Mutuality and Variety:
How UUs Walk Together on Different Paths

"How can two walk together except they be in agreement?"

"Everyone must do their own believing and their own dying."

"We are called not to thing alike, but to love alike"

Francis David

Today’s sermon is my fourth in the series that I’m calling "Eight Themes That Unite Us." I learned of these themes during a two day presentation by the Rev. Roy Phillips at a minister’s conference. Everyone was very excited by Roy’s ideas. This way of looking at our way of the Spirit had enormous appeal to us because it offers a framework that allows us to feel a connection with our own proud history, and with one another. (See the note at the end for references to others in this series.)

I think that our congregations are especially hungry right now for ideas and programs that will help us form authentic connections with one another. Because we are a non-creedal, non-sacramental religious body, it can be difficult for us to name and claim the things that bind us together as a people. In the past, our Unitarian rejection of the doctrine of the trinity, the divinity of Jesus, or even the Christian religion itself was enough to give Unitarians a sense of identity and connection. But today this is no longer true. Our openness to many sources of truth has pulled us away from the old centers of Christianity and Humanism and now many UUs are able to explain their faith only in terms of what they don’t believe. This framework gives us compelling and positive language to use as we explore our tradition and our identity.

Today we’re going to talk about mutuality and variety, two themes that are at the heart of another of our cherished values: tolerance. They are also at the heart of another idea we’ve been talking about lately: covenant.

At first glance, it may be hard to see how mutuality and variety are connected to one another. Mutuality is commonality, whatever is shared between people and the connections people make with one another. Variety emphasizes difference among people and changes in the habits and patterns of people. I’d like to take these themes as our starting point.

Our commitment to variety is the natural consequence of our stance that each of us must be given the freedom to come to his or her own religious beliefs. Ours is a heritage of heresy because we have always believed that people had the right to choose their faith. This commitment to freedom of belief can be traced back to the first Edict of Religious Toleration, which was created by the first and only Unitarian king in history, King John Sigismund of Transylvania. At that time, Eastern Europe was caught up in the devastating wars between Roman Catholics and Protestants that had been waged throughout the Reformation. This young king believed that everyone should have the right to practice the religion and faith that spoke to his or her own hearts and minds. He made this the official policy of his kingdom in 1557. A few years later, in 1568, the king issued another remarkable edict, the Act of Religious Tolerance and Freedom of Conscience, which declared that no one should be reviled for his or her religion by anyone else. Now people had the right to choose their own faith and they were freed from harassment by those who didn’t agree with them. If you are a student of history, you know that Sigismund’s ideas were well ahead of his time, and that a lot of blood would be shed before the kind religious tolerance that he proclaimed would become acceptable.

Even within our own Unitarian movement, tolerance has not been something we’ve practiced easily. From the early 1800s, to the end of that century, American Unitarians struggled over the place of Jesus and Christianity in our way of spirit, as Unitarians labored to define themselves. In 1843, the Rev. Theodore Parker was asked to resign from the Boston Association of Ministers (which was largely comprised of Unitarian ministers) because of his radical renunciation of the necessity of the person of Jesus to the Christian faith. (Parker refused.) By the end of that century, Christianity was no longer the center of Unitarianism, but had become one among several sources of truth and revelation, and Jesus was not a savior but a teacher among other teachers. When Rev. William Channing Gannet offered his summation of modern Unitiarianism in a document called "Things Commonly Believed Among Us Today" in 1887, many Unitarians felt that the shift away from Christianity was the death knoll for their church. Most Unitarians of that time still held a belief in a Divine and Transcendent God, though not necessarily expressed as God the Father. But that too was challenged, as Humanism became a new force in Unitarianism in the first half of the 20th century.

