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BY MICHAEL MCGEE, MINISTER, UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
Listen to this sermon to the Quest sermon podcast
My wife, Terry, who happens also to be my favorite author (writing under the name Emilie Richards), recommends fiction to me, and she mentioned that The Da Vinci Code was getting a lot of buzz, and that I might enjoy it. And did I ever! The writing is not literary by any means, but Dan Brown tells a whopping good story with intrigue, plot twists, codes and riddles, and lots of action. The book is like trying to put together a giant and complex jigsaw puzzle, one of whose puzzling pieces is Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper."
But what I really enjoyed was the religion. The good guys are not only trying to catch the bad guys and save the world, they are also grappling with religious conundrums that have confounded theologians for centuries.
The problem I had in reading the book, and I know others have had as well, was trying to figure out what is true. Since Brown is writing fiction, but interspersing it with historical fact, how can we know what is real and what isn't?
Well, that's another puzzle to put together, isn't it? And that's what I decided to do: find out the veracity of his history and theology. I love my job!
The plot begins with the murder of a well-known curator at the Louvre in Paris and quickly enmeshes Robert Langdon, a Raiders of the Lost Ark-type Harvard professor who is also the primary suspect, in the grisly murder.
Langdon's accomplice and romantic interest is Sophie Neveu, a French police cryptologist who happens to be the daughter of the murder victim. Need I even say that the bad guys are just a step behind—and sometimes a step ahead—as they traipse through Paris, London and points in between, trying to discover the secrets of the mysterious Catholic organization, Opus Dei, as well as seeking the Holy Grail itself. (By the way, the secretive Catholic organizations mentioned in the book have existed, or do actually exist today, but they have made it clear that they are not as terrifying as Brown makes them out to be.)
In the midst of this intrigue, the main characters never miss an opportunity to give a lecture about the goddess, Mary Magdalene, and the divinity of Jesus. In the process, they undercover a hidden history of the pre-Christian and early-Christian Church that most people do not know.
You may have seen the book put out by the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels—What Did Jesus Really Say? The book color codes the Gospels, with the most historically reliable words printed in red and the least reliable in black, with pink and gray in between. Well, why not do the same for The Da Vinci Code?
A major theme of the book is that worship of the goddess was dominant in pre-Jewish and pre-Christian history, and that Christianity has sought to destroy all vestiges of the sacred feminine. Despite all these efforts, the goddess consistently bursts through the seams of church and culture, revealing itself in a wide variety of imaginative ways—even in the Disney film The Little Mermaid.
Riane Eisler would agree. In her radical book The Chalice and the Blade, she tells us that The Great Mother was the central focus of worship in the early Neolithic culture. She was the Birth-giver, the Creator of all life and of all gods. The Great Mother has many different faces and names, just as the male gods have been viewed in a variety of different ways. But no matter what her name, it is the same religious impulse that is always celebrated: the need to affirm and actualize the feminine power within humanity.
Critics have pointed out that Eisler's conclusions are somewhat too simplistic, and that in actuality most of the pagan religions were a complex mix of the masculine and feminine. But it's certainly true that Judaism and Christianity were established in a region where pagan savior religions had existed for thousands of years.
Though the feminine aspects were repressed, many of the symbols and stories in the Bible grew out of the earlier myths of the Persians, Egyptians, and other people from the Near East. I would print most of Brown's words on the goddess in the color pink—how appropriate—to indicate that much of it is true, though there are some overstatements.
As for the portions of the novel dealing with Mary Magdalene, those should also be in pink. The character Sir Teabing states in The Da Vinci Code that:
The threat Mary Magdalene posed to the men of the early Church was potentially ruinous. Not only was she the woman to whom Jesus had assigned the task of founding the Church, but she also had physical proof that the Church's newly proclaimed deity had spawned a mortal bloodline.
It's certainly true that the Church created the image of Mary Magdalene as an impure sinner. Nothing in the Bible claims she was a prostitute. In fact, the Church Fathers merged three different women in the Christian Scriptures into the character of Mary Magdalene in order to impugn her reputation.
