terrible concern

First, be who you are.

-- Forrest Church, Love and Death

“Here there be monsters,” they said on the old maps, meaning to warn us away. But it also entices us.

Follow your bliss, says a mytho-psychologist who captured the popular ear. Wherever it leads you, venture the best you are, and be all you can be. Yeah right. The monsters can hurt you. And the people who love you get hurt with you. When your bliss has been maimed, what have you got left?

Authenticity has great press. Great liberal press. We’ve charged ourselves with the duty of being, each in our own way, real. Trouble is, we’re as secretly lustful for judgment and institution as the straw reactionaries we pummel in our proclamations. We are closet Calvinists, predestinarians in a changed shroud, but substituting diagnosis for anathema. We don’t say damn you to hell for your heresy; we say we’re terribly concerned about you. And thus I fashion your authenticity into a different thing – your “issue.” There’s no defense against that terrible concern.

A little learning, they say, is a dangerous thing. We’ve all inhaled a little psychology. How could we not? If we’ve survived to our present age, we’ve learned a thing or two about what people are really going to do – as opposed to what they say they’re going to do, perhaps even think they’re going to do, perhaps even think they’ve done. We may have had, delving into Freud or Jung or Horney, an Aha! moment, saying “I did that,” or “That’s how I spent my twenties!” Or even easier: “That’s my mother!” or “That’s my boss!” or “That’s you, you jerk!” It’s not rocket science. No higher math required. Any English major can shoplift the lingo, and recite the scripts over wine and cheese.

There is, of course, a healing art of counseling. Growing into it takes long practice, under close supervision, within strict boundaries. Within my own little front yard, I say that I have powers to Hear, to Name, to Bless and to Travel. Modest powers, far from the fantasies of heroism that might seduce one to ministry; and yet, when carefully deployed on the right ground, strong. I learn what I can do by learning again every day what I can’t do. Over and over again, the skin of my face hardens into a mask, to be shattered again only by reality. Mine is a Department of Reality, a Negative Way.

To learn the modest use of my powers, I must myself at some time have been heard, blessed, named and traveled with. Henry Nouwen says we are wounded healers, naming the wounds of others as we come to know our own. There’s no objective knowledge of another’s pain – they call it “com-passion,” a suffering with the Other. Beware the ones who have learned a little, and speak without supervision. Beware the ones who do not know their issues, but have pried open the cabinet of lingo. Beware the pourers of salt.

I came back from the den of lions with a limb missing, bliss mangled. Years later I returned to the place where monsters be, because I wanted, where faith had died, to grow new faith. I came back ready to defend myself from terrible concern. Ready to name the shoplift, claim my ground and hold it. Ironic that, prepared to protect myself, I did not have to. Or perhaps not ironic at all but rather instructive. Instructive about egos and about monsters.

The secret of healing is that there is no secret. It’s hidden in plain sight, too ordinary for words, always to be dis-covered, which is the precise meaning of re-velation or apo-calypse. “The people’s peace,” says one of our poets, is “not past our understanding,” but “falls like light upon the soft white tablecloth.”* It’s far too dumb for Unitarians; no diplomas required.

“April is the cruelest month.” (If Eliot had never written another line, this would make him a great poet.) As we become who we are, Reverend Church, how shall we protect ourselves? And what must we do to protect others? The faith that was lost is lost. New sprouting hurts. Every new life is also a grief.

*John Holmes, in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 164.

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marking time

In illness there are no “negative emotions,” only experiences that have to be lived through. . . . The ill person’s suffering should be affirmed, whether or not it can be treated.

-- Arthur W. Frank, At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness

It’s hard to watch a person suffer. Are you just going to sit there and watch? says the voice. What earthly use are you?

Well, perhaps I am no earthly use. Which does not mean that I am no use at all. But my use might be unearthly, my portfolio uncanny.

