by Worship Associate Jay Kiskel
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation on May 8, 2016
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper,
et in saecula saeculorum.
Amen
And that’s the way it began for me.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son:
and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be:
world without end. Amen.
Only it really was in Latin.
I think it is safe to say that all of us arrived at this Unitarian Universalist service today via some journey of spiritual investigation. The distance traveled, beliefs held, discarded and re-configured are, of course, the contours of our individual travels.
My journey started in my youth with a glimpse of Catholic ritual that had survived relatively unchanged for centuries.
My parents were first-generation children of Catholic immigrants. In the tradition of my grandparents and parents, I was baptized. My personal exposure to Catholicism began when I started school.
In the days of single car suburban families, my mother had learned during the registration process in the public school system that I would be required to walk 1½ miles to Harrison Public Elementary School. The Catholics would provide bus transportation. And so I became very Catholic.
I mean very Catholic. Catechism taught each day by nuns, the confession of sins followed by Holy Communion received on the first Monday of each month. And if that was not Catholic enough, I was an altar boy.
Everything fit. I was anchored. I was at spiritual peace. “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”
Eight years of Catholic schooling was followed by public high school where I shed some of my early religious rigor, but I was still an anchored Catholic. So when I enlisted in the US Marines in December 1969, “Roman Catholic” was stamped on my dog tags. What else could it be?
The military service that followed, of which I share only a snippet, resulted in a most profound challenge to the religious faith of my youth.
I was a 19-year-old Marine . . . really, just a kid. An overseas deployment in Vietnam immersed me in an environment where human behavior was simply untethered to any larger good.
There, my once immutable faith that had so completely defined the boundaries of right and wrong, and good and evil, turned out to be wholly inadequate.
Not a bit of my childhood Latin survived. “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be world without end” lasted only until my 20th birthday.
This loss of a once unshakable faith was not a peaceful time for me. It was, nonetheless, the start of a liberation to explore a spiritual journey that I could call my own.
On this personal spiritual journey I have learned quite a bit about Unitarians and Universalists who have long preceded us. I have learned that their collective journey in the never-ending evolution of our faith tradition has been filled with times of peace and times of challenge.
Let us consider Letitia’s reading from Rev. Chaney, who noted that Unitarians look upon the present race of mankind as, “the latest result of a long process of upward tending life on this earth.”
That process of “upward tending life” has continued.
Where once we held a cross to symbolize our faith, now we light a chalice.
Where once we held only the Bible as a defining source of truth, now we find truth in an array of sources from world religions, humanist and Earth-centric beliefs and the human experience itself.
Where once we energetically declared “we are Christians,” we now have more broadly out-stretched arms that embrace a multitude of faiths.
This process of “upward tending life” is deeply rooted in the heritage and the evolutionary journey of American Unitarianism. And for the sake of brevity, let me confine my observations today only to Unitarians, and save a discussion on our Universalist roots for another day.
Our heritage starts with us as New England Puritan immigrants adhering to a Calvinist belief system.
A belief system that held that we are inherently sinful and are incapable of understanding God. Salvation, therefore, could occur only if God predestined those who were to be saved.
Each generation of these New England Puritan immigrants passed on this belief system to their children, much like I witnessed my Catholic tradition being passed on from grandparent-to-parent, parent-to-child.
And so it was until the 1700’s when a challenge emerged to the belief in the sinful nature of mankind and God’s predestination or salvation of the few.
It started with doubts. At first, doubts from just a handful of Boston clergy who preached of the dignity, rather than the depravity, of human nature. They spoke of a benevolent God, rather than a God who would condemn all but a few of His children. Many listened, many were moved.
Yet no one stood up and said, “I am a Unitarian.” There was still much, shall we say, soul searching to be done before the identity of Unitarianism would emerge.
That soul-searching was accelerated in pre-Revolutionary America by The First Great Awakening and its intense revivalist preaching filled with fiery damnation if repentance was not immediate and complete.
Rev. Charles Chauncy, whose name is noted on a wonderful historical timeline found in the Chalice House, was an early voice of the Unitarian spirit and was a strong opponent of the Great Awakening.
Rev. Chauncy stressed that emotion was a poor foundation for theology. He offered three observations. One, theology should embrace logic and reason. Two, the Bible should be held as a source of truth but must be read with a critical eye and finally that the Christian religion should have as its overriding focus the moral aspirations of man.
Logic and reason; critical Bible reading; the moral aspirations of man.
The liberal outlines of Unitarianism had begun to emerge. And for more than 50 years liberal and orthodox congregants lived peacefully side-by-side within their Boston churches.
The peace, however, ended in 1803 when at Harvard the seat for the Hollis Professorship of Divinity became vacant. A noted liberal, Rev. Henry Ware, was selected to fill the vacant seat. This decision to appoint Rev. Ware was a critical turning point in the journey of American Unitarianism. It was filled with emotion and cries of progress and cries of doom. It can best be understood if we liken it to today’s ideological battle to fill the vacant US Supreme Court seat. Needless to say, a battle of “us vs. them,” “liberal vs. orthodox” followed Rev. Ware’s appointment.
