Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Universalism — Now More Than Ever

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
June 1, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

Go out into the highways and by-ways. Give the people something of your new vision.

You may possess a small light, but uncover it, let it shine; use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women.

Give them not hell, but hope and courage; preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.

— John Murray

 

In this part of the world, Universalism is sort of the little-known little brother of Unitarianism. The unedited version of our name is such a mouthful that people tend to drop the “Universalist.” For many congregations that started out Unitarian, it was years after the 1961 merger of the two faiths before they added “Universalist” to their names, and a few still haven’t made the switch. The church sign and the letterhead of these congregations are symbolic of how the Universalist side of our heritage is sometimes forgotten, even though the most famous and arguably most important California Unitarian, Thomas Starr King, was also a Universalist, serving churches of both faiths.

It was a little different in northern New England and Central New York, where Universalist churches were planted all over, but they were also begun far afield across the expanding country. At its peak in the 19^th century, Universalism was the 9^th-largest Protestant denomination in the country. (To put that in perspective, if our church were the 9^th largest now, it would have far more adherents than the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses.) What happened? The conventional wisdom, passed on in one history after another, is that Universalism dwindled as a denomination when its message became mainstream. It wasn’t that Universalists changed their tune — it was that many other churches adopted their doctrine of universal salvation, or at least stopped harping on hell, damnation, and the terrifying end-times predicted in Revelation. The fear of hell was no longer driving Lutherans and Methodists and the like into Universalist arms. Universalism was the victim of its own success.

So say the history books. And maybe they’re right about the mid-19^th century. But if Universalism stopped being necessary then, then by the same measure, it has sure become necessary again.

Hell and damnation, the Rapture and the lake of fire are going strong in American religion today. Accept any pamphlet from a street-corner evangelist, flip past any Christian radio station, and you will learn all about hell and the way to stay out of it. The “Left Behind” books have sold well over 60 million copies. That’s a whole lot of people reading every day about how the saved are going to be lifted to heaven and the rest of us are going to stay behind in a godforsaken mess of a world.

In the 19^th century, according to the dominant doctrine of the day, everyone’s destiny had been decreed by God and almost everyone was headed for everlasting torment. Picture this: you are convinced by everyone you know and trust that when your life here draws to a close, you will be transported to a torture chamber where you will be ceaselessly racked by every imaginable pain. Not even the release of death will await you. Unless you’re among the elect few, your suffering will be unbearable, eternal and inescapable. That is what nineteenth-century churchgoers heard from their Calvinist ministers and from their parents, and why some of them desperately needed, and heeded, the healing vision of Universalism.

It is no different today. All around us people are suffering with real fear of the hell that is preached to them each Sunday. Most churches that harp on hell nowadays offer an easier out than the 19^th century Calvinists. Instead of preaching predestination, they assure their congregants that trust in Jesus will save them. But if that gives them some peace of mind about their own fate, it doesn’t save their friends and family members who go to heretical churches. Many of us have been prayed for, begged to convert, harangued by the people who love us; they have even baptized our children without our consent, all because they fear for the fate of our souls.

Universalism offered a vision of a God who is too loving to condemn anyone to a fate worse than death; a God who, like a patient parent, understands his children’s failings and has a capacity for forgiveness far greater than our capacity for sins and mistakes. As it evolved, Universalism taught that hell is not a realm where damned souls go to suffer, but simply (and profoundly) the suffering we inflict on ourselves when we are out of right relationship with ourselves and our neighbors. Universalism preached of a process of redemption that was not about groveling before an angry God, but about allowing the love that was all around us into our hearts. And so it promised hope, love, and heaven on earth for all who would partake of them. It still does, and we still need it, because the preaching of hell is alive and well.

But you know something? It isn’t only the members of fundamentalist religions who see doom everywhere. It’s an attitude that pervades our culture — and Unitarian Universalists are far from immune. And that is why we really need Universalism, now more than ever.

Several years ago, I read an essay that noted just how many books and essays proclaimed that this or that had reached its end.