Even then, we cannot ignore the fact that the Gospels place her as the first witness to Jesus' resurrection and she is therefore a critical figure in the Easter story. The statement in The Da Vinci Code that Jesus and Mary were married is also supported in the Gnostic Gospels, where we find in the Gospel of Phillip, "the companion of the (Savior is) Mary Magdalene. (But Christ loved) her more than (all) the disciples, and used to kiss her (often) on her (mouth)." Wow! He was a sexy savior.
The Gnostic Gospel of Mary Magdalene (yes, Mary has her own Gospel) shows Mary teaching and leading the other disciples, to the point where they ask of Jesus, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" But to extrapolate from this that Mary is actually the Holy Grail sought by so many and that she gave birth to Jesus' children is the stuff of The X Files. It goes down in gray as highly improbable, but it does make a good story. I would put in red, however, that the Church Fathers built a wall between orthodoxy and heresy, and that they associated orthodoxy with Mary the mother of Jesus and heresy with Mary Magdalene the whore. That is accurate.
This division between orthodoxy and heresy came about dramatically in the year 325 CE when the Emperor Constantine called the Council at Nicea, in southern France. This part of the book was particularly exciting to me because it deals with the roots of Unitarianism itself. And once again I would color it in pink as being mostly correct.
Constantine was a pagan and worshiper of Sol Invictus, a Romanized version of the god Mithras, but it is unclear from historical data just when he converted to Christianity or why. It's also unclear if he was actually the head priest of contemporary Roman paganism or simply had political power over it. He did not single-handedly assemble the Christian Scriptures, as Brown claims; that happened over a long period of time. And the co-opting of pagan holidays and symbolism was also a long evolutionary process that began before his time, though Constantine should certainly get the dubious credit of transforming Christianity into a repressive state religion.
There was confusion and conflict about the nature of Jesus in the first two centuries after his death, but Constantine wanted to put an end to those differences at the Council of Nicea. The primary conflict was between those who believed that Jesus was the Christ and was one with God (the Trinitarians), and those who believed that Jesus was divine, but not on the same level as God (called Arians—after the priest Arius). It was the Arians who evolved into Unitarians, emphasizing the humanity rather than the divinity of Jesus.
Though the Trinitarians were in the minority, Constantine threw his vote in their direction, and in the end his was the only vote that counted. The Nicene Creed became dogma, and all those who opposed it were branded as heretics.
The Council of Nicea was, in a way, the birth of Unitarianism, for when the Roman Church prohibited dissent, the response of religious liberals was to take up the challenge to be a gadfly to orthodoxy. From that time to this we have consistently and courageously struggled for freedom of thought and expression in religion. And we have sought to reclaim the human Jesus and his message.
But this alternative history has been largely hidden. As Sir Teabing echoes, "history is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books—books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe."
One person who has helped resurrect the history of the defeated is Elaine Pagels, the author of The Gnostic Gospels. When Sir Teabing states that, "More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relatively few were chosen for inclusion," he is correct—though eighty is a bit of an exaggeration. Most of those excluded from the Christian Scriptures are known now as the Gnostic Gospels. I would also color this portion of the book pink. Mostly true.
The Gnostic side of the Christian tradition came into much sharper focus in 1945 when ancient biblical scrolls were discovered in mountain caves just outside of a small town called Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The Gnostics lived in monastic communities where they translated and rewrote their gospels so they could be disseminated around that part of the world.
But when Constantine made Christianity a state religion, he gave the Church the power to eliminate their enemies. It was during that period that the Gnostic communities were burned to the ground and their writings destroyed. But some unknown person was visionary enough to hide 52 of their texts in a nearby cave.
Those texts pointed out the many differences between the orthodox Christians and the Gnostics: the main difference was the Gnostics' belief that when human beings were created they were blessed with the spark of God, and that that spark can find its way back to God in a solitary act of knowledge.
For the Gnostics, knowledge was salvation. This was the essence of their teaching and preaching: that we have within us the most sacred, the most holy essence, and by becoming aware of that essence we gain a spiritual insight as to who we are and who God is.
This is very different from what the Roman Catholic Church was and still is teaching: that only through the teaching of the priest, communion administered by the bishop, and membership in the Church could you know God.
In her recent book, Beyond Belief, Pagels compares the Gospel of John with the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. "John says that we can experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus," writes Pagels.
