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February 2007

Quest Archives

“My religion is the answer to the question which I am.”
—Paul Tillich

Contents

Quest Archives
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the CLF has a free lending library for members? Search the catalog online at www.clfuu.org/library or call 617-948-6150.


To Keep One's Soul

Bowens-WheatleyBY MARJORIE BOWENS-WHEATLEY, MINISTER, UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF TAMPA, FLORIDA

Marjorie was pleased to grant us permission to print the excerpt from her piece which was printed in the 2006 Skinner House book Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism. Marjorie lost her struggle with cancer in December. She gave tremendous gifts to our denomination, and will be sorely missed.

Upon her admission to a hospital some years ago, a woman was asked to state her religious affiliation. When she replied "Unitarian Universalist," the clerk reportedly looked up, smiled, and quietly typed "none" in the box.

It is not easy being a UU. We are widely misunderstood in relation to the dominant culture, especially in the contemporary world of conservative religion and fundamentalism.

You may have seen these words on a bumper sticker: "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

One-dimensional thinking such as this can lead to a desire never to discuss religion again. This is precisely the kind of thinking that led to the birth of liberal religion, to a creedless faith that does not impose a doctrine and does not oblige us to embrace a single truth.

I am among those who are in perpetual recovery from intolerance—indeed abuse—from a past religious experience.

At one level, you could say that the theological tenets my family sought to transmit to me simply "didn't take." My rational mind simply could not reconcile concepts like original sin, the virgin birth, and the resurrection. And so I lost faith completely, professing atheism for nearly a decade. But ultimately, after a crisis in my life, I had to find something to hold onto. So I took an inventory of all the religions that I had explored over the years and chose a path. The path I knew best, the one in which I felt most rooted—in spite of having been hurt by it—was Christianity.

After undergoing quite a painstaking healing process to "get over" my woundedness from the religion of my childhood and adolescence, I discovered that what I believed and tried to follow was the message of Jesus. It wasn't always smooth sailing. I struggled mightily with myself and with fellow UUs. I had to separate Christianity from the message of Jesus before I could begin to understand that there are as many forms (or perhaps nuances) of Christianity as there are of Unitarian Universalism.

When I became a Unitarian Universalist more than twenty years ago, I was proclaiming atheism and was delighted to learn that there was a spiritual community for people like me. But when I took the course "Building Your Own Theology" and other adult religious education courses with my minister, the late David Eaton, I began to realize that I had unnecessarily fallen into an "all or nothing" mentality—"thrown out the baby with the bath water." I had dismissed Christianity as irrelevant because I experienced it as dogmatic and oppressive. Indeed, the particular form of Christianity that I grew up with was oppressive! Questioning was simply not permissible in an environment where biblical literalism prevailed. But in my lack of understanding about the diversity of Christianity, I had indulged in stereotyping; I assumed that if I knew one Christian, I knew them all.

I had to separate the history of the Christian Church from its theological tenets (many of which emerged not during Jesus' lifetime but centuries later). I also had to separate history and theology from the rules that governed the church and the widespread corruption I had witnessed in the church where I grew up.

Today, Jesus remains a central figure of my religious identity. And yet I don't often call myself a Christian because there is no agreement on what the term Christian means, either within UUism or without. Even within Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, there are many interpretations of what it means to be a Christian.

There are conservative and liberal understandings of the Jesus story and Christian witness, and none of these has any exclusive claim on Jesus or those who seek to follow him.

In my Christian witness, no one's soul (or spiritual salvation) is dependent on a particular ritual, obligation, or statement of belief. There is no giant cop up in the sky dictating who will go up and who will go down. And yet I have been moved to tears by liturgical expressions of the story of Jesus and his work as a mystical teacher.

So reconciling the interpretations of my Christian past with a progressive Unitarian Universalism was not just a challenge for me; it took serious commitment and more than a decade to work through my issues and to embrace Jesus again.