My ministry is, by definition, to those who have given up cure. If there were a cure for this cancer, that congestion of the heart, this massive insult to the brain, that insurrection of the nervous system, then the client would be somewhere else. The person in the bed is going to die with this disease. Can I help them live with it? (That is what palliative care means.)

“You’re not going to die of this,” a doctor once told me, “You’re going to die of something else.” This was his version of good news. This body, any body, my body, your body, is chock full of mortality. We’ve all got things going on in us that sooner or later could kill us but won’t, because another assassin will get there first. “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that,” says one of Beckett’s clowns, we’re all dying of mortality. But can we live with it? (This is what the care of souls means).

“It’s taking forever,” he says.

By “it” he means his death. He wishes it would hurry up.

“What’s it waiting for? I’m tired.”

It’s a long train of humiliations.

“I want it to be done with.”

We’ve been through this before. He won’t take his life. He once thought he would, and told me that he had acquired the means – but that turned out to be a hoax, a pep-talk to himself.

No one should have to die in pain – that’s one of our mottos, but the remedies aren’t perfect. Each has side-effects that, in the very particular circumstances of one person’s mortal expedition, may be unacceptable. Too often our people must choose between pain and confusion. Some people would rather suffer their pain than let their brains go muddy.

His body has turned malicious. It’s one dirty trick after another. We treated him for tremors, but the medication made him nauseous all the time; withdrawal took weeks, during which he suffered both tremors and nausea.

One of his unacceptable dilemmas has gone out of whack. By night he is incontinent, by day he can’t pee; for two days now he has been in retention. That’s why he’s in the hospital unit today rather than at home.

He has a gift for intimacy. I said to him once that when he dies, God will be very glad to meet him – because he has a tender heart. His close friends visit, and the people who are paid to care for him begin to love him. When he isn’t wishing to die he gets dragged back into life, kicking and screaming, overcome by his talent for attachments.

So he’s not depressed. There is joy in his life, and a wicked sense of humor. But this is not what he presents to me recently. For me he reserves the desolation. I should feel flattered. When I come through the door, the show is over.

“This isn’t a game any more,” he says.

Or maybe it is. A waiting game. And I wait with him. It’s tedious. Tick tock.

“So there’s no joy left in your life.”

I wait.

“You don’t feel like yourself any more."

I wait.

“Robert,” I say, “is there something I should be doing?”

Tick tock.

“No. This is okay. This helps.”

What is this?

Tick tock.

I’m marking time. I’m celebrating his illness. He’s making a song of it, and an audience is required. I’m the audience.

I want to get on stage, of course. I want to play a transformative obligato of my own. I want to change things.

But I’m not invited. It’s his show. He calls the cues.

If I weren’t there, this time would be unmarked. Life is what can’t be rehearsed.

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expensive commodity

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; you have fed him for a lifetime.

-- Anonymous

It’s a popular aphorism. It’s not in the Bible, though some would like to find it there. The people who want to find it in the Bible are the goats of Matthew 25, the ones who want an anti-prooftext for inconvenient obligations to “the least of these members of my family.”

Just because it’s not in the Bible, of course, doesn’t prove it isn’t at least partly true. To save a person from starvation, you must help him both in the short term and in the long term. It’s important to know the difference. If you bring the starving man a fish today, you haven’t accomplished much if you have to bring another fish tomorrow. But there’s little point in teaching a man to fish if – well, there are a whole lot of presuppositions to this educational program, without which it’s nonsense.

Teaching a man to fish – let’s flesh that out. Placing in everyone’s hands the infrastructure of opportunity, that’s what teaching a man to fish means. In America we don’t guarantee happiness; but we guarantee the pursuit of happiness. Though we don’t guarantee success, we guarantee hope. It sounds so simple, and inspiring. But hope is an expensive commodity: look at what is presupposed.

You must save the man from starvation: that’s what the fish is about. Then, having preserved his life, you must save him from helplessness: that’s what the education is about. 

S = FE. Salvation is the product of food and education. If either term is zero, there is zero salvation.

