Universalism for Today

A week ago I spent eight wonderful days leading a spiritual discussion group on a beautiful rocky shoal called Star Island. This Unitarian Universalist retreat center is an island with a little over a half-mile circumference that rests 10 miles off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine. This week in particular was a working retreat for over 150 Religious Educators, Ministers, RE Teachers and their families. Aside from strong rains on the ferry ride in, and the closing night’s Thunder and Lightning extravaganza that was truly glorious, we had mostly sunny days that occasionally flirted with fog, mist and the rare strong breeze. As one colleague put it recently, “the land of water, sun and spontaneous song in the air.”
Besides leading that discussion group, and two worship services, I gave myself only one other assignment. I was to read Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker’s book, “Saving Paradise – How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire.” I know, I know – light reading. That’s what I thought too. I thought I could get through the 420 pages with the accompanying 132 pages of notes, acknowledgments and index. I was preparing for this sermon and was very impressed with Rev. Dr Parker’s talk a couple years ago at the Liberal Religious Educators’ Fall Conference. She had spent about 8 hours over 4 days offering theological reflections about the Christian church’s notions of salvation and heaven while connecting them to our Universalist roots. I’ll get to more of that in a bit.
So picture it. I’m sitting in a wooden rocking chair on a huge porch big enough for dozens of these chairs with sunscreen on my legs, sunglasses on my face and a cup of coffee clinging to my side (some habits die hard – even on a remote island) with this book in my hands. I’m reading for a while all about early paintings depicting the waters of life flowing down from all over the world. I’m hearing stories about how depictions of the crucifixion are nowhere in Christian art for at least the first 500 years of the church. They paint picture after picture of little earthly paradises with people like you and me dwelling in them. The focus in Christian art is entirely about living life, appreciating the paradise that’s here, and stewarding the world we have. Occasionally, I look up from the book and remark at how pretty that Lighthouse is, or the sun is really glorious hanging right there, or look at those 6 white herons flying overhead,. Then I go back to my academic reading about how many places they visited in Europe to see the paintings with their own eyes. Eventually, and it took me far longer than you’d imagine, I realize I need to stop reading about evidence for paradise and enjoy the paradise I’m presently sitting on a rocking chair in.
That’s one half of the heart of the message of Universalism. There is nothing to attain. It’s already here. There’s nowhere to go to get it. It’s already here. There’s nothing to do to make it. It’s already here. The potential for paradise is the thin line between searching for it in a book, and our looking up from the pages to see the world around us. Nothing is gained, but our perceptions shift into focus and we see. I did travel about 8 hours to get there, but what I really traveled for was the lesson. What I saw is here too. It doesn’t require flights of herons banking in spirals over rocky shoals to exist. The same reality rests in the smiles we share with one another. The substance is identical even if the form differs. What we do to craft the world more picturesquely, in our stained glass and our botanic gardens, simply serves to show the respect and care we have for creation.
I do believe that perception is key here. One of the reasons we travel so far for rest, particularly in cities like the one in which we live, is that it can be hard to see clearly amidst all the busyness, concrete and impersonality on the street. We receive so many messages from the people, signs, and media around us telling us that the world is full of stress, pain and unconcern. Then we forget that it doesn’t have to be this way – certainly not to this degree. We travel to get away, to forget one life and remember another. Breaking the patterns, breaking the monotony, severing our commitments for a week or a month, we are free once more to see beyond our keyboards, and phones, and noses. If you do get the opportunity to travel this summer (I myself don’t always get away) or you already have traveled, avoid the mistake of thinking the peace you find in whatever paradise you’ve visited only begins and ends there. The retreat is a mirror for the potential of the world you inhabit every day.
We may not be able to craft paradise, but we can mar it. We can design economies that efficiently manufacture trash dumps; that thoroughly generate disparities between those who have and those who have not; that fail to honor our roles as stewards of this world and make us into dominators. Seeing the potential for what is right before us is not meant to hide our capacity to destroy it; rather it is to remind us that there is something sacred worth saving and in that memory lies the hope that we’ll change our rapacious and hoarding ways.
