Diligent Joy

An excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love on happiness….

What is “diligent joy”? :  “I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think of happiness as a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your inner contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distres but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”

Which takes us to”diligent joy”:    “As I focus on Diligent Joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once–that all the sorrow and all the trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-’n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, nor merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.”

In light of all this:   I am profoundly inspired by the children of the Tennessee Valley UU Church involved in the play that was to be performed during that fateful Sunday morning when all hell broke loose, who, during the healing service led by UUA President Bill Sinkford, sang these words from Annie:

The sun’ll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There’ll be sun!
Just thinkin’ about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
‘Til there’s none! 

When I’m stuck a day
That’s gray,
And lonely,
I just stick out my chin
And Grin,
And Say,
Oh! 

The sun’ll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
‘Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
I love ya Tomorrow!
You’re always
A day
A way!

“The congregation,” says Annette Marquis, “spontaneously joined in singing with them, and after a few seconds, when the impact of this moment had sunk in, the crowd erupted into applause, tears, shouts, cheers, and many more tears. As the cast finished their grande finale, they took their long-awaited bows to an adoring, grief-stricken, and healing audience.”

Now this is Unitarian Universalism at its best. It’s diligent joy.

Gathering to Bear Witness

I’d like to share the words I spoke at UUCA’s vigil this past Monday, as we held the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville at the center of our thoughts and prayers:

 

We are gathered here this evening because of a human tragedy. Yesterday, a shooting occurred at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. Two people died, another 12 or so were treated for minor wounds, and five continue to be in critical condition. The suspect, Jim Adkisson, opened fire inside the church, during a youth performance of “Annie,” at about 10:18 a.m. His only connection to the church seems to be that his ex-wife used to be a long-time member there.

 

It is a human tragedy, and we gather to bear witness to the sorrows and sufferings that humans are prone to and inflict on each other. Whereas we Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, at times like these we are reminded that inherent worth does not automatically translate to worthwhile action in the world. What is potentially worthwhile may not become actual. Two wolves exist within every breast; one is for good, another is for evil, and life is a journey of making choices about which one of the wolves we feed.

 

Human tragedy gathers us here together this evening. And we gather in solidarity with our brother and sister Unitarian Universalists across the land, right at this very moment, all across the land, for this tragedy has struck close to home. Some of us have friends at the church in Knoxville—we see them regularly at various national and district events and gatherings, including most recently at the Southeast Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute (or SUUSI).

 

There is this—and then there is the knowledge that violence profaned and sullied one of our worship services, shattered sanctuary space and time. This in itself is so deeply disturbing. Reverence is so very fragile. Peace is so very fragile.

 

Finally, you may have heard some of the most recent reports about the suspect Jim Adkisson’s context and motives. The Associated Press reports that he recently received a letter from the state of Tennessee telling him that the food stamps he had been receiving would be reduced or eliminated. Jim Adkisson, already prone to violence in solving his problems—his ex-wife had put out a restraining order on him—was frustrated about being out of work, not being able to get a job. Which he blamed on liberal values and social policies. This is what he did. So he brought all this resentment and all this blame, and he decided he’d take it out on a Unitarian Universalist congregation with a liberal track record—which is so ironic, since last I heard, it’s liberal values and social policies at their best that fight against economic injustice and try to help people like Jim.

 

It’s a human tragedy, and we bear witness. Whether or not we know people from the Knoxville church, our grief and sadness and anger overflow. It is so hard to comprehend senseless violence on this scale, or the monumental misunderstanding that underlies it.

 

At times like this, you might find yourself wanting to know as many details about what happened as possible; you may find yourself glued to the TV or to the internet. Others of you may want to get as much distance away from this as you can. People respond to tragedies like this in different ways, and all of these ways of coping are normal.

 

Please treat yourself and others with care and compassion. It’s also true that a moment like this can trigger memories of times when tragedy visited us and left us feeling out of control in our own lives. The personal impact of a tragedy like this can’t be underestimated. Please treat yourself and others with care and compassion.

 

Dr. Nadine Kaslow, from the Emory School of Medicine, says that one of the best things that can happen in a messy time like this is to take things step by step. She says, “One of the things you can do is let people talk, let them share their stories, let them talk about what they want, but also sometimes, they’re going to want to be distracted, and that’s okay too. Appreciate that everybody has a different way of responding.”

