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Four years ago, when the New York State Legislature voted for marriage equality, I received the news with a mix of joy and sadness, relief and regret. I was so excited that justice, equality, and love won that day – but I missed my partner Tricia terribly; when she died in 1998, marriage was a pipe dream.

And now, it’s here. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that marriage equality is the law of the land. As Kevin Russell at SCOTUSblog writes,

The majority bases its conclusion that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right on “four principles and traditions”: (1) right to person choice in marriage is “inherent in the concept of individual autonomy”; (2) “two-person union unlike any other in its importance to the committed individuals”; (3) marriage safeguards children and families; (4) marriage is a keystone to our social order.

It is a relief – more so now than in 2011 – less tears of sadness, more tears of relief. I am so thrilled that the hard work of so many people has paid off, that we have swayed not just hearts and minds but the law, and that we ALL can move from state to state and have the same legal rights, statewide and federally.

But this isn’t the end of the road for LGBTQ equality.

Just as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was just one important step toward equality, the Obergefell decision is just one important step toward equality. There’s still so much to do; for example:

  • fair housing for LGBTQ people – because some people can be kicked out of their homes.
  • anti-discrimination laws in the workplace – because people can still be fired for being gay, even if they are legally married
  • acceptance and legal recognition of trans and non-binary gendered people – because the T isn’t there for its good looks
  • the court of public opinion – perhaps the hardest battle of all, especially when you consider that not only was the decision 5-4, but that each of the dissenters wrote their own dissenting opinion. There’s a lot of anger and distress here, and that’s just the court.

We know that significant laws and court cases have not stopped racism from thriving. We know that a landmark decision has not stopped the war against women and reproductive rights. So we must brace ourselves for continued homophobia and transphobia – along with the continued racism, bigotry, and misogyny we already work to fight. We must remember the stirring words of Joyce Poley’s song*:

One more step, we will take one more step,
‘til there is peace for us and everyone, we’ll take one more step.

One more word, we will say one more word,
‘til every word is heard by everyone, we’ll say one more word.

One more prayer, we will say one more prayer,
‘til every prayer is shared by everyone, we’ll say one more prayer.

One more song, we will sing one more song,
‘til every song is sung by everyone, we’ll sing one more song.

Let’s take those steps together. In faith, in love, in our call for justice, equality, and the inherent worth and dignity of EVERY SINGLE PERSON.

 

 

*Hymn 168 in Singing the Living Tradition

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My memory is a little messed up. In 2007-early 2008, I had severe back problems and was on pretty heavy pain meds for about 18 months. Within that year, I had three surgical procedures, each one requiring general anesthesia. As I came out of that time period feeling much better and reemerging into the world, I noticed that my memory wasn’t nearly as good. My short term memory requires vigilant note taking and reminders, and there are some gaps in my long-term memory. I recall once listening to a recounting of an historical event and breaking down in tears, because I knew I had once known those facts but could no longer reach them. I didn’t lose everything, but I know that the act of remembering takes a little more work.

But there are some memories I wish I didn’t still have.

I wish I didn’t remember what it was like reading names at displays of the AIDS quilt when I read names at the Transgender Day of Remembrance. While others broke down – a reasonable reaction – I found I could, as I learned in the late 1980s, to read with emotion without getting emotional.

I wish I didn’t remember the moment-by-moment experience of the homeless Desert Storm vet running in front of my car that rainy night in 2006 when last week I sat with the family and friends of a young man who was walking on a street and hit by a drunk driver. I know the general circumstances were different, but it triggered something for me and made the week of pastoral care and memorial preparations all the more resonant.

Mom and Dad, 1969
Mom and Dad, 1969

I wish I didn’t remember the horror of finding my beloved partner Tricia almost dead on the sofa when marriage equality is declared legal in yet another state. We were just starting our life together in 1998, and same sex marriage at the time was a pipe dream. I am always so happy when justice reigns and love wins, but I also relive the loss.

I wish I didn’t remember that my mother died on November 21, 2007, when the reminder of my sister’s birthday pops up. While we justified it as fitting, it still is a hard day, and I pray each year that my sister dwells on the joy of her life and the celebration she richly deserves rather than marking it as simply a day of loss.

On the Sunday before Memorial Day in 2013, I was privileged to step into Sam Trumbore’s pulpit at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany. As we led up to a candle lighting ritual, I talked about our need for memorials:

In memorial, the act of remembering is a physical act, that connects us with the past, that connects us with life, that alters time so that past and present can meet, even for a short while. And we find strength in the remembering. Director Anne Bogart says “As a result of a partnership with memory and the consequent journeys through the past, I feel nourished, encouraged, and energized. I feel more profoundly connected to and inspired by those who came before.”

Connected and inspired.

While it would be easier some days to have the pain of some of my memories much more faded than the crisp images that come to mind, when they do come, they connect me to life – my own, those who have died, and those still living. The pain of these memories informs who I am, how I enter the world, and how I interact with others. And yes, the pain of these memories inspires me to keep living, keep loving, keep remembering.

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I recently studied American Theological Liberalism with Gary Dorrien, and was quite taken by a chapter (from Dorrien’s The Making of American Liberal Theology, Volume 1) on the social gospelers. As I read the chapter, I found myself saying “amen” to Walter Rauschenbusch’s understanding of Christianity, that Jesus’s message was that the personal and the political cannot be separated if we are to see the kingdom manifest ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ I was impressed that Walter could find his way out from under the abusive thumb of his father and find the joy and hope preached earlier by Bushnell – the very hope that seems truly absent in the orthodoxy of the elder Rauschenbusch.

And I found myself thinking this is remarkably familiar territory – I have never read Rauschenbusch or other social gospelers before, yet I had read these ideas, with a different spin. The light dawned when I arrived on the pages discussing the Federal Council of Churches. I knew from other study that Unitarian John Holmes and Universalist Clarence Skinner also wrote on the social gospel… yet they were absent. Mild curiosity turned to earnest consideration as I learned that the Unitarians and the Universalists were omitted from the Federal Council of Churches, all the while being frontrunners on the social gospel.[1] So I wondered: why might that be?