I am profoundly moved by the message of Jesus as I understand it: liberation and freedom from oppression, love and compassion, service to others, and radical inclusiveness. His life and ministry continue to inspire me. Here was a man who challenged the laws, customs, and social expectations of his time. He affirmed the inherent worth and dignity of every person, even of the most marginalized in his day: women, prostitutes, the sick and those who were scorned because they were not part of the dominant religious community. And he affirmed peace—not a passive peace, but rather a peace in which we work proactively to bring about justice.

His values were so threatening to the powers that be that they executed him. Jesus' focal point of preaching and ministry was what he called "the kingdom of God," by which I believe he meant a state of being in the here and now. I prefer the term coined by Christian feminist Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, a Cuban theologian. She suggests that we consider Jesus' reference as a "kindom" of God, as an expression and recognition that we are all related, that we are kin to one another, called to create a new world through loving kindness, a world made new by the way we treat each other.

These universal values were also upheld by people like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela; and we UUs claim them as well, as expressed in our seven principles. And so I find it interesting when people ask: How can you be a UU and Christian at the same time? For me, there is no contradiction.

It's most accurate to say that I am a nominal Christian who has also found truth and wisdom in pre-Christian and mystical religions, earth-centered spiritualities, religious humanism, womanism, and other theologies of liberation. In addition, I have embraced the spiritual practice of Tai Chi and the wisdom of Buddhist philosophy. I am a UU because I do not exclude any particular theology. As the spiritual says, there is "plenty good room" at the banquet table.

Most UUs are questioners, whether they are Christian, humanist, Buddhist, or pagan. Many of us chose this faith because it allows us the freedom to be ourselves, to be authentic, even with our doubts. It provides freedom from authoritarian hierarchy and creeds, and the possibility of truly keeping our souls without violating our own consciences.

If I have any advice for those struggling to discover their own truths, it is found in the ancient wisdom of a Sufi parable: If you want to move beyond a surface understanding of any religious tradition, you've got to dig a well—a well as deep as the self. You have to go into the depths of that tradition if you are to find the living water that awaits your thirst. Stated differently: Find a religious path—any path—and go as deeply as you can to understand and embrace it fully.

The path I have chosen is the path of Jesus, a path that is embraced by some Christians. Unitarian Universalism gave me the freedom to reclaim the message of Jesus—not in an oppressive way but in a way that is freeing, loving, caring, and compassionate. And Unitarian Universalism gives me the freedom to go beyond one path, to continue to explore and embrace different theologies, wherever truth is found.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus went into the temple, rolled out a scroll, and read these words from the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Eternal is upon me, because he has ordained
me and called me forth to bring good news to the poor. He has
sent me to proclaim release to all who are in bondage, to recover
sight to the blind, to liberate all of the oppressed, and to proclaim
Jubilee, the year of God's freedom and restoration.

These words are, perhaps the best articulation recorded in the Gospels of the central focus of Jesus' ministry. I think of it as his mission statement: to bring good news to those who are most in need, to release those who live in bondage, and to bring freedom and healing to the world.

This is my mission statement as well, and the ministry to which I am called.

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Church on Loan

computerThe Church of the Larger Fellowship offers Church on Loan, a program that allows small congregations from the U.S. or Canada to join the CLF as a group, and CLF International, which offers the same services in other countries.

These programs will help you:

  • plan and present effective and meaningful worship services
  • offer ready-to-teach religious education programs
  • provide easy-to-prepare study programs to expand interactive opportunities for adults.

Resources available from the Church-on-Loan include:

  • Sundays Online ~ complete services with excellent sermons by Unitarian Universalist ministers available for use in worship.
  • Religious Education Resources ~ including CLiF Notes: A Curriculum for Small Groups and Families; the KidTalk web page, with monthly information and activities on everything from world holidays to spiritual practices; and Between Sundays, a searchable collection of resources.
  • Quest Archive ~ an online archive of the CLF's monthly worship publication.
  • Plus ~ interest-based email lists, online classes and more.

For information about these programs, including sample resources, an online application, and fees, go to www.clfuu.org and click on "For Small Groups" or call 617-948-6150.