 

In a moment, this is exactly what we’ll be turning to. After a time of prayer, Rev. Keller will lead us in a time of sharing, in which we can share our thoughts and our feelings and so begin the work of healing. 

 

But before we get there, though, I need to mention that we gather here this evening not just to bear witness to a human tragedy. We also gather to bear witness to the human spirit at its best, which mourns and rejects violence, which comprehends the violence that it is always capable of and yet chooses the better way of peace, works for peace and justice.

 

The human spirit at its best, represented by our coming together as Unitarian Universalists, undaunted by the events of yesterday, courageously standing up for our liberal faith and works though they be misunderstood, though they put us in places of risk….

 

The human spirit at its best, which, with Gandhi, says that “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall—think of it, always.”

 

The human spirit at its best, which was so fully demonstrated in the example of one of the Knoxville church members, Greg McKendry, who sacrificed himself so that others might live. Greg McKendry, said a fellow church member, “stood in front of the gunman and took the blast to protect the rest of us.” Another church member made this comment: He “was a very large gentleman, one of those people you might describe as a refrigerator with a head. He looked like a football player. He stood up and put himself in between the shooter and the congregation.”

 

This is the human spirit at its best—and we gather today to witness this as well. Not to forget it, even as we are faced with the evil that people can do. There are two wolves in my heart and in yours; one is for good, another is for evil, and life is a journey of making choices about which one of the wolves we feed.

 

Today, we bear witness to the sorrows and the joys of that journey.

Free Resource on Confronting Gun Violence

I received a heartfelt reply to my previous post about the shootings in Knoxville from Ryan, who pointed out that there is a free resource for congregations on confronting gun violence offered through Christianity Today. Here is Ryan’s complete comment, together with the link to the resource:

“This is such a tragic and unwelcome reminder of the pain and brokenness in our sinful world. Our prayers go out to our brothers and sisters in Tennessee as they mourn in this time of loss. I pray that, though difficult, events like this will help unify the church in the hope of the Gospel.

I was thinking about this today and found that Christianity Today is offering a free resource called “Confronting Gun Violence.” I’ll include the link below for any of you who are interested. While we can never predict when an act of violence might occur, this download offers some precautionary measures churches can take to safeguard their people and facilities.

Again, my deepest sympathies go out to our friends in Knoxville and I pray that we can learn to prevent such tragedies in the days to come.”

http://store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/clink?yhst-78230354700659+8NQpna+cogunviatchd.html

Letter to My Congregation Regarding the Knoxville Shootings

Just wanted to share the letter I sent to my congregation, regarding the Knoxville shootings. I sent it before learning of the deaths of the two UUs.

 

Dear UUCA Members and Friends,

 

As you may already know, today (Sunday) a shooting occurred at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee where seven people reportedly suffered serious wounds and are in critical condition, while another 12 were treated for minor wounds. The suspect opened fire inside the church at about 10:18 a.m. He had no connection to the church.

 

We feel such anguish for the Knoxville congregation right now. Some of us have friends at this church—we see them regularly at various national and district events and gatherings, including the Southeast Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute (or SUUSI). Whether or not we know people from this church, our grief and sadness and anger overflow. It is so hard to comprehend senseless violence on this scale.

 

Please keep the Knoxville congregation in your thoughts and prayers in this time. There will be a vigil in the UUCA sanctuary this Monday at 7:15pm—please join us.

 

In the rest of this pastoral letter, I’d like to (1) offer up some resources that might be helpful to you right now, (2) say a little about how people cope in times like this, and (3) remind you about some pastoral care resources at UUCA that you can tap into, as necessary.

 

Resources

 

àUUA Trauma Response Ministry Web Site: Contains many helpful resources for times like this (look under “resources”): http://www.traumaministry.org/

 

à“Talking to children about tragedies”: http://www.simplemommysecrets.com/Pages/ArtBMI14.htm

 

àA poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” by Wendell Berry:

 

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

à“Words for When I’m Wordless,” by Therese Borchard: http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2007/04/words-for-when-im-wordless.html

 

àA Buddhist prayer: “May Fear Be Cleared Away” by Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden

May the pain of every living being
Be completely cleared away.
May I be the doctor and the medicine
And may I be the nurse
For all sick beings in the world
Until everyone is healed…
May the frightened cease to be afraid
And those bound be freed.  

 

àA theistic prayer, by Rev. Dr. Mark Richardson (adapted): “Prayer in the Aftermath of Tragedy”

God of the swirling stars and spinning planets,
the universe barely holds our grief this day.