But...Thomas's gospel draws a quite different conclusion: that the divine light Jesus embodied is shared by humanity, since we are all made "in the image of God." Thus Thomas expresses what would become a central theme of Jewish—and later Christian—mysticism a thousand years later: that the "image of God" is hidden within everyone, although most people remain unaware of its presence.
I've only covered the tip of the iceberg in The Da Vinci Code and early church history. But I hope it is helpful in better understanding why we are Unitarian Universalists. We are the stubborn underdogs who cling to the message that the light of divinity shines in all people, not just a privileged few. We struggle against the odds to safeguard religious freedom for all people. And we demand that justice be the epitome of faith. Though we be a minority, a small movement in the mainstream of history, may our beacon always be bright with commitment and love.
A large number of UU ministers have written sermons on The Da Vinci Code. Of course, we couldn't publish them all, but here is a small selection of tidbits.
by Marlin Lavanhar, senior minister, All Souls Unitarian Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma
Listen to this excerpt
Some people have claimed that Jesus is the original feminist. That's a bit anachronistic. However, the Jesus movement was an example of a radical social organization in which women played significant roles. The movement of which Jesus was a part and that followed him in the first century was a subversive and alternative vision of community and gender roles. Maybe the Holy Grail is not a chalice or a woman. Maybe it's whatever it's going to take to get the world to a better place of balance between masculine and feminine energy and power. Even if that is not the Holy Grail, it is certainly a worthy quest.
by Ken Sawyer, minister, First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts
Does it matter whether something is true or not when it comes to theology or religion? That's what Brown is dealing with when he introduces so much of the argument about matriarchal prehistory, the eternal feminine, and the rest. Does it matter if scholars say that, carried as far as the thesis often is, the evidence isn't there to support it? It may not be true in an empirical or historical sense. How much does that matter?
As modern UUs, among our goals is the "responsible search for truth…." I am of that kind of mind. And yet I have always loved the basic doctrine of Bokononism, the religion invented by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel, Cat's Cradle. It is this: "Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." Foma are harmless untruths. Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. And maybe "untruths" is too strong a word; let's redefine foma as harmless uncertainties.
This is also part of our UU heritage—what got us called practical religion in the nineteenth century. Believe what you want, if it makes you a better, happier person. And if the thought of an early, happier, matriarchal world sounds good and makes you feel better and more hopeful, well, no one can disprove it. It is no more unlikely than the various stories accepted by billions of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others. I am of that kind of mind, too.
by Davidson Loehr, minister, First UU Church of Austin, Texas
I want to leave you with a quite different question that takes all these stories out of novels and into current events and our daily lives. In its own way, the question is as intriguing as Dan Brown's book, though it's not as complex. It is a very simple one: Why is this particular fight surfacing so much and so often? Why does it matter so much that one list of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century listed Elaine Pagels' 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels as number two? Why would a country like the United States, especially since 1980, want a close tie to a religion of obedience like the repressive versions of Christianity that came into office with the Bush administration?
Perhaps it's because a religion of empowerment like the religion of Jesus may be the spiritual voice most desperately needed now as a corrective to the spirit of our times; to the strident religious voices that want to disempower women, gays and lesbians; and to a government declaring unending war, removing civil liberties, and working to turn America into a country of desperate, poor and obedient serfs rather than an educated and empowered citizenry.
It's just a thought. I could be wrong.
BY DENNIS MCCARTY, MINISTER, UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CONGREGATION OF COLUMBUS, INDIANA
Listen to this article to the Quest inspiration podcast
Unitarian Universalism draws its inspiration from a broad spectrum of religious influences. Personally, I think we're much better off for that. There's a lot of wisdom in the world. A religious tradition only loses when we reject some part of that wisdom because it doesn't seem to come from the "right" source.
In an attempt to capture some of the breadth of this inspiration, the framers of our seven principles also listed six sources of what they called our "Living Tradition." I'd like to share my thoughts on the first source, which is "Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life."
That's a long, long sentence. All the source statements tend toward complex language. But to reduce this one down to its central meaning, the first—and most basic—source of our living tradition is our own "experience of transcending mystery and wonder."
The experience of transcending mystery and wonder has nothing to do with magic or miracles. Or rather, our whole existence is a magical miracle, from before we are born until after we die. The inconceivable universe, the billions of years that life took to develop on our own planet, the chemical reactions that make up the movement of my fingers, the laughter of a child, the flight of a hummingbird. It's all a miracle and a wonder.