Absent today’s social media technology of Twitter, Facebook and SnapChat, a pamphlet war erupted. A pamphlet war between orthodox Trinitarians on one side and liberal leaning congregants on the other. And . . . it was during this war of words that the term “Unitarian” was raised, not as a liberal rallying cry, but as a pejorative flung at the liberals.
David Robinson in his book The Unitarians and the Universalists observed that for the orthodox, the rejection of the Trinity was the most heinous of the liberal crimes; it implied rejection of the divinity of Jesus. The orthodox were eager, therefore, to pin the label ‘Unitarian’ on their opponents.
Rev. William Ellery Channing, who by this time had become the central spokesperson for the liberal movement, responded by declaring the liberal movement not “Unitarian” but “Unitarian Christianity.”
Channing, in a sermon delivered in 1819, sometimes called the Baltimore Sermon, delivered a definitive defense of the liberal position.
Channing embraced the “the liberal crime” and declared, “We believe in the doctrine of God’s unity.’” “We object to the doctrine of the Trinity.”
Again from David Robinson’s book, The Unitarians and the Universalists, the name ‘Unitarian’ may have implied that a central theme among the liberal Congregationalists was a rejection of Trinitarian doctrine. When, in fact, Robinson says, “the stress on moral culture and the corresponding rejection of innate depravity of man were the defining impulses of the tradition.”
Channing, in fact, in his sermon concluded that, “We believe that all virtue has its foundation in the moral nature of man.”
He continued, “We ask our opponents to leave to us a God, worthy of our love and trust, in whom our moral sentiments may delight, in whom our weaknesses and sorrows may find refuge.”
Channing, however, still held that the difference between the orthodox and Unitarian Christians was one of biblical interpretation, arguing it was more a disagreement among Calvinists and Unitarian Christians than an actual distinctive split.
Now some would say, “I am a Unitarian,” but still liberal and orthodox Calvinists co-existed in a somewhat awkward peace in their churches.
That co-existence, the final disagreement with the peace, ended shortly after Channing’s Baltimore Sermon. A bitterly fought court battle over church property claimed by both liberal and orthodox members ended in a victory for the liberals.
That court decision put into motion a physical separating of Congregational churches into distinct liberal and orthodox entities.
In the Boston area alone there were 125 churches openly grounded on Channing’s Unitarian Christianity doctrine.
With in a few years, the American Unitarian Association was formed.
The formation of the American Unitarian Association is a story of a generational divide, a story of the once liberals who affected the split with the Congregationalists becoming the “new orthodox” in the eyes of the radical Transcendentalists. A story we should all know.
However, I have come to the end my initial journey of exploration into our shared heritage.
Our heritage starts with our religious ancestors peacefully anchored in their Calvinist faith. But a doubt emerged. A doubt that grew into a disagreement on the fundamental dogma of the religion of their grandparents and parents.
It was not a peaceful journey from Calvinism to Unitarian Christianity to Unitarianism to Unitarian Universalism . . . I am grateful the journey was not abandoned.
I was once comfortable anchored in my Catholic faith. My own doubts emerged in the religion of my grandparents and parents. It was, like my Calvinist brethren, my liberation and the start my journey to this faith tradition.
I imagine that many of us who found Unitarian Universalism have had various reasons for leaving the religion of their grandparents and parents. The departure point may have been a loss of faith or the pull of an attractive force of a more compelling vision of hope and fulfillment. The route traveled was, was not likely, uncharted.
No two of our journeys are alike, except for the arrival point. We, after all, all sitting here together in this sanctuary.
I would offer with humble opinion that we arrived here together, today because there is unifying trait in our heritage, a shared spiritual gene, so to speak. The same spiritual gene that lifted the hearts of staunch Calvinist 300 years ago to shun a theology based on the depravity of the human spirit to one based on the inherent worth of every individual.
The same spiritual gene shared by my good friends Frank Lederle and J.C. Bond that gave them the determination to turn to a new page in their notebooks and keep writing our future.
We share a desire for the freedom to seek our own spiritual path. It is not an easy path. We have for our own reasons, shunned the creeds and dogmas that provide a carefully crafted, well-illuminated religious path that is void of any ambiguity.
We have opted rather to follow a spiritual path that we can call our own. It’s a bit murky at times, difficult to summarize on a bumper sticker and always subject to re-invention.
It could best be said of our UU faith is that “some assembly is required.”
I would have it no other way. As for me, I am now anchored and at peace once again.
Let us, therefore, re-commit to continuing our ancestor’s journey and, in the words of Rev. Chaney “the upward tending life” in our own free and responsible search for meaning and truth. It is at the core of who we are.
May it be so.