by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, December 7, 2003
In the spring issue of our denominational magazine, the UU World, our President, Rev. William Sinkford, devoted his regular column to David Bumbaugh's notion of a "language of reverence". Sinkford wrote not about humanists' need for that language, but about the need to develop it for Unitarian Universalists-- humanist or not.
He began by noting that in reading through the Purposes and Principles that unite us as a denomination, there is nothing that is framed in traditional religious language. There is no creedal statement, no pledge to uphold a particular tradition or set of beliefs, no description of worship or other rituals, and no mention of God. We don't make truth claims in these short statements that bind us as a denomination. Instead, they are statements of process: we use words like promote, acceptance, search, encouragement and so on.
President Sinkford took some issue with this orientation in our Purposes and Principles. He wrote, "Our resistance to religious language, I believe, helps to account for the struggle that so many of us experience in trying to say who we are as Unitarian Universalists. I always encourage people to work on their elevator speech, what you'd say when you're going from the sixth floor to the lobby and somebody asks you, "What's a Unitarian Universalist?" You've got forty-five seconds. Here's my latest: 'The Unitarian side tells us that there is only one God, one spirit of life, one power of love. The Universalist side tells us that God is a loving God, condemning none of us, valuing the spark of divinity that is in every human being.' So my version of what Unitarian Universalism stands for is, 'One God, no one left behind'."
As elevator speeches go, it's not bad. It does a pretty good job of capturing the main theological strands that gave rise to our unwieldy name in the first place. It captures our embracing welcome, our insistence on linkage and unity, our rejection of any notion that human beings could be inherently evil or irredeemable. But it doesn't say anything about the theological diversity among us, or how hard it might be to find consensus even about the use of the word "God", never mind its definition.
At the beginning of General Assembly in Boston this past summer President Sinkford addressed the ministers' gathering that precedes the regular meeting. There he told us with some bemusement that his brief column about the elevator speech and the language of reverence had set off more of a firestorm of critical response than anything else he'd ever said or done. At issue for most of his critics was Sinkford's use of God language in his definition of our faith. Even though he quoted from a religious humanist and made it clear that his own statement was his alone and not meant to speak for all of us, the God language set a buzz going. As a partial response, some of the humanists within our fold presented a panel conversation at General Assembly that took up the challenge of the "elevator speech". It was titled, "If Not God, What? Humanist Elevator Speeches".
In listening to these various perspectives on the language of reverence, what I have found myself most interested in is not the language part but the reverence itself. One of the things I most treasure about our quirky little denomination is that it so willfully does not insist that we all use the same language when we speak about our faith. Our basis of unity has never been a declaration of certainty about religious truths, but an unending curiosity about what we might discover next.
The ideal that binds us together is not the ideal of following one particular spiritual teacher or book or notion of God's will, but rather the ideal of the open mind and questing spirit. We practice it imperfectly, just as the adherents of every other faith practice imperfectly. Nevertheless, our ideal includes the notion that even if we're all over the map theologically, we will listen to each other with care and attention. So commonality of language is not required. But I think something that is required of us is reverence.
The ancient Greek teacher Protagoras taught a myth in which he said, "Whenever they gathered into groups, early human beings would do wrong to each other, because they did not yet have the knowledge of how to form society. As a result they would scatter again and perish. And so Zeus, fearing that our whole species would be wiped out, sent Hermes to bring Reverence and Justice to human beings, in order that these two would adorn society and bind people together in friendship."
According to Protagoras, the two most critical qualities that make human life possible in society are reverence and justice. It isn't at all difficult for Unitarian Universalists to buy into the justice part. We believe passionately in the need for justice in human relations, and all through our history we have been in the wide march of those who push our cultures toward equity. Even to our detractors we are known as social activists, and although we might disagree on which course of action is the path of justice, once the path is discerned we find an easy consensus that our faith calls us to move in that direction.
It's not quite so clear that we also need reverence. Of all the virtues or inclinations of the heart that Protagoras might have put at the top, why would reverence come up with the blue ribbon? It isn't a concept much in vogue these days, either within our congregations or out in the secular world. The word sounds a little stuffy and old-fashioned, and it has little shadow reminders around it of submission, of bowing down and humbling ourselves -- not popular positions among Unitarian Universalists.
In a book that is simply called Reverence, Paul Woodruff writes, "Reverence is an ancient virtue that survives among us in half forgotten patterns of civility, in moments of inarticulate awe, and in nostalgia for the lost ways of traditional cultures. We have the word 'reverence' in our language, but we scarcely know how to use it…Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside of our control -- God, truth, justice, nature, even death. The capacity for awe, as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow human beings, flaws and all…Simply put, reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods."
By that definition, it's clear why reverence would be seen as one of the essential glues that might hold a society together in harmony. Reverence is a shift in perspective, an attitude of the heart that makes us remember how small we are in relation to the sweep of time and the size of the stars. When that happens, we also remember how deeply linked we are to one another, and how extraordinary it is that we have ever come to life on this planet at all.
The great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "In every event there is something sacred at stake, and it is for this reason that the approach of the pious person to reality is in reverence…Reverence is a specific attitude toward something that is precious and valuable… it is a salute of the soul, an awareness of value without…seeking any personal advantage from it. [When we look with reverence] there is a unique kind of transparence about things and events. The world is seen through [and we recognize]… behind the appearance of things…the delicate grace of existence."