No less important, life can also be a horror and a tragedy. An act of war can strip away our normal existence or a great storm can remind us just how puny we still are in the face of nature's immensity. Everyday life is full of wonder. It's also full of horror.
A nineteenth century theologian named Rudolph Otto called this core religious experience, in Latin, the mysterium tremendum et fascinorum. The tremendous, fascinating mystery. There's nothing simple or sugar-coated about religious experience. It can be uplifting, perhaps, but it can also be anything but. In Otto's words, it is "a unique experience of confrontation with a power…‘Wholly Other,' outside of normal experience and indescribable in its terms; terrifying, ranging from sheer demonic dread through awe to sublime majesty; and fascinating, with irresistible attraction, demanding unconditional allegiance." And here's what's really important: "It is the positive human response to this experience in thought (myth and theology) and action (cult and worship) that constitutes religion."
It is the positive response to the mysterium tremendum et fascinorum that constitutes religion. That's a beautiful statement. It strikes me as not just true but also profound. If we look at it carefully, it can lead us to some important insights about the religious life.
Here's a story about one person's unique and terrifying confrontation with a power, to use Rudolph Otto's words, "Wholly Other." Just after the close of the Second World War, a minor government clerk in New York City took his five-year-old son to New York's American Museum of Natural History. There, this little boy met his first dinosaur. Which, let's face it, fifty years before the Jurassic Park movies started coming out, was about as "Wholly Other" as you could get for a little Jewish kid. They walked into the first hall and this little boy came face to face with a twenty-foot-tall skeleton of an Albertosaurus, a close relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex. He stared up at it, wide-eyed; it glared back at him, with gaping jaws and dagger-like teeth.
Just then, someone behind the little boy happened to sneeze. He cried out in terror, and then realized it had just been a sneeze. The skeleton wasn't coming to life and it was not going to eat him after all. It was just a carefully mounted display. But for one tremendous, mysterious, fascinating, frightening instant, he had thought otherwise.
Remember, according to Rudolph Otto, it is the positive human reaction to an experience like this that constitutes religion. On the way home from the museum, the boy announced to his father that he was going to study dinosaurs when he grew up. If you haven't already guessed, the little boy's name was Stephen Jay Gould. By the time he died just a few years ago, he had become a Harvard University professor, one of the world's foremost paleontologists, and a renowned expert on evolutionary biology.
As he grew, Gould gradually left behind his Jewish faith and became an atheist. Which is precisely the reason I chose him as an example of the religious impulse. Different kinds of people have been experiencing that "tremendous, fascinating mystery" in various ways, for thousands of years. It caused Mesopotamians to build ziggurats, Egyptians to build the pyramids, and Medieval Christians to build the great cathedrals of Europe. It caused the apostle Paul to lay down his life to a Roman executioner and the Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoffer to lay down his life in a Nazi concentration camp. But different people react differently. It moved Mahatma Gandhi to agitate for Indian independence from Britain. It moved Stephen Jay Gould to become a scientist and an atheist. I respectfully submit that each of those reactions is just as positive and just as religious as any of the others.
As Rudolph Otto reminds us, religion doesn't just lie in the experience of mystery and wonder. It lies in our response to that experience. Again, our first Source statement talks about "direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life."
"Renewal of the spirit and openness to the forces that create and uphold life." Every time I saw Stephen Jay Gould being interviewed or heard him explain the field he knew so well, he always exuded a "renewed spirit." He was "open to the forces that create and uphold life." Even when he was dying of cancer, he remained cheerful and enthusiastic. He exuded all the life and purpose of one who had taken a running belly-flop into his mysterious existence, and whose reaction was spectacularly healthy.
If you listen to astronomers describe new discoveries about the rings of Saturn, or engineers describe the latest adventures of the Mars rover, you hear that same excitement, that same sense of mystery and wonder. Astronomer Carl Sagan once wrote, "In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining…with the magnificence of the Cosmos."
Rudolph Otto was a student of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Like Schleiermacher, he saw the real religious impulse as an appreciation, a healthy reaction to mystery and wonder—and terror and dread and horror—not an attempt to explain them away.
