Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.
This morning, Robert Latham, our interim district executive is meeting with the district’s ministers. One of the things he said is sticking with me:
“One way to define dysfunctionality is: to dream big and act small. Then one way to define funtionality is: to dream big and act big.”
Sociology professor G. William Dumhoff recently posted an article by an investment manager about the wealthiest people in the United States. This investment manager (who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons) concludes:
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: A highly complex and largely discrete set of laws and exemptions from laws has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.
For those of us who are concerned about people who are poor, the implication is that we will be able to make no real progress on eliminating poverty.
A robot tells the parable of the Gospel of Thomas, ch. 97. Here’s the text of the video:
The kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is like a woman who was carrying a jar full of flour. While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the flour spilled out behind her along the road. She did not know it. She had not noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.
A slightly different version of Thomas 97 will be the reading in the Sunday services tomorrow.
(Update, 11/22: video moved to Vimeo, audio improved a bit, and editing tightened up a bit.)
Recently, I have been trying to track down the origins of the following quotation attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“A person will worship something — have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts — but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
This quotation appears in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal Singing the Living Tradition, but there is no source listed for it in Between the Lines: Sources for Singing the Living Tradition. (This quotation does not appear in Hymns for the Celebration of Life, the predecessor to Singing the Living Tradition.)
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson are available online at www.rwe.org. I searched the complete works for “tribute,” using both the online concordance, and a brute force search using Google, and did not find this quotation.
Emerson’s complete sermons are also available online at www.emersonsermons.com — these are the genetic texts (including manuscript variations) used in the definitive four-volume The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Albert J. von Frank et al. (University of Missouri Press, 1989-1991). Using a brute force Google search, I did not find this quote in the sermons. I was also able to search eight of the ten volumes of Emerson’s letters online using Google Books (vols. 1-5, and 8-10). This quotation was in none of those volumes. All my searches used the relatively uncommon word “tribute” as the key search word.
At this point, I have not searched vols. 6-7 of the Letters; The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph H. Orth et al.; and The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph H. Orth. Nevertheless, I’m assuming that Emerson probably did not write this passage, and the attribution should read “attributed to Emerson.” Can anyone prove me wrong by providing a definitive source for this quote?
My title for this Sunday’s sermon here in the Palo Alto church is “Liberal religion, Silicon Valley style.” I’m a big believer in the notion that any religious organization will be influenced by the immediately surrounding community. Therefore, Unitarian Universalism in Silicon Valley should have some distinctive features. So what are some of the most important of those distinctive features, and how do they affect the way we do religion here? Here are three possible answers:
(1) One distinctive feature of Silicon Valley life is the ethic of hard work: here in the Valley, people believe that the harder one works the better off one will be. By contrast, Thoreau’s famous book Walden, an important book for many Unitarian Universalists, extolls the virtue of spending less time working hard, and more time contemplating Nature. I’d say Silicon Valley liberal religion extolls the virtue of lots of hard work, and tends to ignore thinkers like Thoreau.
(2) Another distinctive feature of Silicon Valley life is that we live in a truly multicultural and multiracial place. Santa Clara County is a white-minority county with no dominant racial or ethnic group; this is what the rest of the United States will look like within a generation. And while our congregation is 85-90% white, that also means that we are 10-15% non-white, and we’re all so used to living in the multiracial, multicultural world of Silicon Valley that it seems to me we’re pretty relaxed about becoming an increasingly multicultural congregation.
(3) Now add another distinctive feature of Silicon Valley life: the engineering and entrepreneurial drive which lead us to believe we can fix anything if we put our minds to it. I think Silicon Valley is going to be the place where liberal religion figures out how to be truly multiracial and multicultural. Here in the Valley, multiracial doesn’t mean there are both black and white people in the congregation, it means there are whites, blacks, East Asians, and South Asians; and people who were born in several different countries (Russia, India, Taiwan, etc.).
