How Shall We Live?
Part II: Like Willows By Flowing Streams
The Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester, CT
September 30, 2007
“Mysterious Presence, source of all—the world without, the soul within—thou fount of life, O hear our call, and pour thy living waters in.”
The poet Mary Oliver speaks to a similar longing for living waters, speaks of a perennial dryness in her—a thirst drawing her into deeper spiritual awareness: “Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent,” she muses, “yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.”
The Hebrew prophet Isaiah encounters the people of Israel as a thirsty land, as dry ground, as people who’ve forgotten the promise their God has made. He brings that promise of spirit poured down back to their attention, that promise of life-giving waters: “They shall spring up like a green tamarisk, like willows by flowing streams.”
I offer these three expressions of spiritual dryness and thirst; three expressions of a longing for the rebirth of spirit, a longing for the source of life, a longing for moisture. I am mindful this past Thursday marked the beginning of the Jewish harvest festival, Sukkot—the festival of booths. The book of Leviticus specifies four plants—palm, myrtle, citron, and willow—which are held together and blessed during this festival. Each plant represents a component of Jewish spirituality. The willow, which grows by streams, is a reminder of life-giving water, a reminder that in response to our spiritual thirst there are prayers we may learn, promises we may make and receive, ways in which we may live which create spaces in the dry parts of ourselves, spaces into which the life-giving waters may flow.
Last fall I preached about Bishop Carlton Pearson, the popular evangelical minister from Tulsa, OK whom the Congress of African American Evangelical Bishops branded a heretic when he started preaching the Doctrine of Inclusion or universal salvation—the same theology our Universalist forebears proclaimed two centuries ago. I had the wonderful opportunity last June to attend a small conference in Hartford called “Liberation Conversations” at which Bishop Pearson was also in attendance. He and I spoke about Unitarian Universalism. He admires us. He has become close to my colleague and friend, the Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, the senior minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa. He spoke about how, in his earlier days, he and his parishioners would drive to All Souls to sprinkle holy water on the lawn and pray for the souls of Unitarians. He had never imagined he would develop friendships with Unitarian Universalists, Jews, Muslims, Pagans and Native American spiritual leaders. He had never imagined he would develop friendships with same gender loving people, bisexual people, transgender people. He spoke about the Unitarian Universalist emphasis on reason and questioning in the religious life—he praised our emphasis on thinking, saying evangelical and Pentecostal churches spend too much time feeling and not enough time in critical reflection and thought. He praised All Souls Tulsa for its social justice work, saying that for decades he focused his spiritual energy on Heaven. But as he became a Universalist he began to see how important it is to focus one’s spiritual energies on creating peace, justice and liberation in this life, and Unitarian Universalists in Tulsa had been doing this all along.
And then, very gently, he said something I’ll never forget. He said, “But… Unitarian Universalism is dry. You need more moisture.” I can still picture his face when he said it. He was serene and loving. Such a simple critique, yet one which seemed, in a poetic way, to name the key to our future . “You need more moisture.”
“Mysterious Presence, source of all—the world without, the soul within—thou fount of life, O hear our call, and pour thy living waters in.” You need more moisture.
I am still beginning my series of sermons on the Unitarian Universalist principles. I originally planned to speak about a specific principle this morning, but I need to reflect further on the origins of our principles—and moisture—and establish some challenges I will put to our principles in the coming months.
In my past two sermons I have presented alternatives to the critiques of Unitarian Universalism from the Rev. Davidson Loehr. After my last sermon, in which I spoke about the historical evolution of our principles, he said the principles didn’t evolve. “They didn’t come from any discussions of what was worth believing, how you form people of noble character, or even how to build a kingdom of God on earth. They came from self-referential discussion groups held in some selected churches, simply trying to find what they happened to believe. Exalting it is narcissism, but not a religious evolution. Maybe devolution.” He also said, “I’m glad you’re thinking about these things, Josh. When you do your sermons on the principles, I hope you’ll ask whether and to what extent they actually inform many people’s lives at all; and how they differ from the generic biases of cultural liberals. That’s really the key critique, and it’s the one you’re not willing to engage. But it can’t really be shrugged off.”
I’m not shrugging it off, and I do see things differently. It is true there were discussion groups in the late 1970s in response to proposed revisions of the principles. It is true the question being asked was, essentially, “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?” as opposed to “What is worth believing?” It is true that the principles appeal to secular liberals looking for a religious community without doctrine and dogma. It is not true that our current statement principles sprang entirely from the soil of late twentieth century secular liberalism. They have deeper roots.
I once preached a sermon on Unitarian Universalism as a modern religion where modern refers not to what is current or up-to-date, but to a period in Western history beginning in 16th century Europe. I could preach 100 sermons about modernity and its legacy—I won’t—but let me remind you of some of the key themes in modern thought, themes which are studied and discussed primarily in colleges and universities, themes which are foundational to our lives but which don’t make good conversation starters at the dinner table:
Subjectivity. The individual—the human self—moves to the center of philosophical thought, becomes a legitimate source of knowledge and authority. Think of Rene Descartes’ famous saying, “I think, therefore I am.” This “turn to the subject” directly challenged the authority of churches and kings. It was also the source of modernity’s emphasis on human rights. Subjectivity is embedded in our principles in their declaration of the inherent worth and dignity of every person; their call for justice, equity and compassion in human relations; and their promotion of democratic processes.
