Seeking the Center in the Human Soul

Ken Patton was one of the great voices of humanism in our denomination, and in 1986, when he went into retirement, he was given the Unitarian Universalist Distinguished Service Award. In some eyes, this may have been a mistake, because there really was no way, when giving him such an award, to keep him from saying a few words. Ken was a sublime curmudgeon with a gift for oratory. It was once said that if his congregation at the Charles Street Meetinghouse could have found a way to lock him in his office every week from noon on Sunday till about 10:30 in the morning on the Sunday after, the church would have grown to be the largest Universalist church in America. But they didn't. After fifty years of ministry, seeking the center in the human soul, writing words that have stirred so many, working diligently as humanism blossomed in our movement and watching in sorrow as it went somewhat into eclipse, Ken had something to say to all of us by way of criticism and admonition.

"I belong only with your mavericks," he said, with "Adin Ballou, Theodore Parker, Emerson, Thoreau and Channing in his last years. I am a maverick, as were the Old Testament prophets. [I'll bet that any one of you] could name twenty prophets [easily], but who can name one Old Testament priest? . . . Now, as you are cuddling up to the concepts and metaphors of traditional religion, you need young and feisty mavericks more than ever and they may be hard to find in this yuppie generation. . .

"This is not as liberal a movement as the one I entered," he told the crowd. "The evidence that drew many of us to humanism has grown exponentially since [that time], and yet religious humanism has waned. I am bemused that people can ignore or traduce the realities. [Jerry] Falwell knows his enemy is humanism. Whether it is your friend or enemy depends on you. But be assured [that] if you ignore the realities [of existence], you will be ignored [eventually, yourselves].

"I have two admonitions for you," he said. "Keep your one viable and creative tradition of total freedom of religion . . . [and] make sense."

Keep open to all avenues of faith, he was saying. Don't be overwhelmed by any one. Keep your ears open in the concert of human faith aspiration, listening for the symphony made by all the voices rather than succumbing to any given musical phrase. For all have much to offer.

But as you listen, be reasonable. Some of what you will hear from any and all will be discordant. Take this out before repeating what you have heard, that a clearer melody may be heard by all.

Thus a freedom of religion and a quest for sense will undergird the expansion of this faith you share.

These are the admonitions of one of our great humanists, now deceased, whose skillful artistic genius was behind the design of our old blue hymnal, who was a voice for freedom in religion and for rationality, but a voice that felt all those years ago at the close of his ministry that he was no longer being heard.

But we do need the humanism he, with so many others, championed so ably for so many years. The living tradition we share draws from it still. We say it counsels us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, that it warns us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.

But I would go further in saying that it admonishes us to seek the center in the human soul - if I can use the term soul without creating some dualism of the mind/spirit and the body.

It tells us that the laws of nature are immutable and we are a part of the natural domain. We cannot separate ourselves out from the greater drama of existence for we have a role in all that happens. Violate the ecological structures of this precariously balanced world and we will be destroyed as surely as some small species that we choose to step upon. Over reach our understandings of the laws of life that we play with so ardently these days and we will pay undreamed of consequences. We do not rule great nature nor do we stand over against it. My seven year old keeps telling me that we're just another animal as any good humanist knows.

It tells us that pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by doesn't work and that what salvation we will have comes to us in our daily lives. We do not store up merit for the future in order to buy a ticket to the heavenly realms. We merely give to the future of those who follow us as others have given in centuries past to the days we have right now. We plant trees that will only mature after we, ourselves, are gone. We set projects and goals that will benefit our posterity in the broadest sense. We honor life in its many forms as the key to our living and to all life that will follow.

It tells us that though goodness is entirely subjective, there is value to living life as though there were some eternal worth - as though beauty, truth, goodness and love were transcendent rather than being limited to the chain of understanding developed by living organisms down through the millennia, perhaps only here on earth.

It tells us that the great dicta of philosophy, born of the human mind, give us what value we have and that they only do so when they challenge us to action and we work together for the good.

And when we heed the guidance of humanism, we recognize in all prophets a harmony, in all scriptures a unity and through all dispensations of humanity a continuity. We abjure all that divides us and always magnify the ways of peace. We seek truth in freedom, justice in love and individual discipline in social duty. And we honor the great family of humanity as a part of the greater family of all existence.

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After thanking his "individual colleagues and fellow liberals, wherever they are," who had found meaning in his "words, projects and protests," Ken Patton said in that final address before our denominational leadership, "I will close out my misfit ministry with the most beautiful and briefest sermon ever preached. . . A master of a Zen monastery" he went on, "was asked by the neophytes for the meaning of enlightenment. He told the monks to go about their chores, to work with the villagers, and reassemble in a week. They did so, and [when they came together again] the master looked out at the sun and trees, listened to the birds, then spread his arms wide and left without a word."

Ken couldn't quite do this himself. A number of us corresponded with him in those closing years. I wrote a series of letters as I sought out his help when I first started to teach worship to seminarians. And Ken was always quick to respond and shared a number of his publications with those I worked with just as he shared packages of his material with all the active clergy at the time when he finally closed down the Meetinghouse Press. He might have been concerned about who would truly listen. He might question whether all his actions could be as strong as it might have been to simply wave good-bye, but his devotion to humanism and to seeking the center in the human soul - in every human soul - forced him to continue to help others throughout his life.

It is the humanist way - a path pursued by many from antiquity, that gave guidance to humanity during the renaissance and the enlightenment and that marked the way toward the many positive developments of the past century. And it is, as well, the hope for the future. Amen.