Living an ethical life is based upon applying a set of values to everyday challenges, confusions and concerns. It is based upon something. When we run into the difficult choice, we have a set of values that we can refer to in making sense of whatever current dilemma we face. When we talk about saving the earth we live in we lift up everything from the importance of the world, to the practicalities of living with Global Warming. I firmly believe this work is more successful when it’s grounded in our theology (a big word that simply means how we find and make meaning in our lives.) The book by Brock and Parker, “Saving Paradise” points out that depictions of paradise were all in this world. They remind us that the Eden of Genesis was on Earth, not in Heaven.
One writing they lift up to sum this up outside simply the realm of paintings come from the Hebrew Scriptures. (The Song of Songs 4:12-14) “A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a garden locked, a fountain sealed. Your channel is an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all chief spices – a garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon.” The phrase, “living waters” is a way of talking about paradise. Remember, there’s always water in those images of Heaven on Earth. It’s interesting to remember that the Song of Songs (or Solomon as some know it) are mostly talking about the author’s beloved. This depiction of paradise is happening in the present through their love for one another – not to be found some time later. And paradise involves people, with all our faults and imperfections – not reserved for an idyllic future point where we’re cleansed of all our imperfections. In the Song of Songs, it is here, now, and found through the love of two people.
If we understood this theologically, we see this message woven in both our Jewish scriptural roots and our Christian artistic roots. I find this memory very helpful. To get to the place where we meaningfully act to preserve the paradise we dwell in, we need to live this theology on the ground, in our kitchens and behind our computer screens. Remembering in every moment that the potential for finding paradise is in our lived experiences is the key to helping to heal and preserve our world. If we learn to live out balanced relationships with kindness, uplifted by the knowledge of the glory of what is right before us, it becomes increasingly difficult to live in ways that cause harm to the gift we have been given that none of us have earned – our life.
I said earlier all of this was one half of the message of Universalism… the second half, simply, is that it applies to all of us. Early American Universalists like Hosea Ballou and John Murray argued in a time when wide-spread Hellfire and Damnation was the scope and content of preaching in the U.S., that instead God was a loving God and offered salvation to all. John Murray famously said, “Give them hope, not hell!” To this day, Unitarian Universalist ministers, among most other clergy, are trained to find a message of hope in every sermon. This was not the norm always in American religious culture, even though I firmly believe it is the core of religious truth. Ballou and Murray’s primary concern about this message was that an all-loving God could not condemn anyone to ever-lasting pain and suffering. Two hundred years later, we still hear this concern although our words that express it may change. Our Unitarian Universalist “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign that is working toward deeper collaborations for justice in the realms of sexuality, immigration, environmental and economic justice takes this message and applies it to the world we live in. If our roots tell us that none should suffer, that life and God are loving at their core, then we need to build institutions that match this reality. Standing on the Side of Love means we’re seeking to reflect our theology, our heritage and our values. It also reminds us of the Universalist message that salvation is for all. It’s not for some people who look a certain way, or have more prosperity, or just those who live a straight life.
If we pull all these points together we hear: Heaven is this Earth – now; Heaven is for all people; Give them Hope not Hell; Stand on the Side of Love. That’s also a solid progression from theological grounding to ethical application. I talked earlier about environmental concerns. It’s good to make the connection between earthly paradise and our roles as stewards of what we’ve been gifted. How does this apply on the human side of the question of paradise? Our quote from Song of Songs uses the image of a garden to describe paradise, but the paradise that’s found in the Scripture is simply a reference to human love. What does an earthly paradise look like when it’s inhabited? What challenges do we face when seek to steward that type of paradise? What does salvation mean when we don’t necessarily believe in an afterlife?
I’ve been wondering about this over the past few months in relation to the horrors of racial profiling about to go into law in Arizona. It’s a staggering exercise of the power of fear. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Arizona immigration law that is set to go into effect this coming Thursday, empowers police officers to ask for citizenship paperwork of anyone they suspect may be illegally in the U.S. How do you imagine they’ll base their decision-making process on who should be asked? “You, Mam, look awfully Canadian. Could you please show me your paperwork?” No, I imagine that won’t be asked. I imagine folks that look like me will likely never be asked. How does the upcoming law SB1070 help realize this religious sense of heavenly paradise on earth? How does it cause us to forget what’s right before our eyes?
