes, SGM has a lot of quiet talking and sharing of emotions. It is supposed to build intimacy and relationships, two words men use only when they’re trying to impress women.
I had my hand up, but somebody else asked my question first: How did this minister get men to join the program? The answer, after a lot of hemming and hawing, was that he didn’t. “It’s hard to get men to talk about their feelings,” he explained.
So apparently the “revolutionized” UU movement doesn’t need men.
Almost a decade has passed since I heard the claim that UU’s had achieved gender balance in our ministry. I assume that is ancient history by now. Our older generation of male ministers is being replaced by a younger generation of female ministers; for a brief moment eight or nine years ago it all balanced. In my church, the senior minister is male and about my age (49), but for many years our student ministers have all been either female or gay. The only straight male I can remember left without completing the program.
What's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with the individuals. I imagine our previous students are all top-flight ministers now, and I see no reason why they can't or shouldn't minister to heterosexual men, just as male ministers have served female parishioners in past generations. (The only reason I’m being so hard on our current student is that I think she has what it takes to benefit from criticism. She will no doubt have an excellent career also.)
The problem I see is that feminine has become the new Normal. More and more often femininity is the assumed common ground, and I find myself having to make excuses or beg exemptions for my perverse masculine reactions. Look back at the story from this morning’s service. Can you imagine any of the characters in that story as men? I can’t. Even the deceased “partner” seems to be female. It’s a story about women helping another woman in classically feminine ways. And it’s a story about how church is supposed to be.
And someday soon it will probably be that way. But don’t feel sorry for me, I’m sure I’ll be OK. I am unusually verbal and empathic for a man, so I should do well. No doubt the feminized UU church of the future will welcome men who know their place.
At times, though, I’m probably going to be like Goto Dengo: I will feel that I have no choice but to be in this church of women, because by then I’ll practically be a woman myself.
This positive example of seeking support and finding it was contrasted with congregations where it is necessary to “wear armor.” In congregations like this, everyone pretends to have life well under control and engages in all sorts of do-good projects to help unfortunate others -- who of course resemble ourselves not at all.
I understood the point our student minister was making, and in fact I sympathize with it. We UU’s do have paternalistic tendencies, and we sometimes project our own pain onto distant others rather than deal with it in the first person. But I had trouble listening to the point of the sermon because I couldn’t get past the story. My wife has survived two different cancers over the last ten years, and has come close enough to dying that I could easily identify with the story’s recently bereaved woman.
And I thought: I hope to God no one treats me that way.
Because no matter how politically or socially liberal I may be, I am a man, and I deal with my emotions in a masculine way -- alone, or in front of at most one very trusted person. When hurt, my greatest fear is not that my pain will go unrecognized, but that having once plunged into the overwhelming depths of pain, I will never come back up. I fear being so broken that I will never stand up again and take my place in the World.
I think that's pretty normal for a man.
And so, if I am ever bereaved, my showing up at church will be a sign that I think I’m done processing my emotions, at least for now. It means that I believe, or at least hope, that I’m ready to take up my role again in some limited form. I’m going to show up with a few extra plates of armor that day, and be glad to have them. My goal will be to have more-or-less normal interactions with people, ones that don’t revolve around my woundedness and inability to function.
People who want to support me that day can do so by creating social situations that are easy to handle. Let’s talk about sports or the weather or whatever cute thing your kid did this week. I’ll be like a racehorse newly recovered from a leg injury. I’ll want to trot around the track gingerly and make it back to the stable without incident. Help me out. Don’t create any special opportunities for me to cry. If I break down, I’ll have failed in my mission. And the more people who see me fail, the longer it will be before I dare to come out again.
Contrast the minister’s feminine story with this masculine story from the Neal Stephenson novel Cryptonomicon. Goto Dengo is a Japanese soldier who has survived a series of disasters, each of which killed nearly all the soldiers around him. Though he did nothing wrong, he feels dishonored by his very survival. Rather than dying an honorable death like his colleagues, he now recovers helplessly in a Catholic hospital in the Japanese-occupied Philippines.
The Filipino priests and nuns who staff the hospital have been forbidden to proselytize, but Goto Dengo feels that merely by caring for him in his helpless condition, they are forcing him into Christianity. How? Because their care dishonors him. His Japanese religion requires him to maintain his honor, but he sees Christianity as a religion for “low people” -- people without honor. Now that his honor is gone, he fears he will have no choice but to become a Christian.
