The Good, The True, and The Beautiful

It is a central paradox of life that in the midst of change, we cling to such verities and rituals as provide us comfort and continuity from year to year and from season to season. And at the same time, in the very repetition of seasonal patterns and familiar events we search for the possibilities inherent in each new beginning.

In the midst of change, we cling to the safety of the familiar; and while anchoring our lives in the rubric of routine, we wait full of hope for the fresh winds of possibility that come with each new dawn. Our lives, properly balanced, make room for both elements of this paradox that makes life worth living: the grounding of the familial and the familiar, and the growing of spirits still free to explore and expand.

It occurs to me at the start of a new church year, on the occasion of our Ingathering from summer’s wanderings, that Religion too, when properly balanced, honors and blesses this paradoxical human need at once for grounding and for growing. In fact, one of the oldest definitions of church pays homage to this human paradox. It defines the church as “the community of memory and of hope.”

Once again, as it has now for 177 consecutive autumns, First Unitarian Church calls us (in Kenneth Patton’s vivid phrase) “out of our singular rooms” here to reassemble our community of spirit, to resume our familiar places, to reclaim the joy of these remembered faces.

We’ve come back to these familiar pews, to this venerable pulpit, to this circle of friends and neighbors, to the customs and traditions of our liberal Unitarian Universalist faith, to the style of worship that has given expression to so much that is dear to us over the years. On this holy ground, in this sacred space where we have named our babies and memorialized our dead, this church where we have ordained our ministers, where so many times we have worshipped together and mourned together and wondered and worried together over matters great and small. This house of prayer, this house of music, this house of worship, this house of God, this haven for heretics (yes, that too).

The community of memory: we know what this church has been for us in years past, and we are back, many of us, in part because we need to reserve such holy familiar space in our lives. We need to know we are part of a company of like spirits; at our best, capable of a surprising charity; unafraid of community; open to the challenges of a redeeming justice and a rare compassion in this imperfect world.

It is not a blind or unquestioned faith that reassembles us here. Reinhold Niebuhr might well have had us skeptical Unitarian Universalists in mind when we wrote,

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by Hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate content of history; therefore, we must be saved by Faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by Love.

We are back, in part, because it is here in this house, amidst this extraordinary company of ordinary people that we have sometimes caught fleeting glimpses of our ideals, momentary outlines of our best selves. We’re back partly hoping that what was true for us here in the past might still be true for us here this new September.

The difference, it is important to remember, between a museum and a living church is that a church is not solely a community of memory. A church is also and simultaneously a community of Hope for every person who walks through the front door of a Sunday morning, called here by something already inside themselves; by something in need of connection, perhaps, or something in need of healing; or something in need of naming, or something in need of affirmation and inspiration and celebration.

There are many ways to say what it is we hope to find in church, I suppose. In terms not too theological, I trust, we might say that we come to church hoping to uncover something of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in our lives. Those were Plato’s terms for what is most important for human beings. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful. In the Greek understanding these were the three highest measures of value, and in human activity they translated into Morality, Knowledge, and Art.

Some five centuries later, St. Paul, who was educated in the Greek tradition, would later summarize his vision of what is the heart of our human quest in these words from his letter to the Philippians:

Whatsoever things are true,

whatsover things are honorable,

whatsoever things are just,

whatsoever things are pure,

Whatsoever things are lovely,

whatsoever things are of good report,

if there be any virtue,

if there be any praise,

think on these things.

“Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,” Keats would sing to us in the 19th century. “That is all Ye Know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

But the connection and correlation of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful has become blurred to us in the conditions of modernity. What is most basic to moral human behavior, even in our most public realm, even in our most public compacts, now threatens to become lost amid legalisms and the betrayals of public trust. And what once we seemed to understand as our common values, we now experience as neither given nor firm guidelines for public decency. The moral compass points of our culture are harder to read, and it feels at times that we have lost any sense of our moral True North.

Ken Wilber, in his recent book, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, (Random House, New York, 1998) has a fascinating consideration of how, in our Post-modern world, we have come to devalue and disassociate the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as integrated realms of human ideals.

We’ve imagined a rather stark world where for too long Religion and Science, soulful imagination and practical knowledge, were seen to be incompatible and in mutual denial of each other’s validity. The predictable result for a lot of educated people in our time was often feeling they had to choose between loyalty to a soul-less kind of science on the one hand, or a superstitious and ignorant kind of religion, on the other.

Unable to conceptualize life’s mystery and sacredness in terms other than the personal and all-powerful Mythic God the Father figure of history, it was easier for many in our century to abandon the Sacred as a category altogether. But in leaving Religion to the Fundamentalists and the Pietists to define in our culture, we’ve not established many church communities where a reasonable and integrated dialogue between Religion and Science can even take place.

I think this is one reason the Unitarian Universalist community includes so many scientists, and why so many people of learning feel at home in the UU church. Because the expression of the sacred that is employed here, the addressing of the human quest for the Good, The True, and the Beautiful here is not given in terms insulting to a twenty-first century rationality or inconsistant with a twenty-first century education.

I mean no arrogance when I say there are not many churches in our culture where that integration is respected. And it has hurt our culture, it has impoverished the spirit of our culture to fail in holding up a vision of our humanity that is at once soulful and scientific, communal and inclusive, religious and reasonable.

I make bold to say that is what we can be about in the UU church. A church is a community of Hope, which is to say, a community of unlimited potential.

Such a church is a community capable of producing radical change — in the lives of its members certainly, but in the life of the wider community as well. Such a church is a community of incredible possibility, because it is by definition a community of faith. And faith is one of the few inexhaustible resources in the universe. The only thing that ever limits the potential of a living church is its own lack of faith – faith in who they are, faith in who they can be, faith in what they can do as a community, faith in their own mission as a church. There are no limits on the potential of people who believe in what they’re doing. That is true of individuals and it is true for a congregation, as well.

Walter Royal Jones, one of our great preachers of the UU tradition, once worded a covenant for the Free Church in these words. He wrote:

“Mindful of truth ever exceeding our knowledge, and community ever exceeding our practice,

reverently we must covenant together,

beginning with ourselves as we are,

to share the strength of integrity

and the heritage of the spirit

in the unending quest for wisdom and love.”

And so I welcome you back to church, you long-time members and old hands, and I welcome you who are newcomers, too. I welcome you who are here for the first time, you who have been looking for a spiritual home but weren’t sure if there really was a church for you anywhere. I welcome you who have been searching for a community where affinity of spirit, not conformity of belief, is what defines us. I welcome you to a tradition where great thoughts, good works, and open hearts are valued, where religious life for children is education and not indoctrination. I welcome you to the Unitarian Universalist church.

“This is the mission of our faith,” as Bill Schulz once said. “to teach the fragile art of hospitality; to revere both the critical mind and the generous heart; to prove that diversity need not mean divisiveness; and to witness to all that we must learn to hold the whole world in our hands.”