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February 25, 2007
A Universalist Ethos Rev. Barbara J. Pescan
New Member Welcome Sunday Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois
I am a Universalist Unitarian Universalist. I came to the Akron UU church with my family the same year as the merger of the Universalist church of America and the American Unitarian Association. The Akron church had been a Universalist congregation since 1811, 150 years. It was in that congregation that I came to learn the ethos of Universalism. My family learned the spirit of that community first hand when my father was diagnosed with central nervous system degeneration. Quite simply, they were there for us. From the minister on through, they were there for us through his inappropriate behaviors and his forgetfulness, his fears and his rages. They never let him go. They never let us go.
Though the two denominations merged in 1961, the flavor of each continues in the Unitarian Universalist Association. Some congregations reflect more of one than the other; some are a blending of both. Some members still refuse to recognize the merger, and claim they never signed on to be a Unitarian or signed on to be a Universalist. But, we UUs really are a plurality, really are both, and more.
Around the time of merger people used to joke about the differences between Unitarians and Universalists. Unitarians were said to be intellectual and scholarly; to believe, as one divine said, in one God…at the most. They were urban, East coast, reserved, stuffy and disparaging of anything that came from West of the Berkshires. They brought a greater number of parishioners to the new association than the Universalists.
The Universalists were said to be rural, suspicious of the clergy, were not too intellectual, were more mystical, felt they had direct access to the divine without benefit of clergy intercession; were impatient with too much head stuff. They were said by Unitarians to be wont to wear white socks with formal wear. They were social activists who worked for abolition and women’s right and suffrage long before most Unitarian spokesmen supported such causes. They did not believe in hell, but believed that a loving God would save all humankind. Universalists brought fewer members but most of the money to the new association.
Thomas Starr king, a Universalist minister of the mid-nineteenth century was the first minister called to the Unitarian church in San Francisco, he said he was leaving the libraries of Boston for the West, to see if I am made of anything. He was the author of an old witticism that goes this way: Universalists “believe that God is too good to damn them” for all eternity, and Unitarians hold that people like themselves were simply too good to be damned.
Though both denominations, in the 19th century, had a growing faith in human ability, Unitarians emphasized human free will and the ability to earn salvation by our own effort. Universalists had their optimistic view of humanity, too, but stressed that God’s loving concern for us and God’s intervention would bring about the salvation of all souls who would be united with God in heaven. For nineteenth century Universalists, there was no hell. In the preface to the 15th edition of Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement, in 1959, my home church minister, Gordon McKeeman, wrote: “The Universalist Church was gathered to promote a belief in the final good result of the human venture, and was founded upon the brilliant insight that [individuals] inevitably move toward the good.” In addition, McKeeman wrote,
The doctrine proclaimed by Universalists is in essence this: Individuals are so made that they can move only toward what appears (or feels) to them to be good. If, then, they progressively learn what promotes their wholeness, they will work, study and consecrate themselves to its attainment.
Now, I ask you, what on earth are we to do in the 21st century with that lovely, lyrical description of the human enterprise? Given what Gordon McKeeman had known, even in 1959, of war and holocaust, of atom bombs and Joseph McCarthy; given what we know now about humans’ propensity for brutality and militant hard heartedness --- what are we to make of that Universalist doctrine?
I cannot look at the world entire; nor can I keep in the width of my sight the long line of human history. What we might do is keep in view the few things closest to us. I will make a brief digression here about history.
I grew up not liking to study history, which is a bad habit. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it, George Santayana said. But, as it was taught to me in those dark ages of high school and most of college it seemed to me that history was always one bloody battle after another, and one insane monarch after inept monarch in endless succession.
Of the three history courses in my undergraduate work that held my attention one was an eight a.m. course on Civilization, ancient and modern; one was a course in Old English language and literature; and the other was a survey course in English literature. Each teacher taught as if he loved his subject. All three told us about the economics, politics and social world of the times. They made archaic language and obscure references accessible.
In seminary I was required to take courses in church history. The first course was team taught by professors from several of the schools in our consortium. Each lecture was given by a different post-Reformation Christian – someone from the Lutheran school, the Episcopal school, the non-denominational school and the Baptist school.
In addition, we were required to attend a preceptorial, an additional three-hour session with one of the lecturers, in a smaller group, to ask questions and get into the particularities of our own denomination’s slant on the history.
Our seminary did not have anyone giving a preceptorial. I signed up for the Lutheran lecturer’s session because Dr. Goeser was a lucid lecturer and had the reputation for being a madman behind the lectern. He was passionate for the material and never failed to make it interesting.
The third week of the preceptorial I apprehended a great truth. Dr. Goeser was lecturing about how the stories about Jesus of Nazareth became canon in the early church. He was pacing rapidly around the front of the lecture room, gesturing wildly as he hissed and breathed fire about the writings of the apostles.
I caught some of his excitement. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the men and women around Jesus to know such a gentle and passionate man. How it must have been to hear the stories first hand, to be called from one’s other work with so clear a demand, and to have one’s life forever changed.