Reason. The primary resource available to the human subject, a faculty of the human mind, reason enables people to formulate ideas, solve problems and judge for themselves what is true in science, philosophy and religion. Reason is embedded in our principles in their affirmation of the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
Progress. Modernity’s basic attitude of hopefulness and optimism. As Cornel West says, “a belief in the unlimited possibilities of individuals in society when guided by reason.” Our principles demonstrate the value of progress in proclaiming the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
Criticism. Modernity’s conviction that everything may be subject to free inquiry, that all claims of authority may be challenged—including the authority of reason—and that the autonomous subject, the individual, must engage in ongoing self-examination. Our principles imply the value of criticism in their affirmation of the right of conscience.
Induction. Modernity’s attempt, in science and philosophy, to look at the various parts to understand the whole, to see how things fit together and how they relate to each other. Induction is embedded in our principles in their call for us to respect the interdependent web of all existence.
There’s much more to modernity—scientific method, capitalism, industrialization, etc. My point is that Unitarian Universalism is a modern religion and that one way to analyze our principles, rather than shrug them off as simply the biases of late twentieth-century secular liberals, is to look at how they express the key themes of modernity that have been operating in Western culture for more than 400 years. Secular liberalism is also a child of modernity, so it is no surprise that when a group of liberals is asked to state what they believe, their answers are modern answers.
But what does that mean for our religiousness, for the living waters which religion ought to provide? What about willows by flowing streams? What about moisture? Modernity was born out of a relentless skepticism and bitter hostility toward religion’s aspirations to power and domination. Articulate the individual’s relationship to the infinite? Search for certainty? Modernity will criticize and challenge. Any religion born of modernity is going to be very different from—and even unrecognizable to—religions born in earlier eras. Any religion born of modernity will always risk running dry, not only because its premises are so academic and intellectual, not only because it so readily dispenses with gods, goddesses, myths, scriptures, rituals, ceremonies, but because it is profoundly ambivalent towards spirituality, towards the unseen and unprovable, towards the possibility that some fount of life, some mysterious presence, some indefinable, transcendent reality may, in some incomprehensible way, hear our call and pour its living waters in. “You’re dry,” said Bishop Pearson. “You need more moisture.”
I propose two challenges our principles must meet if they are to form the core of a religion, if they are to bring moisture to our parched throats, if they are to effectively answer the question, “How shall we live?” First, they must make vivid and real the ways in which modernity can support a robust spiritual life. I don’t think we’ve fully tapped the spiritual potential modernity can encompass. Listen to these words from Cornel West. He’s talking about what it means to be modern. In my view he’s talking about ways of living spiritually. These are not the words of one parched with spiritual thirst:
“To be modern is to have the courage to use one’s critical intelligence to question and challenge the prevailing authorities, powers and hierarchies of the world…. I am a quintessentially modern thinker in that I weave disparate narratives in ways that result in novel forms of self-exploration and self-experimentation. To be modern is to live dangerously and courageously in the face of relentless self-criticism and inescapable fallibilism; is to give up the all-too-human quest for certainty and indubitability….My conception of what it means to be modern is shot through with a sense of the dialogical—the free encounter of mind, soul and body that relates to others in order to be unsettled, unnerved and unhoused. This experience of dialogue—the I-Thou relation with the uncontrolled other—may result in a dizziness, vertigo or shudder that unhinges us from our moorings or yanks us from our anchors. This thoroughly modern lightness of being—produced, in part, from the innovations of modern science and technology or improvisations of modern music and the arts—is both frightening and energizing. This loss of our footing and gain of our freedom compel us to acknowledge that the very meaning of being modern may be the lack of any meaning, that our quest for such meaning may be the very meaning itself—without ever arriving.”
Spiritual paths open up within modernity when we consider not just critical intelligence but the courage to use it; not just inherent worth and dignity but inherent fallibility! Not just the free subject, but the subject in dialogue, in unsettling relationship with the uncontrollable other. Not just the mind but the body and the soul! Not just the free and responsible search but an inescapable possibility of no meaning, engendering fear, dizziness, vertigo, a shudder, and energy compelling us onward in our quest. Not just freedom as some abstract concept we take for granted and can’t talk about at dinner, but freedom as dangerous, tangible, raw, messy engagement with the real world! A stream can flow here. A willow can spring up here. Thirst can be quenched here. Do our principles bring us here? Do they bring us modernity’s full potential to support an embodied spiritual life marked by courage, dialogue, dangerous freedom, an honest appraisal of our fallibility, and a soulful engagement with the world? This is the first question I will ask of them.
Second, modernity does have its limits. Modernity’s attack on religion cut it off from the full range of religious wisdom from earlier eras. Modernity has not fulfilled its promises of freedom, justice, equality and progress for all. Nor have many of its scientific assumptions kept pace with new discoveries. Where modernity misses the mark, so do our principles. Any worthy appraisal of our Unitarian Universalist principles must take into account how the limits of modernity are also embedded in them. How can we address those limits? How ought we to transform or expand our principles so that their modern limits may be transcended? What language would bring more moisture? How might each principle evolve so the Mysterious presence, the source of all, the fount of life might hear our call and pour its living waters in? How might each principle need to change so that we may live more fully like willows springing up by flowing streams?
Amen and Blessed Be.
Beach, Seth Curtis, “Mysterious Presence, Source of All,” in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press and the Unitarian Universalist Association, 1993) #92.
Beach, Seth Curtis, “Mysterious Presence, Source of All,” in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press and the Unitarian Universalist Association, 1993) #92.
