We Are One: Another Definition of Universalism
Once upon a time my daughter learned a catchy little song at Chalice Camp–a Unitarian Universalist day camp. The lyrics, by Laila Ibrahim, come as close to a UU catechism as anything I’ve ever encountered:
It’s blessing each of us was born.
It matters what we do with our lives.
What each of us knows about God is a piece of the truth.
We don’t have to do it alone.
I could do a sermon or even a sermon series on each of those lines. Next week, in this month dedicated to exploring the Gift of Interdependence, I’ll focus on the last line. This morning: What each of us knows about God is a piece of the truth.
Though the song says “God”, we can substitute “Life” or “Existence” or capital T “Truth”. What each of us knows about the universe and our place in it and why it all happens the way it does and how we are to live in it and with one another is a piece of the truth.
Several weeks ago I traced the Universalist half of our multisyllabic name back to 18th and 19th century Universalists who rejected the concept of hell and damnation, embracing and preaching instead universal salvation through the grace of God’s universal love of all humankind. Narrowly defined, from a strictly historical perspective, that’s how half of our theological forbears came to be known as and call themselves Universalists. But as the 19th century drew to a close our Unitarian forebears had begun to embrace a universalism that was complementary to that earlier Universalism but with a different focus.
In 1893, as part of the Chicago’s World Fair, the World’s Parliament of Religions was held. According to the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, the Parliament was organized in response to the growing awareness of religious diversity and problems it caused. Ten thousand invitations were sent. Some who received them declined to attend–including such disparate leaders as Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid II and Archbishop of Canterbury. Nevertheless, for a period of three weeks, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Unitarians, and adherents of the Shinto and Zoroastrian traditions gathered at what organizers called “the morning star of the 20th century.” They lectured on and discussed and celebrated what they called universalism or universal religion.
That first Parliament (several more have been held since that one) was marked by both bright eyed optimism at the prospect of understanding and accord brokered through religious universalism, and also dissent and criticism. No Native American were included in the Parliament. Only two of the major speakers were African American, who called out organizers for ignoring the millions of African American Christians. Some speakers from other countries and non-Christian faiths called out Americans for their ignorance of other faiths as well as for racist laws and practices. There were women participants, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first women ordained as a minister in America. Cady Stanton “called for a religion that would preach the dignity of all human beings”, while Blackwell argued for access to the pulpits for women. Still other speakers noted that though parliament was convened with declarations of non-sectarianism, many at the Parliament in fact understood universalism to be within the tent of Christianity.
Despite the faces not seen, the voices not heard, despite testimonies of a real lack of universal harmony within religion, at the end of the Parliament, the chairman, Presbyterian minister John Henry Barrows, reflected:
“Religion, like the white light of heaven, had been broken into many-colored fragments by the prisms of men. One of the objects of the Parliament of Religions has been to change this many-colored radiance back into the white light of heavenly truth.”
Such positive regard of the whole endeavor led to the formation by 1900 of the International Council of Unitarian and other Liberal Religious Thinkers and Workers, which eventually became the International Association for Religious Freedom, Many Unitarian Universalists from North America, and Unitarians from other countries around the world, are active in the IARF yet today. And a belief in the possibilities for understanding to be gained from and peace and prosperity built through embracing universals in religions has carried on into 21st century Universalism. That’s why next month’s SoulMatters theme is the Gift of Pluralism–even though this sermon wants to get there ahead of time!
You’ve probably seen posters or t-shirts or memes that list variations on what we call the Golden Rule–each according to a half dozen or more of the world’s religions. I first encountered such a list on a resource from the UUA when I was a director of religious education fresh out of college in the late 1980s. It was typical Unitarian Universalist pedagogy of the time to go beyond the affirmation that “what each of us knows is a piece of the truth” to an overemphasis on the similarities of the world’s faiths that downplayed or ignored the differences.
That approach of reducing the vast and rich fullness of distinct faiths to easy common denominators knowingly or unknowingly, echoed Chicago rabbi Emil Hirsch, who declared at the 1893 Parliament: “National affinities and memories, however potent for good, and though more spiritual than racial bonds, are still too narrow to serve as foundation stones for the temple of all humanity. The day of national religions is past. The God of the universe speaks to all mankind.”
In the book Communion, Community, Commonweal, edited by John S. Mogabgab, Sue Monk Kidd wrote:
"I took part in a retreat one in which the leader gathered the group into a circle and handed out three balls of colored yar. She asked us to toss the ball back and forth to one another across the circle, each holding onto a piece of it. The result was a beautiful, multicolored web stretched across the center of the circle. “Each of you take turns and wiggle your thread,” the leader instructed. What we found was that every movement vibrated the entire web. And it dawned on my–this immeasurable truth we were portraying. We are each a thread woven into the vast web of the universe, linked and connected so that our lives are irrevocably bound up with one another."
