On Our Principles

In her recent UU World reflection, Meg Barnhouse exhorts Unitarian Universalists to approach the Seven Principles in a more concrete, embodied way. Try attaching “beginning in our homes and congregations” to each line, she commends practitioners. Extending her own advice, she finally arrives at the following observation: "If I start with my own heart, the demands of our Principles get even heavier. Peace and compassion in my heart? Justice too? Freedom as well?"

It is often easier and, hence, more enchanting to treat the Principles as abstractions, as lofty ideals. I admire Barnhouse's desire to re-focus our attention on the immanent and urgent messiness of being-in-the-world. Interestingly, her intuition that the demands of justice begin in "my own heart" resonates with Francis Greenwood Peabody's compelling assertion that "the individual and the kingdom grow together." For Peabody, Jesus addresses the individual in an attempt to reanimate the social: "The kingdom is to come, answers Jesus, not by outward force or social organization or apocalyptic dream, but by the progressive sanctification of individual human souls." Martin Buber shares this orientation as well: Political uprisings “are futile and bound to be self-destructive so long as a new structure of genuinely communal human life is not born out of the soul’s renewal."

It is no accident, thus, that the Seven Principles begin with the individual and conclude with the collective. As Peabody suggests: "the social order is not a product of mechanism but of personality, and that personality fulfils itself only in the social order."


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What Would Unitarian Universalists Tweet?

I'm currently working on a project that addresses issues in online ministerial identity. One section of the paper discusses the Twitterverse - which led to the following question: what would a 140 character UU elevator speech look like?

I warmly welcome your thoughts and responses - please, be as creative as you like!

Thanksgiving Blessing

Today's shabad reads: "The beautiful fragrance of sandalwood emanates from the sandalwood tree, and attaches to the other trees of the forest" (SGGS 1351). As we gather with friends and loved ones to share in a Thanksgiving meal, may we humble ourselves in gratitude for the bread of life; may we heal wounds and bridge chasms; may we emanate the beautiful fragrance of tenderness, inspiriting the forest with soft wisps of care.

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The Unshaken Cave

Today's shabad asks: Where is that cave, within which one may remain unshaken? (SGGS 943)

We might be tempted to answer material wealth, but markets crash and homes foreclose.
We might be tempted to answer occupation, but bosses fire and firms let off.
We might be tempted to answer love, but partners pass and families meddle.
We might be tempted to answer death, but memory resurrects and love sustains.

Where is that cave, within which one may remain unshaken?

When we open to the world and lean into God's grace,
Life shakes with pain and passion
But we remain unshaken.


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Autumnal Blessing

God of sinking light -
God of growing night -
Ripe with budding hopes, we pause for spitting snows.
Sleeping into shadows, we hallow fading glows.
"Nothing gold can stay" ablaze,
The tumbling leaves depart;
Yet may this holy harvest warm
Our body, mind and heart.


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The Soil of Human Flourishing

In an 1814 collection of sermons, Rev. James Freeman, former minister of King's Chapel, contends that the best form of prosperity is being rich in good works. He considers human life “a soil, where every kind of seed will vegetate” if you water and nurture it. You plant your own garden. You plant your own life. But just as your plot of land draws its nutrients from sources beyond itself, so too the fertility of your soil directly impacts the plants around you. You affect, and are affected by, the ecosystem of which you are a part.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Freeman observed how “the air [was] filled with the seeds of vice.” He therefore exhorted his parishioners to “Pluck up…the weeds of evil, as soon as they appear.” Two hundred years later, Freeman’s advice remains frightfully relevant. We, too, must pluck up the weeds of excess and irresponsibility. Instead of living way beyond our means, we should adopt the practice of self-emptying. We should release ourselves from gratuitous desire. We should lose a life of surfeit in order to gain a life of sustainability.

Our garden depends on it. The soil of the world, literally, depends on it.

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Freedom and Grace

Actions should reflect sincere intention, ethical behavior should issue forth from interior conviction, our hands should do the work of the soul. In his 1831 tract Formation of the Christian Character, Henry Ware Jr. articulates this mantra in the following way: "It is not the external conduct, not the observance of the moral law alone, which constitutes a religious man: but the principles from which he acts, the motives by which he is governed, the state of his heart.”

Today's shabad appears to share this orientation:

ਅੰਤਰੁ ਮੈਲਾ ਬਾਹਰੁ ਨਿਤ ਧੋਵੈ ॥ ਸਾਚੀ ਦਰਗਹਿ ਅਪਨੀ ਪਤਿ ਖੋਵੈ ॥
If a person is polluted within, he may wash himself everyday on the outside, but in the Court of the True Lord, he forfeits his honor.
[SGGS 1151]

For Ware, the human subject possesses the agency to enact this transformation: "Remember always, that you are capable of being more devout, more charitable, more humble, more devoted and earnest in doing good, better acquainted with religious truth." The burden falls on the individual to ascend to higher moral ground. Similarly, the Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji exhorts disciples to position their "feet on the right path."

Importantly, however, neither text falls prey to a belligerent super-human idealism. We always need God. Ware insists: "these two things, then, may be regarded as axioms of the religious life; first, that a man's own labors are essential to his salvation; second, that his utmost virtue does nothing toward purchasing or meriting salvation." This poignant dialectic of deterministic freedom echoes in Guru Nanak's assertion: "Without the Name of the Lord, everything is false." We always need grace. We always need one another.

We are caught, it seems, in a web of freedom and constraint.

In Jean Paul Sartre's novel La Nausée, protagonist Antoine Roquentin suddenly comes to realize the existential inertia of life: "This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder…in a frightful, obscene nakedness." And yet, while casually listening to the syncopating sounds of Sophie Tucker's jazz, Antoine comes to realize that we stake our humanity on small acts of creative transcendence - I would add: small acts of love, faith and, above all, grace.

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