Until he knows how to fish, the man must be fed. There’s no point in teaching him to fish if he starves to death before he graduates.

There have to be teachers. People who know how to fish, but also how to explain fishing to others, must be compensated for leaving their poles and bait, and dedicating themselves to pedagogy.

There has to be a reliable supply of fish. The river hasn’t been diverted to irrigate desert golf courses. The pond wasn’t drained to fill back-yard swimming pools. The Megalithic Fish-Stick Company hasn’t over-harvested the species to extinction, and Foulblot Industries hasn’t poisoned the stock with unnatural sludge. These interests will no doubt protest against our restrictions.

The tools of fishery must be available. If bamboo and worms don’t naturally occur in profusion, they must be available at a reasonable price. (When we say “Reasonable,” we mean that the fisherman can buy what he needs without putting his future in hock, and All-Glutinous Bank will not repossess his gear in the first lean season.)

It’s assumed that thieves of the blue or the white collar won’t be stealing the catch or the tools. We have therefore taxed ourselves to support a police force for prevention of theft, a court for bringing malefactors to justice, and a jail for the serving out of sentences.

It’s assumed that if the man catches more fish than he needs for the day, he can preserve the product or sell it for profit. There is therefore salt or refrigeration to preserve a surplus, and there is a well-policed market where the day’s prices are fairly determined. The Blutocrats won’t be permitted to put him out of business by flooding the market.

This teaching of a man to fish is a damned expensive proposition. It requires a community of institutions and mutual loyalties. It requires an ethic of the Common Good – the Invisible Hand’s more idiomatic name. We have to invest resources in our aspiring fisherman for a considerable period of time; it’s not obvious when we will reach the break-even point on our investment, though sooner or later, on average, it happens.

It ain’t no free lunch, this teaching of a man to fish. And it ain’t natural. If anyone in nature manages to catch a fish, with his hands or his teeth or his toenails, everybody else tears fish and fisherman to pieces if they can, trying to get a piece of his action. The most brutal then takes all. If people don’t act this way, it’s because they’ve become unnatural. They’ve learned that they don’t like being alone with their food.

Human beings have for the most part from the very beginning behaved unnaturally. This is a good thing, because it allows more of us to eat and survive, setting aside surpluses and arranging recreation, making art and doing philosophy. It turns out that we don’t just grab what we want, not most of the time. We invent fictions called property and law, justice and generosity, and our unnatural behavior makes life something more than a food fight.So let’s teach the least of these members of Yeshua’s family to fish – after we have fed them. But teaching them to fish is harder and more expensive that simply feeding them.

From now on, certain people are forbidden to speak of teaching and fishing. The free lunch crowd, the grab everything that ain’t bolted down and run for the hills gang, the give me everything I want right now and never send the bill cabal, the balance the budget by cutting taxes club, the goats of Matthew 25 – they don’t know what it means to teach a man to fish.

Hey you. Just shut up.

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merrie band

He makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do.

-- Plato, Symposium*

Socrates was a flute-player of no mean skill. He could seduce with music, but he is more famous for seduction with his words.

I once traveled across the continent to spend two weeks with a teacher of performance. He let me join his studio, where he taught how infinite space could be bound in a nutshell. I learned to be as large or as small as I chose. I learned that if I needed a costume or a set I didn’t deserve them. No need for lights camera action: it was I who would turn on the lights. Or not. If I needed a script, I did not deserve one. I could never be lost, because the air, this sound, that light, the landscape in that window or this object close to hand right now, were more story than could be exhausted before night fell.

He stopped once, as palpable ideas swung round his head like pendants of a mobile, interrupted in their orbits. I’m sorry, he said. I’ve spoiled you now. You’ll never see the theatre again as you used to. You can’t go back. No, I’m not sorry, he said. You’re spoiled.

And I was.

Yeshua, they say, walked the streets, the hills and seasides, and drew people to himself. The rules of folklore require us to number his merrie band at twelve; but scripture makes it clear that they were more than twelve. He spoiled them. They could never go back to the farm, to the fishing-boat, to the tax office, once they had roused the sleeping power within them. Why fish for fish, when you can fish for souls?