The End of Blackness
The End of Dreams
The End of History

Several contained the phrase “The End of Civilization.” Doom was in the air. It continues. Published just last year was The End of America. And now, as if to sever the last threads of hope, another book foretells The End of Baseball. Of course, it’s not long past the turn of the millennium, and we know what that kind of calendar event does to people. It can make even the soberest person go positively millennial, seeing — even hoping for — the end of days wherever they look. We may be suffering some aftershocks of the year 2000 (or was it 2001), and still be a little hyper-attuned to potential endings everywhere.

Even so, it goes to show what kind of mood we’re in as a culture.

Predictions of doom are supposedly the territory of religious conservatives: people who give humans little control and tend to see this world and humanity as pretty sorry messes. Part of the essence of conservatism, whether political, social, or religious, tends to be a conviction that things were better in the old days — that things will never be quite the same — that we’re going downhill, unless we work mighty hard to return to the glory days — that those glory days are not likely to come again. But religious liberals seem to have grabbed a pretty good corner of the doom market too.

The environmental movement alone could keep us all in gloom and doom, and I’ve done it myself, said “Woe, the end is nigh.” Some religious liberals of a Pagan bent tell of a glorious time of human history when women were priests, goddesses of peace and abundance were worshipped, hierarchy was unknown, goodwill reigned, until the patriarchal god-worshippers came along and ruined it all. Go to a demonstration against the war and you can hear one prediction of doom after another — very little hope to be had. Among Unitarian Universalists as well as anyone else, there’s just a pervasive sense that things are getting worse.

I’m inclined a bit toward this way of thinking, myself. One day a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door and said, “Do you ever feel as if the world is just getting worse and worse? Do you worry about all the environmental devastation, war, crime, and poverty? Are you ever filled with despair? Well, the solution is here,” and they held up their magazine.

I knew they were witnessing to a faith I wasn’t interested in and didn’t share, and that as soon as they ended their spiel I was going to discourage them from my door. But I did wait until they’d said their piece, because as they were posing their rhetorical questions, something came to me: the answer Yes. Yes, I pretty much agreed with their description of the world. I did worry about all those things and despair did threaten to overtake me. So I told them so. I said, “I often feel the same way, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But I don’t agree with your solution.” To me it just looked like more of the same: obey the God who created this mess to begin with and it will somehow all come right.

But then what solution do we have to offer, as members of this liberal — this radical faith? If we paint the same grim picture of this world as the Calvinists and the fundamentalists, but don’t even offer a solid hope of heaven in the next, why should anyone listen to our message?

There is good news that has been preached to us by our Universalist forebears and that we have to give to the world, to lift its burden of despair, bitterness and fear. We offer an alternative to the voices that say, “We are sinners in the hands of an angry God. Repent and perhaps he will not cast you like vermin into the fire.” Universalism says that at the heart of the universe is not anger and punishment, but love, an unconditional love, a love that soothes all our wounds, that sees all our failings but will never give up on us.

What the old-time Universalists, meant by this is that we were created by a God whose nature is love. You may believe it too, as do many Unitarian Universalists of our day, which puts you in the long and distinguished line of Universalists going back twenty centuries or more. I’m a Universalist too, but my faith is a little different than that. Frankly, I think the forces that created us are indifferent to our fate. The universe is impersonal and as a leaf falls, a sparrow falls, a human falls, it does not care. But just the same, I am a Universalist because I believe — no, I don’t believe, I know — that love is all around us and within us. In easy times, it is a stream rushing and singing, and in hard times, it is a well buried deep under the desert sand. But its waters are always there, somewhere, visible to the eyes of hope.

Do I need to tell you stories of love bursting forth where there seemed to be nothing but mistrust and fear? You know them. You know the man who was hurt and disillusioned by divorce — by the failure of love in his life — and learned to open his heart again to make a marriage that would stay loving. You know the sisters who swallowed their fear of each other’s rejection and ended years of feuding by reaching out to reconcile. Here’s a true story I heard on the radio program “This American Life”:

A child is taken to an orphanage and spends the first seven years of his life there, hardly ever being held, hardly ever hearing a word of love from any adult, not having even a toy. Most children learn love from the adoring gaze of their parents; he has no one who looks upon him like that. Many would say it’s too late for him to give love, or take it in. And then someone adopts him as their own son. And when he screams in anger, they stay close to him, and when he tells them he hates them, they hold him, and no matter how much of his anger and fear he pours out on them, they love him. He’s arrested, he’s banned from their synagogue, he destroys all the furniture in his room, he steals. He just doesn’t believe that they care about him; to him they are jailers, like the people who ran the orphanage, giving food and shelter but nothing more. But his parents embody a love that will not let him go, and in time he comes to love them and to know that they love him. This story of Rick and Heidi Solomon and their son Daniel played on the episode themed “Unconditional Love.”

