Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Our Whole Story

Reverend Darcey Laine
September 18, 2005
Palo Alto, CA

Our Whole Story part 1

The history of Unitarian Universalism is often told something like this: In the 1500s a Spanish physician named Michael Servetus, the same man who discovered respiration in the lungs, published a book called “On the Errors of the Trinity” He believed that God was one, and that the bible did not say anything about a trinity. He was burned at the Stake by John Calvin in 1553 for refusing to retract this statement.

During this time, such ideas were traveling across Europe. Just a decade later in Transylvania [1568] a young king, John Sigismund was convinced to listen to great preachers of different sects of the Christian tradition that before he name the state religion. A preacher named Frances David won the day with his ideas about how the trinity was not in the bible, and how “we need not think alike to love alike.” David advised King John that not only his ideas but all Christian religious groups should be allowed to co-exist under an “edict of tolerance.” Now groups of Unitarians began to worship together for the first time under this name. Other strains of Unitarianism grew in Poland and in England.

But Unitarian ideas continued to be met with persecution. Joseph priestly, an English Scientist and Unitarian Minister fled to America after his laboratory was burned to the ground because of his ideas. [1791]

Many in America were responding to a powerful fundamentalist movement called “The Great Awakening.” This was revival movement that grew out of Calvinism. Opponents of this movement emphasized the importance of reason and logic, an approach to the bible that valued historical and critical thinking, and the importance of ethics. Unitarianism is one of the movements that grew out of this opposition.

But the Unitarian churches were still part of the state-sponsored church system. Universalism, which had its roots in similar ideas, believed in a separation of church and state, and were allied with radical fringe groups like the Quakers. Universalism grew up in opposition to Calvinism, which said that only a certain small group had been chosen by God at the beginning of time to go to heaven; the rest of us were going to hell.

Universalists thought that this seemed like something an all powerful all loving God would not put in his design, and centered their faith with the idea that all persons could be saved.

The Unitarian and Universalist movements grew alongside one another. Both were deeply impacted by the transcendentalist movement, which preferred the natural world over the biblical literalism on which even the old-school Unitarians built into their faith. Transcendentalists like Channing, Fuller and Emerson wanted to strip away the historic structures and teachings of the church and center their faith in the direct experience of God. The transcendentalists also introduced Eastern thought into our movement, widening our Judeo-Christian roots.

This was also a great time for Social Justice as Unitarian and Universalist preachers and activists worked to end slavery, worked to give women the right to vote, and work in other areas which badly needed reform like the Prison and Mental Health systems. Pioneers like Olympia Brown, the first woman ordained into the ministry in this country, paved the way for gender equality in our own Universalist Tradition.

In the 20th century, the humanist idea that one could be religious and ethical without God was a powerful one in our movement. It was a driving force in this church when it was founded in 1947 and this building was built on a piece of land some thought too remote from the hub of Palo Alto.

In 1961 the Unitarians and the Universalists merged into one movement. Together we were allies and activists in the civil rights movement. We have been and still are leaders in women’s liberation and in the rights of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender persons. Today we provide a bridge between the secular and the sacred, among faiths and theologies.

The rest of this history is ours to make.

Our Whole Story part 2

I often look at this beautiful Madrone branch that has hung on our church wall for as long as anyone can remember and think how it represents the story of our tradition. Maybe this is the execution of Servetus right here, this break in the branch our break from the Catholic Church and our Protestant cousins. But now I want to say something about the symbolic tree on which this branch grew.

Frances David and Michael Servetus were both raised Catholics, and were part of the protestant reformation that rocked the western world. The Church of England, the Calvinists, the Baptists and many other protestant movements blossomed and evolved within a generation of Martin Luther, the Augustinian Monk, nailing his 95 thesis to the church door in 1517. Luther had been upset about corruption in the Catholic Church, and had grown in his disputes with Catholic theology.

With the invention of the printing press in 1450, common people could now read and interpret the bible for themselves. The spread of the printed bible translated into the popular tongues created a grass-roots movement within the Catholic Church.

The Roman Catholic Church had become the legal religion of Western Europe, tightly allied with political and financial power.

Monastic movements, like those founded in the 12th century by St. Francis and in the 5th century by St. Benedict created an alternative to the wealth and corruption which infected the power structures of both church and kingdom. Men and Women religious took oaths of poverty and devoted their daily life to sharing work and to cultivating the spirit.