As it turns out, both Holmes and Skinner were critics of Rauschenbusch and the social gospel promoted within the Federal Council. So I turned to the more familiar of the writings, Skinner’s Social Implications of Universalism, for answers.

Written in 1914 while serving as Professor of Applied Christianity at the Crane Theological School of Tufts College, Social Implications begins with a flat indictment:

The fact is that the traditional Protestant Church is dying, dying hard with colors flying and battling heroically, but nevertheless dying. The theology upon which it is built is dying; the individualism which called it into being is dying; the social order which it expressed is dying. Why should it not also die? (pg 1)

Indeed, Skinner is going after orthodoxy; he spills pages of ink arguing against the “religions of authority…who render stupid obedience to the established social order” (pg 9). He notes with derision that the traditional churches have been “so feeble” in social action because of “inertia inherited from the medieval ages when humanity lacked social dynamic” (pg 42). He argues that given the new age, “only those theologies which frankly and persistently align themselves with the world, and openly champion its potential goodness, can logically enter the great reformation of the twentieth century” (pg 48).

Skinner-DrClarenceRussellAnd it is there where Skinner shifts his attention from only skewering the orthodoxy to also calling out the liberal church. Any theology that sees salvation as coming “by escaping from a world which is inherently unsavable” – even in part, as Rauschenbusch promotes – is “individualistic, anti-social, medieval faith” (pg 49). He suggests that because of the emphasis on the death of Jesus, the church has inherited vicarious atonement which “has no social dynamic in it” (pg 55) – and that it is the social dynamic that is the actual ministry and religion of Jesus. “No dogmatic theologies about Jesus ever saved any one in society or out of society” he writes (pg 57), wondering why personal salvation should be necessary if the core of Jesus’s teachings are about social salvation. Instead of salvation being found in a statement of belief, a rite or sacrament, salvation, and Christianity itself, is “life lived in the open in the midst of the push and pull of social forces, and thus implies and demands a social context” (pg 59).

Skinner continues his arguments against the liberal church (particularly the hopeful theology of Bushnell that many social gospelers found attractive) in his section on “Hell and Salvation;” on the plus side, “liberal theology has successfully driven these nightmares [of a wrathful God and a brimstone hell] from the minds of enlightened men” (pg 63). Yet he thinks they have whitewashed the story, doing away with “moral accountability”; rather, the ideas of heaven and hell essential elements of religion. He makes this clear: “Universalism has not abolished the idea of hell. It has humanized and socialized it” (pg 63, emphasis his).

It is because of the hell on earth, then, that salvation is purely a social act as well; Skinner argues that “there is no royal road to salvation…it is as much subject to the natural law of cause and effect as is punishment” (65). Old ideas of heaven and hell are anti-social; thus, the need for personal salvation is anathema to the real salvation: saving ourselves in the here and now.

Skinner’s book is of course, largely an argument for Universalism, suggesting that its long history of social consciousness, open arms, and trust in a loving God will one day be at the center of a unified church. He believes that others will come around when they realize the truth of Universalism and let the medieval faith fall away completely. And obviously, that has yet to occur, if ever.

But the Universalists wanted to be at the table with the other social gospelers; that they and the Unitarians were sidelined left these two humanity-centered denominations to flounder and eventually find themselves. As Unitarian Universalists, we work alongside modern social gospelers, gently reminding them that we’ve been here for a long time – and welcome to the party.

 

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 Listen here.

In my first semester of seminary, I took a course in systematic theology from Dr. James Cone, known as the father of black liberation theology. Dr. Cone is a force of nature – a slight black man from the backwoods of Arkansas, with incredible passion and intellect, and who at age 73 can literally run circles around even the fittest 20-somethings I know. His class lectures were a tour de force – right off the bat, he encouraged us to build our own theologies; he said that his job was to show us how theology worked and then we were to build a theology that worked for us.

The first time I heard this introduction, I was enraptured. The second time – the very next week, I thought “okay, he really wants us to get this point.” By the third week, it was clear that Dr. Cone would pretty much say the same thing for the first 20 minutes of class each week, and we all became a little less anxious to get to the lecture hall on time.

I tell you this story because I feel a little like that – for those of you who have been here for the first two parts of this sermon series, my introduction will seem a bit familiar. On the plus side, this is the last week of this series, so unlike me and Systematic Theology, you escape another 10 weeks of the same introduction.

For those of you here for the first time, the good news is that it won’t take long to get up to speed. Our working metaphor is the universal translator from Star Trek that allowed the crew of the Enterprise to understand the languages of everyone they encountered without struggling with Google Translate. The problem – not just for the Enterprise crew but for us, without universal translators – is that even when we understand the words, we don’t always understand their context; much like strangers to western culture wouldn’t understand the image produced when we say “Juliet on her balcony”, we aren’t well equipped to understand the narrative imagery other cultures use to communicate. Thus, we have to build our own universal translators – especially when it comes to talking about God.

What we know is that we struggle when we talk about religious ideas with others, because our ideas vary greatly, even when we use the same word. Now of course as Unitarian Universalists, we try to mitigate that problem with many words to substitute for “God” – spirit of life, creator, infinite all, the divine – we have such a litany of names to whom we pray it’s a wonder we ever get to the prayer itself.  But the word “God” – as laden as it is, is a kind of shorthand that lets us get into the real questions, about the nature of the Divine.

It’s this nature that we’ve been exploring – not just in general, but in how we Unitarian Universalists understand it – in our principles, in our theology, in our songs.

Two weeks ago, we looked at the transcendent God – the God that is above and separate from us, and who – for us anyway – is loving, forgiving, and comforting, the God we sing of in hymns like “immortal, invisible, God only wise.” Last week, we looked at the immanent God – the God that is in everything: the trees, the rocks, the animals, the air, the fire, and the people; this is the God we sing of in hymns like “for the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies.”

But of course, being a pluralistic faith, there are other ideas of God in our faith tradition, imbedded in our hymnals – this week, we’ll examine an idea of God that seems somewhat new but is in fact much older: this is the god of process theology.

