A follow up to “Calling the question“:
There have been a couple of comments about this line:
To state it baldly: we [UUs] do not have the luxury of doing things that do not transform lives (or lead to transformed lives).
I thought I’d try to fill that out a little. When I was writing that post, I considered bolding that line and perhaps I should have. It’s difficult to understate the importance of transformation.
1. In college, I was deeply influenced by liberation theology, particularly the feminist theology of Rosemary Radford Ruether. Two of her terms—metanoia and relationality—still influence how I see the world. Metanoia literally means a change of heart and/or mind. For Ruether, metanoia is a change of heart toward full relationality, that is, the actual, lived embodiment of right relations with others, relations that are characterized by mutuality. This is something of what I mean when I urge that we make transformation central to UUism.
2. I have also been deeply influenced by two of Jesus’ sayings. The first is “by their fruit you will know them.” If the Eternal Sharing of Opinions About Who We Areâ„¢ doesn’t help us to bear tangible spiritual fruit, then it’s bullshit in the end.
The other is this: “You are like children in the market place, crying out, ‘We played wedding but you wouldn’t dance. We played funeral but you wouldn’t cry.'” More of Jesus calling bullshit. Just because we UUs like to play Eternal Sharing of Opinions About Who We Areâ„¢, that doesn’t mean we have to. Or should.
3. So what kinds of transformations should UUism be about? A specific kind of transformation UUism offers is healing from past religious abuse. This is both good and necessary. But we are not even loosely methodical about helping people through the healing process, often offering little more than the Eternal Sharing of Opinionsâ„¢.
Some will say that we have no business proscribing a healing process. Yet we have little hesitation condoning such things when it comes to medical care and therapy. Why should it be different with spiritual healing? Why does spiritual healing have to bring up fears of the supernatural and superstition?1 Spiritual healing is a fully natural process, or so says this religious naturalist.
But our lack of method leaves many of the spiritually broken stuck in “cross cringing.” As Atlanta Unitarian would ask, do we not love them enough to help them through it, even if that help requires a little prodding now and again?
4. There are many other transformations we should be about, and I won’t belabor this post with more of them—that’s for other belabored posts. In general they should look something like “becoming the people the world needs.”
But I do want to return to the criteria of spiritual fruit.
Spiritual fruit are specific: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. There are other lists. Spiritual fruit are about our relations with specific people, the people we are in relationship with. If we cannot bear fruit together, what good are we? And if we intend to bear fruit together, how shall we go about doing it?
5. In conversation with Kinsi today, I found myself saying that if the Eternal Sharing of Opinionsâ„¢ was going to help us bear fruit, it would have done so already. If it has helped us bear fruit, I’d like to know how (honestly). And if it has, I’d like to know if that’s the exception or the rule.
- We act superstitious about the supernatural. [↩]
Glad my stupidity helped you think something out.
I completely disagree with you though about your conclusion that the eternal sharing of opinions never helping us bear fruit. I kinda think it has. We seem to get a lot of new people in the door at Eew-ka and if we share our opinion, its a way of reaching out to the new peeps and edumacate them on who we are. Which is extremely complicated.
I do think it serves a point, because of the whole no leader thing. No prophet, no pope, no hirearchy, etc. Individual congregations seem to define who they are completely differently, although we want to maintain some unity so we don’t feel like completely isolated beings.
In reference to part of point 3, I don’t think that UUism should be about people escaping their abusive religious relationships. That might be where we get a lot of influx…but I don’t think we should make it our point for existence. Spiritual healing is something different though. But I don’t think we can preach healing from the pulpit. Its more in the programs, or lack thereof, we offer for it.
And you mentioned this has never born fruit? if it hasn’t taught you patience….
And you should be stating more things baldly. Remember me teaching the word bald to Derek? *grin*
So, to sum up my slightly incoherent thoughts, I do think this sharing of who we are can help. I think its mostly helpful if you’re new to UUism and if you’ve been in UU for a while it’ll probably get drab. But the leaderless nature of UUism lends credence to us needing to define ourselves in an open dicussion or risk losing sight of our shared community.
There. That sounded Unitarian enough.
I don’t know about transformation, but in my half-educated way, I tend to gravitate back to the root meaning of the word “religion,” which I am told means “to tie back.” I think religion needs to tie us back into something bigger, to bind us to a community or a god or a universe-as-dharma or to our ancestors or to something meaningful to us, whatever that may be.
One of the many books in my stack of to-be-reads is a book called “Why God Won’t Go Away,” the thesis of which is that many spiritual experiences can be traced back to a specific part of the brain that deals with spatial orientation that gets TURNED OFF. These researchers have determined that these esperiences of being “in the presence of God” or “One with everything” happen because our brain can no longer determine where our bodies end and the world outside begins. That’s not to say that God is “all in your head,” and the authors don’t say that either. In fact, you could argue that if there is a God that created people, She might have thought to build in a way for us to experience Her. Nevertheless, my point is that religion is not only semantically about “tieing back,” but can be physically and mentally about that connection as well.
