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Fifty Years: Looking Back, Looking Ahead
Rev. Charles Eddis, Given at the CUC annual meeting Sunday service,
Edmonton, May 23, 2004
This decade, a large number of our congregations are celebrating
their fiftieth anniversaries. Fifteen of the fifty or so congregations
we have today began in the 1950s. In 1953 and 1954, seven new congregations
were formed.
Fifty years ago this very month, I stood before the Edmonton congregation
on the occasion of its founding. Little did I imagine I would be
standing here on its fiftieth anniversary.
It amazes me how much has come together here today. While I was
completing my preparations for the Unitarian ministry at the Meadville
Theological School in Chicago in 1953, I decided I wanted to be a
parish minister. I also decided that, should the opportunity arise,
I wanted to contribute to the Unitarian cause in Canada. The extension
department of the American Unitarian Association offered me a position
on its staff as a minister at large, to build up and found a Unitarian
church in Edmonton.
Edmonton was a booming city. There was not a Unitarian church in
any Canadian city between Winnipeg and Vancouver. Indeed, there were
only six Unitarian ministers in the whole country. Edmonton had had
a Unitarian church from 1912 to 1937. The Unitarian fellowship, founded
in 1951, was growing.
I flew out to Edmonton in June, 1953 to look over the situation,
and to have the Edmonton Unitarians look over me. Friends of mine
from Toronto who had moved to Edmonton took me aside and warned me
Edmonton would never have enough Unitarians to form a Unitarian church.
I chose not to take their advice.
I got to work. Boston headquarters paid my salary. The congregation
paid the expenses. We moved from the basement church the fellowship
had been renting in Garneau, near the university, to downtown. We
rented space in the Odd Fellows Hall, a suitable place for Unitarians.
It was on 103rd Street, half a block north of Jasper Avenue, - right
opposite the liquor store. Every one seemed to know the location
of the liquor store! The location was more central and cosmopolitan.
We spent a considerable part of the budget on advertising. Twenty
five dollars bought us five column inches opposite the editorial
page of the Edmonton Journal on Saturdays. I rounded up all the people
I could find who had been in the old Unitarian congregation, of which
Carl Storm had been the last minister. Many CCFers found in us a
congenial spiritual home. Its provincial organizer, Bill Irvine,
a Unitarian minister who had been in parliament with J.S. Woodsworth
and had served the Ottawa congregation, was one of our charter members.
We had one member of the Social Credit Party, but she realized one
day she had made a horrible mistake and resigned.
Sunday attendance and the mailing list grew. The only thing that
did not grow for several months was the membership. We had, however,
a deadline. We had to apply to the Board of Directors of the American
Unitarian Association by its May 1954 meeting for recognition as
a church and to receive a continuing subsidy. To be a church we had
to have 100 charter members, bylaws, and officers. We just made the
deadline. We held our founding meeting on May 17. We adopted a constitution,
and elected officers and board members. We forgot to put one item
on the written agenda: we forgot to list the question of the calling
of a settled minister. The congregation asked me to stay. I agreed.
I stayed another four years.
I returned from my summer vacation in Ontario with a wife, Nancy.
To celebrate the addition to the congregation, Ruth Patrick conducted
a mock wedding. She was already on her way to becoming a CUC lay
chaplain, though in those days there was no CUC and no lay chaplains.
One unanticipated development I must acknowledge on this occasion,
when we have so many here from across the land. During my initial
visit here in 1953, on the second Sunday evening, I told the small
Unitarian band gathered in the old church basement in Garneau I was
not here just to grow another church for the American Unitarian Association.
I was a Canadian. I did not know what that meant, but I knew it must
mean something. So I asked the growing congregation “What about
O Canada?” in just those words. What were we going to do to
acknowledge where we were living? Three years later Dick Morton,
who used to invite me to Edmonton Eskimos football games, took me
to lunch and proposed the formation of a Canadian Unitarian Council.
Other churches and fellowships were forming. Unitarians in other
cities were having the same idea. Bill Jenkins, then the powerful
minister at First Unitarian Congregation, Toronto, came to be the
theme speaker at the annual gathering of the Western Canada Unitarian
Conference and informed us that a Toronto committee was reviving
regular publishing of the Canadian Unitarian, a small flyer to be
distributed with all church and fellowship newsletters. Look what
has happened since!
Those were lively days. We were an excited bunch of people who were
glad we had found each other and banded together. We created a haven
for heretics. In those days we felt upon us the pressure of one faith
widely deemed to be mandatory and the one and only true one. Every
Sunday Premier Manning was broadcasting over the radio from the Capitol
Theatre on Jasper Avenue. It was generally assumed in polite society
that every proper citizen had a religion, preferably Christian. Grandparents
pressured their married children to have the grandchildren baptized.
