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Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster

Public and Private Religion
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
September 26, 2006

There is a Sufi teaching story about two holy men -- one a careful student of his tradition, the other not so careful. One day, while the careful holy man walked along a river bank, he heard someone on an island in the middle of the river loudly shouting the holy call of his religious order and mispronouncing it! Being a very careful student of his tradition, he felt he had a duty to correct this mistaken person. So he rented a boat and rowed out to the island where he found the man continuing to mispronounce the call over and over again. "My friend," he said, "you are mispronouncing the call and, since I know this, it is incumbent on me to tell you so." Then he instructed him in the correct way to say it. The other man, recognizing erudition when he saw it and pleased that the other obviously better educated person should have taken notice of him, thanked him humbly.

The careful holy man then began rowing back to the river bank, satisfied with himself for having done a good deed, especially since it was said that a person who could repeat the sacred call correctly could even walk on water -- something he had always hoped for himself but had not yet been able to do. Then he heard a faltering sound from the island as the second man hesitantly started to repeat the cry -- but in the same old mispronounced way. While the first man thought about this, reflecting on the perversity of human persistence in error, he suddenly saw a strange sight. From the island the other man was coming toward him, walking on the surface of the river. Amazed, he stopped rowing. The second man walked up to him and said, "Brother, I am sorry to trouble you but I must ask you again the standard method of making the cry because I find it difficult to remember." [Tales of the Dervishes, Idries Shah, p. 84f.]

I like the Sufi story of the two holy men. It shows that, even after principles and rules have been identified and put in place, it may be the individualist or the heretic who actually does that toward which the principles and rules were aiming. We need to remember this when we think about how our personal religion meshes -- or doesn't mesh -- with the way others think we ought to do our religion, or the way we think others should do their religion -- or with the way we all try to do it together. We don't always mesh.

And this can cause a problem for us. At times, it is not easy to get together collectively to do anything, especially worship and celebration. It's a truism that, no matter what we do, some (perhaps many) other UUs may not think we are doing it right -- or they will just not like it. As instances, if children are present at the service, some people are pleased and others aren't. If we sing a patriotic song, some may like it and others may think it out of place in a religious service. Flags are especially controversial in a religious setting. Many view them as political intrusions that carry political messages into a setting that should be kept as free of political bias as possible. Furthermore, if we conduct a casual kind of service, people who want things more formal (or "churchy") are dissatisfied. But, to have only services of the customary sermon-centered, hymn-sandwich type drives other people up the walls, if not out of them. The use of theistic or non-theistic language can have the same effect - as can the use of traditional terms like worship and prayer and more generic terms like celebration and meditation. There also may be some disagreement as to who best can enhance the spirits of a group: a minister or a bartender.

This morning I want to raise this question: "What makes it so difficult at times to mesh our personal desires with our collective acts?" The answer isn't simply that

Different expectations create conflict, not if we really mean it when we say that diversity is good. In our system, differences should make our religion work better - more interestingly, more creatively, more inclusively. Not being alike is, after all, a basic assumption in our democratic system. But, it's hard always to accommodate things that do not satisfy our personal needs. Sometimes, a kind of acid eats away at us -- an acid that can make us impatient with one another and can leave us self-righteously feeling that we are only acting on principle and for the best interests of the group when we object to the other person's "fuzzy spirituality" or "arid rationality".

This "acid" is an assumption -- the assumption that not only should our personal perception of reality be identical with the congregation's practices but also the congregation's practices (i.e., what everybody does together, the liturgy, "the work of the people") should be identical with our perception of reality. Such an assumption can lead us to insist that the congregation be more in line with our particular beliefs. Even though we can't yet walk on water, we don't want anyone else mispronouncing our religious "call." It is inevitable that many of us should feel this way. After all, most of us join a religious group because we believe it represents the way we think. If we think we are with people of "like minds", it is only natural that a proprietary attitude should develop. It is only natural that we not only would want - but also expect -- the group to express our religious views and biases.

This attitude is not so much wrong as it is simplistic; reality is a bit more complicated. Yes, we should feel that the church we join is our church. Yes, when its ideas or practices seem to need change or improvement, we should work toward change and improvement. But, we have to remember that, in a diverse group, others may not agree with our ideas or our priorities. That other people are trying, all at the same time, to modify the nature of "our" religious group considerably limits the way we can exercise our individual proprietorship.

What we too easily overlook is that we have to distinguish between the religion we hold privately as individuals and the religion we, as a diverse group, can express publicly together. These, after all, are two different things. We may want them to be the same, but they are not. I doubt that anyone present believes only what everyone present can agree to. Some, here, might wish the group to think in Jewish and/or Christian terms, others in more secular terms. Others might prefer more emphasis on Buddhism or paganism or esotericism or mysticism. Others might prefer the spiritual over the thoughtful - or vice versa. Still others are like myself and prefer a mixture of several of these elements from time to time. The reality is that we are like individual shapes of belief (circles, squares, triangle, rectangles, polyhedrons - you name it) brought together from different directions. But, what we share with one another is not our shapes, but where our shapes overlap. What we are as a congregation is where we all overlap.

Please notice I am not just saying that we are a diverse group. I am saying, too, that -- especially in our UU context -- privately held religion and publicly held religion seldom can be identical. Of course, we know this; this is obvious, logical, and transparent. But we can easily forget it and act in ways that frustrate one another instead of ways that supplement and complement one another, even though we come together intending to supplement and complement one another. Even though we may be making beautiful music together, we can be at times like the members of the quartet in which, although they harmonize, all four members think the other three can't sing. The crucial questions to ask ourselves are these: In light of the inevitable differences between our public and private forms of religion, what is required to make our collective religious venture into a dynamic, mutually supportive, free religious faith? Or, how are we to respect individual differences and yet have a common enterprise together? Where, indeed, do we all overlap?

