I believe that Unitarian Universalism is growing up. It’s
growing out of a cranky and contentious adolescence into a more
confident maturity in which we can not only claim our Good News,
the value
we have found in this free faith, but also begin to offer that
Good News to the world outside these beautiful sanctuary walls.
There is a new willingness on our part to come in from the margins.
I spent some time in early November in Dallas with the President’s
Council, a group of staunch UUA supporters who serve as advisors
to the Association.
The keynote presentation was given by Marlin Lavenhar, the dynamic young
senior minister serving at All Souls, Tulsa. In his talk, Marlin
wrestled with finding
a way to describe and talk about Unitarian Universalism.
The next morning, Jim Sherbloom led the worship–he’s a successful
business person who is now, in midlife, a divinity student. He tackled the
same subject from a liberal Christian perspective. The interesting thing was
that neither speaker drew heavily on our Principles and Purposes, which is
where most of us turn when we are asked to describe Unitarian Universalism.
So I went and reread the Principles and Purposes. I know, I know. . .I’m
supposed to know them by heart. But as I reread them, I realized that we have
in our Principles an affirmation of our faith that uses not one single piece
of religious language. Not even one word that would be considered traditionally
religious. And that is a wonderment to me; I wonder whether this kind of language
can adequately capture who we are and what we’re about.
Our Principles and Purposes date to the merger of the Unitarian
and Universalist movements in 1961, when the effort to find
wording acceptable
to all–Unitarian,
Universalist, Humanist, and Theist–nearly derailed the whole
process.
The current revision of our Principles and Purposes dates back
to 1984. It deals with the thorny question of whether or not
to mention
God
or the Judeo-Christian
tradition by leaving them out of the Principles entirely, but including
them in the section on the sources from which our living tradition
draws. It was
here that we placed reference to “Jewish and Christian teachings, which
call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves,” as
well as “Humanist teachings, which counsel us to heed the guidance of
reason and the results of science, and warn against idolatries of the mind
and spirit.” And even that compromise went too far for those in our movement
who feared “creeping creedalism,” and not far enough for
those who would have preferred more explicitly religious language.