I’ll also add that I used to be rather perplexed and perhaps smug about the fact that the religion I gravitate to most strongly (Buddhism) asks you to rely on your own experience to determine what is true and what isn’t. That is until I realized that many evangelical Christians (the faith from my youth that I rejected) are going by experience as well, and what they experience in a very pyhsically moving way is the loving power and prescence of God. I still think they’re deluding themselves, but I can’t deny that they feel it and that, given their experience, it makes just as much sense for them to believe it as it does for me to believe in the nothingness I have experienced. And we have all been transformed by our experiences.
I would say this discussion (and its lead-ins) have been fruitful. I like this post very much.
naw, kinsi, i think chutney is right on. chalicechick wrote something really meaningful to me the other day. basically the gist was that as a general rule, UUs do the theoretical work, but they don’t want to get their hands dirty. we talk a big game, but, in the end, we’re more likely to lead a campaign to protest cutting government funding to programs that feed the hungry than we are to actually feed the hungry.
and maybe that’s who we are. but i really hope not. i don’t think that chutney is arguing that we should never share opinions about who we are again, but it doesn’t matter how loudly i say that i, say, care about making the education system better, if all i do is talk about it to people who agree with me.
talking can be doing something (bearing fruit) sometimes — if we’re talking to people who will be changed by our words. those newcomers you mentioned, for example. but incessant, never-ending spirals of self-congratulatory navel-gazing aren’t the fruit that i want to be known by.
there is too much passion, power, money, education and privilege in this denomination for us to waste it all with our heads up our asses.
“To state it baldly: we [UUs] do not have the luxury of doing things that do not transform lives (or lead to transformed lives).”
i do slightly disagree with this, though, chutney. i think that we (UUs) have lots of luxuries. we wallow in them. even folks like you and i, who i’m pretty sure are below the median denominational income, have a lot of luxuries. we are used to our lifestyles and we expect it — and often don’t realize that, say, buying a $25,000 hybrid car isn’t really “service.” or lull ourselves into a warm cocoon of feeling like we’ve done “enough” when we cross the t’s on that check to the Sierra Club or finish wrapping the property in rainbow ribbon.
i dunno, maybe it’s my personal fundamentalist demons that make me feel like we have a moral imperative to evangelize and do real service. to spread the Good Word of liberal religion and to transform lives. but most days i’m pretty appalled at the pure fact that there is a sizable contingent who don’t want our church to grow, who don’t care about bringing newcomers into the fold, who smugly sip their free-traded coffee and decry the horrors of darfur to their friends who listen to the same news stories on NPR every morning and then get in their shiny priuses (prii?) that still have kerry/edwards ’04 tucked in with the litany of bumper stickers proclaiming their enlightenedness to drive to their half-million-dollar homes in brookhaven or druid hills or sandy springs.
i don’t really think that “we do not have the luxury” is the right way to say it. perhaps we should not allow ourselves the luxury?
personally, i would say it this way: it is PATENTLY IMMORAL for UUs to focus on (and define ourselves by) doing things that do not lead to transformed lives. maybe even evil. if one believes in that sort of thing.
Fouralarmfire,
I think we’re fundamentally in agreement here. I take your rephrasing in stead.
UUism is good news—that is, an evangel. Why wouldn’t we share it? Why would we keep it to ourselves? Why would we try to hid our city on the hill?
Nineteenth Century Universalism was one of the largest religious movements in the US. I suspect they didn’t get that way by keeping their light under a bushel.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to Borders to buy a hardcover book so I can think profound thoughts this weekend.
I will repeat here what I said to ChaliceChick about UUs doing something other than navel-gazing:
Our rather stodgy and conservative UU church is part of a rotating shelter for homeless families: we house them for a week every six weeks (including food). We also support a local charitable organization called Samaritan House with a regular line item in our budget. There are other such support items in our budget. (a battered women’s shelter comes to mind.) One collection per month goes to a worthy group outside ourselves. (it’s the biggest collection of the month usually — people give extra). Last year our Rochester project was working with encarcerated youth, and we did a number of things. (This year our Rochester project is Sustainability and we’re not quite so active because everybody thinks they already know it….) Some of the youth stuff from last year continues.
We have adopted families left homeless by Katrina and have been sending stuff to them.
We periodically show up as a group at Second Harvest Food Bank to work — and one of their most active trainers is one of our members who got started because of one of these evening events.
Homework Central is in our church weekday afternoons — it helps students (local, which happen to be mostly Hispanic) with their homework. We have arranged for local high school kids to help with Homework Central for Community Service credit — and we pay them some too.