Now one of the struggles in talking about this particular aspect of God is that it is a fairly new way of thinking about God, and the language is still morphing. We have narrative imagery, but not a concrete word or phrase to describe that imagery. When I sent the descriptions for this sermon series, I called this god the creating-creator God. But I could have just as easily called this god the relational God, the dynamic God, the responsive God, the big picture God, the persuasive God, the changing God.

Why such difficulty? Perhaps it will help to look at what we mean by process theology and where it comes from. Now the scientists and engineers among us are going to like this next bit – because process thought starts with Einstein.

More specifically, it begins with a mathematician named Alfred North Whitehead, who was fascinated with Einstein’s work, in particular, quantum physics, where we see that everything is in motion; everything – from the biggest bodies of mass to the tiniest quark, is in motion; it turns out that everything we thought was fixed, stable, and solid, is actually vibrating, changing, and shifting. Whitehead realized that this didn’t just apply to the physical world, but to the metaphysical world as well, and he developed a philosophy that proposed that events are the discrete base of reality, not matter. Essentially, the core of Whitehead’s philosophy is “if it seems static, don’t trust it.”

Soon, process philosophy found a home in theological circles; Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb realized that if everything was an ever-changing event – then surely God and all of creation was equally ever-changing. Instead of a transcendent God – above us, creating the rules of nature but not in nature; or an immanent God – present in the material world; this God is as mutable as the quark – at once a vibration and a particle. This God – like us – is always being created, is always creating, is always happening; this God – like us – is eternally becoming.

Now in Unitarian Universalist thought, our ideas of God – or the divine, the collective unconscious, the universe, the infinite – is one of benevolence. God is good and wants what’s best for us. Thus, when we apply process theology, we find a God who isn’t controlling us but is inviting us to imagine, to grow, to dream, to create – enticing us toward goodness and wholeness. This God invites us to be architects, as we see in hymn number 288, All Are Architects; please join me in singing verses 1 and 2.

I used a word a few minutes ago that I’d like to reflect on – “becoming.” What does it mean to be always becoming rather than being? This is a bit contrary to what we think of in the Eastern traditions, where nirvana is a state of being. Yet I think we can find, even in Buddhism, the idea that we are ever-changing, always striving for that nirvana.

My own understanding of becoming comes from thinking about concepts of time. There is the idea that time is linear, with a rather causal past, present, and future. But there’s also an idea that time is not linear; rather, we have all that is known, the eternal now, and then all that is unknown. At every moment of the eternal now, we have a choice; we create reality in relation to all that is known and all the possibilities of the unknown. In that eternal now, we are constantly becoming.

In process thought, time is not linear; instead, it is unfolding in many directions all at once, each new moment ripe with possibility. Each new moment carrying the known, offering an opportunity for creativity, always becoming, always in that eternal now. We are always making choices, small and large. When applied to our faith’s call to action, we know that our choices lead us to fight for economic justice, reproductive rights, immigration reform. Our choices lead us to follow this call from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.

Another aspect of this God of process thinking is that God is relational – perhaps the most relational reality of all. Human choices to hurt others hurt God. And maybe that is evil – when we make choices that hurt others. Process theologian Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki suggests that “In positive choices, we blend our own interests with the interests of the wider communities within the world. In negative choices, we secure our own interests against all others. Process thinking affirms that God calls us beyond violence toward communities of well-being.”

Like the immanent God we spoke of last week, the creating-creator God calls us to action, to “come build a land where we’ll bind up the broken” and “I’ll bring you hope, when hope is hard to find…” and “ ‘til there is peace for us and everyone, we’ll take one more step…” We also hear the call in hymn number 6, Just as Long as I Have Breath. Let’s sing verse 1.

So when we embrace the idea that we are not just experiencing God in all living things, and not just experiencing God as a big eternal separate idea – but are experiencing God as co-creative force calling us into communities of well-being, we see a God that is a Living Whole of which you and I and others in the “cosmic conversation” are active parts and partners. In a “participatory universe” where all have a role in the construction of reality, God participates in all life and every act of creation. And we in turn must participate too. Einstein put it this way:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

And we see our place in the whole of the universe reflected in hymn number 22, Dear Weaver of our Lives’ Design. Let’s sing verses 1 and 2.

 

When I first read about process theology in our Wellspring spiritual deepening course a few years ago, I felt as though the Universe opened up to me with a resounding Yes. If I’d been reading in the tub, I would have been like Archimedes jumping out naked and running through the streets shouting Eureka! For the first time, I discovered there was a theology that matched what I believe: process thought jives with my Unitarian belief in human potential and reason as our way toward truth and meaning; it jives with my Universalist belief in universal goodness and love, which propels me to serve my human family. And apparently, I am not alone. UUs all over are realizing that we understand this idea of God intimately. As Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar points out in her book Fluent in Faith, process thinking affirms many of the threads in our theological heritage:

We are a part of an interconnected web of life in which each affects all. There is a sacred spark, a spiritual energy and power, in each of us. It matters what we do with our lives. The great, ultimately unnamable mystery of life is a call to goodness and love. As we choose love, decide for love, stand on the side of love, we are part of the growing God in the universe. This is process theology made real.

This creating-creator God affirms our long-held belief in the goodness and progress of humanity; we find this in James Freeman Clarke’s affirmation of the “the progress of humankind onward and upward forever.” In the early 20th century, John Dietrich, considered the father of religious humanism, spoke of a ‘cosmic theism, which “interprets God as the indwelling power in the universe rather than an individual, separate power.”

No wonder this God – this creating-creator, relational, dynamic, responsive, big picture, changing, becoming God – is so familiar. And our hymnal shows it; the Center for Process Studies did an extensive review of a variety of hymnals – ours, along with hymnals from the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ – and named 349 out of 414 hymns as representing this creating-creator God – that’s 85%. And that’s not even the teal hymnal, which further reflects this god of process thought.

This God…who is an artist and reminds us, as Arthur Graham puts it, that “Each of us is an artist whose task it is to shape life into some semblance of the pattern we dream about. The molding is not of self alone, but of shared tomorrows and times we shall never see.”

