Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflections On Unitarian Universalist Identity

By Reverend Kenneth W. Collier
Fall 2000 Palo Alto, CA

(Note: this paper was originally presented to a group of UU ministers)

Sometimes we give each other well researched, documented, even scholarly papers. This paper is not one of those. Some may be interested in writing such a paper on this topic, but I am not. In fact, I'm not real sure that such a paper would be very helpful, at least it would not be helpful to me.

Think about the adolescent who asks herself "Who am I?" Research is not to the point; reflection is, and soul searching. Her question is not an objective one; it is an existential question. This paper is more like that. I think that the issue of Unitarian Universalist identity is really an existential one and not a objective one, and therefore it is best grappled with reflectively, like that adolescent grapples reflectively. And it needs to be revisited from time to time, just as all of us need to ask ourselves occasionally who we are and how our development is integrated. That's how I conceive of this paper, and how I hope you will receive it.

Let's begin with some of the questions we are often asked by outsiders-and even by some insiders, too. Do some of these sound familiar?

• So just what is a Unitarian Universalist, anyhow?
• How come your Seven Principles are not a creed?
• If you don't share a creed, what holds you together?
• How come you're not just a bunch of folks with different beliefs who find it convenient-or even just pleasant-to hang out together?

We all hear these, their functional equivalents, and other equally puzzled questions far more often, perhaps, than we care to admit. And most of us find ourselves surprisingly hard pressed to answer them. I've been a Unitarian Universalist minister for 21 years, and I've been trying to find satisfactory answers most of that time. It's all about Unitarian Universalist identity. Why is Unitarian Universalist identity such a difficult topic? Baptists seem to know who they are, and Jews always seem to be able to find one another with no trouble at all. Why do we have such trouble?

I think it is because of a basic commitment that we made very early on in our movement. We've all heard the nonsense about Unitarian Universalists being a people who can believe whatever they want to believe-a clear case of a half-truth masquerading as a whole truth if I ever heard one. Unitarian Universalists can't believe anything we want to believe, but only those things that we discover in the quiet integrity of our hearts we must believe, that we cannot help believing, that make us who we are. And that's the rub. We embrace, in Bob Kimball's words, a radical respect for the primacy of individual integrity and therefore also of individual belief.

I would not want to trade that in for anything, because I believe that religion is, ultimately, a matter that one discovers in the primal intimacy of one's private heart and brings forth into the glorious light of communal context. It emerges out of a dance between one's heart and one's community, between one's ego and one's spirit, between who I am, standing naked before the Profound Beauty, and who I am, standing clothed in the light of relationship with the world.

There are, though, implications to this commitment to individual religious autonomy. In the first place, it means that theology, for us, is not a prescriptive science, but an autobiographical investigation. There is no Unitarian Universalist theology that we hope to spread through the world. (This, it should be noted, is a claim about contemporary Unitarian Universalism, not about historic Unitarianism or Universalism.) Instead, there are individual personal theologies, that we share with one another, not to convince someone else that we are individually right, but to deepen our mutual understanding of one another, of the communal ties that bind us, and of our own understanding of the depth of the experience of being human. Unfortunately, without a common theology, it becomes difficult to see what it is that holds us together. Without a common theology, what makes us different from a secular community? In short, what's religious about us?

In the second place, there is no common theological language among us. All Christians, even the non-creedal Christians like the Baptists, talk about Christ and couch their theological and religious conversation in terms of Christ, God, the Holy Spirit, and so on. We have nothing even remotely comparable. We can't even agree on how to describe the religious enterprise. If we have no common religious language, how can we possibly talk to one another? How can we hope to come to any agreement, even tacit and temporary, about Unitarian Universalist identity? If we do not speak a common religious language, once again, what is religious about us?

