Reclaiming Grace, the Unitarian Way

Krista Taves (March 14th, 2004)

Meditation
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 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 ocean 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. 
- Mary Oliver 

I had an epiphany the last time I flew down to Missouri to see my partner. Now this is nothing unusual -- neither the part about my flying down to Missouri, nor the fact that I have epiphanies during the trip. It seems that the flight down there, with the usual transfer in Chicago, which is usually running behind, is the time when I do some of my deepest thinking. There are few distractions and lots of waiting time. And so I think.

I tend to reflect on the work I've done in the intervening weeks, the work I do here at Northwest as your ministerial leader, and the work I do at the Unitarian Congregation of Guelph, where I function as their consulting minister. I was reflecting, in particular, about the sermons I've been writing, and I came to a realization. If any of us including myself ever tried to do all of the things I recommend in my sermons, we would be working ALL the time. The kind of Unitarian Universalism I talk about in my sermons takes a lot of work. Let's do just a brief survey of some of the things I have preached on this year. In a sermon on death I talked about unfinished business, and that we need to deal with the unresolved issues in our lives, not just so that we can die at peace, so that we can live in peace. The following month I preached a sermon called The Politeness Trap, and it was about living a life of truth telling, even if it means being the scapegoat, even if it means dealing with conflict and difference. I preached three sermons on ethics and social justice ? one on same sex marriage, one on pornography, and one on cloning. Each asked us to dig deep into our assumptions and to question them, realizing that this could be a difficult thing to do. In January I preached a sermon on Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, who argues that we are a covenant making people. We make promises, break promises, and then renew our promises. To be a good ethical religious person is to be a commitment making person. I then did what turned out to be a three-part series on commitment. The first was on congregational polity, and I discussed the covenant we have with other Unitarian Universalist congregations. The second was on the Canadian Unitarian Council, and I discussed the commitment we have to our national body, and then I preached a sermon on love, where I explored the commitments we make with other individuals, and I also talked about the relationships we build with our congregations. Each of these sermons ended up leaving you with ... Homework. Things to do in order to live richer, fuller, spirit-filled lives. My epiphany on the plane was that the basic underlying message in all my sermons is that rich and fulfilling life takes work, that a spirit filled life is not easy, that a faith-filled person makes sacrifices in order to enjoy the rewards that follow.

What is going on here? Am I a workaholic, and trying to get the rest of you to follow suit? Am I simply taking my own philosophy of life, what I have found to be true in my short 34 years, and putting it on you? Or is there something deeper here? Is there something about Unitarian Universalism that calls us to this understanding of life?

In my reflection, I decided to broaden my thinking out from the sermons I provide, to the lay led services you provide yourselves. By and large, the lay led services are focused on education and critical inquiry. Whether you are dealing with social or ethical issues, our services are about expanding our minds, building new understandings of the world, and about self-improvement. There is a common message ? that life is about?. Work. We have work to do here. We have a vision of the world and it is up to us to make that vision reality. Many of us may grow disenchanted with our ability to be successful about implementing our vision, but it is the vision nonetheless. That vision is spelled out in our principles and purposes (direct newcomers to front of hymnal). Starting from the belief that each human being has inherent worth and dignity, and ending with the foundational recognition that we are an interdependent web, we have a vision of a world based on compassion, justice and equity. Because we live in a world that is full of injustice, cruelty and inequality, we always have more work to do. Whether that work starts with healing ourselves, or healing the world, the response of a person of faith is to get out there into the muck and make something happen.

This understanding is consistent with our faith whether you look at its modern manifestation or as it existed in history. From their inception and growth in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Unitarianism and Universalism have promoted active engagement with the world with the aim of making this a better place. On a personal level, there was the conviction, especially in Unitarianism, that critical inquiry and investigation was an act of faith. So, your personal betterment, working on your faith and beliefs, was tremendously important. There was also a growing sense in both Unitarianism and Universalism that we should be involved in social justice and reform issues. By the mid to late 19th century, Unitarians and Universalists were actively involved in abolition of slavery, the equality of women, the establishment of educational institutions for the poor, the reform of prisons and asylums, and the accessibility of health care for the poor, to name but a few.For them, being a person of faith meant building the Kingdom of God on earth. They believed that as God was good, and that we ourselves are made in the image of god, then we are compelled to do the work of God on this earth. To be a good Christian, meant work. It meant moral perfection. It meant good deeds. It meant selflessness and kindness and generosity. It meant charitable giving and voluntarism. Some have called this kind of Christianity muscular Christianity, because it seems to imply that it is by our work that we are saved.

When Unitarianism and Universalism began flirting with humanism in the late 1920s and 1930s, it wasn?t a huge leap to simply take God out of this equation. Human beings were not impelled to work for a better life on earth because we were children of God, but because we were children of humanity. We were responsible only to ourselves for improving the world, for responding to the injustices of our society, and for living our lives as ethical human beings. And so the work continued. In Canada we supported the movement for universal health care, a social safety net, better schools, gender and racial equality, and reproductive choice for women. We were active in the nuclear disarmament movement, in anti-Vietnam activities, we are strongly aligned with a commitment to the environment, and in recent years we have come out strongly in favour of equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons. Even though no longer grounded in a theistic theology, we continue to work to build a better world.

We have also continued to work to make ourselves into better human beings. We are committed to the individual spiritual journey. Supporting that journey is explicitly stated in many Unitarian Universalist mission statements, and so the call to self-betterment is as strong as the call to answer the injustices of the world. In fact, many among us would see these as bound together in that interdependent web that is the foundation of our faith.