We struggle to understand the tragedy of violence whenever it strikes,
and now in the aftermath of unspeakable horrors
at the Knoxville UU Church.

There is no comprehending the loss and heartache we feel.
Apprehension stirs in our hearts and minds.
Questions of why and how have barely formed on our lips
when we realize how inadequate and ill timed they are.

As we grieve, we are bound together in prayer.
Bring comfort, we pray, to everyone touched by this tragedy.

Bring peace to all whose hearts are broken.

Bring solace to the family of the gunman.
Help your people everywhere to live courageously,
not being overcome by anxiety or fear,
but overcoming even these in the spirit of love.

May we embrace one another and all people in peace,
and walk together into the future with hope.

 

On Coping

 

At times like this, you might find yourself wanting to know as many details about what happened as possible; you may find yourself glued to the TV or the internet. Others of you may want to get as much distance away from this as you can. People respond to tragedies like this in different ways, and all of these ways of coping are normal.

 

The personal impact of a tragedy like this can’t be underestimated. A moment like this can trigger memories of times when tragedy visited us and left us feeling out of control in our own lives. Please treat yourself with care and compassion.

 

Dr. Nadine Kaslow, from Emory School of Medicine, says that one of the best things that can happen in a messy time like this is to take things step by step and to help each other. She says, “One of the things you can do is let people talk, let them share their stories, let them talk about what they want, but also sometimes, they’re going to want to be distracted, and that’s okay too. Appreciate that everybody has a different way of responding.”

 

Some Care Resources Available at UUCA

 

There will be a vigil this Monday at 7:15pm in the UUCA sanctuary

 

Our UUCA Lay ministers provide pastoral care in the form of home and hospital visits during times of personal crisis and are available to provide longer term pastoral support to members. For pastoral care needs please contact the UUCA Office at 404.634.5134 and request to have a lay minister call you. You may also contact the lay ministers directly by emailing us at layministers@uuca.org

 

For assistance with families and children, please contact UUCA’s Director of Religious Education, Pat Kahn at 404.634.5134 or pkahn@uuca.org

 

Blessings,

 

Rev. Anthony David

Rev. Marti Keller

On “Repelling Fewer Visitors”

Just a short comment, which relates to the UUA Presidential Campaign. As I understand things, BOTH candidates affirm the importance of repelling fewer visitors. Thus Rev. Hallman talks about the importance of maintaining clean, attractive nurseries, which is key to not repelling young families.

As I see it, neither candidate ”owns” this very important issue. 

On Righteous Indignation

I have been struck, over and over, by the righteous indignation that various people over the past several years have expressed over the fate of the Pathways Large Church Start Up, using such language as “the Pathways fiasco.” Clearly, it did not grow into large size rapidly, as per the initial plan, which had been formulated by many many people. Whatever the flaws in this plan might have been, or in its implementation, I think it is critical that we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Many UUA staffers and leading ministers in our movement tried to do a new thing—they experimented with a new way of beginning churches. It is this spirit of innovation that we need to continue supporting and cultivating, even as we work hard to improve things on the implementation and accountability end.

 

Let’s learn the many lessons of the first Rapid Start Large Church—some positive, some not so positive—and move on. WellSprings (the second large church start-up–see http://www.wellspringsuu.org/app/) surely has; they have benefited tremendously from the lessons of Pathways—and this, of course, was one of the purposes of the Pathways project: through trial and error, to develop a sound, detailed blueprint  that could be used by other rapid-start congregations. (Why is it, by the way, that people have demanded perfection out of a project which was, from the start, supposed to have been “trial-and error”?)

 

We need to thank our innovators and encourage them, rather than tear them down, subject them to ridicule. Unless we do this, we cut off our nose to spite our face. We paralyze ourselves. We become a movement that is too freighted with self-criticism and self-condemnation to be imaginative and playful. And, since imagination and playfulness are the doorway to essential creativity, this is serious business.  

 

Reflections on the UUA presidency and growing UUism

Now that the race for the UUA Presidency has started, and the two candidates are casting their growth visions for our movement, I am mindful of an ancient story…

…about a mouse who was in constant distress because of its fear of the cat. A magician took pity on it and turned it into a cat. But then it became afraid of the dog. So the magician turned it into a dog. Then it began to fear the panther. So the magician turned it into a panther. Whereupon it was full of fear for the hunter. At this point the magician gave up. He turned it into a mouse again saying, “Nothing I do for you is going to be of any help because you have the heart of a mouse.”