Baptism or christening was a thing done, like getting married. I
dedicated the first three children of Ken and Phyllis Ferguson at
one crack. Keith, the eldest, was nearly eight.
Our congregation was definitely a mongrel breed. We were, perhaps,
more humanist than anything else. Many of us were refugees from Christianity.
Yet we could not leave Christianity alone. I devoted countless sermons
to interpreting, to justifying, our celebrations of Christmas and
Easter. We had a small but lively study group on the New Testament
which outlasted me by years.
There was considerable diversity of opinion among us. We encompassed
many religious points of view, including Unitarian Christians, theists,
humanists, and the occasional theosophist. We explored other faiths
with guest speakers, Buddhist and Muslim. I add that we had steadfast
support and encouragement from Congregation Beth Shalom and its rabbi,
Louis Sacks. “Edmonton needs a Unitarian church,” he
would tell us when he came as guest speaker, as he did, several times.
Jews, he told me, always felt safer when there was a Unitarian church
around. We felt safer or at least more comfortable with Jewish moral
support. No church in those days expressed appreciation for our presence.
All that was fifty years ago. The world, Canada, the spiritual and
religious landscape, has all changed. Today we feel no social pressure
in matters religious. We are free to be anything or nothing. Many
of us have not been anything. Many of us are looking for something,
something we have not found. Compared to the sparse offering of fifty
years ago, today a rich banquet is spread before us, a banquet of
seemingly endless options of bewildering variety. We tend to taste
rather than eat, lest we lose our appetite for the unproven, the
unexplored. Yet we sense in ourselves an unsatisfied hunger, a deep
yearning for meaning, to know how and why we are here, to set the
sails of our lives in true directions.
It was easy fifty years ago. If you were inclined a certain way,
and wanted some spiritual companionship, there seemed nowhere to
go but to the Unitarians. But everything has changed. So what way
do we follow now? I am not at all certain in my heart that a tolerant
eclecticism will get us anywhere. If we all dig separate wells, we
shall not draw much water, even though the water is there and all
well holes may work. We shall lack depth. We shall not go deep enough
to draw from the eternal sources. We shall not be able to share waters
of life with each other.
So what do we do? Does our religious association hold essentials,
perhaps unspoken, we should affirm and protect? Of recent years the
question has troubled me much. I have changed. I have mellowed. I
have found kindred souls in many faith communities. Today I could
find a spiritual home today somewhere else. But I remain a Unitarian.
And wherever I go, I take my whatever-it-is with me. What is it?
I have identified four underlying themes. They do not constitute
a summation of whatever-it-is. They could be worded differently.
I seem to have settled on them. They may be controversial. They may
be too obvious for us to mention. We tend to find our disagreements
more interesting than our agreements, except when it comes to behaviour.
I do not know how these four themes will strike you. In any case,
here they are: four identifying, essential themes:
The first theme is reason and evidence.
When I was studying the New Testament at divinity school, one of
my assignments was to take a look at a conservative introduction
to the New Testament. My choice happened to be a Roman Catholic one,
published in 1932. (1932, of course, was thirty years before the
Catholic transformation of Pope John XXIII.) On the very first page
were printed the ecclesiastical seals of approval, the Nihil Obstat
of the censor, the Imprimatur of the bishop. Then came the main body
of the book: the truth, as known and proclaimed by the Roman Catholic
church,- in clear, simple language, in large type, taking up 125
pages. The gospels, it stated, were written in the order in which
they appeared in the Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That was
enough to put me off. It went on from there.
The book did not end with the 125 pages of officially approved text,
however. In fine print, packed into 300 pages, was a small appendix.
The appendix was entitled, “The erroneous conclusions at which
we would arrive, were we guided by reason and the evidence alone.” In
those 300 pages were packed one of the best summaries of liberal
New Testament scholarship I have ever seen. There, for instance,
reason and evidence led to the conclusion that the order of the writing
of the gospels was Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John. With that I agreed,
and still agree.
“The erroneous opinions at which we would arrive, were we
guided by reason and the evidence alone.”
Reason and evidence should guide us. No authority, no teaching,
should prevent their clear exercise. I am not advocating a cold rationalism.
Evidence is the beginning point. Evidence is experiential. We should,
in the words of Jacob Trapp, “keep our capacity for faith and
belief and wonder,” but let “our judgment watch and question
what we believe.” The first theme I commend to you, then, is
reason and evidence.
The second theme is naturalism. This is hard to sum up while standing
on one foot. Our clue to it lies in the nineteenth century rejection
of the miracles in the Bible by the English and American Unitarians.
As the nineteenth century began, all Unitarians who spoke English
believed the miracles as described in the Bible really happened.