Yes, this is most assuredly a god I believe in – to me, this God encompasses the transcendent and the immanent and brings us in deep relation to the wide universe. This is the God who reminds me that everything evolves – not just life forms but thought and ethics and understanding and relationships. This is the God who reminds me that truth and revelation are not static but are forever unfolding. This is the God who reminds me to be open to the eternal now, to be open to becoming. This is the God who persuades me gently with love and compassion and the promise of a new day. This is the God who accompanies me, as God accompanies all of creation, on this journey. This is the God that is at the heart of our universal translators; this is the Unitarian Universalist narrative image for God.

This is the God I pray to when I sing “our world is one world – what touches one affects us all” and when I sing “we are blessed with love and amazing grace, when our heart is in a holy place” and when I sing “when we live in deep assurance of the flame that burns within, then our promise finds fulfillment and our future can begin…” and when I sing “woyaya…woyaya…”

 

We live in a participatory universe. We do not leave things up to a remote God….we act with the divine energy…we too create out of mystery….we share in the opportunity and responsibility of creating reality. We are all artists…creators of what is, and what is becoming.

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 Listen here.

Last week, we started cobbling together our own universal translators. Unlike the Star Trek universe that Gene Roddenberry created, we aren’t equipped to automatically understand the many different languages of many cultures, and even if we were, we wouldn’t always know what people really meant. What we know is that real communication relies not just on vocabulary and syntax, but also on the metaphors and idioms we use. We rely more heavily on narrative imagery than we realize – the example I used last week was that of Juliet on her balcony; to those of us immersed in western culture, we understand this phrase to indicate young romantic (and maybe doomed) love. And every culture – whether a local culture or a corporate culture or a religious culture – uses different and sometimes confusing narrative imagery to communicate. Thus, we have to build our own universal translators – especially when it comes to talking about God.

What we know is that we struggle when we talk about religious ideas with others, because our ideas vary greatly, even when we use the same word. Now of course as Unitarian Universalists, we try to mitigate that problem, with many words to substitute for “God” – spirit of life, creator, infinite all, the divine – we have such a litany of names to whom we pray it’s a wonder we ever get to the prayer itself. But the word “God” – as laden as it is, is a kind of shorthand that lets us get into the real questions, about the nature of the Divine.

It’s this nature that we’ve been exploring, not just in general, but in how we Unitarian Universalists understand it; last week, we looked at the transcendent God – the God that is above and separate from us, and who – for UUs anyway – is loving, forgiving, and comforting. I am sure it amazed some people that this God even exists in our hymnal, but we found many songs and readings expressing this very idea of God.

But of course, being a pluralistic faith, this isn’t the ONLY idea of God we find in our hymnal – so this week, let’s look at a different idea, one that may seem a bit more familiar to many of you – particularly those who are big fans of Emerson. This is the immanent God.

The immanent god is the divine presence seen in the material world – the god that permeates the mundane. It is also the God that inhabits the material in visceral ways. It is the god we saw in the verses we sang this week in Down the Ages – “the present God-head own where creation’s laws are known.” It is the God that sometimes makes the choice to come to church difficult, as nature beckons for its own communion.

The spiritual practices of the Hindus perhaps most explicitly explain this narrative image of God; they begin with the concept of sacred perception, where the devotee enters into a state where they can truly receive the image of the deity as given by the deity.

It is a visceral, real, tangible experience. For Hindus, the deity isn’t just represented in the statue or image; the deity is in the statue or image. The Divine is immanent, present, touchable, seeable, knowable. And this isn’t a one-way experience; the deity is present with, knows, communicates, and touches the devotee as well. The devotee begins by bathing, dressing, adoring, and anointing the statue; once properly clothed and honored, the deity is fully present, and allowed to be seen by others. And… they understand the deity to be fully present and fully whole everywhere at once.

The Hindu understanding of the immanent God was especially attractive to the early Transcendentalists; encountering Hindu texts meant that for the first time, Americans were exposed to a view of the divine that wasn’t transcendent; that is, separate and above us. Henry David Thoreau was one of the earliest American readers of the Bhagavad Gita, and the ideas of the immanent Divine spoke deeply to Thoreau, as well as other transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. They began to see the same fully present and fully whole divine presence in nature. The idea that God might be in the trees and rocks and the very water they sat by was remarkable and expansive in a time when Unitarian theologians sought to limit God to being, as William Ellery Channing described, the creator of nature, not within it.

We don’t see much of the immanent God in the Abrahamic traditions; occasionally, the immanent God appears in the rocks, or in the air, or in a burning bush. We do, however, see it in the words of the mystics. Let us look at responsive reading 607, by the Islamic mystic Hafiz.

By and large, the immanent God is not represented in Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. Thus, it was quite a remarkable shift for Unitarians in the 19th century to embrace the immanent God in nature; to us in the 21st century, it feels, well, natural. We resonate with the words William Wordsworth uses to describe God in his poem “Tintern Abbey”:

A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

And we find this immanent God in nature quite vibrantly in hymns such as number 25, God of Earth. Let’s turn to this and sing verses 1 and 2.

I have encountered this god several times – perhaps the most memorable was during a trip to England about a decade ago. A friend and I went to Avebury, the less commercial and more interactive version of Stonehenge. We began at a collection of stones at the center of the village, the center of the concentric circles of monoliths placed there by a long-ago people. And we touched the stones; they were warm, and they gave off an almost imperceptible vibration. We went to the next stone…and the next…and touched every stone in the inner circle. Something clicked for us, that we needed to commune as our ancestors might have. Soon, we were going over streams, through corn fields, and over rocky cowpaths to touch every stone in Avebury… because for reasons we could not explain, we had to connect. We knew we weren’t just connecting to the stones themselves – although we imagined the many stories they could tell of the many events through the many millennia they’d born witness to. We were connecting to the people who first set the monoliths into these wide circles… and to both the earth that they rested on and the earthiness of each stone itself. At the end, I felt as one with the world as I have ever felt.

It was a remarkable day; it is a now part of my universal translator that helps me better understand those who would rather hike to the top of a mountain than read in an air conditioned coffee shop. And it helps when we are confronted with less-than-hospitable attitudes toward the earth. We need to add to our universal translators the note that some believe we are simply visitors on this planet, and stewardship of the earth isn’t part of our call. But as eco-theologian Sallie MacFague points out, we are earthlings; we belong to the earth. Because Unitarian Universalists understand the idea of an immanent God who inhabits the very earth itself, we see ourselves as part of – not separate from – the interconnected web. And we sing about it quite emphatically in hymn 317, We Are Not Our Own. Let’s sing the first verse.