Thus it is that we have a hard time with identity questions. Not only do we have difficulty talking with one another, but also we are not even very sure what to talk to each other about! That's what the Seven Principles are designed to help us with. To be sure, they do not define us. I'm not even sure the such a definition is all that desirable or even useful. Rather, The Seven Principles are a list of principles to most of which most of us can give some strong degree of assent. At best, then, they are a, more or less temporary, description. That helps, but not all that much. After all, we all know people who are very clear that they are not Unitarian Universalists but who can give strong assent to most of these principles. Elie Wiesel, springs to mind, for example, or Thich Nhat Hanh.

It has not always been true that we had such a difficult time with questions of identity. Back when both Unitarianism and Universalism were clearly Christian sects, there really was a commonalty of belief. Unitarians believed that God is a radical, undifferentiated unity, utterly without division. Thus it followed that Jesus could not be divine. They followed Jesus, not because they believed him to be God, but because in his life and teachings, they discovered this Unitary God. They may not have had a creed, but they did have a theology. One was a Unitarian because one embraced the theology of a Unitary Christian God. Heretical it may have been to the traditionalists, but it was also clear.

Universalists believed that the essence of God is pure love. Since vengeance is not an act of love, this loving God must guarantee salvation to all beings, i.e. must already be gathering unto himself the souls of the world. The religious task for them was that of returning God's loving embrace and giving the flesh of their lives to the radical love of God. Universalists were Christians because they believed that Jesus preached the word of this God of pure love. Though they may have differed considerably about the details, they, too, had a theology and even a doctrine, if not a creed. One was a Universalist because one embraced the theology of a purely loving Christian God.

The situation began to change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as both Unitarianism and Universalism began to open their theologies. They began to see either the Unitary God or the God of Pure Love in the teachings of other religious geniuses and began, as movements, to step out of the Christian fold. As they did so, they became less and less sure who were the "real" Unitarians and Universalists. The process was neither easy nor without controversy. Many left both movements in great pain because they felt betrayed and saw the religion they had given their lives to being stolen from them. This process of change continues to the present day, and it is no less painful now than it was then.

So where do we go from here? Is there something deeper, some substantive way of telling that Elie Wiesel is not a Unitarian Universalist but John Buehrens is? And even if there is, is it possible to express that whatever in a way that most-the quest for unanimity among us being, I'm afraid, a fool's errand-would agree to? Or is it closer to the old saw about pornography: I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it?

Let's go back to what I think is the central question: What is religious about us? A difficult, difficult question, and I do not expect everyone to agree with my answer. But I think that addressing this question is the place to begin understanding Unitarian Universalist identity. I think that there is a way of being religious among us that is, at least in the Western world, close enough to being unique that it gives us a discernible identity.

First, we need a glance at a more general question: what makes anything religious? What makes Christianity religious? What makes Buddhism religious? What makes Voodoo religious? How can you tell which, of all the institutions and activities of a culture, are the religious ones?

My answer to this may surprise some. I do not think religion is about mythology or manipulation of the universe or the gods, or social control, or any of those other fairly common suggestions. The essence of religion is not in its cult or in its sociology. These things and others like them all flow, I believe, from something that is more fundamental. I think that there is an essential drive within human beings toward a certain kind of integration. I do not know whether or not this is what makes us human, but when it is allowed to flourish, it certainly keeps us that way. All of the rest of the stuff, the mythology, theology, social control, and so on, are designed to foster, facilitate, and express this drive toward integration.

The obvious question is what integration I am talking about. This is where things begin to get decidedly dicey. I have absolutely no confidence that anyone has language for this that will be generally accepted by Unitarian Universalists. Here is how I think and talk about it. Please try not to get hung up on my language. It is not very important, and we Unitarian Universalists have a tendency to get so worried about the language that we miss the deeper point entirely. If you don't like this language, try to look through it and understand it in your own language.

I find that human beings are complex enough to be able simultaneously to conceive of the world in multiple, apparently incompatible, ways. For example, we can analyze the world, taking it apart into smaller and smaller pieces, trying to see what makes it work and even how the pieces fit together. And we can see the whole thing all at once, as a unified, seamless thing. Which way of seeing the world is right? Why should one be right? We see it both ways, the former giving us a finer and finer understanding of the structure of the empirical world, the latter giving us wider and more and more expansive views of the magnificence of the universe. Both, I think, answer to basic drives within our minds and hearts, the drive to understand and the drive to embrace.