Simply put, healthy religion can draw its inspiration from many different sources. Schleiermacher writes, "Each person must be conscious that his religion is only part of the whole, that regarding the same objects that affect him religiously there are views just as pious and, nevertheless, completely different from his own, and that from other elements of religion intuitions and feelings flow, the sense for which he may be completely lacking." My inspiration may not be yours and yours may not be mine. Transcending mystery and wonder look different to each person.
Schleiermacher tells us that religious feeling "is as fleeting and transparent as the first scent with which the dew gently caresses the waking flowers, as modest and delicate as a maiden's kiss, as holy and fruitful as a nuptial embrace; indeed, not like these, but it is itself all these." To this day, this is still the most wonderful piece of theology I've ever read. To me, Zen Unitarian Universalist that I am, it expresses exactly what "direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder" is.
Because of Schleiermacher's emphasis on the importance of individual perception, it's no surprise that he influenced American Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson. His take on spirituality perfectly parallels my own Zen training. It also perfectly fits the scientist's approach to research.
Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler explained his interest in science as "a wish to know the mind of God." Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and J. Robert Oppenheimer used similar language. (And I don't think any of them thought of "God" as a big, bearded white guy with magical powers and a bad temper.)
Both Schleiermacher and a Zen master would tell you that the important thing is to live in that sense of wonder, to keep yourself awake and open to the divine, minute by minute, all the time. A real student of Zen doesn't worry about the nature of God. To a Buddhist, the very existence of God would be "an improper question."
Religion, or part of it anyway, is the positive reaction to the transcending mystery and wonder—and horror—of our lives. It's about looking for wonder in the smile of a baby, or in the breeze shaking the leaves in a forest—or really paying attention to the horror of a great storm and a flooded city. Religion isn't here to provide an escape from our everyday lives. Rather, it's here to provide fuel and a compass for the journey.
A story when nothing goes right and no one seems to notice. A mouse who collects memories. Frightened cats who help people overcome racial differences. The world of picture books has much to offer us: delightful stories, spectacular illustrations, moving messages. We will explore some wonderful children's picture books (three-five per week) and their meanings and uses in our lives and in our Unitarian Universalist faith. This course, taught by the Rev. Keith Kron, starts July 20th and runs eight weeks. It will involve reading these books, responding to questions for further thought about each book, and examining themes and uses for these books in our lives and the lives our families. Family participation is encouraged.
A story when nothing goes right and no one seems to notice. A mouse who collects memories. Frightened cats who help people overcome racial differences. The world of picture books has much to offer us: delightful stories, spectacular illustrations, moving messages. We will explore some wonderful children's picture books (three-five per week) and their meanings and uses in our lives and in our Unitarian Universalist faith.
This course, taught by the Rev. Keith Kron, starts July 20th and runs eight weeks. It will involve reading these books, responding to questions for further thought about each book, and examining themes and uses for these books in our lives and the lives our families. Family participation is encouraged.
Taught by the Rev. Valerie Mapstone Ackerman, this course starts September 16th, 2006 and runs eight weeks. UU history and principles call us to work as agents for social change. This course will look at successful movements for change and the history of UU involvement in social justice as a background to helping participants develop practical skills as change agents, as well as helping them connect to the spiritual basis for social justice work.
Taught by the Rev. Valerie Mapstone Ackerman, this course starts September 16th, 2006 and runs eight weeks.
UU history and principles call us to work as agents for social change. This course will look at successful movements for change and the history of UU involvement in social justice as a background to helping participants develop practical skills as change agents, as well as helping them connect to the spiritual basis for social justice work.
To register and pay online go to "Online Classes" under the Religious Education menu on the CLF web site. Each of these classes has a $40 fee.
BY JANE RZEPKA, SENIOR MINISTER, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
Listen to this sermon to the "From Your Minister" podcast
"Jaws was entirely a fiction…. Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges. There's no such thing as a rogue man-eater shark with a taste for human flesh. In fact, sharks rarely take more than one bite out of people, because we're so lean and unappetizing to them." This from the author of Jaws, Peter Benchley, who died this past February. Having created a horror of sharks in millions of people the world over, Benchley spent the rest of his life as a global shark protectionist, still incredulous that the public couldn't distinguish fiction from truth.