In the 1960s, the civil-rights movement brought back an awareness of the "Social Gospel" movement, and for some Unitarians, Jesus’ teachings about the poor and oppressed became a source of inspiration and power that remains true to today for those of us who find truth and hope in Liberation theology. Those of you who were UUs in the 1970s may recall the impact on our congregations of the "New Age" movement. Now we had people coming into in our congregations who were seekers for truth and meaning from new and sometimes startling sources — Eastern religion and emerging forms of spirituality that took in some of the rituals and beliefs of earth-based religions and other new groups. You can see that from the very beginning, Unitarians (and Universalsits, though I haven’t recounted that history for you) has been pushed to be more inclusive, more open to those believers who were out of the man stream.

One of the results of the interest in pagan religions in our congregations was the recognition of earth-based religions as one of the "official" sources that UUs draw from in our search for truth and meaning at General Assembly in 1994. The vote on this addition to our Principles and Purposes was one of the closest in recent memory. Another important and lasting result was a renewed discussion of tolerance and variety; Just how far do we go in accepting differences? To paraphrase and turn on its head the reading in our hymnal by Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley (#576);

If I’m an atheist and you’re a member of the Unitarian Universalist Christian fellowship, does it matter? If you believe that when you die, you will be reincarnated and I believe that death means nothing more than the end of my existence, can we accept one another? If you are a fiscal and political conservative and I am a committed liberal, do we owe each other a respectful exchange of our views? If you think that my family is not congruent with your understanding of family or even human love, are you obligated as a faithful UU to accept me as a person of inherent worth and dignity?

I say that if we accept the statement of Principles and Purposes of our Association of Congregations, then the answer is yes. In fact, by this statement, we are called to accept and encourage one another in matters of individual spiritual growth even when we are not on the same spiritual path. And this, I think, is where we find the source of many of the conflicts that are so difficult for our members and our congregations.

After all, it can be pretty easy to come to a passive acceptance, a cheap and easy tolerance of another’s beliefs, as long as we don’t have to get too close and hear too much. If someone tells me that they believe in karma and reincarnation, or that the earth is governed by seven spiritual masters who visited earth via spaceship and left a few of their kind here and that was the beginning of the human race on earth, it’s easy enough for me to shrug my shoulders and say, well, "different strokes for different folks," smile, and walk away. I can even love that person, despite the fact that we don’t think alike. In fact, I think it’s what’s expected in our pluralistic society that proclaims "different strokes for different folks" as if that’s the way to build understanding and community; as if it were that easy, that simple. I beleive that most of us know better

Anyone who has ever loved a friend or built a rewarding and satisfying partnership with a colleague knows better. Anyone who has worked to keep a long-term relationship with a life partner knows better. Anyone who wants to fulfill our obligation — yes, I said our obligation — as Unitarian Universalists to foster and encourage individual spiritual growth knows better. Growth isn’t fostered by indifference or an attitude of "whatever." We don’t grow when we’re comfortable, satisfied, and dulled. We can’t grow if we think we have all the answers, if all the big questions are already settled, and there’s nothing new under the sun for us to consider.

Most of the people I know have found that it was in times of challenge, uncertainty, and change that they have been able to grow the most and gain new wisdom. Our personal religion may give us purpose and comfort on the days when the sun shines and all’s right with the world. Then "it’s summertime, and the livin’ is easy." But when the world slaps us upside the head or shakes us to our very core, we need a personal religion that is resilient enough to see us through many dangers, storms, and snares. Or, as a well-known Jewish rabbi would say, you’d better build your house upon a rock, because tides are unpredictable and the rushing waters of life can wash everything away in a few seconds. Theology, says Richard Gilbert, is the result of the tough and tender experiences of life. And the purpose of the church is both to stimulate tough and tender experiences and to help us understand their meaning, so we might enrich our spiritual living. I wonder how many people would say that tough experiences are what they’re looking for when they begin a relationship with a UU congregation.

You might come here on Sundays hoping for tender experiences. We all enjoy greeting friends, smiling at the children, and the experience of emotions as we hear the joys and concerns that are shared within the walls of this room. You might expect and even want a couple of sermons to challenge your assumptions, or push you to make some changes in your life. But many UUs say that at the end of the Sunday service they want to feel affirmed and uplifted, ready to face the week ahead. They want a safe place where they feel accepted for who they are, in all their wonderful differences.