We find this connection to the earth and this immanent God in some of our favorite hymns: “for the earth forever turning” and “the wide universe is the ocean I travel, and the earth is my blue boat home.” Even more, we find that the immanent God leads us to broader connections. In her new book Fluent in Faith, UU minister Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar suggests that the immanence of God in nature actually directs us to “move beyond material realities to the meaning of life and love, to the truth that there is more beauty and care in this world than we can comprehend or capture in our scientific explorations.”

Thoreau got it when he realized that ice cut from Walden Pond was sent to India and thus likely mingled into the Ganges, which is a holy river for Hindus. As he wrote in Walden,

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well … In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta [sic]… I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

It is this connection that we see in Emerson’s words: “that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart.” Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul” is beautifully interpreted in Jim Scott’s song “The Oneness of Everything” – number 1052 in the teal hymnal. If you can, sing along with me on the first verse.

But the call of the immanent God is not just one of appreciation. The call of the immanent God is one of action. Yes, we can commune with nature and we can connect with one another, but, as UU minister Kathy Huff notes, “being part of a conscious universe means that each moment profoundly matters; everything I do, say, think, or feel relates to everything else and may have consequence and meaning beyond my comprehension.” The immanent God calls us to protect our mountaintops from strip mining, to protect wildlife endangered by climate change, to stand for any person whose inherent worth and dignity is compromised. The immanent God expands on Frederick Buechner’s comment that “there can be no peace for me unless there is peace for you also;” this expands beyond humanity, to all who inhabit the earth and the very earth itself.

As I said last week, I find myself at times thinking many different things about God, sometimes all at the same time. And yes, the immanent God is one in whom I believe. I turn to the immanent God when I am too much in my head and need grounding. I turn to the immanent God when I lose faith in humanity’s goodness. It is the immanent God who compels me to a life of compassionate service. This is the God to whom I pray “we would be one, as now we join in singing” and to whom I pray “for the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies” and to whom I pray “listen more often to things than to beings…tis the ancestor’s breath, when the fire’s voice is heard…tis the ancestor’s breath in the voice of the waters…. aaahh.”

The immanent God is present – here, now, among us and in us and with us. It is the divine in you, connecting to the divine in me, which we honor in this simple gesture: Namaste.

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 Listen here.

Many things would be a lot easier if we lived in the Star Trek universe.

You see, in the Star Trek universe, it is important to be able to communicate with sentient beings from other planets and galaxies – in English, of course – and thus, Gene Roddenberry created a universe where everyone is implanted with a Universal Translator. Rarely does anyone – not Kirk, Picard, or Janeway – encounter another culture without being able to speak their language.

But even so, in the Star Trek universe, there are communication problems – not with the words themselves, but with how those words are used. In my favorite episode, “Darmok,” the Enterprise encounters the Tamarians, whose words are intelligible but whose meaning is baffling. Sentences like “Darmok and Jilad, across the ocean” and “Mirab, his sails unfurled” make up the entirety of their discourse. As you can imagine, the crew is baffled; and Captain Picard is even more so when he is stranded on a planet with their leader. But eventually, they come to realize that the Tamarians speak exclusively in narrative imagery. Their meaning is deeply enmeshed in their narrative; as the crew of the Enterprise discover, it is analogous to our saying something like “Juliet on her balcony” – it portrays an image of youthful romance, but if you don’t know the Shakespearean play or its use in our Western culture, you would not understand.

We run into the same problems when we talk about religion – particularly about God. How handy it would be to have a universal translator, so we could move from church to church, from theologian to theologian, from congregant to congregant, from song to song – and know exactly what the narrative imagery behind the word “God” really is for them.

Well, sadly, despite many great strides in science and technology that are bringing us closer each day to that Star Trek Universe, we don’t have universal translators yet, so we have to rely on more primitive means of understanding for some of these big ideas – like this sermon series, which I feel blessed to be able to share with you.

Now some of you may already be antsy; you may feel, like Murray Penney did at the end of a service we did many years ago about the Ten Commandments, that there was just too much God talk. Yes. I will be using the word “God” a lot over the next three weeks. But here’s the first piece for your universal translator: when people like me talk about God in Unitarian Universalist circles, we are using the word as shorthand for a particular aspect of belief; you may want to translate that word into your own language: creator, spirit of life, the divine, holy one, infinite, the collective unconscious… whatever makes sense to you. But I will use the word “God’ as we look at some of the aspects – the narrative imagery, if you will – of the Divine.

And it’s important, what we’re about to do. Having this universal translator doesn’t just connect us to other religious cultures – like Muslims, pagans, Hindus, and Methodists; it connects us to the people sitting next to us, with their own beliefs about the Divine; it connects us to our own sometimes contradictory ideas about God; and it connects us to our Unitarian Universalist tradition. It allows us, as Rebecca Parker says, “to enter a theological house that has already been built – a theology of a heritage, of a tradition, of a community.” And because that house contains a plurality of beliefs, we can’t necessarily know even from one hymn to the next exactly what image of God we’re singing about.

But over the next three weeks, we’ll be figuring out exactly that – what the songs and readings in our hymnals say about the ideas Unitarian Universalists have about God.

You’ll note that we’ve put a hymnal on every chair – we’ll be flipping around, looking at readings and singing some verses of songs. This is one instance where looking at the hymnal during the sermon will not be frowned upon.

So let’s begin. We’ve already sung a few verses of Down the Ages We Have Trod – and learned that some think God is “a being throned above, ruling over us in love.” This is what we would call transcendent – the aspect of God’s nature and power which is wholly independent of (and removed from) the material universe. This is an all-powerful, all-knowing, always-present God, whom some turn to for something greater than themselves. We see the transcendent God in Islam – a single and absolute truth that transcends the world; a unique and indivisible being who is independent of the entire creation. We see the transcendent God in Hinduism: “Brahman is supreme; he is self-luminous, he is beyond all thought.” We see the transcendent God in Judaism and Christianity – a parent figure who exists outside the realm of natural occurrence. And it is this aspect that Unitarians and Universalists inherited from our Protestant forbearers, including Martin Luther himself.

