"A Language for Life"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
January 3, 2010

As part of my preparation for ministry, during the summer between my first and second years of theological school, I served as a chaplain at South Suburban Hospital, a thirty minute commute from our condo on the south side of Chicago. Our clinical supervisor, a female African American Presbyterian minister, wanted us to get practice preaching, so each day at noon we held a worship service in the chapel, and we broadcast it on the Hospital TV channel into all the patient rooms. Of the six seminarians and three Resident chaplains, I was the only Unitarian Universalist. The others were Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, or Pentecostal, and all the other chaplains included lots of Bible readings, prayers to God and Jesus, and “Praise Music” in their services. Several of the chaplains routinely ended conversations with “Have a blest day.” Before seminary, I considered myself to be a UU humanist/ Buddhist, and I had left off using most religious language. That summer I found it a real challenge to be so fully immersed in Christian expressions. I knew that in order to become a minister I needed to learn how to help people with different religious beliefs, but I was pretty uncomfortable with all of the “God-talk.”
We visited every patient on our assigned floors of the hospital each day and always asked if they wanted a prayer. I had to do it in a way that was meaningful to them, and that often meant praying a Christian prayer, and at the same time I had to remain authentic to my own beliefs.

One day I visited an 80 year old patient, a retired Catholic priest. After talking with him about his condition for awhile, I asked his advice for me, a not so young but a still novice minister. He said, “Just be yourself. You have lots of experience to draw from. Care for people; show empathy…” His gracious answer made me feel he approved of what I was doing. As I began to take my leave, he asked me to give him a blessing. This took me back – it seemed a strange twist – for me, the not quite yet minister, to bless the retired priest. I suspected what he wanted was a specific kind of blessing, but I didn’t really know what he that would be. I stumbled through a prayer and then made a hasty retreat from his room. I think I did OK, but I was embarrassed. Later, I asked the Catholic and Lutheran chaplains about it. They told me the Priest wasn’t asking me for my personal blessing but wanted me to ask for a blessing on him from Jesus. Next time a Priest asks me for a blessing, I’ll know.

Bless me Father, Have a Blest Day, – these set phrases sound like Christian insider jargon to the rest of us. They made me feel like an outsider. I wished for a way we could convey blessings on each other and on patients that didn’t require membership in the same religious faction. I kept wondering, “Do we, as Unitarian Universalists, need some kind of religious language?” “Uh-Oh,” I can hear some of you saying, “I can understand why a Unitarian Universalist minister needs to be conversant with the terminology used in various religions, but why does the average UU need that? Why can't we just be spiritual but not religious?”

The majority of UUs are “Come-Outers,” that is people who left another faith tradition and eventually became UUs. Another portion of UUs were unchurched for most of their lives until they found UUism. Many Northern Hills members view themselves as refugees from Catholicism. Come-outers often unequivocally reject anything they associate with the religions of their past. They expect Unitarian Universalism to provide them a church with only the most basic forms of religious practice and discourse. For some UUs, singing “Spirit of Life, Come Unto Me” is as far as they want to go in expressing their spirituality, and for others even Spirit of Life goes too far.

There is no religious vocabulary on which all good Unitarian Universalists agree. It is not news that there is controversy about religious language in our church. Liberal religionists have always expressed differing opinions on religious language, just as we are still discussing it right here at Northern Hills. The controversy over how religious the language for our Principles and Purposes would be almost derailed the merger of Unitarians and Universalists back in 1961. When the Principles and Purposes were revised in 1984, the controversy surfaced again with a debate over whether to mention God or the Judeo-Christian tradition. A compromise, which leaves God and tradition out of the Principles and includes them in the Sources went too far for some and not far enough for others. In 2003, an address in Fort Worth by Bill Sinkford, then President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, ignited the controversy once again. In his address, Sinkford said:

“[The Principles and Purposes] serve us well as a covenant, holding out a vision of a more just world to which we all aspire despite our differences, and articulating our promise to walk together toward making that vision a reality, whatever our theology. They frame a broad ethic, but not a theology. They contain no hint of the holy…. I fear, in words borrowed from former UUA president Gene Pickett, that ‘they describe a process for approaching the religious depths but they testify to no intimate acquaintance with the depths themselves.’…I do feel that we need some language that would allow us to capture the possibility of reverence, to name the holy, to talk about human agency in theological terms-the ability of humans to shape and frame our world guided by what we find to be of ultimate importance.”