Once, when they had lost everything and betrayed the cause, they tried to go home. On the road to an otherwise unheralded place, they talked with a stranger about what they were leaving behind. Honoring the commandment of hospitality to sojourners (“for we were sojourners in the land of Egypt”), they broke bread with him, and saw who he was. Then they understood that they could not leave him, for even the mode of their despair had been changed.

The first democracy put Socrates to death. He was too much for them. How can we levy taxes, they said, and hold festivals, and conduct wars, when the people are taught to hate their lives, and the wise are shown to be foolish, and the worse is made to appear the better cause? This is not the orderly process of citizenship. We already know, they said, how to live, and who is wise, and what is better. Better be happy about it. The realm needs happy people, and those who long to live differently are its enemies.

So Socrates was a corrupter of youth. He spoiled them. He made them long for something better. He made pictures in the mind – or did he play the tunes? – of justice and virtue, truth and beauty, beside which every law and proposition, poem and painting looked tawdry. These youth could never look at their elders again in the same way. And the elders weren’t used to being looked at this way, the new way learned by youth. They wouldn’t kill the children, so they killed the piper who had taken their minds.

Yeshua too corrupted the youth. He took them from their useful labors, and set them to wandering the streets and the hillsides, confessing that they ought not to have lived as before. They rehearsed a better kingdom, where lions and lambs lay down together. Where there was darkness, they turned on a great light, and in that light the shabbiness of the mighty was revealed. The newly naked wise and mighty struck back of course.

Today the name of Pontius Pilate is shorthand for the false innocence of bureaucrats. Meletus, Anytus and Lycon are known only as weaklings who could not abide honesty. The words they tried to suppress have “gone viral;” spreading from soul to soul with the speed of light.

John Lennon is supposed to have said that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. That, as far as I can tell, would be true of eternal life as well. It’s never what we expect, as we fix our eyes on noble purposes or their failure. It’s something that slips in at the periphery, the corner of the eye, like that stranger traveling the road with us, to whom we confide our troubles.

The Divine Domain is the last thing we expect. It’s what we didn’t plan for, and we’re slow to recognize it. Socrates taught that writing is false, and his pupil immortalized him in books. Yeshua, who spoke scripture from his heart to the illiterate and desperate, was crowned hero of a new scripture. But when we see it, we are spoiled for mere mortality. We can’t go back, because Emmaus isn’t what it used to be. It has changed. We are changed. He is risen.

*trans. Benjamin Jewett

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what sticks

What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame.

-- Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

Job’s wife told him to curse God and die, but he wouldn’t. “Shall we receive the good, and not the bad?” he said, and nothing more.

Then his friends came to comfort him, and they waited seven days for him to speak. When he spoke, it was more than they could bear. “The arrows of the Almighty are in me;” he said, “My spirit drinks their poison; the terrors of God are arrayed against me.” The Scripture says that Job spoke truly when he said this, for God was indeed the author of his grief and of his suffering. Flabbergasted, his friends fought with him, leaving us timeless texts in how not to counsel grief, until God had to come down and sort the whole thing out, this thing that God had started in the first place, and for the most unworthy of motives.

I sat with a woman by the deathbed of her daughter, whom she had put through a private school and assisted through college by the work of her hands. This mother had born three children to a shotgun marriage with a man who raped her, abused her, and then abandoned her after the sons grew up. The daughter was her youngest child.

“We’re with the Lord,” she says.

Where was the Lord when you were raped? I’m thinking.

“We accept the Will of God.”

And Whose Will is it, that we should watch our innocent children die?

“I know she’s going to a better place.”

I hope so, I’m thinking. A place not ruled by insecure middle-management deities, who put us to suffering to see how much we love them.

“She keeps me going, she’s my pride and my joy.”