We find Luther’s most famous hymn in our hymnal – number 200, A Mighty Fortress. Let’s look at the first verse – please sing along with me, or just listen.

 

“On earth is not an equal.” We won’t find the transcendent God in the trees and the rocks – this is most assuredly a God above. It is an image of God that is steadfast, unchanging – an image that says no matter what happens here on earth, there’s always a safe haven in this God that is watching over us, protecting us, mightier than us.

Now it might seem that modern Unitarian Universalists wouldn’t be very into that God – yet, given the frequency of references to the transcendent God in our hymnal, we clearly still value this idea within our faith tradition. It is certainly in our history; notable 19th century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing believed that God was first and foremost beyond humanity and beyond nature. As he said in his famous “Baltimore Sermon”:

We believe, that in no being is the sense of right so strong, so omnipotent, as in God. We believe that his almighty power is entirely submitted to his perceptions of rectitude; and this is the ground of our piety. It is not because he is our Creator merely, but because he created us for good and holy purposes; it is not because his will is irresistible, but because his will is the perfection of virtue, that we pay him allegiance.

Channing also forwarded the popular notion that God is not the natural laws that permeate the natural world. God created the universe and nature, and the laws of nature are subordinate to God. In Channing’s thinking, it is perfectly natural to say that God can suspend the laws of nature without being contradictory. Indeed, for early Unitarians, miracles definitely happened.

Now for some UUs today, this is still true; it is certainly true in other Christian denominations, so it’s important for our universal translators to remember that miracles are, for many, their proof that God exists, and must assuredly be separate from us. Now to them, this is a given – much like Juliet on her balcony means young romantic love. It is their narrative imagery – a God who is beyond humanity and nature – thus, much of the conflict raised by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, Unitarians who talked about an immanent God, which we’ll discuss next week. This transcendent God isn’t one with us but is simply One, above us. This is the God we see reflected in Immortal Invisible. Flip to 273 and sing verses 1 and 2 with me.

 

Now you may notice at the bottom of the page that this hymn is based on a biblical verse – 1 Timothy 1:17. That’s not surprising; first, our Unitarian and Universalist roots are Christian, so we can’t long avoid Biblical references when looking at our faith’s heritage. But beyond that, there is a lot of transcendence in the Bible; you will find this transcendent God throughout the Abrahamic religions – no more poetically than in the Psalms. Let’s join Beth in responsive reading 535, which is based on Psalm 42.

 

We see in this reading – and in perhaps the most famous biblical passage of all, Psalm 23, which begins “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” – a transcendent God who is a comforter. It is this aspect of God – the comforter, the parent figure who takes care of us and makes things better – who is the God many people turn to in times of pain and sorrow. We see the comfort the transcendent God brings in hymns like “Nearer My God to Thee, nearer to thee” and “There Is a Balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole” – these and more, found in our hymnals.

The transcendent God we find here is loving; and this is a hallmark of Unitarian and Universalist thought. We have waged a battle against the Calvinists about this for centuries: a key theme of Channing’s Baltimore sermon makes this point:

We cannot bow before a being, however great and powerful, who governs tyrannically. We respect nothing but excellence, whether on earth or in heaven. We venerate not the loftiness of God’s throne, but the equity and goodness in which it is established.

We believe that God is infinitely good, kind, benevolent, in the proper sense of these words; good in disposition, as well as in act; good, not to a few, but to all; good to every individual, as well as to the general system.

Yes, there are many who believe that this transcendent God is a vengeful God – and if you read the bulk of the Old Testament, you might think that’s all this transcendent God is; after all, what kind of God gets itchy and floods everyone out but some guy and his pets? What kind of God sends a faithful man out to sacrifice his kid? What kind of God takes everything away from a guy just to prove his faithfulness? This is a mean, spiteful, angry, vengeful God – NOT the God of any aspect of Unitarian Universalism, but … one that exists in the world. Again, if I might add a bit to your universal translator, it’s helpful to remember that when some speak to you of God, they are actually afraid of what God will do if they behave badly. But because we see the transcendent God as a loving figure, we have an opportunity to offer a different view of God above, one that may offer comfort, forgiveness, and healing. This is the God of Hymn 10, Immortal Love. Let’s sing verses 1 and 2.

 

Now I realize I’ve been pretty cagey with my language, talking in generalities about Unitarian Universalist perspectives on transcendence while keeping my personal perspective out of it. But of course, I have a perspective. The truth is there are times when this transcendent God is the God in whom I believe. This is the God I turn to when I need comfort. This is the God who broke the silence when I refused to reach out. This is the God to whom I pray this song: “Open mine eyes that I may see / Glimpses of truth thou has for me / Open mine eyes, illumine me / Spirit Divine.” And when I pray this song: “Spirit of life / come unto me / Sing in my heart / all the stirrings of compassion.”

I believe this is the God who shines down when “we are marching in the light of God.” I believe this is the God who commands us to “do when the spirit says do.” Yes, I believe many different things about God – sometimes all at the same time. But this transcendent God, who is above us, who loves us unconditionally, who welcomes us into harmony, who, like the universe itself, is greater and bigger than we can possibly imagine – this particular narrative image of God – is part of my universal translator, offering me hope and comfort – and allowing me to offer others the greatest gift of all: Universal, unconditional love.

 

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REMEMBER me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

–Christina Rossetti

 

I for one would rather forget that my father died suddenly at age 60 and remember that try as he might, he could not stifle the explosive guffaws when watching the movie Airplane. I would rather forget that my mother’s last hours were spent suffering in a hospital and remember that she would sometimes pick me up from school and stop by the video store so we could indulge ourselves in a classic movie before Dad got home from work.

It’s easier – and more comforting – to remember the fun, the loving and touching moments, the happiness our loved ones brought to us in life. Yet we memorialize their deaths. We go to gravesites, we build makeshift altars at sites of their deaths, and on a larger scale, we build memorials – often of granite and marble – to mark the moments of death.