I’m sure there’s other stuff I’ve forgotten to list. Plus, most of our members are active in other organizations that do “good works”.
I don’t think we are constantly being nothing but intropective. Our congregation isn’t perfect — far from it. But we are doing stuff.
3:50 PM, June 14, 2006
Kim said…
I forgot the stints with Habitat for Humanity.
10:57 PM, June 15, 2006
Oh, and $25,000 for a Prius is a lot better than $30,000 for an SUV or $50,000 for a BMW. Even the new Subaru is $30,000, and you can get a Prius for a bit over $20,000 if you don’t want all the bells and whistles. And the Prius does help by polluting less.
On the other hand, I (my 1990 Subaru wagon) only get about 20 to 25 mpg, but just the fact that I’ve had the car for 16 years makes up for that — they didn’t have to make me a new one, which uses a lot of resources.
Kim,
The work your particular congregation does is laudable, but is it representative of UUism as a whole?
I don’t think my point, or Peacebang’s point, is about any particular individual UU congregation or any particular individual UU Prius.
Well, if my congregation does stuff and yours doesn’t, then neither is “representitive of UUism as a whole”, because it obviously contains both types of congregations. So, which is more typical, yours or mine?
Around here, I think most congregations are doing some kinds of outreach.
All Priuses get better than average mileage. If you’re going to get a new car anyway, why wouldn’t that be better than some other car? Has nothing to do with individual prii (?). (My major objection to the Prius is the stupid name.) Besides, they’re really cute.
My congregation serves as the de facto PTA for an inner city school and recently built a library for a village in Africa.
We also have twenty or so committees whose primary purpose, as far as I can tell, is to talk about how great it is to be a liberal and how great the world would be if people weren’t too stupid to not see the world they way we do.
And then there are the committees who exist to do “125,247 good things for Jesus,” as Real Live Preacher has put it. And to report the 125,247 things. Especially that.
All are present. But which kind of “service” is predominant? And what are we doing to do more of the first kind of action and starve off the other two?
I say if you are actually doing a decent amount of good works, then it doesn’t really matter how much talking about it you do or don’t do. The talking doesn’t hurt anything as long as it doesn’t stop the good works altogether. and some people really do need to talk about it. As long as it’s not ONLY talking.
Besides, we need to talk about it in church so WE know what we are doing — after all, no one reads the newsletter!
Good point: perhaps it is a matter of proportion.
my understanding of this conversation was about this: when we ask “who are we as a religious movement?” what is the answer?
in my limited experience, a lot more UUs that i have met would say “we believe in questioning” than would say “we believe in making the world a better place” or “we believe in building a transformative spiritual community through radical acceptance and service” or something that seems, you know, like something cool we would have to offer a seeker.
yes, many UUs do great things, but i just can’t get down with questioning and the Eternal Sharing of Opinionsâ„¢ being our most central spiritual practice, especially when many folks seem to use the church as a way to stay inside a happy, privileged bubble.
i do think that figuring out what is our most central practice may be a matter of proportion to some extent… i don’t know.
i feel sometimes like the mainline religions are pretty lucky that someone got around to compiling all their sundry stuff into an organized story before folks started questioning it too much. i feel like there IS a UU Gospel, of sorts, but it’s just not compiled in a neat package (printed on recycled paper and bound in organically farmed hemp, of course).
chutney to the rescue, i hope?
Well, I think it’s the talk versus the walk that’s a matter of proportion. Even then, I suspect that entirely too much of our walk falls into the “125,257 good things for Jesus” (or who/whatever) category. In that link, RLP urges that we focus on doing one good thing. Whether individually or denominationally, that’s good advice.
I’m still partial to the slogan “becoming the people the world needs.” Of course, you’re still left asking, needs for what? But it gets us a good deal of the way there.
Figuring out what is/are our most central practice(s) is a matter of trying out some central practice candidates. Nothing short of that (especially talk) will make it happen because without some experience of practices to talk about, there is, well, nothing to talk about.
Additionally, if UUism is not good news, why are any of us doing it? It stands to reason, then, that if we’re doing UUism for a good reason (that is, because of its good news), then we already know what that good news is.
So what is it?
The good news is that the details of your theology don’t matter as much as your love of neighbor and the good things that makes you do. That you do those good things from love rather than guilt. That revelation and transcendence and Experiencing the Divine Mystery don’t depend on believing any particular dogma, but on compassionate conscious living.
In fact, many of us believe that dogma gets in the way of transcendant experience, so we are the denomination that is trying to have a religion without dogma in order to try to keep the channels open to deeper experience; to keep the religion from ossifying and becoming a dead crust of dogma around a suffocated god.
In any religion, not everyone experiences transcendance. But each has it’s own way of trying to invite the experience. Ours is by doing away with dogma and taking a liberal view of the divine mystery.
well, not very organized, but I hope it’s ok for the spur of the moment….