At this point I want to make a bold claim that not all will agree with: religion is about the drive to embrace. It is about falling in love with the Cosmos at deeper and more and more profound levels. It is about the discovery that the integrity which guarantees my own autonomy (inherent worth and dignity) is but one expression among many of a deeper integrity that binds everything up into a holy union (interdependence). The thing that makes Christianity and Buddhism and Voodoo religious is that they are all ways of falling in love, some more expansive and effective than others, to be sure, but all ways of finding oneself deeply and profoundly held, loved, and loving the Cosmos.

(I realize that this assertion may be somewhat controversial, especially in light of the level of hatred that has been engendered, especially by Christianity and Islam. Yet the fact that these religions, among most others-including ours-have not been entirely successful and have been limited and even perverted does not change the fact that, to use Christianity as my example, the essential message is that God loves everyone and that the essential commandments all assert that the core work is that of love-of God, of self, and of neighbor.)

If Unitarian Universalism is a religion, then it, too, must be a way of falling in love with the Cosmos. Is it? It must be a way of revealing the depth, the profundity, the essential Beauty of reality. Is it? It must be a way of cultivating the essential drive to stand within the greater integrity of the whole and extending the autonomy of one to embrace the autonomy of all. Is it? If the answer to this "Is it?" is "Yes," then our way of doing these things is what creates our Unitarian Universalist identity. If the answer is "No," then the most that can be said is that Unitarian Universalism is becoming a religion. I think that the answer is becoming "Yes." Let me explain what I mean by that before you roll your eyes and say, "That is so UU."

If the answer were a clear "Yes", then our religion would be a force to reconcile enemies, to reconstruct broken lives, to bind up that which has been torn asunder. All that happens, but I am afraid that it is far more the exception than the rule. Ask yourself how many people you know who, when they discovered Unitarian Universalism, experienced a genuine conversion, i.e. had their lives turned around. More often than not, we are embarrassed to talk about conversion to Unitarian Universalism. How many people do you know, for example, who have used Unitarian Universalism as a source of inspiration and strength to overcome addiction? How many have found in us the inspiration to break the cycle of domestic violence in which they found themselves to be the aggressor? How many have found in us the source of healing from a life broken by racism or homophobia or any of the thousands of ways people are broken?

I think that most of us can think of people we have known in our congregations for whom the answer to at least one of these questions is yes, but what of the rest of our people, for whom the answers seems to be no? How many were wandering in darkness, and, discovering Unitarian Universalism, walked out into the light, and, finding themselves surrounded by love, changed their lives forever? If that even sounds like a peculiar question to ask, do we not have to pause a moment to consider how deeply religious our movement is? If the point of religion is to fall in love with the Cosmos, to explode in love of God, self, and one another, then would not the number of people who are so in love in a denomination be a measure of its success, even a measure of the religious profundity of that denomination? I think so, and I cannot help but wonder about us. Yet the very fact that we all know people for whom our movement has been life saving, if not literally then at least figuratively, certainly suggests to me that there is something religious about us, even when we have been chary about talk of conversion and falling in love.

Something has been happening in the 21 years that I have been a Unitarian Universalist minister. Questions about conversion and falling in love and the like are not as peculiar now as they would have been back in 1976 when I entered Starr King. In fact, in those days, these kinds of questions, when they were not held up to outright ridicule, were thought to be irrelevant. We are changing once again.

This time we are beginning to realize that these questions are not irrelevant, that they are crucial to our very identity as a religious movement. Another way of putting it is that if what we stand for does not have the power to change people's lives-to heal the broken, to reconcile the estranged, to give meaning to the absurd- then we really are religiously and spiritually irrelevant. We are beginning to recognize that the ego without the spirit is condemned to wander in existential loneliness and the spirit without the ego is condemned to a hollow meandering journey. And as before the process of change is difficult and painful. Once again it feels to many that their church is forsaking them. Once again, people who are unable to accept the development of our religious movement are feeling forced out, ignored, unappreciated, bewildered at best, betrayed at worst.