Job’s wife is my confidant. I think this mother might have to curse in order to survive. Curse God and live.

But she doesn’t curse. She is grateful for what she has had, for a chance to love, and an opportunity to rise above adversity. Has she worked through her anger, or never admitted it? “I don’t know how I’ll get on without her,” she says. And this is what concerns me.

Some people need to rage. If she needs to rage, I can send her to Job, who drew up the grandest and most complete indictment of God’s universe. He cursed the day he was born. He named God as his persecutor. He summoned God to a courtroom, to give account. Job never gave up his demand for justice. If this was God’s will, then there had to be someone else up there to talk to. “I know that my advocate lives.”

Those who speak without irony of the “patience of Job” never read beyond the second chapter. There are forty other chapters. The story shows that you can’t just decide to “receive the bad,” merely because you received “the good.” It’s not that simple.

“Everything happens for a reason,” some say. You don’t have to be Christian, or a believer of the Book, to say it. It’s an instinctive expression of hope. We’ll get through this. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. Every cloud has a silver lining.

But when you’re grieving, there is no meaning to it. Your viscera have been torn out, and you have no strength, and you can’t stand up because there’s nothing to hold on to. You’re on your own, collapsed in the road, violated and unengaged and unattached.

Sooner or later, somehow, most of us find ourselves walking again, going somewhere, toward something, with someone. We’re heading in some direction or other, and the direction of our movement is its meaning. But the meaning comes from now, not then. We make the meaning now by moving again. And then we retroject that meaning: “Oh! That’s why it had to happen;” we say, or “So that was God’s purpose.” But it wasn’t the purpose, of God or anyone else. It’s the meaning of now, the stir of your blood, the tingling of your breath, your recovery and your survival. Sometimes we suffer before there is meaning again, but that doesn’t mean that the suffering had meaning. It proves that we make something out of nothing.

It’s not for me to direct this mother. I cannot make her rage, just because I would. If she starts to tend that way, I can name it, and show her the tradition of rage at divinity, the healing and the blessing that may come after. Is she in denial or in transcendence? I’ll have to observe her. In the meantime, she teaches me.

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these days

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-- W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

The book on us is that we lack intensity. The book of those whose opinion we care about.

There’s another book on us, of course. The book of those who say we are the devil’s spawn, godless, traitors, killers of what is Christian and American. But we don’t read that book. We don’t care about the opinions of those who have always metaphysically reviled us. They are to us buffoons. Unless they bring their guns. Then they are buffoons with guns.

The book that hurts us is the book of those with whom we would be solid. When people of color say they can’t trust us, because we lack passion and our solidarity is lukewarm, it staggers us. When they say we can’t be solid with them because we’re people of privilege, we feel ashamed. We don’t know from oppression, they say. If we did, we’d be as passionate as they are.

We’d like to say, we have the courage of our convictions. We’d like to say, we have studied the situation, we have risen above our location, we can see the struggle for justice from the height of our principles. We know where our loyalties should be.

And what good are you up there in your balloon? says the hurtful book. White people can’t jump, don’t know how to clap their hands, can’t sway without falling over. You lack rhythm, have left your bodies and lost your souls. Your truth is not incarnate.

I rise each morning in a particular place and time, to do work that gets my attention. Some days I am proud of what I have done. Then I’m tired, and I have to recreate myself. I go home. I read. I write. I look out the window. I meditate. In my own way, I pray. I go to sleep. If I don’t recreate myself, I can’t come back in the morning. Not honestly. I can fool myself for a while. My well-trained reflexes will continue to operate. Only the spiritually gifted will notice that the soul has gone out of my eyes.

I have a reasonable chance, on a given day, of fulfilling the prophet’s requirement. Today I might love kindness, act justly, and walk humbly with my God. If I fail today, I may succeed tomorrow. If I succeed today, it’s something. I can’t do everything. Part of humility is knowing how much I cannot do.