Are we obsessed with death?  I don’t think so… I think exactly the opposite is true. We remember when and how people died because we are obsessed with life.

We mourn the loss of life. When it’s a closed loved one, it cuts us in intimate ways – the death of my partner in 1998 was like losing a limb. When it’s a little more distant, like the recent deaths in Moore, Oklahoma or the constant barrage of mass shootings in New Orleans, Newtown, Aurora, Tuscon, Columbine – it cuts into our understanding of thriving in global community and leaves an existential feeling of loss. When it’s a soldier – especially one who lost their life in combat – it’s more complex. We hate war and how it rips apart our planet; yet we respect deeply those who have chosen to serve.

It’s all so difficult – these memories tied to life and death. We grapple internally with loss, with pain, with the deep well of sorrow that drowns us in cold unsettling grief; yet while much of our personal mourning is private, we publicly memorialize. Why do we take time to memorialize? Why do we ritualize it? We do, after all – we have services and parades and graveside markings and songs. We’ve been doing this for millennia – we see evidence of it in the psalms written during the Babylonian exile in the 5th century BCE: “by the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” There are ancient markers where battles where fought, and stories passed down about Badon Pass and Hannibal and the 300. Today, we see evidence everywhere; even in my little hometown of Taborton, the veteran’s group puts fresh American flags on all the graves of veterans in the little cemetery on the hill overlooking Little Bowman Pond, complete with a brief ceremony at each stone. Round Lake holds a ceremony at our little war memorial – if you come to the service next week, you can see our memorial across from the municipal building. And even today – in a few minutes – we will also memorialize through the ritual of lighting candles for those we have lost. We will speak their names…remember their faces…make sure that others know who they were. Memorializing formally, as ritualist Brigitte Sion says, creates a space where we can claim our right to grief and mourning; we can’t just ‘get over it’ – we need to make space for our memory. And when that space isn’t provided, we find ways to make it.

One of the most powerful memorials I have ever experienced is the AIDS quilt. Unlike a large, permanent memorial, like the Wall or the Holocaust Museum or the striking Korean war memorial, that is planned and sanctioned and funded – it is organic, and surprising, and moveable. Adding to the quilt is a given, for it is also ever-changing. It begins with friends, sitting together, sewing and painting and gluing – and talking. Sharing memories, tears, and Kleenex. And then it’s added to a larger quilt, where more memories are shared as it’s attached to quilt pieces from others; there, our memories become attached to other memories. And then, it is displayed…and others have a chance to remember, to see these lives. And when it is displayed, the names are read. We hear those names – those lost to this horrible disease, those who initially were marginalized even as illness decimated an already marginalized community. I’m sorry to say I have worked on more than one quilt piece – but I am glad that I can remember, and that others can share those memories.

In memorial, the act of remembering is a physical act, that connects us with the past, that connects us with life, that alters time so that past and present can meet, even for a short while. And we find strength in the remembering. Director Anne Bogart says “As a result of a partnership with memory and the consequent journeys through the past, I feel nourished, encouraged, and energized. I feel more profoundly connected to and inspired by those who came before.”

Connected and inspired.

This, especially, when remembering those who served their country in the military, is key. It’s hard now – we have such a difficult relationship to war; misguided policies led us into controversial conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan. Remembering those wars requires us to grapple with larger, difficult issues. And I would say we had an easier relationship to war prior to Korea – certainly some of the reasons we fought in the World Wars are more cut and dry. But even those wars – and the Spanish American War, the Mexican Wars, and the Civil War, where the seeds Memorial Day began, are much more complex than simply fights between good and evil.

Yet we cannot help but remember with some admiration the people who have chosen to put themselves in harm’s way – not for personal interest – but for their community and their nation. The first Memorial Day celebrations – and many places claim “first”, including black children in Charleston who honored the US Colored troops who died in the Civil War  – those first celebrations were about remembering sacrifice and honoring the lives of those people who died. And it was such a right and remarkable act, that we institutionalized it and continue to remember and honor those who have served – not just in uniform but in the many ways we understand service to our nation and our world community.

We acknowledge their service, we recall the circumstances of their deaths, and we dwell in the quiet sorrow of our loss … but mostly, we remember their lives. We connect with the living – and we journey with them, even if only for a moment. We recognize the souls that walked among us, while they lived. We hear their names, and we see their spirits in those who bring them to our table today – they live in us. As Kathleen McTigue writes – and we will read together responsively (No. 721, Singing the Living Tradition) – they are with us still.

As we complete our reading, I invite you to come forward to the table as you are so moved, to light a candle and speak the names of those you wish for all of us to remember today.

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Civil War historian Bruce Catton once said that if people are going to agree on something, any words will do, but it is an infallible sign of a coming fight when people argue over the precise wording.

In Syracuse, in late October 1959, the UUA was very nearly an almost thing, simply because of a fight over the wording of the Statement of Principles. As Warren Ross explains in The Premise and the Promise: The story of the Unitarian Universalist Association, there were three factions: traditional theists, who wanted to include references to our Christian heritage; Universalists who wanted references to prophets and teachers from all traditions; and humanists who wanted no God language at all. The first draft from the Merger Commission included God, excluded Jesus, and sounded like a creed.

No one was happy.

And the argument over this one set of words nearly derailed the entire endeavor. Ross says that subsequent revisions were proposed and defeated during an unscheduled session that went late into the wee hours of the morning. Even in the middle of the night, delegates were knocking on each others’ doors with proposals and better wording – finally ending with a very particular, specifically-chosen pronoun: not “our Judeo-Christian heritage” but “the Judeo-Christian heritage.”

Because of a pronoun, the endeavor was saved and the consolidation went forward.

 

Is it any wonder there is still a great deal of contention within Unitarian Universalism over what seem to be key issues regarding theology? Is it any wonder one of the most painfully fitting jokes about us is that we’re terrible hymn singers, because we’re always reading ahead to see if we agree with the lyrics?