So how do we fall in love with the universe? What do we do to fall in love? What is our method? It is such a strange question, as if it were asking for our prescription for falling in love. And how could there be a prescription? But the love I am talking about is not like the love that one feels for a friend or even a lover. There are those who believe that these loves are haphazard, coming upon one out of nowhere, like the scent of hidden flowers or the burbling of a hidden mountain stream. The surest way to avoid falling in this kind of love is to seek it out. But the love of which I speak in religious terms is something different. It is always there, never missing. It is not something that we must construct or that must find us or we it. It is rather something that we discover ourselves to have been in all along, something in which we "live and move and have our being."

That means, of course, that the love itself cannot be cultivated, but our awareness of it certainly can. And that is the first step in the religious journey, cultivating, not this deep and profound love, but an awareness of it. And the second step is bringing that awareness back into our lives and making it visible and real in the things that we do and the lives that we lead. How do Unitarian Universalists do these things? That, it seems to me is the same question as the question of Unitarian Universalist identity. So what's the answer?

I think that we have seen the bits and pieces of the answer already. First, and somewhat negatively, we do not think that the church is the repository of the only infallible way of falling in love. Rather, we think that each individual human being is bathed in this love and can discover it within the heart only in his or her own way. There is no high road to discovery. There are rather as many paths as there are human beings. Each path leads one and only one person deep within the heart where integrity lives and where falsehood and prevarication are impossible. It is here that we know who we are, and it is here that we discover that we are loved.

We do not have a single vocabulary for talking about this because words are not appropriate for this discovery. Awe is appropriate; humility and joy and the changing of one's life are appropriate; but, save perhaps for poetry, words are not. This is the mysterious, i.e. that before which all one can do is to stand in silence, head bowed in acceptance of that which is greater than oneself and yet gives one worth and dignity, love and autonomy, integrity, strength and profound self-awareness. As words are incomplete for such a thing; we can but use them, as the Buddhists say, to point at it as a finger pointing to the moon, i.e. poetically.

Thus, and still negatively, we do not think that it is the place of the church to dictate how to speak about the unspeakable or how to experience Profound Love. This is where our theological autobiography begins. I think of this enormous integrity as an utterly inexpressible and Profound Beauty; some think of it as the Rational; and others think of it is still other ways, some similar, others radically different. But my years in ministry suggest to me that the thing that all of our autobiographies seem to have in common is that they point at something that is greater than we are individually, something that embraces us and gives our lives grace and power. We take refuge in this in this Profound Integrity, call it what you will.

There is an interesting thing about autobiographies, though. It is impossible to write a definitive autobiography, because when you are finished writing, you're still living. There is always more to write, always more to understand, even concerning the living that has gone by. And it is impossible to wrote an autobiography when your living is finished. This applies to our religious autobiographies, too. They are never finished; there is always a need to return to the presence of the Profoundly Beautiful and look again, look deeper, discover that there is yet more to us than we thought possible, that we really are infinite.

Religion is not, for us, an event. It is a process, ever renewing, ever returning, ever deepening. But the process that takes me deeper need not be the process that takes anyone else deeper. The issue is not that we all practice alike, but rather that we find a practice that works for us individually and embrace and follow that practice wherever it may lead. We take refuge in the process.

This observation that we take refuge not so much in a single saving event but rather in an on-going religious process also sheds light on the puzzling nature of our sense of conversion and even religious healing. I think that for most of us the life-transformation of religion does not come as a flash of lightening. It is rather more like the unfolding of a flower, or the rising of a tide. (We are more like Soto than Rinzai.) As I look over my own congregation-and even my own life-and think about who these people actually are and what they have told me of their lives, I realize that many of them have indeed had their lives transformed by their discovery of Unitarian Universalism, and most are not finished, for as the old Jewish proverb has it, those who think they are finished generally are.