I could talk at length about discrimination in employment and payment practices, the injustices of globalization, the dueling myths that often get lifted up that “poor people don’t work hard enough – that’s why they’re poor” with its flip-side talking point “they’re taking our jobs!” We could inquire when does a particular group get to “legally” immigrate and how has this changed over the past 500 years of colonization, invasion, war and immigration on this soil? Who gets to call themselves citizens and who gets to call themselves slaves? All our questions of identity, of power, or self-justification. They’re little acts of building white picket fences dividing up paradise on earth thinking it somehow grants us more than what we already have – or at the very least staves off losing what little we do have.
Instead, I’d like to reflect upon our theological basis for this ethical dilemma. If we accept that paradise is here to be found in this life, on this earth, in the midst of human relationships, then we need to begin to craft social policy that seeks to generate harmony and not re-imagine suffering in newer and more disastrous ways. If we reap what we sow, then planting a garden that instills fear among folks who may look different than those who are in power, is a farming practice that will only harvest fear, separation and dissonance. It’s a gardening practice that assumes far too much about what and who it is to be an American.
If this image is too far from home to relate to, let me draw it differently. Imagine a NYC where anyone from a certain identity group might be stopped by police and asked for paperwork proving they were of the “right group”, the “legal identity.” In this fascist dream, there would be no requirements placed upon the officers to validate who and when they asked someone for paperwork. For me this has echoes of the runaway slave laws earlier in our history; it has echoes for me of yellow stars and pink triangles in Nazi Europe. I don’t believe we’re that far along – fortunately – but where is the exact point that the line gets crossed into that fascist nightmare? Do we want to take this any less seriously?
This law actively works to dissemble the religious message of Heaven on Earth. It divides the world into Us and Them, with Us looking a certain way with some variance, and Them always looking another way. Our Universalist message says that the promise of life is one made to all people. Our global legal system may not be at a stage where it can manage without national identities, but our application of our laws should not serve to make people illegal; it should not generate fear on the streets; rather our laws should buffer up right relations. We cannot trade one for the other. Does what we’re doing increase the peace or disturb the peace? Does it unnecessarily back people up against a border of our creation?
The responsive reading by Audre Lorde we read earlier this morning together, speaking of another type of border, (#587) was a curious one to choose today. It seems to have the opposite message from our Universalist clarion call of hope not hell. I chose it intentionally for this reason. Lorde poignantly captures the effect of the worldly powers of racism, sexism, homophobia and nationalism. “For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone…” The truth of the matter is that the egalitarianism of paradise is yet to be seen on this earth. This is true because theologically, humans have tragically tended and attended to the message of separation and scarcity. We create this hell for ourselves on this earth. We must choose our theologies carefully lest they create the world we fear. I began this sermon describing a shoreline of beauty and privilege and respite. I end it with Lorde’s shoreline of decision. It is my religious prayer that we live out our lives in such a way that all people have access to the shoreline in which I spoke. I also pray that we as a people are able to see the ways in which we all sometimes place our fellow inheritors of the garden at the shoreline in Lorde’s poem.
It’s important to make space to honor what we learn from both types of shorelines without saying one perspective makes the other untrue. Blithely holding onto the dream of paradise without recognizing the suffering that’s part of our world leads to reckless idealism and inaction. Staring solely into the pain of the failings of human generosity leaves us dry and paralyzed. Arguing for one side or the other as dominant can be a satisfying intellectual exercise, but that path has no draw to it. It will never lift us up. The potential for paradise as our inspiration in our daily lives, and the tragedy of Lorde’s shoreline as a marker for what we lose when we give up that dream. One great challenge of the human experience is to hold both these truths in tension. I find hope in her poetry for the very reason that she faces this truthfully. Universalism calls for this broader view.