Does that story feel foreign to you? Good, it was supposed to. The moral I want to draw from it is that people who are different from you may need a different kind of care. Merely being good to them according to your own lights may not be good at all. In particular, the emotional process that seems caring and supportive and healthy to a woman may be exactly what a man does not need from his church.
Last summer I read the book Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow. Murrow is a Christian, and his book examines a paradox: Why does a church founded by men, whose ministry is overwhelmingly male, attract about twice as many women as men to most of its activities? He finds a self-reinforcing cycle, in which the church’s message, environment, and activities are geared for women because they’re the ones who show up. (This matches my experience programming UU adult education classes. My wife once joked that the reading course I was leading was my “night out with the girls.”)
Murrow’s book is populated with many semi-fictional characters, including the Christian couple Greg and Judy. Judy loves their church, but Greg hates it. Partly, it’s the way the message is pitched. “Greg,” Murrow writes, “has no desire to fall in love with a wonderful man, even one named Jesus.” Hearing this message preached by a man every Sunday does not make it any more palatable. Worse, the whole church environment is stacked against Greg. The skills their church needs and rewards are typically feminine skills that Judy has but Greg doesn’t. “To really [succeed] at Judy’s church, Greg would need more than a conversion experience; he’d need a personality transplant.”
Murrow characterizes the men who fit in well at churches as feminized:
"Men’s ministry so often falters for this simple reason: it’s actually women’s ministry for men. When Christian men gather, they’re expected to relate like women and to enjoy the things women enjoy. Men’s ministry is built around the needs and expectations of women -- or more precisely, the soft men who show up for men’s ministry events. So the men’s retreat features singing, hugging, hand holding, and weeping. Men sit in circles and listen, read, or share. We keep our conversations clean, polite, and nonconfrontational. While there’s nothing wrong with men doing these things, it feels feminine to a lot of the guys. So they stay home."
Murrow is describing Christian churches, which are bastions of the Patriarchy by UU standards. At the Boston General Assembly a couple years ago, I attended a panel discussion on UU men’s groups. Someone in the audience commented on the difficulty men’s groups had addressing standard male topics, like sports. One of the panelists had an answer: A UU men’s group could discuss how it felt to be the last kid picked.
That’s great. Just fabulous. Hey, guys! Were you always the last kid picked? You ought to be a UU! We’re all losers too!
A couple years before that, the Massachusetts Bay District organized a meeting to promote the new Small Group Ministry program for UU churches. The male minister of a church in Maine told us how the program had revolutionized his church and could revolutionize the UU movement. Like the men’s ministry Murrow describes, SGM has a lot of quiet talking and sharing of emotions. It is supposed to build intimacy and relationships, two words men use only when they’re trying to impress women.
I had my hand up, but somebody else asked my question first: How did this minister get men to join the program? The answer, after a lot of hemming and hawing, was that he didn’t. “It’s hard to get men to talk about their feelings,” he explained.
So apparently the “revolutionized” UU movement doesn’t need men.
Almost a decade has passed since I heard the claim that UU’s had achieved gender balance in our ministry. I assume that is ancient history by now. Our older generation of male ministers is being replaced by a younger generation of female ministers; for a brief moment eight or nine years ago it all balanced. In my church, the senior minister is male and about my age (49), but for many years our student ministers have all been either female or gay. The only straight male I can remember left without completing the program.
What's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with the individuals. I imagine our previous students are all top-flight ministers now, and I see no reason why they can't or shouldn't minister to heterosexual men, just as male ministers have served female parishioners in past generations. (The only reason I’m being so hard on our current student is that I think she has what it takes to benefit from criticism. She will no doubt have an excellent career also.)
The problem I see is that feminine has become the new Normal. More and more often femininity is the assumed common ground, and I find myself having to make excuses or beg exemptions for my perverse masculine reactions. Look back at the story from this morning’s service. Can you imagine any of the characters in that story as men? I can’t. Even the deceased “partner” seems to be female. It’s a story about women helping another woman in classically feminine ways. And it’s a story about how church is supposed to be.
And someday soon it will probably be that way. But don’t feel sorry for me, I’m sure I’ll be OK. I am unusually verbal and empathic for a man, so I should do well. No doubt the feminized UU church of the future will welcome men who know their place.
At times, though, I’m probably going to be like Goto Dengo: I will feel that I have no choice but to be in this church of women, because by then I’ll practically be a woman myself.
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