This is a story for us to consider seriously. We can talk about “repelling fewer visitors” all day long–we can enumerate specific mechanical (magical) strategies which promise (although it’s really more presumption) to ensure temporary numerical growth. But the real issue has always been and continues to be: what is the state of our hearts? What is the inner dimension of Unitarian Univeralism that connects people with the sacred, heals relationships, and changes lives? What is the courage and conviction that will make us mice unafraid of cats, dogs, panthers, hunters, and all else that gets in our way?

There is a huge distance between “repelling fewer visitors” and people being swept up into a way of life that is adventurous and transformative and healing. With the latter, people are guaranteed to stay a while–rather than being initially excited but then eventually discouraged and disappointed.

I want the next UUA president to focus on the heart of our “mouse” movement. The issue is not centrally about numbers or size; numbers and size are byproducts of something far more important, which is clarity of purpose, a sense of adventure, and the availability of effective practices that grow our souls.

The virtue of hyphenated religious identity

I commend to you an article in The Unitarian Universalist Christian (Volume 58 2003), by Peter Huff, entitled “Gandhi, King, and the Virtue of Hyphenated Religious Identity.”

Peter Huff begins by telling this story. “In May 1833, the S. S. Tuscany departed Boston Harbor for a journey half-way round the world. [While there was nothing particularly unusual about such a venture, what was genuinely unique] was its cargo. It was loaded with a renewable New England natural resource that would dramaically transform traditional Indian foodways and make American entrepreneur Frederick Tudor a cool fortune. The product was ice. Cut in blocks from frozen New England ponds, packed in felt and sawdust for the long overseas haul, and stored in specially constructed facilities in India’s bustling port cities, ice joined cotton and tea in the nineteenth century as one of the staples of Indo-American trade.

“Henry David Thoreau, intimately acquainted with the wintertime harvesting of ice from his beloved Walden Pond, was perhaps the only American capable of detecting any sort of spiritual dimension in this new international enterprise. [...] In his own classic Walden, he concluded his chapter on “The Pond in Winter” with an engaging meditation on the parallel between his cabin-door view of workmen cutting ice for foriegn markets and his emerging insight into the significance of the East-West encounter….

“Thus it appears [says Thoreau] that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta…. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”  

With this, Peter Huff goes on to talk about the mingling of East and West in his own life. He says, “It makes it virtually impossible for me now to describe the condition of my spiritual life in categories drawn exclusively from a single religious tradition.” Then he talks about how this condition is “ultimately attributable to a long-term commitment to the cultivation of interior dialogue.” He says, “For about half a century, proponents of ecumenical and interfaith dialogue have argued that the true beginning point for genuine dialogue among religions is within the inner life of the individual person. In the 1960s, Catholic monk Thomas Merton … spoke eloquently of the need to ‘contain all divided worlds in ourselves.’ Since Merton, many of us dedicated to the wider ecumenism of interfaith work hae deliberately attempted to shift dialogue from a U.N.-style encounter of external forces to a deep interior meeting on traditions within our own experience.”

“What we are only now beginning to realize is that once this process of inner dialogue has been initiatied religious identity takes on an unexpected and unpredictable life of its own. In a context where, as theologian Catherine Cornille has observed, ‘the idea of belonging exclusively to one religious tradition or of drawing from only one set of spiritual, symbolic, or ritual resources is no longer self-evident,’ pluralism becomes much more than simply an objective description of outward cultural diversity. It becomes an inward state of being a new way of seeing reality…”

While Peter Huff has more to say in his article, I’ll conclude with his important observation that hypenated religious identity (or interspirituality, dual citizenship, or multiple religious belonging) should not be dismissed as “a harmless middle-class recreation, just another designer New Age adventure in suburban captivity.”  He says, “For Thoreau, the mingling of Walden and Ganges waters irrigated an already deeply-rooted sense of self-reliance that gave rise to an emerging radical tradition in American thought. For Vietnamese activist Thich Nhat Hanh … hyphenated religious identity enhances a degree of critical engagement with culture that poses a serious challenge to the materialism and nihilism of a decadent and secular West.”

And THIS is when Peter Huff starts to talk about the hyphenated religious identities of Ghandi and MLK…. 