I’ve participated in that exercise a time or two, and it is a useful tactile, visual, experiential object lesson in the meaning, possibility and power of the concept Unitarian Universalists call, with some redundancy, “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part”.
Sue Monk Kidd goes on to end her reflection describing the intense kinship, compassion, and love for others around the circle the experience had evoked in her. I stopped short of reading that bit of heart-centered meaning making to you because I want to draw our attention to a bit of structural meaning making.
The exercise only works, the web only becomes strong yet responsive to the slightest wiggle of any part of it, when each person around the circle holds fast to their bit of yarn each time they catch one of the balls before tossing it to another person. If someone caught the yarn ball and simply tossed it on without holding onto any part of the yarn, and then another person did the same, and another, pretty soon there would be no web. Only a snarled mess of yarn sagging, from the few hands that did hold on to their piece before tossing the yard along, down onto the floor. Not only is the web stronger with each of us–it is only a web with each of us.
So it is, I think, with Truth. It maintains integrity and accessibility only if each of us continues to hold our piece of it–not hide it or shield it from others–but hold it firmly even as we offer it to others. What each of us knows about God, the universe, existence is a piece only we can fully know–forged in and born out of our particular time and setting, and ways of experiencing and being in the world. If we surrender our grasp on the piece of Truth as only we can know it, in the name of moving beyond religious parochialism toward a goal of religious unity or universal religion, we end up with a colorful, perhaps even beautiful, but ultimately meaningless tangle or jumble. Without the structure of being held in and grounded by particularities, the guidance, comfort, and wisdom embedded in all our individual pieces of the Truth become difficult to recognize, the relationships between and among all the pieces become hard to discern, some bits of the Truth might even become lost.
In one of our readings this morning, Alberto Rios, a poet laureate of Arizona, wrote of our mistaken search for unity through geography, and of our misplaced belief that a perfect world comes through “everyone understand[ing] and react[ing] to the world as we do.” He says the gift of poets is that they “carefully and painstakingly lead us to other places, helping us all…to see, to feel, to experience the senses in alternative contexts.” I believe poets aren’t the only ones with that gift. I believe that one of the reasons we gather in congregations, in faith communities, is because ultimately we all, in our own ways, lead one another to experience the senses and all of life in alternative contexts–because what each of us knows about Life is a piece of the truth.
Richard Blanco, the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, the youngest, and first Latinx, immigrant and gay person to serve in such a role, wrote our second readings, One Today, for President Obama’s second inauguration in January 2013. I delight in the pictures and sounds that fill my mind and my heart as I read and hear this poem. I especially love the ending:
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together
In my heart, however, I tweak it a bit. I make the “us” of those final lines even bigger than Blanco made it. He was writing for a specific occasion, a specific national audience. The ‘us’ of his poem, those with the power and possibility of mapping and naming a new constellation of hope, are citizens and residents and inhabitants of the United States of America. In my reading and hearing of his stunning poem, the ‘us’ is all of us–in the United States and Indonesia and Gaza, in Canada and Thailand and the Caribbean, in Chile and Bulgaria and Tunisia, in Jordan and Israel and Russian.
It’s blessing each of us was born.
It matters what we do with our lives.
What each of us knows about God is a piece of the truth.
We don’t have to do it alone.
I’ve been frustrated for days because I couldn’t keep pluralism out of my interdependence sermon. But there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason those who listened for hundreds of hours to thousands of Unitarian Universalist talk about their lives and their faith included both interdependence and pluralism in their encapsulation of Unitarian Universalim’s core values: because doing it alone isn’t just lonely–it prevents us from experiencing the fullness, beauty and meaning of existence on this planet at this time. And so does claiming to have the Truth all to ourselves–or alternately, believing that only some other person or group has the Truth all to themselves. But interdependence wed to pluralism wraps us, grounds us in the care and security of community, while opening before us …all of Creation.
Unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury who refused his invitation to the Parliament, a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville said: “Let an honest effort be made to get at the facts of religious experience, and the truth of God will take care of itself.” He (for it surely was a he, though the speaker wasn’t named on the account of the Parliament on Harvard’s Pluralism Project website from which I drew all my historical information for this sermon), he may have had a definite idea about what the truth of God is or would be revealed to be, and if he did, it was probably quite different than what I believe the truth about God to be. But I like his trust in the process.
When we are one, all together, with our different practices and music and stories, getting all the facts about all our countless religious experiences out there, something better happens than myriad of colors dissolving into one white light: we approach the truth about God, we become, as Rios wrote, “more alive for how our imaginations are fed by possibility and nuance”; and we might just map a new constellation we are so very much in need of having mapped–hope.
May it be so. Amen.