At the same time mystics like Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen held at the center of their faith a direct experience of the divine (intellectual ancestors of the transcendentalists). Throughout Christian history there was a consistent tension between those keepers of the church traditions and institutions and those mystics and martyrs who held themselves accountable only to God, playing at the edges of heresy.

Arius, a parish priest at the turn of the 4th century, found himself on the heretical side of the Nicene Creed when in 325 the Council of Nicaea drew its theological line in the sand. Arius had taught that God created a Son who was the first creature, but who was not equal to God. According to Arius, Jesus was a supernatural creature not quite human and not quite divine. Some call Arius an early ancestor of Unitarianism.

Though there was as yet no council to declare him heretical, many controversies have followed the teachings of Origen of Alexandria, who lived a century before Arius. (185-232) He preached the eventual return of all souls to a perfection in proximity to God (an early ancestor, some say, of the Universalists).

Before Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and issued The “Edict of Milan” (CE 313), which ended the persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire, the early followers of Jesus were enemies of Rome, tortured and punished by death. Paul, who is credited with forming the early church, was imprisoned and writes about his imprisonment in the New Testament. Early Christianity was a religious movement which identified strongly with its crucified teacher. It was an egalitarian movement, a reform movement both within the Jewish tradition and within the Roman Empire.

Within the Roman Empire, the Jewish people lived as a conquered or occupied people. Many spent their lives as slaves, taken in battle. Roman procurators kept the peace and collected taxes, pocketing additional money for themselves. Roman leaders swung between tolerance of Jewish religious practices and persecution. Like the early Christians, Jews were tortured or put to death when they refused to worship pagan gods, or to worship the emperor as a God. In 70 CE the fall of the second temple in Jerusalem was the sad outcome of the Great Jewish Revolt against the Empire.

Our Whole Story part 3

This time moving backwards to the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem under Babylonian rule was a time when the books we now think of as the Hebrew Bible were canonized and began to assume their present form. This was the time when classical Greek philosophy was thriving, and the Jews were known for the strong ethics of their legal code and tradition. The last books that made it into the canon were writings of the prophets like Exekial and Zacharia who spoke out against the injustices of the ruling class, and of their contemporary culture as a whole.

The chronicles of Jewish history that appear in the scriptures describe a struggle of kingdom against kingdom, of the rise and fall of powerful men. This was a patriarchal time when women rarely had political power, and were not part of the Jewish Rabbinate. The Indian Mahabharata tells similar story. The Hindu and Greek pantheons also reflect the role of war in Classical society. And so it was throughout the world, as the Chinese warred for dynastic control of China, and the Aztecs in this continent.

Writing was also a child of the classical civilizations, first in Sumer and later in Egypt allowing the writing of scared stories and texts. Classical religions such as Judaism bring sacred writing to the center of their religious identity.

But the earliest books of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures share oral roots with the stories of Islam. All 3 religions call themselves descendants of Abraham. The first five books of the bible, called the “Torah” collect stories of a very ancient oral tradition. 20th century feminist scholars have used the stories and descriptions of the life of women to help recreate a picture of what women’s lives might have been like. We notice the presence of deities like “the Queen of Heaven” in these biblical stories . Since women were not taught to read, and in many times and places worshiped separately from men, their stories and rituals would have been passed down orally and many were lost. Scholars like Marija Gimbutas have found evidence of a time before written history when women held power in politics and religion, when God was female.

Before the written record, before the lingering stories of ancient times, we have only the material record to help us understand what came before; the residual tools of a Neolithic village, the sediment of an evolving earth. Before the farm oriented urban centers, were the Neolithic villages grown out of small settlements. Only about 1 million humans lived on earth. Archeological evidence of the first shrines and religious art shows us that religions focused on the cycle of life, the return of the sun after winter, harvest after planting. It was the role of early religions to pass on this cyclic wisdom, and to remind people of their place in the natural world. The Great mother deity gave birth to and cared for the universe.

These earliest peoples passed on to their offspring not only their genetic coding, but a cultural coding which preserved the learning of parent and grandparent for each evolving generation. Spoken language had made this possible in a new way.

As far back as our Neanderthal ancestors, ritual surrounded burial of the dead. Evidence of such a burial is found in an archeological site in Lebanon including a thoughtful arrangement of stones and a deer killed as food for the deceased. We identify with the drive of these early hominids to find meaning in the cycles of life and death, establishing traditions for integrating such experiences in their own lives and in the natural cycles of life.