To our kinfolk of color we would extend the hand of fellowship. Welcome. We know you were unjustly treated. We know you deserved better. We have read your story, in books and in your eyes. We want for you to do well. That’s how we were raised.

We want for you to do well. To say such a thing sounds condescending, but not to say it is a sin. We want it in principle, because it is right that you should do well. We want it also in our bodies, to ease the sickness at the pit of our stomachs. We are nauseated by what our country did to you.

I don’t say that our pain is your pain, or its moral equivalent. But we would like you to know that we also hurt from injustice. We have trouble getting that across.

The hurtful book says we are privileged. I learn that, though I do not have all advantages, I am privileged because I am tall, and firstborn, and male, and born to people who valued education. I also learn that white folks are privileged because they are white.

It’s hard to get your mind around the thought of privilege when you’re not rich and you’re not powerful, and you’ve more or less barely survived. So perhaps I don’t deserve to have survived. I have been rescued a number of times, given several chances to succeed. For others it’s one strike and you’re out. Or none. To me it has seemed a hard struggle to get here, and here seems no place of eminence; but the little I have should perhaps be taken away, because I got it by unfair means, born as I was with fair skin, blue eyes, male sex and blond hair.

If you say I’m privileged, you’re saying I’ve got the things you want and deserve. Among those things is power, to determine my destiny and that of others. If I hold such power, I hold it therefore in trust. I should use it not in triumph but in doubt. I cannot be of single mind about it. Some of it can be given away, but not all. It’s hard to deploy one’s power if one feels unworthy to do so.

You may not recognize my struggle of discernment as passion. You may think I am dispassionate. And yes, I am dispassionate; I must disown the instinct of privilege, which is to grab and consume, and to make of others the means to my happiness. I must rise above entitlement and climb out of my native joy, before I can come to meet you.

So I don’t come to your story as you do. Yet I want to hear it, I want to take it in, I want to grow my nerves into it. If I learn your song, my passion will not be yours; it will be the passion of a person born elsewhere, who came to meet you. I will have learned it, and you will have to hear it from me, in my own accent and idiom, inflected with harmonies that my parents lovingly taught me. That’s the best I can do. It has to be good enough. It’s all the conviction I’ve got.

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brute material

All theologies, knowingly or not, are theologies of specific life-experiences.

-- Otto Maduro, “Liberation Theology”*

We must admit that Unitarian Universalism has a specific, sometimes alienating culture, and we must change it.

-- Rosemary Bray McNatt, “We Must Change”**

Marx would say that ideas of God are epiphenomenal. Which is to say, they are sparks flung out by clashes of brute material: ideas do not make history but are made by it. The god of rulers justifies their rule, while the god of those who are ruled consoles them in their oppression. Religion is the sword of the mighty, the opiate of the masses.

“The history of the world, my sweet,” sings Sweeney Todd, “is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.” The liberation theologians begin with Marx’s view of history, bottoms-up: theologies arise, they say, from specific locations in time and place, and answer the needs of those who live in those places. No theologian wants to think his ideas of God are mere gurgles in history’s gullet, so the liberationists choose one of God’s locations as the right one. God, they say, has taken a “preferential option for the poor,” adopting the location of the oppressed as Her own. But the Oppressed do not love their location; they want to change it. So when the God of liberation joins the poor, He must help them move out of Egypt and into the Promise. “Congratulations to the Poor! for they shall inherit.” But what they shall inherit is somewhere else.

Let’s say it again. Every theology has a social location. And every social location has a theology. When the Oppressed arrive at their Promise, they will take on the theology of their new location. They shall all be changed, and will no longer be the people whom God had preferred. Oppressed people want to become, in at least one respect, like liberals. They want to be autonomous. They want what liberals have – the physical, social and intellectual capital of autonomy. As oppressed people rise up and free themselves, with or without God’s help, everything will change for them.