So liberal religion in Silicon Valley is characterized by a strong work ethic; by multiculturalism; and by a can-do attitude. This raise the interesting question that I’m going to try to address in the sermon: Does this mean all we’re going to do in our congregation is work our asses off? Because if all we’re going to do is to work our asses off (or work our collective ass off, whatever), even if it’s for a good cause, I’m just not interested. There has to be a better way to do religion….
The news from CERN is — very interesting. According to the BBC: “Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Colider, have confounded physicists because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.” CERN scientists are releasing their results to allow wider investigation and debate in the scientific community.
Whether or not this experimental result winds up being confirmed, what particularly interests me is the willingness to challenge one of the cornerstones of physics. Fallibilism is a powerful principle: even the special theory of relativity has to be up for grabs; everything has to be up for grabs.
I’m wondering why people join Unitarian Universalist congregations. Do we join in order to find a posse to help us further our existing social justice commitments? Do we join in order to help us stay in our current jobs, and maybe get better jobs? In other words, do we join in order to meet our own needs?
I’m a fan of liberation theologies. Liberation theologies talk about a preferential option for persons who don’t have as much power as the rest of the world. So Latin American liberation theologies talked about a preferential option for the poor: the purpose of religious communities was to live out Jesus’s consistent teachings to help people who were poor. Feminist liberation theologies say that religion communities must recognize that women and girls are as fully human as men and should be treated as such. And so on through black liberation theologies, queer liberation theologies, etc., etc.
Why have a preferential option for the poor? In liberation theology’s terms, the preferential option of the poor is how a religious community can begin to establish the Kingdom of Heaven, whether you believe the Kingdom of Heaven is something that’s here on earth waiting to burst out into reality if we give it a chance, or whether it is a reward that awaits you after death.
We can contrast liberation theologies with prosperity spirituality, which is “characterized by the doctrine that God desires Christians to be prosperous.” (William Kay, “Prosperity Spirituality,” in New Religions: A Guide, ed. Christopher Partridge [Oxford University: 2004], p. 91). Prosperity spirituality is designed to appeal to those who find the prospects for the future to be bleak and who don’t want to wait until the afterlife to enjoy the rewards of religion. Oral Roberts was the first great purveyor of prosperity spirituality.
Unitarian Universalism, and liberal religion more generally, strike me as being much closer to prosperity spirituality than to liberation theology. Many Unitarian Universalists are skeptical about heaven, and the rest are probably more concerned with getting heaven into people now, than in getting people into heaven later (to paraphrase John Corrado). Either way, we’re more concerned with how we can make our lives better, than we are in how we can enjoy the rewards of the afterlife. To my mind, this has pushed us into a kind of prosperity spirituality: Join our congregation because your life will be better due to improved mental and emotional health — join our congregation and do social justice to others which will make you feel better about yourself.
Sure, I’m exaggerating and engaging in polemic (as usual). But I also think I’m right: we Unitarian Universalists are far more likely to engage in our form of prosperity spirituality than we are to believe in a preferential option for the poor.
The summary for a recent post on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog reads as follows: “The sector needs to shift the definition of success from organizations that survive to organizations that actually achieve their missions.” The actual post was less interesting than this summary because it narrowly addressed specific challenges faced by social entrepreneurs. I want to rewrite it to apply to congregations….
Congregations need to shift the definition of success from being institutions that survive, to becoming living organizations that actually achieve their missions.
At the founding of a congregation, you can feel the excitement among the founding members. They are thinking, saying, and feeling: This congregation is going to be where we bring into being our dream of a warm community that holds us accountable to our highest shared ideals while supporting us through the difficulties we have in our individual lives. These people are willing to try something new and untried, and it’s exciting.
Sixty years later, in many congregations you can feel the anxiety among all the members: We have to raise money to keep the congregation going, so we need enough new members who will supply that money, but not so many that they will use too much of our existing programs, programs which exist solely to draw in new people who will give us more money.
