Who Are We?

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"Who are we?" This is the question that I proposed as my topic for this morning. It is generally assumed that when one proposes a question they will then persevere to answer that question. I mentioned in the brief description of this topic that the question was pointedly chosen in distinction from what I perceive as the more traditional Unitarian Universalist question, "Who am I?" In the intervening time since I provided the church with this topic, as I have studied and wrote, a new question rose repeatedly in my mind, "Why did I chose this topic?"

It may also be in some of your minds to ask, "Just who is he to be asking who are we?" I am not a minister. Although I have the degree that most of our ministers have. I worked as the administrator of a Unitarian Universalist congregation not far from here for more than five years. I am a Unitarian Universalist. And I care about who we are and where we are going as a movement. I am very concerned with the nature of the "we" in our movement.

I didn't grow up in this denomination. I grew up Catholic in the city of Boston. Where we viewed the Unitarians as generally harmless but tragically misguided. But not a threat in that the Unitarians represented Protestantism in it's most polite, reserved and non-evangelical stance. And even today I would say that if a person converts to Unitarian Universalism there is rarely any particular UU that could be singled out for praise or blame in influencing the individuals decision.

I have a Masters of Divinity degree from the Catholic University of America. I had intended to be a catholic priest at one time. But as Archbishop Cranmer is reported to have said on the way to his execution: "It's a topsy-turvy world and these are topsy-turvy times." As a Catholic I had taken a few sentences from the Constitution of the Church in the Modern World as a fundamental statement of my faith. These words: "The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts." I did not see anything in Unitarian Universalism that inhibited me from maintaining that commitment. I got here that same haphazard and mysterious way that many of us got here.

Now that I have indulged my Unitarian Universalist penchant for answering the "Who am I?" question, I can proceed. Who are We? I have to admit that I can't answer the question in any final global manner. Unitarian Universalism is (in the sense of it's being a denomination) a non-creedal, congregational movement. It is interesting to note that the denomination has to defining words that are used in its title: Unitarian and Universalist. It is no small matter that these two words have little if any religious meaning to a vast number of UU adherents. That there is a unity in the person of God and that this one God calls all people to salvation is viewed as theologically irrelevant to many of us.

We have our Purposes and Principles, which are frequently displayed and quoted. But make no mistake, the Purposes and Principles are not a statement of our dogma. If they were, I would not belong to this church because I will not and can not offer an assent in faith to every article contained in the Purposes and Principles. So I believe that when we are to speak of who are we, it must be done at the level of the congregation.

This is not to say that we cannot make certain kinds of general statements about Unitarian Universalism. Perhaps the only thing in our movement that is accepted in an almost doctrinal fashion is the tradition and practice of congregational polity. The congregation decides upon minister and structure and bylaws. The congregation ordains to the ministry. The congregation holds the authority that in many other churches would reside with a bishop. We find the true radicalism of the American experience in how we govern ourselves. And we pay a price for this freedom among ourselves. Congregational polity can be a tyranny in bitterly conflicted congregations. We cannot vote ourselves into right relations.

But I suspect that it isn't voting that gets our congregations into trouble. The search for "we" in our congregational life is made problematic not from actions of the community but more from inaction. We don't know who we are and are adrift in a sea of dead worship experiences and spiritual faddishness. People are searching. Our ministers are searching. Recently I have heard stories of several ministers who describe themselves as Buddhist UU's, and recently one prominent minister abandoned the movement and became a Roman Catholic. Wiccan maypoles adorn many of our courtyards. I remember being told of a UU family who young adult son had become a member of an extreme Christian fundamentalist sect. I was seated with a group of UU's at lunch when this story was of the young son was shared. One member of our group shook her head and said, "Well, some people have a strong need for answers."

Upon reflection I found this reaction disturbing. Can it be that Unitarian Universalism does not offer answers? People come to churches because they have questions. Will they come to a church that professes not to have answers? Will they stay if they do make in the doors and find only more questions? But of course this is the church where I also here it proclaimed with pride, "You don't have to believe anything to a Unitarian Universalist." Whenever I hear someone say that I usually respond with, "Oh, but what do you believe?"

Now some within our movement are encouraged by the broad mix of new spiritual and metaphysical practices that can be found within our churches. I am not one of them. The new spirituality generally happens outside the expressed wish of the congregation. We rarely have worshipping communities. We have spiritual factions at best. But more often than not we have Unitarian Universalist individualism with a new gloss. I would say that we are witnessing a great awakening of Pietism. James Luther Adams defined Pietism as, "the restriction of religion to the immediate relations between the individual and God and to interpersonal relations. In Pietism the relation to God is a one-to-one relation between the individual soul and God and between the individual and other individuals-that is, with other "saints." Whether in the Orient or the Occident, Pietism of this sort wrongly assumes that if the individual is on the path to Nirvana or is devoted to personal meditation or gives his life to the Jesus of personal piety, he does not need to be concerned directly with institutional existence. The problems of institutions, we are told, will take care themselves, if everyone would only adopt this religion of personal salvation."

There is no sure test to separate the genuine spiritual practice from the fad. I believe that congregations can come to self-definition. Unitarian Universalist congregations in my experience hold themselves back in several ways. There is the fear that someone will be offended. We want to everybody's church. Everybody's church is nobody's church. We cannot shrink from defining our identities. The only place that I've seen filled with people and not one of them offended was a cemetery. And I've been in UU sanctuaries on Sunday morning that felt just like that.

"But what about diversity? We can't define ourselves. We would exclude people." I don't believe that communities that come to self-definition of their spiritual and ecclesial mission need be exclusive. But I also know that too much attention has been paid to what I describe as micro-diversity. Congregations want to collect just the right number of racial or sexual minorities to be diverse. That this leaves the minority always in a welcomed but powerless position does not seem to deter this practice. I look to an age when we can promote macro-diversity and see within this movement congregations that are strong and self-defined where diversity in our denomination would be endowed with institutional power.

So, Who are we? We are congregations. We are congregations where strife is common. We are congregations where people choose more and more frequently to find their spiritual depth in private. In the past one hundred years we have moved from being the focus of liberal Christianity in America to being churches uncomfortable with almost any practice that could be construed as religious. We cannot return to what we were but we must move beyond being the church where you don't have to believe anything. I hope, sincerely, I hope that I do not sound too pessimistic. I am not pessimistic finally. We have much to be proud of. We are liberal religion in America's best hope for the twenty first century. And even with the critical observations I have offered there is no other place this Sunday morning I would rather be. We can become who we are because you and I and others keep returning to rooms like these on Sunday morning. Let me close with the last stanza of Philip Larkin's poem Church Going,

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.