For a long time, truth has been a big deal for Unitarian Universalists. It even shows up in one of our principles: "A free and responsible search for truth and meaning." Personally, like most UUs, I am a major fan of truth. But its popularity in UU circles at the moment seems to have been somewhat eclipsed by spirituality and transformation. Not totally, though.
Months ago, when the CLF's Quest editorial team learned that a movie based on Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code would open this spring, we thought CLF members might appreciate a sermon in Quest that offered a UU context for this much-discussed topic. So we did what we always do—we googled the daylights out of the Web and brought a number of Unitarian Universalist sermons to our editorial table. And you know what? All of our ministers took the same approach. They asked, "What in The Da Vinci Code is true?" Or, "Does it matter what is true?" One way or another, what UUs cared about was truth.
"Was Jesus' ‘real message' systematically distorted and hidden by the Church?" "Did Jesus really love Mary Magdalen the best and frequently kiss her on the mouth in public?" "Is it true that they had children?" "Did secret societies commit themselves to preserving Church secrets?" On some level, UUs want the facts, the truth.
But we know that religious truth is not that simple. Beyond consideration of factual truths, our ministers talked about the perils of historical subjectivity, the importance of balance, the philosophical complexities of Absolute Truth, relative truth, and postmodern truth (or the lack thereof). Who's the final arbiter? Which religious truths should we care about? Does my truth have to be your truth?
Most religion is perceived to be soft on empirical truth. Stereotypically, it depends on "truthiness," a devotion to information that one wishes were true even if it's not. Its devotees are those who "know with their heart" instead of "thinking with their head." A phony word coined by the pretend newscaster Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central, the word truthiness has offered us a wake-up call. To remain titillated in horror by every type of shark would be a truthiness problem. Ditto for those who believe every word of The Da Vinci Code.
Wouldn't it be great if Unitarian Universalism could offer a nice system for establishing truth? Or degree of truth? Or the importance on a cosmic scale of any particular truth? I would really appreciate it if we could sort out the relative merits of truth in the face of hope and happiness, or hope and happiness in the face of truth. Plenty of other religions have done all this for themselves, but Unitarian Universalists, by choice, won't accomplish it anytime soon.
And that's because, ironically, we are always actively searching for truth. We welcome new evidence, new perspective, reliable revelation. For just that reason we refuse to codify our truths into doctrine or creed. That's our way, and it's certainly my preference, whether the topic is sharks or religion.
Shared Interest Groups: Join a group of people for informal email conversation about something that you have in common. Our Shared Interest Group facilitated email lists include everything from groups for retirees or people dealing with life-changing illness to groups for UU pagans or UU Christians. Contact our minister for lifespan learning, Lynn Ungar (lungar@clfuu.org), if you have an idea for a new group (especially if you'd like to lead it).
Email lists: Our email lists include a high-volume general list (CLF-L) and our CLF-RE list for folks interested in doing religious education with their kids at home, whether that means formal Sunday School classes or simply the ongoing work of helping kids to live our values.
Covenant Groups: These groups of CLF members build in-depth community, providing the opportunity for deep listening and sharing, and for spiritual growth within a structured, covenanted community.
Or, if you'd like a bit more structure to your “search for truth,” under the Religious Education menu you can also find:
Online Courses which provide the opportunity to be in conversation with other CLF members as well as with some extraordinary teachers. See page 5 of this Quest for information about two upcoming courses. These classes carry a modest fee, but we also have free ongoing classes which provide an introduction to UUism and to the CLF.
In addition to the courses you will find at our Online Learning Center, the site also hosts our CLF Forums, which provide an avenue for discussion and debate on a variety of topics. You can register for the Learning Center at www.clfuu.org/learn.
BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
Listen to this article to the "REsources for Living" podcast
It's not unusual for my daughter, when she's reading a book or watching a movie, to ask "Is this a true story?" I always find that a trickier question than you might imagine. I usually answer that it's fiction—something that didn't really happen—or non-fiction—something that did happen in real life. Fiction and non-fiction are pretty clear ideas. "True" is a little more complicated. For instance, try taking this little quiz, marking an "x" by the statements that are true.
___ 16 + 16 = 32 ___ Home is where the heart is. ___ Love will guide us. ___ It's the end of the world as we know it. ___ A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. ___ Christopher Columbus discovered America. ___ Laughter is the best medicine.