The "delicate grace of existence" is something we can see and honor from any theological stand at all. Whether we choose a language of belief that implies a creator God behind it all, or lodge ourselves entirely within the realm of science and its revelations, when our eyes are opened to the delicate grace of existence, reverence will be our response. It is just as evident in the language of a religious humanist as in the language of a theist, a Christian or a mystic.
David Bumbaugh writes, "The Humanist language of reverence…provides a story rooted not in the history of a single tribe or a particular people, but in the sum of our knowledge of the universe itself. It gave us a doctrine of incarnation which suggests not that the holy became human in one place at one time to convey a special message to a single chosen people, but that the universe itself is continually incarnating itself in microbes and maples, in hummingbirds and human beings, constantly inviting us to tease out the revelation contained in stars and stones and every living thing. A language of reverence for Humanists begins with our understanding of this story as a religious story -- a vision of reality that contains within it the sources of a moral, ethical, transcendent self-understanding."
It's hard to imagine a more reverent language than this, or a more compelling vision. It shows that awe, wonder and reverence can be our heartfelt response to the world whether or not we intuit a divine presence and whether we name ourselves a mystic, a Buddhist or an atheist. This brings me back to the modest controversy stirred up by the fact that our denomination President developed his "elevator speech" using theistic language. To my way of thinking, the problem is lodged not in the "God talk" but in the fact that none of this complex and rich and layered groping toward meaning is the stuff of a 45 second speech. We live in an era and within a society in which speed is everything, and in which we've come to expect that a sound-bite will deliver the essence of whatever it is that has to be conveyed. This is rarely true when it comes to reporting the news, and it's never true when it comes to reporting our religious beliefs.
Unitarian Universalism is a mouthful even to pronounce, much less explain; in fact, one friend of mine once titled his sermon, "Unitarian Universalism: It's Better Than It Sounds!" While this is probably true, it isn't the slogan around which we would want to launch a campaign to attract the unchurched! We are not a religious community that's easily described, and because we deliberately hold ourselves open to diversity of belief, it is impossible to capture all that we stand for in one short statement. We know this about ourselves, and sometimes we're self-consciously proud of it, even as we mumble our complicated answers to the question of who we are or what we stand for.
But it's just as foolish to imagine that any of the more traditional faiths are captured in their fullness by a shorthand creedal statement. What would a Jew say, or a Muslim, a Hindu, a Catholic or a Buddhist, to describe her faith in a forty-five second elevator speech? I once sat down with a fundamentalist Christian, at her request, to talk about our beliefs. We were both ministerial students and had been thrown together in a hospital for our clinical pastoral training. She had never met a person of my persuasion before, and she wanted to know more.
We didn't have our conversation in an elevator but at a table over a lengthy cup of coffee; Debra asked me all kinds of questions, and I gave her answers that had to do with our history, our range of beliefs, our commitments in the world and my own theology. Then it was her turn, and in answer to the question of what she believed, the first thing she said was, "I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, and that my salvation from sin is through him." There was a heartbeat of dead silence, and then we both started laughing at the contrast between our answers. I said, "But Debra, what does that mean, that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior? What does it mean that your salvation is through him?" And sure enough, it took just as long for her to really explain her beliefs as it did for me to explain mine, despite her reliance on creed and bible and tradition.
It makes sense to be able to answer with something general and invitational when someone wants to know who we are as Unitarian Universalists, maybe even something that could be said in forty-five seconds. But in matters as important as faith, we'll never capture what's really important in the space of a sound-bite. If someone ever asks me to tell them about our faith in an elevator, I'm likely to say, "Do you have a few minutes so I can really explain?" And of course a few minutes isn't enough, but it gets us to something deeper and more truthful at least, with these awkward and inadequate words of ours, always trying so hard to point beyond themselves.
In a real life elevator I know that it would sound silly to say to someone, "Unitarian Universalism is a religion in which we cultivate reverence, beyond all the boundaries and divisions of our beliefs and the words we use." It would sound silly, but I think it's true. Our Purposes and Principles may sound too sterile or bland, and I confess I've never found them poetic or inspiring. But each one of them is an expression of reverence: toward human life, toward our planet, toward our fragile connections with each other and our struggles to understand.
In the end of course, all of our language fails. Reverence isn't a matter for words, but for silence. And if we're lucky, we will have someone close by whose hand we can touch, who will stand with us in the awe and the gratitude and let the silence and the touch stand for all we cannot possibly say in words, even with all the time in the world.
Another of our religious humanist ministers, Victoria Safford, writes, "What if there were a universe…that began in shining blackness, out of nothing, out of fire, out of a single, silent breath, and into it came billions and billions of stars, stars beyond imagining, and near one of them a world, a blue-green world so beautiful that learned clergymen could not even speak about it cogently, and brilliant scientists in trying to describe it began to sound like poets…What if there were a universe in which a world was born out of a smallish star, and into that world (at some point) flew red-winged blackbirds, and into it swam sperm whales, and into it came crocuses, and wind to lift the tiniest hairs on naked arms in spring…Into that world came animals and elements and plants, and imagination, the mind, and the mind's eye.
If such a world existed and you noticed it, what would you do? What song would come out of your mouth, what prayer, what praises, what sacred offering, what whirling dance, what religion, and what reverential gesture would you make to greet that world, every single day that you were in it?"
What song, what prayer, what praises, what offering, what dance, what gesture? All of them. Under our roof, with our blessing, all of them. AMEN.