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Displaced

GellerdBY JUDIT GELLERD, TRANSYLVANIAN PHYSICIAN, MINISTER, AND FOUNDING HONORARY PRESIDENT OF THE UU PARTNER CHURCH COUNCIL. DR. GELLERD LIVES IN PHOENIX, AZ

This past summer my husband and I lived in Transylvania, in a tiny village. To get to our house, we passed under a giant stork nest. We watched these magnificent birds grow, take their first awkward flight and finally migrate from Transylvania at the end of the summer.

They brought back sweet childhood memories. Storks seem to like parsonages: my father's Transylvanian parsonage had a stork nest—and it kept him busy. The chicks would fall from the nest quite often and my father would climb the longest ladder to the chimney, carrying the storks in his arms, back to the nest.

When this summer ended, our storks were ready to leave for Africa, for their temporary (and voluntary) displacement. The storks, like me, have two lives, two kinds of realities, two sets of assumptions—one for Transylvania, and another for their second homeland. (You would not believe their conditions in Africa.) I met them, I met our Transylvanian storks in the jungles of Tanzania, and I was astonished how those proud, individualistic birds chose to live in "refugee camps" on giant trees, perched there by the hundreds.

I even imagined that they asked me about their nests back home, and we talked Hungarian. They were waiting for the spring, the end of our Transylvanian winter, their liberation, when they can fly home.

We are tempted to ask, "where is home for the storks?", the place they dream about: their solitary birthplace in the harsh climate of Transylvania or the communal life in tropical Africa? Well—both, necessarily.

I identify with the storks in their displacements. On the great journey that life is, I am always on the way, always somewhere else than where my assumed place might be. I am always half-way in between. There is no arriving and getting comfortable, and there is no leaving and forgetting. It is the journeying, the bringing together, the mutually nurturing.

At my birth, I already was a culturally displaced baby. I was born to Hungarian parents; I am a Unitarian preacher's kid. But we were Romanian citizens—not by choice, but by coercion, as the borders moved back and forth in Eastern Europe.

Romanian language and culture was as alien to us as Eastern Orthodoxy to Unitarian liberalism. We Hungarians have lived in Transylvania for over eleven hundred years, and Unitarianism is the only Hungarian-born religion, originating in the 16th century, indigenous to Hungarians in Transylvania—but officially I was born into Romania.

The storks flee the harsh Transylvanian winter. My youth coincided with the reign of terror of Ceausescu, the mad Romanian dictator, who killed my father. And, as thousands of other educated people of Transylvania did, as my brother, Andor did, I fled my homeland, with a pretended marriage—to another communist country, Hungary ! It took me seven years to get government permits. Leaving behind my parents and my career that I had painstakingly built, I left Transylvania with a suitcase and my violin for the beautiful city of Budapest. This was more than a metaphorical displacement. But I was still in my own Hungarian culture.

Budapest seemed to be the fulfillment of my life. I specialized in neurology, then in psychiatry. And yet... I was lonely, unbearably lonely. I saw life's sole meaning in having a family. Nature's biological clock would displace me this time.

My personal existential anguish led to the ultimate displacement, but also with the ultimate potentials: I found the great man of my life in a California professor, George Williams. I soon married him and moved to Chico, California. This was the challenge of turning the crisis of displacement into opportunities.

It seems like a paradox of intention, that my desire to finally settle down made me leave the nest again, uproot myself from my homeland for the second time. From a wider perspective, however, the risk of leaving culture, place, language and status was necessary, for I have found love and freedom to serve in a more comprehensive fashion.

My people back home have no doubt about the providential nature of my displacement into this land of possibilities. I came here in a time of a historic crisis for Transylvanian Unitarians. Ceausescu planned to bulldoze away 8000 of our villages, many home to our Unitarian churches. I sent an SOS message to the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Palm Springs through my then fiancée, and as a result the UUA was the first organization to protest Ceausescu's village destruction policy.