Notes on “How to Find Your Mission in Life”

Notes on How to Find Your Mission in Life (by Richard Nelson Bolles)

 

What life is like when people are living their mission: “We now have a strong desire for living combine with a strange carelessness about dying. We desire life like water and yet are ready to drink death like wine.” (G. K. Chesterton)

 

Three aspects of Mission (according to Bolles)

 

First aspect: “to seek to stand hour by hour in the conscious presence of God, the One from whom your Mission is derived.”

·         Mission is shared with all others

·         Requires unlearning the idea that our Mission is primarily to keep busy doing something—it’s more about learning how to BE a Son and Daughter of God

·         “Before we go searching for ‘what work was I sent here to do?’ we need to establish or in a truer sense reestablish contact with this ‘One From Whom We Came and The One to Whom We Shall Return.’ […] [B]y the very act of being born into a human body, it is inevitable that we undergo a kind of amnesia… We wander on earth as an amnesia victim. To seek after Faith, therefore, is to seek to climb back out of that amnesia. Religion or faith is the hard reclaiming of knowledge we once knew as a certainty.” “But we are ever recalled to do what we came here to do: that without rejecting the joy of the physicalness of this life, such as the love of the blue sky and the green grass, we are to reach out beyond all this to recall and receive a spiritual interpretation of our life. Beyond the physical and within the physicalness of this life, to detect a Spirit and a Person from beyond this earth who us with us and in us…”

·         Cf. Rabbi Steinsaltz: “every descent is for the sake of ascension; when we fall, what we get is the opportunity to pick ourselves up and perhaps be even stronger than we would have been had we not fallen.”

 

Second aspect: “to do what you can, moment by moment, day by day, step by step, to make this world a better place, following the leading and guiding of God’s Spirit within you and around you.”

·         Mission is shared with all others

·         Requires unlearning the idea that everything about our Mission must be unique to us

·         “But instead of the mountaintop, we find ourselves in the valley—wandering often in a fog. And the voice in our ear says something quite different from what we thought we would hear. It says, “Your mission is to take one step at a time, even when you don’t yet see where it is all leading, or what the Grand Plan is, or what your overall mission in life is. Trust Me; I will lead you.”

·         “In every situation you find yourself, you have been sent here to do whatever you can—moment by moment—that will bring more gratitude, more kindness, more forgiveness, more honesty, and more love into this world. There are dozens of such moments every day. Moments when you stand—as it were—at a spiritual crossroads, with two ways lying before you. […] It all devolves, in the end, into just two roads before you, every time. The one will lead to less gratitude, less kindness, less forgiveness, less honesty, or less love in the world. The other will lead to more gratitude, more kindness, more forgiveness, more honesty, or more love in the world.”

·         “It is necessary to explain this part of our Mission in some detail, because so many time you will see people wringing their hands and saying, ‘I want to know what my Mission in life is,” all the while they are cutting people off on the highways, refusing to give time to people, punishing their mate for having hurt their feelings, and lying about what they did. And it will seem to you that the angels must laugh to see this spectacle.”

·         “The valley, the fog, the going step-by-step, is no mere training camp. The goal is real, however large: ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth, as it is in Heaven.”

 

Third aspect: “to exercise that Talent which you particularly came to earth to use, in the place(s) or setting(s) which God has caused to appeal to you most, and for those purposes which God most needs to have done in the world.” 

·         This aspect of Mission is uniquely individual

·         Requires unlearning the idea that our unique mission (1) is something that we are ordered to do, without free choice on our part, (2) consists in achievements which all the world will see and recognize as valuable, (3) is something we accomplish on our own, without the Spirit’s constant partnership…. 

·         The talent we most rejoice in using “is usually the one which, when we use it, causes us to lose all sense of time.”

Commentary on Parker’s “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity”

In this blog post I want to focus on Theodore Parker’s main claims in “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” and then critique them from my own philosophical/theological standpoint.

 

Parker’s main claims:

1. There is a dimension of religion which is “always the same thing and never changes.” Parker calls this “Absolute Religion.” Besides describing Absolute Religion as ahistorical and changeless (and therefore of absolute value), he characterizes it as “existing in the facts of human nature and the ideas of an infinite God” as well as “the deep sentiment of love to man and love to God.” He also says that Absolute Religion is true “like the axioms of geometry.” 

2. The relationship between Absolute Religion and religion’s transitory forms is complex and troubled. First, the transient depends on the permanent. Second, the transient is inessential to the permanent-—just as a robe is inessential to the angel that wears it. Third, the transient can be confused with the permanent and thus lead to bad things such as a bewildering pluralism, the perversion of the religious life, and anxiety. Fourth, when the transient is seen in proper perspective, it can be tremendously helpful in the religious life. Finally, directly realizing the permanent in religion heals anxiety and gives serenity . 