That’s when I understood that no matter what the gospel writers wrote down, it would never capture the experience of those first people who heard the stories from Jesus himself, who broke bread with the man himself, and who walked with him into a new covenant.
I understood that the attempts to wring the meaning out of the gospel, however one interprets it, indeed, out of any “good news,” is impossible unless one also has a life-changing experience equal to the direction and magnitude of those who were there at the beginning.
The way I formulated that for myself was this way: The farther away from the Christ Event the Early Christians got, the more generations removed from the man and that first group of disciples, the more they wrote down, codified and canonized. But, if the life was not to go out of the message, it was also important for them to experience new formative events, new events of moment, that had equal meaning and made equally potent demands on them for change and commitment to new life.
What I have understood from this history lesson was: Each person has to have her own or his own conversion experience. Each person has to have his or her own ‘coming out’ experience – coming out of the old life and into the new. Stories help put one in the mood, and can shake loose one’s old ways of thinking. Any body of word that is called gospel is a signpost that can tell us where we are headed or where we have just been. A ritual can mark the passage. People can encourage you from the sidelines, the edges of the road. But the event itself, the moment of doubt and despair, of triumph or desolation, the instant of knowing – has to be experienced by each one of us, over and over again.
More than that, I find that I have to continue to be re-born, to convert again from habits of sadness or dullness. I have to rouse my wintry heart, grown closed and hard in some long or brief weather of dullness, and rediscover my open heart.
Some of us never move beyond that falling into despair. Snatched from the familiar ways where we found comfort, we might turn away forever from belief. We might even turn away from the struggle to find out why we might need to have faith in something, or to live faithful to some ideal or promise. I can imagine feeling so lost. I have felt so lost.
When we are that lost, the words are dead words, and religion is only going through the motions. So, two things happened for me in Dr. Goeser’s church history preceptorial: first, I quit the course. Those were the days at Starr King School when you could get credit for a course and for life experience if you wrote an adequate explanation of what you had learned from it. I did that. And my seminary gave me a passing grade for the course. But, beyond that, learned that I understood in my bones a basic precept of Unitarian Universalism: the value of first hand experience of what one finds of ultimate concern.
The ethos of Universalism is, for me, the strength and persistence of what McKeeman said this way: “The Universalist Church was gathered to promote a belief in the final good result of the human venture, and was founded upon the brilliant insight that [individuals] inevitably move toward the good.”
The evening of that day we got the news about my father’s illness, I went to a class at church. Dr. McKeeman had been leading us in an exploration he called “Doing Religion,” leading us to discern our own theology and practice. That particular evening he was out of town and our religious education director, Ruth Herrold, led the class. I told them that my father was in the hospital and the doctor’s had discovered what was happening to his brain.
That was the first time in my life I had experienced such warmth and caring from a group of people not my family. They talked about my father with love --- about his intelligence, his humor, his wonderful tenor voice. That night they gave me the gift of my healthy father, in the midst of my despair before the prognosis of his degenerative condition.
The next week, when Dr. McKeeman returned to lead the class, at the beginning he had us stand in a circle, as usual, and invoke the peace and understanding to listen to each other speak. And, he said, there is one more here with us tonight. Even though George Pescan is across town in Akron General Hospital, he is among us. Let us speak together knowing George is with us, too.
My heart was changed. It continued to turn and to open until, four months later, I began to discover a call to ministry. That gift of community, of ministry and community, has given my father back to me in times when my memory has lost his goodness. That gift of community in that Universalist UU church has given my work back to me when I have misplaced my sense of vocation. The gift of individuals and community in this church has opened my heart again when I have felt it closed up tight.
The Universalist ethos begins to be visible in the presence of loving people who promise never to close their hearts against each other. It is manifest when we go on to create in the world such conditions that invite the good from others, from even those poorest in spirit, hardest of heart. The spirit of Universalism is not a personal thing, although the human heart is its greenhouse, its seeding place.
I think about Oprah’s leadership school for girls in Africa; and I think about other philanthropies whose gifts create the conditions for the human spirit to flower where, unattended, it would wither and blow away. We might think of public servants who keep an eye on the core of human life --- health and learning and freedom from fear --- and who do what they do in order to enhance the public trust. We might think of Nobel Peace Prize recipients whose work has been noticed and rewarded by a committee and a trust begun with the wealth of Alfred Nobel, an armaments manufacturer.
In a sermon, Dr. McKeeman once quoted someone who said something like, “It amazes me that while Jesus went about doing good that I am so often simply satisfied with just going about.” The old Universalists were do-gooders, no doubt about it. And, without doubt, we are their heirs. Their big heart is in this place. They brought fewer members to our merger in 1961 because by then their message that God is love had become mainstreamed into other Christian denominations. But, they brought more of the money. They also brought with them the insistence that each human being is of inherent worth and dignity, and that our work, our vocation is to be about creating a world in which that worth and dignity may grow and flower and seed more good.
I am a Universalist Unitarian Universalist. Or, let me say that on my best days that is who I try to be. And, I say Amen to that. Amen.
Benediction – a poem of Hafiz
If God invited you to a party and said,
Unitarian Church of Evanston
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