Our Whole Story Part 4

2.6 million years ago the Homo Habilis was the first hominid to make an abundance of stone tools. We can tell that Homo habilis were hunters because the kind of tools they made -- developed for hunting and cutting apart their food. This initiative was so definitive, that we call this period which begins with the Homo habilis the Stone Age. These were the first of our close relatives.

Earlier hominids were distinguishing themselves from other primates with a larger brain size and upright posture, though our ancestors still spent a lot of time in the trees.

The primates and other mammals had began to flourish in a vacuum left by a devastating extinction 67 million years ago. This mass extinction eliminated the diversity of dinosaurs, marine reptiles, mollusks, fauna.

Placental mammals had first emerged in the wake of another devastation 114 million years ago. When we talk about time on this scale, and follow the story of our pre-human ancestors, we notice a cycle where richly fecund and diverse ecological communities are devastated by global changes to climate or chemical composition. Land animals evolved endotherm,(the power to have a warm body in a cold climate) as an adaptation of the Permian-Triasic episode [245 million years ago] which erased 75-95% of all species living on earth. Lycopods developed wood cells, becoming the first plants who could defy gravity and stand upright on land and vertebrates came ashore in response to the Devonian catastrophe 370 million years ago.

Our earliest multi-celled ancestors filled the planet 2 billion years ago after the most vast glacial extinction earth has ever seen. The ability of the first single celled organisms to use oxygen for fuel spontaneously adapted in response to the growth of overpowering clouds of oxygen which was toxic to all life forms then on our earth.

This surplus of oxygen is traced back to Promethio, an ancestor who evolved to photosynthesize 3.9 million years ago, to capture photons and turn them into energy when the chemical nutrients which had sustained life for so long were over-consumed by a growing single-celled population.

Aries, our first living ancestor emerged in the lightning storms and turbulent chemical interactions of earth’s oceans.

But even this is not the beginning of our Unitarian Universalist story. Our story reaches back to the formation of planets 4.45 billion years ago from collections of granules and gasses coheased from the 10 bands formed around our sun. These granules were bathed in nutrients by the brilliant death of the supernova Tiamat. Our bodies and our planet are formed from Carbon, Oxygen and other elements that were ejected around that dying star, as it collapsed. Tiamat had, in turn, been born from the death of other stars.

These stars were formed from cohesion of heavier elements like helium and hydrogen, as self-imploding centers divided clouds of elements which had been shaped by the density waves. The cooling universe had entered a new level of stability as Neutrons and protons were able to bond and form lasting relationships. The result was that more particles went out of being than finally endured. (Another kind of mass extinction). Because the photons were no longer able to leap into and out of being as the universe expanded and cooled. The growing universe had been and continues to be shaped by density waves which are amplifications of the subtle fundamental vibrations or aftershocks from the flaring forth.

The foundational forces of our universe were a balance of expansion with gravitational force maintaining a cohesion which allowed a balanced and sustainable unfolding. The first thing that ever happened in this universe was emergence, birth, the unfolding and expanding of space. All the energy that ever was and ever will be came into existence in an area smaller than the point of a pin, although that’s not really the right way of talking about it, since space and time were contained within that tiny singularity. The beginning of our story, and indeed of all that is was the flaring forth from a singularity. The first thing we were was one.¹

Closing Words

This is a chalice year in our religious education program. This means that we want to focus our attention on our Unitarian Universalist history, heritage, and identity. Who are we? What is our whole story?

One thing that has been true of Unitarians since we called ourselves by that name is a value of science and reason. And Science has given us a new story of who we are and where we come from.

We live in the eon of geologic time in which all 5 kingdoms of life have blossomed on earth. We live in a time of war, of competition for resources, of technological achievement. We live in a time of massive species extinction and changes to our biosphere.

If we only follow our branch of the tree back to the first people who called themselves Unitarian, or even to the first primate to stand upright, we are missing part of who we are. We might take for granted our understanding of the respiration of the lungs, or worse, we might take for granted our amazing ability to breathe oxygen. We might be missing the part of the story that will help us shape a bright future for our selves and our biosphere. The collected wisdom in our culture, in our bodies, in our DNA, in our ecosystem is a remarkable inheritance.

Who better than a faith that values science and reason to appreciate such wisdom. Who better than a faith which affirms we are all on the same path, to heed that wisdom in shaping a just and vibrant future. Who better than this very community to be students and teachers of this, our whole story.

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