It has been said that the person who knows only one place knows no place; one who knows one religion, one language, is limited to the perspectives of that religion or language. Perhaps we are afraid that we will lose our identity if we displace ourselves outside of the familiar. Displacement might entail forced removal and estrangement. But we are the ones who make a place a home or a refugee camp for ourselves. It is we who bring the home into the place. We can be at home anywhere where human love and care surround us.

Many among us came to this church seeking a spiritual home, perhaps because we were religiously wounded—spiritually displaced. Displacement is painful, but often necessary, like a surgery. We come here in the search for a home, a home religiously, intellectually, spiritually. How liberating it is to find this church as that place of harmony, wholeness and healing.

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To Love an Alien

GilmoreExcerpted from a sermon by Forrest Gilmore, minister, UU congregation of Princeton, New Jersey

About a year ago, I heard about a survey of Unitarian Universalists. And in that survey all the various theological groups in our movement were studied: humanist UUs, pagan UUs, Christian UUs, Jewish UUs, theists, atheists, agnostics, on and on. And in that survey every single group—every single one—revealed that they felt marginalized, that they felt their views were not honored enough, appreciated enough, valued enough, that they did not quite belong. Members of every group indicated on some level that they felt like an alien.

However, there was in fact one group that said they did not feel marginalized in our movement: the UU Buddhists.

I think we have something to learn from the Buddhists. Did you know that the Buddha taught for 47 years and in all that time, no one tried to kill him? He created a radically different form of religion and yet seemed to threaten no one in the process.

There are two things about Buddhism that strike me as wonderful. First is its intentional focus on spiritual practice over a particular belief. The core of their faith is the opening practice of meditation. And second, at the heart of Buddhism is the awareness of our connections.

I think the center of our UU faith is connection. It is in the experiences of our connections that we are able to love, to love each other, no matter how strange or alien. We love the alien as ourselves because we, too, are the alien. And if our spiritual practices, no matter what they may be, don't open us to our connections, don't free us from our isolations and attachments, don't increase our capacity to love our neighbor and ourselves, then we need to think about whether our spiritual practice is doing its job.

We are in fact all connected. Black, white, red, yellow, brown, beige, pink...atheist, theist, agnostic, humanist, pagan, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Shinto, Taoist...gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual...man, woman, transgender... Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, Independent, we are all connected.

We all belong.

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Big Heart in the Heartland

Interview by Paul Sprecher, 2005-6 ministerial intern, Church of the Larger Fellowship, now serving as minister, Second Parish in Hingham, Massachusetts

BrennekeEleanor Brenneke of Hortonville, Wisconsin, now in her eighties, is a saver. A friend of the Fox Valley UU Fellowship and member of the CLF for over forty years, she has a four drawer file cabinet filled with "everything I've ever gotten from the CLF" as well as her nature file and astronomy information. She's going through it now to figure out what she doesn't need, but "It's very hard to throw anything out," she says. Eleanor saves a lot more than informative literature.

Over the years, she and her husband Howard (now deceased) helped save the day for quite a few children by becoming foster parents.

The two met in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1940 while riding their new three-speed bicycles with a group of other young people, and were married thirteen months later. Howard was drafted into limited service during WW II, and their sons Chuck and Jim were born in 1946 and 1948 respectively. Two sons, Tommy and Peter, born later, died as infants due to problems stemming from Rh factor incompatibility. Realizing in 1958 that they would not be able to have more biological children, Eleanor and Howard applied to become foster parents. Their first foster child, a thirteen-month-old Menominee boy named Clyde Anthony, came to them that same year. In 1960 they relocated from Green Bay to Hortonville because of Howard's job as a superintendent at a local vegetable packing and canning company. The move prompted the agency to push for Tony's adoption by a couple who was already considering it. "The boys had an emotional reaction to the loss of Tony," Eleanor remembers.

After the move, the couple switched their foster care certification from the state of Wisconsin to their county (Outagamie) Oneida reservation. "The Oneida Indians lived in New York, but were forced to come to Wisconsin," Eleanor explains. They began to care for both Native American and Caucasian children. Marty, a five-year-old Oneida boy, was placed with them in 1961. They adopted him in 1964. Over the years Eleanor and Howard provided services for 44 children.