Sinkford, a long time ardent Humanist who now uses theistic language, explicitly stated in his address that he was not suggesting UUism return to traditional Christian language. However, he was misquoted in a Fort Worth newspaper, and sparks began to fly. UU Humanists, many of whom are atheists, felt beleaguered throughout the 1990s as they realized their non-theistic theology, or non-theology if you prefer, no longer dominated our movement. Now they thought our president had publicly called for Unitarian Universalism to use “God talk.”

Sinkford got the newspaper to retract its erroneous report, and his actual words were printed in several UU publications. At the 2003 and 2004 General Assemblies there were workshop sessions and forums in response to the uproar, and this book, A Language of Reverence, was published in 2004. It contains Sinkford’s speech and essays on the subject by several prominent UU ministers and theologians. I don’t think Sinkford meant to create controversy, and I believe he was right-on when he called for UUs to examine our ability to talk about our deepest religious experiences. This is a dilemma we have to solve for ourselves, and we need to do it in good conflict management style so that we remain a loving community.

Some of the heat came off Sinkford when he attributed the thesis for his Language of Reverence speech to a 2001 address entitled “Toward a Humanist Vocabulary of Reverence,” by the Rev. David Bumbaugh, a venerable UU minister, Meadville Lombard professor, and long time humanist hero. In his address, Bumbaugh said UUs have “manned the ramparts of reason and are prepared to defend the citadel of the mind against a renewal of superstition until the very end. But in the process of defending, we have lost the vocabulary of reverence, the ability to speak of that which is sacred, holy, of ultimate importance to us, the language that would allow us once more into critical dialogue with others.” In his address, Bumbaugh suggested that we need a new vocabulary of reverence with which we can tell the awesome story of the universe’s evolution and humanity’s part in it. A story he says is a religious one because it includes “a vision of reality that contains the sources of moral, ethical and transcendent self-understanding.” He sees humanity’s role in the universe’s evolution as making creation conscious of itself. “In us the universe is grasping for self-knowledge, for understanding and for insight.” One of the purposes of humanity is to articulate the meaning of creation.

Sinkford’s and Bumbaugh’s calls for a vocabulary of reverence fall in line with historical humanistic instincts. Charles Francis Potter was one of the pre-eminent Humanists of the first half of the 20th century. He was a Unitarian minister, briefly a Universalist minister, and a signer of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto. He saw humans as possessing the highest known form of consciousness. He believed people could cultivate what he called a ‘Creative Personality,” in which they saw their life as unified, with meaning to it, and with a felt relation to the universe. He credited people with the power to extend their personality to obtain a larger selfhood. Potter, who insisted everything be interpreted naturalistically, that is without resort to supernatural causes, using modern scientific knowledge, believed the ultimate goal for humanity was to achieve a state of ‘Cosmic Consciousness.’ He said Cosmic Consciousness might be obtained through reason and intuition, but more often it comes through a mystical experience. Describing “Cosmic Consciousness” Potter said, ‘The most significant point about the experience is that the person who awakes to the immensity, unity, and vibrant life of the universe has an overpowering feeling that he is related to it all even to the extent of identity. There is a sense of self-expansion to include all things. Matter has become alive and conscious in him.”

Potter and other early humanists struggled to break free from traditional religious language, insisting that modern people must base religion on modern knowledge and life experience. In his lifetime his religion evolved from Baptist through Unitarian and Universalist to Humanist, his theology from Theist to Atheist. Yet, he always recognized the need to talk about humanity’s cosmic connection to the universe, what our 7th Principle calls our connection to the interdependent web of all existence. At the behest of humanists, UUism has relinquished traditional religious language but in so doing we have made it almost impossible to express our desire for Transcendence, to declare our connection with the something larger than ourselves. Even humanists need to feel unity, in harmony with life. At times we crave it desperately, and nothing on earth seems enough to satisfy the urge. Islam calls these lonely cravings that grip and torture our hearts the ‘Roots of Heaven’.
Sufi poet Rumi gives expression to this yearning:

“We can’t help being thirsty,
moving toward the voice of water.
Milk-drinkers draw close
to the mother. Muslims, Christians, Jews,
Buddhists, Hindus, shamans,
everyone hears the intelligent sound
and moves, with thirst, to meet it.