This longing for safety is the beginning of mutuality, the second theme that we want to discuss today. We recognize a need to create a safe place for one another, for ourselves, and our children. We need a place to share our experiences, our hopes and frustrations, and our thoughts and plans for the future. We need people to stand with us as we pass through the inevitable events of life: birth and death, triumph and loss, joy and suffering. And I believe we have that here. But I would also say that this is not enough to develop the level of mutuality that is the hallmark of a healthy religious community.

True mutuality develops as we get to know one more deeply. By this I mean that we know what’s going on in someone else’s life and we know what the experience means to that person. How do they interpret their lives, based on their individual history, their own store of knowledge and experience, their personal strengths and weakness, their dreams and their disappointments? What meanings do they draw from their reflections on beginnings, endings, accomplishments, unexpected events, and death? What do they wonder about? Where do they encounter mystery, awe, beauty? Where is certainty for this person, the bedrock of their faith that they can’t explain or go beyond, that part of them that simply IS? Of course, to be truly mutual, we have to allow others to know us just a deeply, just as honestly. For many of us, this is the tough part of our Sunday experience.

It’s in this process of coming to know one another’s mind and hearts, that profound spiritual truths are discovered and faith is developed. We really can’t grow a religious faith all by ourselves — even though individual study, reflection, and action are essential. We need to be able to share with other people our thoughts along with the images and meanings we’ve come to through reflection and study. We need other people who will ask us questions, prod us to go deeper, to consider other options, other ways of seeing and understanding while still allowing us to be ourselves. We need others to challenge us if we are to grow and develop that sturdy authentic faith that will see us through the downpours and the floods of life’s storms.

The realization that we come to our faith through dialogue with fellow seekers is made clear by the Chinese ideograph for belief, which is two persons talking. As heirs to the tradition of the free church, we know that our faith is not handed to us between the covers of a book of discipline or in a catechism that we memorized as children, though books and even catechisms have their place for us. A deeply authentic faith is constructed over a lifetime of experience, reflections, and the shared gift of mutual engagement — even in the face of differences that are too fundamental to be ignored or erased.

Now, here’s the really tricky part of mutuality: If we are going to develop deep and truly mutual relationships with one another and give encouragement to one another to grow spiritually though dialogue, we will have to spend time together; good old fashioned face-to-face time. We will need to spend time in many different ways: playing and working, planning and creating, singing — and even arguing. We will need to be vulnerable and accept that our human relationships will sometimes cause us pain. We must be willing to be uncomfortable, to challenge one another, and to be as respectful and honest and caring as we can. And let’s not forget that we will have opportunities to be forgiving to one another and ourselves, for human relationship are messy and often troublesome, but necessary for our human growth. As an anonymous UU observed,

"The genius of liberal religion is not creedal conformity, but a common commitment to walk together in religious living."

Learning to live together will require more that coming to the Fellowship on Sunday and sharing a hymnal with your neighbor! I’d encourage you to consider how you can deepen your spiritual life by spending some time with your fellow UUs by spending time together at a circle supper, at an adult enrichment class, or at choir rehearsal. I’d urge you to learn more about our new program of covenant groups and to talk to the group leaders or some of the participants to see if one of these small groups would be right for you. I am planning to start a new opportunity for worship and spiritual growth in March based on a UU program called Evensong 2. If we have enough interest, this service will continue on a regular basis.

Variety and mutuality are the children of freedom and tolerance and responsibility. Because of our historic commitment to these values, our congregations are bound by covenant rather than by creed. We call on many sources of truth and on our own human experiences as we search for meaning, for understanding, for hope and healing. We may see life from many different angles, we may come to any number of conclusions about the great mysteries of human existence, but we know that we do not need to think alike to love alike.

May it be so.

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