After the two surrendered their foster care license in 1971, Eleanor worked for the foster care agency and was appointed to the Village Board of Hortonville, as well as several other boards. She discovered the CLF in 1965 when her sister invited her to an ecumenical women's group that had some CLF literature. "What I like about the CLF is that you're always there," says Eleanor. "I know I can call any time if I need reassurance. I'm glad to know you're there."

When Howard died, Tony and Marty participated in the memorial service for Howard, and they did an Indian sage smudging as part of the ceremony at the Fellowship.

We extend our sincere appreciation for Eleanor's generous and loving heart.

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Liberal vs. Progressive, from the Quest Forum

As part of our online series of discussions on topics from Quest, our minister for lifespan learning, Lynn Ungar, posted the following question:

In his piece "A Way of Walking in the World," Jack Mendelsohn writes about what it means to him to be a liberal. During the decades since this piece was originally written, the word "liberal" has increasingly fallen into disfavor. Do you consider yourself a liberal? What does that word mean to you? Some people who might have called themselves liberals in the past are now using the word "progressive." Is that a term you embrace? How do you see it as being the same as or different from "liberal"?

Here's what a few of those CLF members had to say:

In my area (Central Valley of California), radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and others have made "liberal" into a dirty word. Once I spoke at a city council meeting in favor of saving some 100-year-old trees. The landowner who wanted to cut the trees down hissed the epithet "liberal" at me as the worst possible critical term he could think of!

I don't know anyone who can use the word "liberal" anymore... except for wishing we could use the word again. Just as the Religious Right has stolen the true meaning of the word "Christian," so have they stolen the real meaning of the word "liberal" from us. We have to use the word "progressive." To me, this is OK: "liberal" used to mean someone who advocated heavy taxes and heavy government spending; today that kind of advocacy is reserved for the neoconservatives like our President (who taxes future generations heavily by merrily spending billions on warfare).

I certainly don't consider myself a "tax and spend liberal" as the term is derided by people like Limbaugh, so the term "progressive" works well for me as a political term. The word "progressive" to me means simply forward thinking, caring about people more than corporations, and about the future more than the economic welfare of the rich.

However, I am not sure the word fits well as a description of or adjective for our religious faith. I see that most UU materials still frequently use the phrase "religious liberal" which makes me cringe because in our Bible-belt area that is just as effective as trying to sell Satan worship. While UU is indeed "progressive," I think we need a new term to substitute for both "liberal" and "progressive" as we describe our religious faith. Any ideas of what it could be?

—Harold
Visalia, Calif.

George Lakoff talks in his books about "framing" discussions and using the framing of words to change their definitions. That is what seems to have been done to "liberal." Those of us who claim liberal as our label need to either reframe it to its previous definition or come up with a different word such as progressive or another more catchy word to use instead. I favor "farsighted" or, perhaps "visionary." Both conjure up, to me, a sort of specialness, an ability to see and know much more than ordinary people. And we really need to do some of that if we want our country back.

—V. Diane
Fresno, California

I like the term "progressive," and find that it embodies much that has been swiftboated out of the once-useful terms like "liberal" or "left-wing." Civil discourse has become so hate-filled in recent decades that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have become political spitballs to be thrown back and forth.

The term "progressive" makes me think of progress in political and social movements, and of open-mindedness in religious and spiritual matters. Maybe that's just because the term shares roots with "progress," and also because it's associated with the left-wing political parties and (still published) journal from pre-WWII America.

In general, though, I tend to try to remind myself that any such labels are going to be tricky when you start thinking of wild examples that contradict the general philosophies behind them. In the long run, I feel that it's what you do and how you live that counts, and that whatever labels people apply to themselves or others are bound to fall short.

—David
Germantown, Tennessee

Oh, my! This is such a good topic! I guess you'd have to call me an unreconstructed Liberal.... I am not ashamed of the Liberal label; I am not ashamed of standing up for the underdog and for the finest principles on which this country was founded. Our predilection for seeing all shades of gray, rather than black and white, makes us really bad at "sound bite" argumentation.