___ 16 + 16 = 32
___ Home is where the heart is.
___ Love will guide us.
___ It's the end of the world as we know it.
___ A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
___ Christopher Columbus discovered America.
___ Laughter is the best medicine.
"16+16=32" is true. Not much wiggle room there. But what about "Laughter is the best medicine"? It's an old saying that means that laughing makes people feel better, which I think is true. But if I had an infection, I think I'd want antibiotics, maybe even more than laughter. And what about "Christopher Columbus discovered America "? Well, he did sail from Europe to America (although his real name was Cristóbal Colón). But to say he "discovered" the continent sort of implies there was nobody there when he arrived, which is certainly not true. Sometimes things we accept as true need a harder look to see if we're assuming things that we shouldn't assume.
And sometimes stories that never happened are "true" in the sense that they have important things to teach us. For instance, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan (version in clear language ). Nobody much thinks that the story of a man who was beaten and left for dead, and then ignored by his own people, but saved by someone who belonged to a group of people he hated, is a story that really happened. But it has something true to say about the great religious belief that you should love your neighbor as yourself. Someone asked Jesus, in thinking about the idea of loving their neighbor the way they loved themselves, "Who is my neighbor?"
Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan as a way of giving the answer, "Everyone is your neighbor, especially the person you think you shouldn't have to care about." I would say that's a true answer, and true in a bigger way than the question of whether the story really happened the way he told it.
Unitarian Universalists say in our principles and purposes that we believe in a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning." Obviously, truth is important to us. But how do we know what is true, especially if we might not all agree? How do we grade the quiz? Who got the most answers right? How would we know?
Well, we might start by talking about it. We might start asking one another questions about our heart and our homes, about how we know the world, and what it might look like if that familiar world were to change. We might talk about whether we are people who like to go with the safe thing (the bird in the hand) or whether we like to take risks and try to capture the two in the bush. And we might talk about what things we're willing to risk and what things we aren't. We might talk not only about Christopher Columbus coming to America but also about what we feel when people assume that folks from one part of the world are more important than folks from another part of the world. And we would certainly get some good medicine by laughing together.
We probably wouldn't learn much about who got the most right answers, and we probably wouldn't come to any agreement about what the answers should be. But in talking with one another, in being willing to ask difficult questions and listen to different opinions, different life stories, different reasons and different feelings, we might each of us have a better answer than what we started with, even if our answers were all different.
It's kind of like hide and seek. A free search means that you can look anywhere you want to look, and a responsible search means that you don't trample anyone or anything while you're looking. It also means that you commit to trying to see what is really there, even if you wish you were seeing something different. Answers are out there, hiding in secret places. But what really makes the game worth playing is that we're all of us running around, looking in the same spots and in different, new places, all of us in the game together.
Ever since I graduated from college, I have had a recurring dream. My wife has had it, too, as well as a lot of other people I know. In my dream, it is time to take an exam and I am unprepared. I have not gone to classes all semester. I failed to do the reading. Usually, I am even a little confused about the subject matter. What was being taught? Who was teaching? What was I supposed to learn? No answers are provided. Now it is too late to make up for lost time. With a sense of approaching catastrophe, I realize that although I am about to be tested, I haven't a clue how to pass.
What is the meaning of this peculiar dream? I was never that nervous about taking tests in real life, because I was a fairly good student. Why does it seem to be a fixture of our collective unconscious? Surely it concerns something more than lingering classroom jitters.
I think it is a dream about the Great Examination that each of us must face. The items on the exam are the Ultimate Questions: Who am I? What do I want? What am I afraid of? To whom (or what) am I committed? Where is my own highest good calling me?
This is not just a dream about academic anxieties or forgetting the dates of the Magna Carta. It is about forgetting our own reason for being.
We have one lifetime (that we know about), and no make-ups are allowed. Is it any wonder we are all tossing and turning in our sleep? By the time morning comes, we have to be ready to give some account of ourselves. Sooner or later, we have to answer for how we choose to spend our lives.
By Gary Kowalski, minister, First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, Vermont. From Green Mountain Spring and Other Leaps of Faith, published by Skinner House in 1997, and available through the CLF Library (www.clfuu.org/library or 617-948-6150)
Last updated April 23, 2006
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