The moral is not that anyone can reach anyone given enough patience and perseverance — I don’t know if that’s true. It is that deep within us lies a capacity to love and be loved that may remain hidden for half a lifetime, until it is called forth. How and why love breaks through is a mystery; but that it does happen in the most improbable and unpredictable moments is undeniable. It is one of the miracles of which the Rev. Scotty McLennan spoke to us last month. Like the wind, we do not know where it comes from or where it goes, but we hear its sound (John 3:8). You may say it comes from God, or the human spirit, or I’ve heard of people who literally believe it comes from space aliens who move invisibly among us, but whatever its source, it is real. When we think we are full to the brim with indifference or vengeance, when we are lost in loneliness, when we think no one will ever love us, when the nightly news chants fear and hopelessness, love can still break through to us, improbably, incredibly, again and again. And when it does, it saves lives, and it saves souls. And this is the good news of Universalism, the good news that by bringing hope and courage we also save lives and save souls. When we make progress in resolving the problems that fill our scenarios of doom, such as war and environmental devastation, it is less fear that powers our transformation than it is love: love for each other, for our planet, for the life we share.

Can we have faith in this power of love? Do we dare?

A song has been singing itself in my head, a song written by a Unitarian Universalist minister named Meg Barnhouse. It expresses this struggle through a dialogue with the most famous words of Julian of Norwich. Julian, sometimes called Juliana, was an English mystic of the 14th century who is as loved as a saint, and has been venerated by the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. The beautiful and perplexing words that inspired Barnhouse’s song are “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.” That refrain is sung repeatedly in the clear, sweet voice of faith. But the singer challenges,

Julian, do you not know, do you not know about sorrow?
And Julian, do you not know, do you not know about pain?
Julian, do you not know, do you not know about hunger?
And Julian, do you not know, do you not know about shame?

Julian just replies, “all will be well, and all will be well,” and the singer continues, “Do you not know about loneliness? … about disease? … about cruelty?” She voices all the doubts I’ve ever shouted back at Julian’s apparent complacency. “It’s too much!” she says. “It brought me to my knees.”

And then Barnhouse puts these chiding words in Julian’s mouth:

“No one does not know, does not know about sorrow
And no one does not know, does not know about pain.”

She knows, too; she also has been brought to her knees by hunger, shame, loneliness, disease, cruelty, and all the troubles of the world. And yet, she affirms, what she heard there on her knees was the assurance, “All will be well.” For as she goes on to sing, lovingly addressing her challenger,

Baby girl, do you not know, do you not know about tenderness? …
do you not know about friends? …
do you not know about the spirit? …
do you not know--it’s only love that never ends.

And so she sings, “All will be well. All manner of thing will be well.”

Oh, my friends, I’m still arguing with Julian. It isn’t only love that never ends. Pain and loneliness and cruelty all seem to have an awful lot of staying power too. And not everything will be well, not when we turn on the radio a week after the earthquake in China and hear the wails of a woman who has just found her child’s body in the rubble of her school. All the tenderness, love and friendship in the world will not wipe the pain from her heart. And yet, and yet, they are a blessing and a balm. Julian had a vision, recorded as the Revelations of Divine Love, in which she was assured that God loves and saves everyone. Small wonder she is known as a universalist in her own way: her vision looked into our future and revealed there not hell, but enduring love. Our suffering is not the whole story. Love is as solid as pain.

Love is all around us. It springs forth within us, and it flows from us. It is within our power to make a world in which pain and sorrow do not have the final word. We can give the people something of our new vision. We may possess a small light, but we can uncover it, let it shine, and use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. With our love, we can bear the message not of hell, but of hope and courage. My brothers and sisters in Universalism, so may it be, and so may we bless the world.