I have no idea why we have been so reluctant to engage in a political discussion of ideas, but those traditional Liberals that we always looked up to seem to have abandoned the fray! The Democratic Party seems also to have abandoned its principles in favor of a dysfunctional reliance on polls and political advisors.

Being a Liberal, to me, means caring about people (all people, not just one's neighbors); it means caring about being good stewards of the Earth; it means working to bring peaceful conclusions to problems; it means not creating false "issues" that depend on discriminating against some out group that is not in a good position to defend itself; it means not pandering to people's worst instincts for political gain.

It is time that we Liberals stood up and pointed the finger of shame at those who would denigrate our highest ideals.

—Bill
Harvard, Massachusetts

If you are interested in participating in our Quest Forums, or in any of the various topics in our Discussion Forums, go to www.clfuu.org/forums to register and sign on.

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From Your Minister

Rzepka; photo by Nancy PierceBY JANE RZEPKA, SENIOR MINISTER, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP

"There are creatures in the deep caves of Mercury." That's how a passage by Kurt Vonnegut begins—my colleague, Ken Sawyer, pointed me to it in The Sirens of Titan. So we are imagining that on the planet Mercury "the creatures in the caves look very much like small and spineless kites. They are diamond-shaped, a foot high and eight inches wide when fully mature," and "they have no more thickness than the skin of a toy balloon." They cling to the walls of their caves, for they are nourished by vibrations.

I'm not much of a science fiction fan, but here's the part that captures my attention: By means of the vibrations of the caves' walls, creatures on Mercury have weak powers of telepathy as they live there in the caves, clinging. The first message is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the first.

Here's the first message: "Here I am, here I am, here I am."
The response? "So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are."
The creatures are called harmoniums.

Unitarian Universalists talk a lot about the inherent worth and dignity of each person. Worth and dignity. Rolls right off the tongue. It amounts to, "If you are there, I am glad"—or at least respectful.

Occasionally we may ask ourselves, "Is it really true? Is my religion asking me to be a harmonium?" Hitler and evil come quickly to mind, and those who have done us harm—or who have harmed the world or the innocents or the people we love. Aren't there people who on the face of it seem wholly undignified and unworthy, exceptions to the dignity and worth rule? Maybe the UU notion that every person deserves dignity and worth is pushing it. I've certainly heard the case made.

I'll tell you where I am on this. Day to day, I try to go with the harmoniums. In a theological discussion I might make a concession or two, but mostly I believe in the "Here I am/So glad you are" approach.

handsI have a mental image of a huge collage made up of pictures of hands—the hands of CLF members, say. Little tiny hands, gnarled hands, hands with tattoos on them or rings, hands showing spots or scars, trembling hands, perfectly smooth hands, big strong hands, delicate hands, even metaphorical hands. Hands we love, mysterious hands, firm hand-shaking hands, good hands to hold.

To qualify for inclusion in the collage, your hands would have no tests to pass, no theological criteria to fulfill or mandatory number of good works in their history. No one would ask if your hands voted as political liberals or conservatives, how much they dropped into the coffers of the CLF, or whom they loved or how. Your hand would be worthy of our display because it is your hand. Every hand a worthy hand; our theology made flesh.

Perhaps because it appears as a responsive reading in one of our hymn books, Singing the Living Tradition, a number of Unitarian Universalists can more or less recite Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese."

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

That's our general theological position as Unitarian Universalists. Each of us has a place in the family of things. We know that there are people who have been startlingly rude or breathtakingly gracious. People who thwart all progress and people who make the ride easy, people who say what they feel and people who keep us all guessing, people who let us down and people who stun us with their accomplishments. Consistent people, unpredictable people. Givers. Takers. People who lose it, people who keep it together. Smilers, frowners. But we move forward assuming that somewhere inside each of those people is a person of dignity and worth.