So clearly, the idea that ethical living is about work is deeply deeply embedded in our faith tradition, and so should it be any surprise that this is the theme that is woven throughout the sermons I have presented to you and that it informs most of the services you provide for yourselves?

But the question I have is this. When are we called by our faith to rest? Is there room in Unitarian Universalism for gifts of life that are freely given? So much of our faith calls for us to be givers. When do we get to be receivers? There is an oft used proverb, that to give is to receive. But in my mind, that still means that you give in order to receive something. It is an exchange. I?m not talking about an exchange. I?m talking about receiving the gifts of life simply because you are.

To use the words of Mary Oliver that I recited this morning, "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.... Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.."

What could this possibly mean? In a faith where we are told, over and over again, that the world rests in our hands and that only we are responsible for what happens here, what could it possibly mean that we do not have to be good, that the world offers itself freely to us?

I think we understand this by looking to our roots ? not only the roots of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors from the 19th century, but to their ancestors, and that means, to the Christian tradition. It seems to me that many of the weaknesses of modern day Unitarian Universalism are a result of us having turned away from our roots. When we shifted from liberal Christianity to religious humanism as the dominant paradigm, we left a lot of things behind that no longer served us, but we also often turned our backs on other things that did, and one of those things, was the concept of grace.

Now just what is grace? Well, given that Christianity is not a monolithic religion, there are different understandings of grace. I will offer to you the Unitarian and Universalist understandings of grace. In both Unitarian and Universalist Christian theologies, God is a god of benevolence, a God who epitomizes love, kindness, steadfastness, permanence and forgiveness. Unitarianism and Universalism differed from other Christian denominations around them who saw God as a god of penance and judgement, and who was only too ready to condemn his children to hell should they fail, even minutely, to obey him. Our Christian ancestors also differed in that they saw the human condition as one of goodness. Unlike their more conservative neighbours, they believe that we are not inherently evil, we do not carry the curse of Adam and Eve. Furthermore, because we are made in the image of God, and God is ultimately good, we are good as well. And yet often we do err. We do fall short of our potential, we make bad decisions and live lives that hurt and confuse. We often fall short in our goals and may not live our lives as we had intended. Grace is God?s act of forgiving us for our shortcomings and it is freely given. In Unitarian theology, it meant that it was more than likely that most of us will be reconciled to God in the next world if not in this one. They were loathe to presume that most of humanity would end up in the fires of hell, unlike their Calvinist cousins. Universalists went even farther. They believed that NO ONE went to hell. You might have to suffer a bit if you hadn't made up for all your mistakes before you died, but ultimately, everyone got to heaven. Ultra Universalists went the farthest of all. They believed that you did not need to suffer AT ALL once you died. Your punishment for an ill actions was simply the consequences of those actions in your life. Upon your death, all was forgiven. So grace is not given only if we are good, only if we ask for forgiveness, only if we see the error in our ways and repent. Grace is given freely because God is love, and therefore God always forgives and God always saves.

Now I imagine you?re wondering how this can possible apply to us. Most of us do not believe in a God. We rarely concern ourselves with an afterlife. Many of us don't pray, When we think of forgiveness, it?s usually in reference to a particular person or group of people, not to some power far beyond us. And the act of being saved? Well what in the world do we need to be saved from?

Well, perhaps we need to be saved from the terribly alluring belief that our worth as human beings rests in what we do and in what we accomplish, rather than what we are. In short, that our worth is not tied to our work but to our being itself. You do not have to be good. You do not have to crawl on your knees a hundred miles, repenting. You do not have to be the perfect parent or grandparent, the model board president or trustee, the flawless congregational pianist, the selfless volunteer, the responsible treasurer, the minister who always knows the right thing to say at the right time and whose sermons are equally inspiring week after week after week. You do not have to be the always kind and loving spouse or partner, the perfect friend, the loyal employee, the academic who has always read the latest and hottest publications, the most reliable social activist, or someone who is always on the cusp of an epiphany regarding their personal spiritual growth.

We are good as we are. We are good in the eyes of whatever higher power may guide us on our paths. This goodness is embedded right in our principles and purposes. We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Regardless of your class and station, regardless of your conduct in this life, nothing can alienate you from your inherent worth and dignity. Nothing is beyond forgiveness. Our inherent worth and dignity remains fast and steady, even in the darkest moments. And this, I believe, is Grace.

So what does this mean in the context of a religious tradition where we are called to serve the world and each other? How can we both strive for justice while affirming the perfection that already is? In a faith that constantly calls us to be givers, that sees life as a work of progress, and in a world where we are constantly being made aware of how much there needs to be done, what are we called to receive? Where is our grace?

Perhaps it is as simple as this. None of our aspirations, none of our social justice initiatives, none of the personal spiritual journeys we embark upon, the relationships we build, the policies we develop in our congregations, the pledge campaigns we design, and the visions we develop for our personal and collective futures can amount to anything except as we are human beings with inherent worth and dignity, and this means we are already steeped in grace from the moment we are born and from this grace steeped place we are given what we need to engage the world. Our perfection, our inherent worth and dignity gives us exactly what we need to be in this painfully imperfect world. You do not have to be good, because you already are. You do not have to crawl on your knees for a hundred miles repenting, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Whoever you are, the world offers itself to your imagination, announcing over and over your place in the family of things.