Clean your ears. Don’t listen
for something you’ve heard before.

Invisible camel bell,
slight footfalls in sand.
Almost in sight! The first word they call out
will be the last word of our last poem.

There is a danger in over-analyzing Rumi or any ecstatic description of a mystical experience, but my interpretation of what he is saying here is that we begin to transcend our lonely selves by our very longing for meaning. You can keep this yearning inside-many mystics do-claiming it’s a mystery that cannot be said. Yet, some deep part of our being knows that in our yearning we are connected to every other human being in history. We all look for that one source of truth, of sustenance for our souls, which will make us whole. But talking about it is also a path to transcendence, and in so doing our search for truth benefits others. Expressing our ecstasy, grief, or love, sharing our spiritual stories, can help bring precious insights and meaning to the world.

Unitarian Universalists have always been known as “Bold minds [who ask] crucial and difficult questions about the universe and [take a shot at coming up with] working answers,” but we UUs are often just plain afraid to speak to others about our deepest religious feelings because we have no language of reverence. “To be [hu]man is to go on record about the nature of the mysterious universe around us.” It is a pity when our vocabulary only allows us to speak about these issues in trivial ways.

Partially out of respect for others, partially out of political correctness, and partially out of not knowing what to do, UUs have abandoned much of the religious language of our Christian heritage. In its place, we often use language from other cultures – from eastern religions, pagan, Native American. This is not a bad thing in itself. There is wisdom in all the worlds’ religions. For me, learning something about women and earth honoring religions and Buddhism provided a way to comparatively re-evaluate the Christian religion I grew up with. At this church I have heard Shalom, Namaste, Blessed Be, even Allahu Akbar. However, should UUs borrow religious words from others? There are many potential problems with using the language of other religions and cultures. When we appropriate other’s religious language do we offend the members of that culture? Can we be authentic or really understand another’s religion – especially if we only dabble in it? I think borrowing from any religious tradition is OK if we are respectful of it and of its practitioners. Most important is using language and spiritual practices that really work in our lives. In other words, do we have a vocabulary that answers our need for involvement in and transcendence of our human condition?

What shall we say about God – does she wear a red hat or a blue hat? Our story today taught us that this is a mystery, and we are better off leaving people to their own opinions about it. Can we resolve the Language of Reverence issue by including as many names as we can think of for God? On the ministers’ email chat one minister told how she helped her congregation deal with the Language of Reverence issue by having them sing “Bring Many Names” several times right after she started at her church. I think that song has a very good message for theists who want to expand beyond the traditional image of God as a gray bearded old man. However, Bring Many Names has always made me uncomfortable because it leaves no room for atheists.

Within Unitarian Universalism are theists, atheists and agnostics. Some are comfortable using god talk, some aren’t. We can each individually choose the vocabulary we use to talk about our ultimate concerns, and in the UU church we are encouraged to do that. We all need to be able to articulate our feelings about common human experiences such as: falling in love, winning or losing a football game, leaving home, losing God, finding faith, facing death. I encourage all new UUs to participate in our Build Your Own Theology course so they can find a comfort level talking about these kinds of things. If you have not taken this course, I invite you to join the new class which begins in a few weeks. However, religious language has to work not only for us as individuals; it has to work in our communities. We need to be able talk about our ultimate concerns – not only with our co-religionists, but also with our neighbors, co-workers and family members, and visitors to Northern Hills at coffee hour, people who may use religious language different from ours. That is why I believe UUism must remain open to using religious language of all types – even when some of it makes us uncomfortable.

Some religions make people fear using anything other than their customary religious language, but UUism imposes no such restrictions. That’s why the burden of creating interfaith dialog often falls to UUs. As the lone UU chaplain that summer years ago, I taught other budding ministers something about Unitarian Universalism, and we were all opened up to an exchange of ideas about each other’s religions. Today, if we keep ourselves open to people whose religious language may seem off-putting to us, we can learn from them in ways we never expected. If we make the effort to understand people of different faiths, to really understand their deepest feelings, we can love each other in spite of our differences. Building community and interfaith relationships in the Cincinnati area may be our unique role in the world. May we be brave enough to speak to others about the most important things in life.
Go - with my blessings - and make peace.