When the Quest editorial team met last October to compile this issue, they noted that somebody should write a little something about love, it being the February issue after all. Jane maybe. So here's what I know about one way of loving: a reverberating, harmonious perpetual Valentine's Day. Somebody out there sends the signal: "Here I am, here I am, here I am." The response? "So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are."

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REsources For Living

BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP

UngarAs Jane, our senior minister, mentions in her column on the previous page, when the Quest team got together to plan this issue, we thought that, seeing as how it was around Valentine's Day, we ought to have something in here about love. After all, love isn't the kind of thing you want to just skip over, if you know what I mean....

So what do you love? Me, I love my family, both the one I was born into and the family I live with, which includes my partner, my daughter, two dogs, two cats and a fish. (Well, alright, I don't really love the fish, but I like him OK.) I also love reading, singing, dancing, and having my feet rubbed. I love delphinium flowers, redwood trees, and bats, as well as dark chocolate, Thai food and coffee ice cream (but not coffee itself—yuck!).

In some ways, the most important thing you can know about a person is what they love. What we love is, in a sense, who we are. Not, I suppose, that you really know a lot about me from knowing that I love coffee ice cream and bats. It turns out that the kinds of things that really define us are usually bigger, harder-to-describe things that we love—like loving freedom or honesty or fairness. These big, hard-to-define things we love are called "values." And our values are what help us make the decisions that shape our lives.

mother holding her child in the airValues are a big part of what religion is all about. Religion leads us to name the big things we love and helps us to live in ways that express that love. Different religions have different values. Buddhism values what they call "non-attachment," just accepting life the way it is, while Islam values submission to Allah (God). Confucius valued knowing your place in society, while Jesus valued the idea of treating all people equally, regardless of what society said. But religions have a lot in common, too. For instance, most religions value compassion and sharing and kindness and respecting your parents.

So what do Unitarian Universalists value? Well, unlike some religions, which value obedience to the authority of a book or a religious leader, UUs value freedom, especially the freedom of people to decide what they believe for themselves. Unlike some religions which value doing what they believe will get them into heaven, UUs value doing things that will make the world a better place while we are alive—and for future generations. Unlike some religions which love a particular holy place, like Jerusalem or Mecca, UUs love the planet as a whole, and think that all of nature is holy. Unlike some religions which value conformity, and believe that the faithful should all dress alike or believe alike, UUs value diversity, and think that it is great that people look different from one another and have different beliefs. But we still value compassion and sharing and kindness and respecting your parents (and your kids).

St. ValentineI know all this talk about religion and values seems kind of a long way off from Valentine's Day and cards and candy and all. But think about it this way. One of the stories (yes, there's more than one) of how the Valentine's Day holiday came about says that it is in honor of a young Roman Catholic priest named Valentine, who is said to have died on February 14th of the year 270.

Why did he die? Well, the Roman emperor at the time had forbidden people to get married, because the emperor wanted more soldiers, and he figured that married men wanted to stay home with their families, not go off to war. In spite of the ban on marriage, the story says that Valentine performed weddings for people. So the emperor had him killed for breaking the law.

Valentine's religious values told him that the love of two people who wanted to get married and build a life together was more important than having more people to fight in a war. Which, come to think of it, sounds not too different from the Unitarian Universalist ministers who have done wedding ceremonies where a man marries a man or a woman marries a woman, in spite of the law says that only a man and a woman can get married. A lot of Unitarian Universalists would say that one of our values is "standing on the side of love."

Standing on the side of love. I think that's a pretty good value to hold for Valentine's Day. You could even put it on a heart and mail it to the emperor....um, I mean the US president.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Love,
Lynn

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hands holding a seedlingOur task now is to do what we can to advance reverence for life and deepen the promise of love. Let us dedicate ourselves to the thinking, researching, practice, and learning that will bring more love into the world.

By Rebecca Ann Parker, president, Starr King School for the Ministry. Adapted from Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now, published by Skinner House in 2006, and available through the CLF library (www.clfuu.org/library or 617-948-6150) or the UUA Bookstore (www.uua.org/bookstore or 800-215-9076).

 

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