3. Jesus is an example of one who achieved direct access to the permanent in religion, and we ought to strive to do the same. “Christianity is not a system of doctrines, but rather a method of attaining oneness with God.” Parker calls this method “intuition” which is an “oracle God places in the breast.”

Before I offer my critique, I want to say that I was very surprised to discover that Parker’s sermon echoes Descartes’ Meditations in key respects. Descartes begins his work by saying, “Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false”—-and the problem is that practically every item of belief can be doubted. This gives rise to anxiety, to say the least—-the same sort of anxiety that Parker talks about in light of the fact that  “In respect of doctrines as well as forms we see all is transitory. ‘Every where is instability and insecurity.’” 

Descartes’ approach to a solution resembles Parker’s, too. Descartes: “Archimedes used to demand just one firm and immoveable point in order to shift the entire earth; so I too can hope for great things if I can manage to find just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshakeable.” Descartes’ “firm and immoveable point” was “I think therefore I am”—-and Parker’s is “Absolute Religion.”

Now, my criticisms:

Regarding 1:

Parker’s conception of truth as changeless and ahistorical betrays his ultimate philosophical loyalty, which is to the Greeks. It also marks him as living in a pre-Darwinian world. Above all: though he purports to speak for Christianity, he is not loyal to Christianity’s deep commitment to history and change.

Parker rejects the idea—-a truism today—-that the knower has a significant effect on the known: how it appears, how it is articulated, and so on. He believes that Absolute Religion exists like Platonic Forms “somewhere out there,” and our ideas are true insofar as they passively mirror these unchanging, eternal forms. However, this is an extremely flawed view of the nature of human knowledge. My own preference is for the position called “incomplete constructivism” which I take from William James. According to him, “there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control …. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless.” The given is a sort of limit, containing certain inherent tendencies, patterns, and consistencies, beyond which we cannot go—-but up to this point, language, history, tradition, and other experience-structuring factors have full sway.

I believe that the “permanent” element in religion which Parker talks about is one of the “urgencies within our very experience” which James talks about. It very much exists—-on this Parker and I agree-—but I do not see it as discrete and well defined. It is, as I see it, a vague though insistent yearning for ultimacy—-a yearning that is also precognitive, affective, and quite amoral.

One more thing: Absolute Religion cannot be true as geometrical axioms are true. Geometrical axioms are true self-evidently, but is by no means self-evidently true that God exists (except for those who accept the Ontological Argument). If God’s existence and love were self-evidently true, then atheism would be as unthinkable as a square circle—-and a Feuerbach or a Dietrich would never be possible.  

Regarding 2:

I believe that Parker radically underestimates the importance of what he calls the transient elements in religion. The transient elements are not so much like a robe that some angel puts on and takes off without being changed in any essential way but, rather, more like a musical instrument. A musical instrument gives body and shape to what is otherwise a vague musical talent. Though it makes sense to talk about musical talent separately from musical instruments, our talk must ever remain on the level of vague generalities until a person actually takes up lessons and learns how to play. What musical talent in the end becomes is all-dependent on the instrument. Throw away musical instruments, and musical talent—the religious impulse—never becomes an actual, real force in the world. 

Unitarian Universalist identity is not a cape. It is a violin. If we learn how to play it, it makes beautiful music out of our religious longing. And the process of learning how to play–the deep, difficult discipline–shapes who we are in fundamental, essential ways.

Because Parker radically underestimates the necessity of “the transient,” his prediction about our being Christian today (“Christians quite as good as we, or our fathers of the dark ages”) is laughable. (That is, I’d laugh if I wasn’t crying.) But what else could be expected, when Parker puts the person of Jesus, the Bible, theology, and religious identity all in the category of the transient!

Regarding 3:

What I said in part about Parker’s first claim applies here as well. Parker thinks that a Jesus is possible—one who has direct, unmediated access to “Absolute Religion.” I say impossible. All knowing is mediated through language, history, culture, and so on. Parker’s understanding of intuition prevents us from realizing the very real biases that direct or limit its searchlight. 

A final comment. I used to have students in my philosophy courses who’d come up to me after class and say, “Christianity is not a religion.” At the time I thought them absurd. Now I find the same sort of sentiment in a canonical text in my very own religious tradition!