Again. Every theology has a social location. The liberal church is not the church of everyone. Nor is the church of the oppressed for everyone. Liberals hope to be saved through each person’s affectional, intellectual and spiritual freedom. Oppressed people hope to be saved through communally enacted dreams of a better future. To liberals, a free mind is the holy of holies; to the oppressed, a committed heart. These priorities do not amount to the same thing. But priorities change as people change their location.

Again. Every theology has a social location. Every social location has a theology. So it’s not a sin to be socially located. Nor is it a virtue. But each theology, in its social location, is an occasion of sin; we are called to own our location and know its boundaries, to contain its deathly tendencies and to enhance its powers of life, knowing that if we stood in a different place we would believe differently, and knowing that we owe solidarity, regardless of their theology, to those who were born with a boot on their necks. We liberals, unlike other people of privilege, know that we owe such solidarity. We know it because we are highly educated, and because we inherit the Enlightenment with our education. Our ethic of solidarity is a product of our social location.

We white liberals will never be born with a boot on our necks. We missed that bus. People like me did not create black liberation, nor did we give to people of color such freedom as they have. Liberation belongs to those who need it and have struggled for it. At times we have been solid with them, and we owe such people our solidarity, but not because they’re liberals – many are not. We owe them solidarity because they have been badly treated and deserve better. When they have achieved the Promise of autonomy, when they choose their loves, their works and gods, and respect that choice in others; then and only then will some of them be liberals. But it’s not for me to say that they should become liberals. Liberated people are not obliged to love my songs and thoughts, or to vote my way in the next election, just because at times I was solid with them. Their only obligation will be to become, each of them, who they are. I am not the one to say who they are.

Again. Every theology has a social location. Liberal religion is a specific culture. Some like it. Some don’t like it. Some are at home in it, some are alienated from it. But being who you are is not a sin.

Harvard is a great university, so great that its name stands for excellence. Everyone aspiring to college, in a sense, wants to go to Harvard. But if everyone went to Harvard, then Harvard wouldn’t be the thing that makes everyone want to go there. So our world doesn’t really need for everyone to go to Harvard; what it needs is for Harvard to endure, so that talented people of many races, nationalities, beliefs and cultures can be educated there.

Unitarian Universalism is a great American religion. It could be larger and more influential than it is, but it will never be a religion for everybody. So America doesn’t need everyone to be a Unitarian or a Universalist. What America asks of us is to endure, so that people of talent and integrity, who reject both arrogant metaphysics and brute materialism, can continue to practice the third way of religion.

We will endure better, and spread our values more effectively, if we look more like America as it is becoming, and less like the society of Mayflower descendents we once were. We might have to diversify our musical choices, learn to permit enthusiasm, and apply our curiosity to the scriptures of America’s great religions. But I don’t want my church to “look like America” in its sexual ethics, or in its view of biblical authority. I don’t want a church that demeans the value of women, or the role of conscience in Revelation. These are not superficial matters. Liberal religion will always alienate somebody, but it doesn’t deserve to die on that account.

Perhaps one of the reasons we don’t spread our message very well is that we have lost our faith. Liberationist thinking has done such a number on us that we feel unworthy to be good. They tell us that our principles are mere rationalizations for our privilege. We remind ourselves that we are creatures of privilege, corrupted in our judgment, undeserving of what faint power we hold. But self-loathing is not a persuasive quality. If we could own our social location, claim our besetting sins and our besetting virtues, take responsibility for our errors and pride in our achievements, perhaps it would be easier to attract diverse communities to our fellowship. They don’t know, after all, why we look so sheepish and guilty. It’s a mystery to them.

Again. Every theology has a social location. We should learn from the liberationists that we liberals are not oppressed. We are, compared to many of our neighbors, privileged people – and the choices before us are the choices of privilege. I cannot become black, or gay, or female; but if it is true that my lack of such credentials amounts to power, then I should use that power without apology on behalf of my brothers and sisters. The problem is not that some are comparatively free. The problem is that so many are not.

*A New Handbook of Christian Theology, eds. Donald W. Musser & Joseph H. Price (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1992)

**UU World (Feb. 15, 2010)

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