But the truly successful congregation will feel little anxiety, and a lot of excitement. Sixty years after their founding, the truly successful congregation doesn’t care much about raising money, but does care a great deal about bringing into being our dream of a warm community that holds us accountable to our highest shared ideals while supporting us through the difficulties we have in our individual lives. We are the people who are willing to try new and untried things, and it’s exciting.
There’s an interesting post with a long comment thread at the blog Warp, Weft, and Way that touches on the differences between Chinese and Western philosophical traditions. The opening paragraphs captured my attention, but then I found myself questioning whether Western philosophy is defined too narrowly:
A core feature of philosophical culture in the Western tradition is the supposition that debating about abstract matters is productive of insight, and that it encourages (or at least comports with) the attainment of appealing moral and religious goals. The canonical thinkers of classical Greece and China all deplore eristic debate, where the point of articulating and defending theses is simply to gain victory over the opponent. Plato and Aristotle, however, domesticate the procedures of eristic debate, yoking precise definition and dogged discussion of entailments and justification to ideals of friendship and inquiry.
I think this kind of domestication never took place in classical China: the moralists with lasting influence (Confucians and Daoists) were not inclined to think friendship and inquiry well-served by prolonged argumentative discussion….
From my perspective as a former student of philosophy who now does theology, the cases of Plato and Aristotle are interesting and foundational to Western thought — but these two philosophers do not adequately represent the full spectrum of Western thought.
Western theology, which has been understood as both a subset and a superset of Western philosophy, includes several mystical traditions that tend more towards enigmatical pronouncements than towards reasoned debate (or domesticated eristic debate). For example, in the American intellectual tradition, Emerson tends towards mysticism; and it can be very hard to try to engage in reasoned debate with Emerson, since he tends to transrational and aphoristic pronouncements that depend more on intuition than reason. Another example from ancient times might be Jesus of Nazareth’s parables, as reported by later followers.
The Western theological tradition draws not just on Greek philosophy, but also on the deep reservoir of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish intellectual tradition. This expands the Western theological repertoire well beyond reasoned debate. Neither Ecclesiastes nor the parables of Jesus can be characterized as reasoned debate, yet both have serious intellectual content. None of this is to deny that there is a distinct difference between Chinese and Western intellectual traditions, but whether theology is a subset or superset of Western philosophy, I’m not convinced Western philosophy can be reduced to domesticated eristic debate.
It’s still start-up season, that time when many congregations increase their activity levels after a summer slow-down. This start-up season has been as busy as any since I started working in congregation in 1994, and more intense than any other start-up. And then in staff meeting this week, Amy, our senior minister, said she was experiencing a very busy start-up season as well.
Perhaps it is just coincidence that we’re both experiencing busy start-ups at the same time our congregation appears to be on the brink of a size transition, from a pastoral-size congregation to a program-size congregation (that is, from less than 150 average attendance to over 200 average attendance). But I don’t think it is a coincidence. Other ministers who have been in congregations in this same size transition zone have also reported feeling intensely busy; so have lay leaders.
The thing is, sometimes that feeling of intense busy-ness can lead to burnout among clergy or lay leaders. I have documented a few instances of clergy burning out to the point of leaving the ministry. (I’m half convinced that some clergy sexual misconduct can be traced to burned-out ministers in transitional congregations who engage in stupid and/or self-destructive behavior.) Because when a congregation is growing, the first impulse of most people is to do more. You do more, but all it gets you is exhaustion. And it scares newcomers away — who wants to be part of a congregation where the clergy and lay leaders look burned out?
So I’m thinking the best way to handle an intense start-up, especially in a congregation that is on the edge of a pastoral- to program-size transition, is to spend less time doing, and more time just being. Fewer committee meetings, and more time spent in small groups just talking with one another about life. Less email and more face-to-face conversations about matters of the heart. Less writing of reports and more singing. Fewer tasks and more meditation, prayer, and worship. Doesn’t that sound more pleasant?