And there is more to it, even than this. As Rabbi Hillel said, "If I am only for myself, of what use am I?" We can go only so far in religious practice before we discover that we are not alone, that all those others out there, on the other side of the skin, are also loved, are also infinite, are also bathed in worth and dignity. But that means that they all have something to teach us, to disclose to us, to reveal to us. Our individual vision of the Profound Integrity is necessarily incomplete and so will never be the final word. In short, not only are we surrounded by others, but also we are incomplete alone. The only healing for the existential loneliness of the heart lies in a loving relationship with others. The flower of our integrity may bloom in the private sanctuary of our hearts, but it cannot come to fruit except in the company of others. Thus we take refuge in loving relationship.

So what's so special about all this? What makes it uniquely-or at least "semi-uniquely"-Unitarian Universalist? It may not be absolutely unique, but I do think that among typical institutional Western religions we have managed to turn things upside down. All religions include something of a dance between the individual on the one hand and the community and institution on the other, but at least in the West, the major emphasis is almost always on the institution, the church. That's a claim that may be hard (in the sense of time consuming and requiring research into a lot of different churches and theologians) to make out in detail, and in a reflective paper might be out of place. But I do think that, with the possible exception of the Society of Friends, virtually all Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sects put their primary emphasis on the institution rather than the individual.

What would Christianity be without the Gospels, or Judaism without the Torah, or Islam without the Koran? These scriptures are thought to be the essence of revelation, containing the core of religious belief. Disagreement and dissension there may be, but it all must be within conformity to the scriptures. Indeed, the dissension often turns on whether or not a proposed understanding or interpretation is in fact within the allowed limits of conformity to scripture. And that puts institutional conformity before individual understanding.

We've changed that. We do not argue about whether my understanding is legitimate or your interpretation is correct or conforms to the received wisdom. Rather, we Unitarian Universalists maintain that the words of the mouth are not as important as the words of the heart, and that since each person's integrity is unique, Religious Truth is multifarious and multi-voiced, speaking differently within each heart. To stifle the revelation of any heart is to deny Truth. And that puts individual understanding and revelation before institutional conformity.

It should be noted that to say that we put individual understanding before institutional conformity is not to say that we believe that the church is irrelevant or that the religious community is a mere convenience. On the contrary, as noted, if we take refuge in the Profound Integrity as it is discovered within the heart, we also take refuge in loving relationship, i.e. in the church. But we conceive of churches, not as repositories and guardians of ultimate truth, but as the context within which each of us can both bring the words of our hearts into the days of our lives and deepen the power of those very words.

There is more to be said. For example, I have hardly even brushed what I think is the critical historical question: is it a mere accident that we call ourselves Unitarian Universalist, or are we genuinely in the tradition of the great Unitarians and Universalists of history? It is one thing to claim that we are, but it is quite another to make that claim good. To do that would require showing how contemporary Unitarian Universalism is a direct and relevant development from the churches and thinking of the past and that there is something essentially Unitarian and Universalist that we share with these claimed ancestors. That's a task I will gladly leave to others; I have run out of both time and steam.

To close the circle, let's go back and look at those troubling questions we started with:

• So just what is a Unitarian Universalist, anyhow? A Unitarian Universalist is someone who believes that the path to religious understanding is multifarious, begins within every human heart, and leads one back to the world with a deep sense of both being loved by and loving that very world.
• How come your Seven Principles are not a creed? They are not a creed because, even though most of us give assent to most of them, they are not, either individually or collectively, a necessary statement of religious faith.
• If you don't share a creed, what holds you together? We are held together in a dance in which the individual and the church strengthen one another, beautify one another, uphold one another, and even create one another.
• How come you're not just a bunch of folks with different beliefs who find it convenient-or even just pleasant-to hang out totogether? It is more than just having fun hanging out together; we help one another fall in love with the Cosmos. And that is the very essence, it seems to me, of religious community.

© 2000 Kenneth Collier