In some ways, Ross’s book points to the very truth Catton spoke of; we have spent the last 52 years quibbling over some pretty big ideas that we are trying to encompass within our expansive denomination… and those fights get expressed in semantics. I recall a floor fight on a motion during the 2005 UUMN conference that was all semantics and ultimately got shelved thanks to some fancy interpretations of parliamentary procedure. We see it all the time within our congregations (“sacred” is okay, but not “holy”).

So what are we really doing? Are we fulfilling Catton’s belief that we have more to fight about than agree upon? Or are we the example that proves the rule – that our constant and abiding fights over semantics make us stronger and more united? I’d like to think our quibbles over language reflect our deep care for expression and inclusion.

It’s not a bad reflection on us. Words matter; let us be masters of our words so we can nurture spirits and help heal the world.

 

 

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Among the more striking characteristics of generational theory is the particular personalities of the four generational types; as Strauss &Howe explain, the cycle of historical events, parenting styles, and cultural shifts lead to a cycle of general generational traits. Of course, each person is different, and each specific generation is different, but there are patterns that emerge fairly clearly when we look at large cohorts over time.

In my work in generational theory, I’ve concentrated primarily on the currently living generations – how people who are living relate to each other, particularly in UU congregational settings. But in reading the first couple of chapters of Gary Dorrien’s The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progresive Religion 1805-1900, I began to see what Strauss & Howe are really talking about.

Dorrien’s first few chapters concern primarily the founding of Unitarianism and the Transcendentalist movement – key of course to our denomination, but also key to American liberal religion in general. Among the players in these early years are 

  • William Ellery Channing – born 1780 – Compromise Generation (Adaptive)
  • Andrews Norton – born 1786 – Compromise Generation (Adaptive)
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson – born 1803 – Transcendental Generation (Idealist)
  • Theodore Parker – born 1810 – Transcendental Generation (Idealist)

Now what we know about Adaptives is they are very invested in process, considering all sides of an issue, and bringing people together.  Idealists tend to be invested in vision, big ideas, and persuasion.

Thus, when Emerson and Parker catch fire with their transcendentalist thought, they are willing (Parker moreso) to throw firebombs; Parker was so horrified at the rancor at a meeting of the Berry Street Conference that he remarked “I intend in the coming year to let out all the force of Transcendentalism that is in me. Come what will come; I will let off the Truth fast as it comes.”

Emerson seemed a little less eager to rush into controversy; however, his Divinity School Address was a bold statement against the Unitarians, and he should have expected the firestorm that ensued. Norton fanned that flame; while he was an Adaptive, Norton saw Emerson’s – and the other Transcendentalists’ – passion as an affront to what he saw as the open arms of Unitarianism. Consensus challenged led Norton to fight for what was most important, coming together.

Channing, on the other hand, didn’t engage the fight as much as he worked tirelessly to find common ground, to bring everyone together. As Dorrien notes, this factional fight was what Channing spent the latter part of his career mediating. As a result, he was claimed by both sides – another charge often leveled against Adaptives, who just want everyone to get along.

I think about the parallels today – Harry Reid, the Adaptive, against John Boehner, the Idealist. Harry, accused of playing both sides – and John, so stuck in his resolve he won’t budge. And in our congregations, we see it: the over 70s who won’t leave leadership for fear of what will happen to the congregation they so lovingly nutured, and the Boomers who usher in big sweeping changes with great vision and excitement.

What will be interesting in the subsequent reading of our Unitarian and Universalist history – as well as the next decades of our congregations – is how the next generation of Nomads, those pragmatic, just do it types, affect and shift who we are and can become.

 

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I learned this week that I am a radical Universalist.

I credit David Bumbaugh for this. In his book Unitarian Universalism: A Narrative History, Bumbaugh spends 20 pages outlining the beginnings of the Universalist church in America, from deBenneville’s sermons preached across Pennsylvania; to the founding of the first Univeralist church by Murray in Gloucester, Massachusetts; to the founding on the New England Convention of Universalists; to Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement. It’s a rich history, and a reasonably short one: only 44 years passed between the first universalist sermons in 1741 and the first Convention in 1785 – just 44 years to go from idea to denomination.

I have always been fascinated by universalism, have always found it one of the most hopeful aspects of our faith. But it was in reading this treatment, seeing the varying theological differences within universalism, that I saw my place, standing with Caleb Rich and Hosea Ballou in believing that we pay for sins in this life – that “God doesn’t need to be reconciled to humanity; rather, human beings need to be reconciled to God.” I stand with them in understanding God as a loving deity and that Jesus’s ministry is largely about how to “grow into harmony with the Divine.” I stand with them – Ballou especially – in believing that “God would not endow humanity with reason and then present a revelation that was incompatible with that reason.” I also stand with Ballou in rejecting the Trinity and instead embracing the unity of God.

(I also, by the way, appreciate Benjamin Rush’s assertion that faithful Universalists must commit to social justice, which he calls “an unescapable consequence of Universalist faith.”)

Rich’s theology was called “Death and Glory”; unlike other Universalists who believed there is some punishment for sins after death but then eventual reconciliation with God, Rich said no – a loving God doesn’t want to see us suffer. In a world where a loving God exists, we have room to reconcile to each other, to work out our issues, to confront our sins, knowing that every step we take toward the good is another step toward the Divine. For me, it’s encouraging to think I don’t have to rely on some magical thinking to be saved from a mythical hell. Every mistake I make, every trauma I suffer, every sin I commit – everything I do to heal, reconcile, rectify, brings me closer to God and those around me.

Some find this theology too freeing – if there’s no eternal threat, why do good, they suggest. And I know it’s an issue people have long debated. But what I know is that it is human nature, for the most part, to do good – to act in altruistic ways, to nurture, to help, to want to improve the world. People want to be in right relations with other people. And when we do this, we create a more harmonious space. Universalism tells us that this isn’t an exclusive club, where only some go to heaven, and the only way you get in is by believing and/or doing exactly the right things. Univeralism tells us we’re all part of the club, and we have to do right by ourselves and each other in this world, while we can. And this is what I think the creator-creating God (see process theology) wants too.

So maybe I’m a radical process Universalist. Whatever the label, with this set of theological perspectives I feel loved, and compelled, and nurtured, and yes, in awe of the expansiveness of the Divine and of human potential.