Jesus walked on the sea of Galilee, stilled the storm, and so forth.
A rising new generation of Unitarians, beginning with such as James
Martineau in England and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the United States,
broke with tradition, believing that all events happened naturally.
Two weeks ago I heard John Spong, a retired Anglican bishop, set
forth the meaning of naturalism for a renewed Christianity. There
is, he was saying, no higher power intervening in the normal events
of the universe. God is in the world, or behind the world, but not
above it. God is no cosmic rescuer. Spong, like Paul Tillich, the
theologian with whom he studied in New York, is a naturalist. Tillich,
when questioned, once wrote that he was “an ecstatic naturalist.”
When my first granddaughter was five, I found it disconcerting to
play simple board table games with her. The problem was that she
changed the rules as the game proceeded so that she would always
win. I quickly realized there was no point in trying to tell her
that she was breaking the rules. By the time she was eight, however,
it was quite different. She now plays games according to the rules,
and she, her mother, her grandmother and I enjoy playing games together
around the kitchen table. She now wins sometimes, but not every time.
Too much religion is still at the five-year-old stage. We want to
bend reality, call on some power to change the rules, so we will
always be winners. The book of Job, however, tells us that when we
take the world seriously, it is not like that. The world goes on
its way, the sun shining on the just and the unjust, the innocent
suffering as well as the guilty. Nature has its rules. Nothing, so
far as we know, intervenes to suspend the rules from time to time,
for any reason, good or bad. This is elementary and fundamental,
and the second theme: naturalism.
The third theme I commend is respect for our ancestors. Canadian
novelist Margaret Laurence was a Unitarian. She wrote her book The
Olden Days Coat for a Unitarian Sunday school pageant in Vancouver.
She stopped being a Unitarian, however, becoming active in the United
Church in Lakefield, Ontario. Her thinking did not change. She left
us because she felt Unitarians had a serious lacking: respect for
their ancestors.
One thing that has grown on me in my sixty years as a Unitarian
is respect for our ancestors. The heritage was available to me from
the first day I entered the doors of a Unitarian church in Montreal
in 1945. I feel embarrassed now to realize how little I knew about
the people who were so welcoming, with whom I felt so at home. I
recognized from the first that there was room for me, all the room
I wanted. I did not know what had gone into creating that room. I
did not know, I did not appreciate how much exploring, how much seeking
and discovering Unitarians before me had done. I was Columbus, venturing
on seas I did not know, not realizing that much of the world had
already been explored. I did not know that in 1835 Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau walked from Concord to Boston to buy the
first copies to arrive in America of Max Mueller’s translation
of the sacred books of the east. (Eventually they ran to 51 volumes).
The incident is not important. The time for which Unitarians and
Universalists have been looking to the East as well as to the Middle
East is. Much of the time we of today are not the first explorers.
Much was already accomplished, a century ago.
We must, each of us, do our own explorations. We can, we should use
our imaginations, entertaining all sorts of myths and legends, metaphors
and fancies. We should, however, recognize what we are doing. We
should distinguish between the poetry and the prose of religion.
It is our ability to speak prose in religion that makes us distinctive.
We should maintain a committed contact with reality as we know it.
We should hold each other accountable and responsible, able to respond
to questions of what and why, speaking prose. We should honour what
Unitarians and Universalists in years past have done, and what they
had found that can enrich us. The Bible tells us, “By their fruits you shall know them.”
I would say, “By their stories you shall know them.”
Our identity is tied up with the stories we tell, about such people
as Michael Servetus, Bernardino Ochino, Francis David, Joseph Priestley,
John Murray, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore
Parker, Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, Julia Ward Howe, Olympia
Brown, John Cordner, Eliza Reid, Magnus Skaptason, Emily Stowe,
Bill Irvine, Bill Jenkins, Philip Petursson. To be fully who we
are as a religious community we have to know, and we have to tell
stories, about our people, as Peg Gooding, a longtime religious
education director in Ottawa, knew full well.
Respect for our ancestors is our third theme.
I have a Hebrew word for our fourth and final theme: tikkun. Tikkun,
or more fully tikkun olam means repairing the world. It comes straight
from the ethical impulse of our Judeo-Christian heritage: the impulse
that tells us we must do something to mould the earth and its precious
cargo of life nearer to the heart’s desire. Healing the world
means justice. It means love. It means sharing power. It means sharing
wealth. It means taking care of the environment, of caring for all
creatures, and all living forms.
The second chapter of the first letter of John begins, “Beloved,
we are God’s children now; and it doth not yet appear what
we shall be.”
I do not know where our future lies. I only know it must grow out
of what we have been. From what has been I draw four themes:
Reason and evidence; naturalism; respect for our ancestors; tikkun.
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