This is the question I want to raise in everybody's minds because it's so hard to find an answer to which everyone agrees. Too often what people tend to do is to say: "If we can't all celebrate life or worship together on the same terms in this group, let's go find or even start another group." Or, "If this minister won't do, let's get another minister -- or a bartender!" This kind of thing happens over and over again in many denominations -- and even in UU circles from time to time. To me this does not fit a rational, tolerant, and free people who claim to have a high degree of respect for one another. Rather, the integrity of a church or any religious group requires a more inclusive, less divisive answer than that offered by members who try to make the congregation over in their own image.

As I see it, if we are to have a common enterprise that respects individual differences, we have to identify where we overlap and where we don't. That is, we have to ask what is basic about Unitarian Universalism that we share and what is secondary that we do not share. And then, we have to make that which is basic our focus and pointedly center our church program and, especially, our Sunday services around it. That is, I think we have to identify the central core of beliefs (and/or commitments) that we do hold together.

The notion of a core of belief has been called many things. To the orthodox, it is gospel or revelation. I think of it as a bedrock, empowering affirmation of life. Regardless of what it is called, any coherent collective approach to religion requires an identifiable, and clear, shared perception that enables people to define both themselves and their common enterprise in its terms. If there is no such core of shared belief, then it is amiss to expect the group to have any solidarity of action, thought, or experience. At best it can be only a collection of individuals singly projecting their personal opinions onto each other. If some do not affirm that core, then they simply are not part of the community and they are hanging around for reasons quite different from why the community exists. Their commitment is elsewhere. However, if everyone affirms such a core, then a great diversity of practices and beliefs can come out of it because, in basic terms, people can trust one another. For example, people who don't pray can listen to people who do pray without having to identify with prayer as such but still affirming the integrity of the person who prays. And the same can be said in reverse. If people can do this, they are not just hanging around, they are hanging together -- to add a different kind of english to the statement Benjamin Franklin made at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

It would seem unlikely that a free religious group, priding itself in the absence of a creed or a body of doctrine, could define its faith. But, I believe there is a central core around which Unitarian Universalists, as individuals, have clustered historically -- and around which we cluster today. Most of us do, after all, share something that holds us together as a larger religious community. I do not see that to be our vaunted UU principles because, as admirable as they are, they are a list, not a focus. Furthermore, they do not clearly distinguish UUs as a group because they are sentiments that any liberal in any denomination can affirm. I know persons in other religious groups who affirm every one of our principles as much as UUs affirm them. Rather, I see the core around which we cluster to be, first, the conviction that the human person is of inestimable worth and is capable of dealing with life and religion on his or her own terms without dependency on creeds and dogmas. Everything else is derivative from this affirmation of human intelligence and self-reliance -- even our UU principles. And, second, most of us share the conviction that a community of mutually supportive persons is necessary to sustain us. If we did not have both faith in our human capacity and confidence in one another as resources, we, probably, would not be UUs in the first place. This gives us a central religious commitment. It is a commitment that says that individual human beings can deal with life on human terms and that they do it better when working with other human beings. Our purposes and principles would be different were this not so. An anonymous wag has put this into perspective by saying, "I'd like to be independent, but I can't do it alone!" There is unexpected truth to this remark.

This commitment (this core belief) is of prime importance to our religious enterprise; but it is easy to fall into disagreement over issues that are not basic to this core belief. It is easy to let secondary things obscure what we hold in common, such as when we try to impose only one preferred theological stance on the group. This happens, for instance, when some insist that our community be one that only either believes in God or disbelieves in God or that its focus should be on "spirit" rather than mind, or the other way around. Such things may be basic in other religious settings, but in our context they are more personal than collective issues, and I believe that, when they are made central, they contradict our basic affirmation. Such considerations may be of ultimate importance to individuals but they are of de facto secondary importance to a religious organization made up of people who affirm one another's right to disagree on such things.

Of course, every UU congregation has to pursue and celebrate the diverse views within it. And it is not amiss for different congregations to develop different personalities as some secondary beliefs become more influential within the group than others. But, if these secondary beliefs become so strong as to exclude those who do not hold them, then the process will have been compromised. Someone's or some group's personal religion will have prevailed and public expression will have become dogmatic and exclusionist.

So, we have a great need to keep two things clear in our minds: 1) What our basic agreement really is; and, 2) How variegated are our beliefs that stand outside that agreement. Unless we do this, what we do together suffers from confusion and misplaced expectations. That is, we tend to want our particular political or economic or social enthusiasms, or our personal views of God or no-God, of rule-centered ethics or situational ethics, of formality or informality, of prayer or no-prayer in our services to prevail in the group. But, if we start with and center on our faith in the human capacity to deal with life on human terms and our faith in each other as helpers one to the other -- and if we keep this focus central -- then all the rest becomes manageable. And no matter the theology of the preacher, the liturgy of the people, or the language used, diverse people will feel included. In fact this is the emphasis that has shaped the way many UU congregations already implement religion. After being here almost two month, it seems to me that this congregation has figured out much of this already.

Certainly, we each have our own private religion with its principles, doctrines, and dogmas -- however we construe what we believe. But we also have a common core of faith out of which collective beliefs and values arise and which makes possible our public expression of diverse beliefs. This, I believe, is the common glue that holds us together in our differences: We believe in ourselves and we believe in one another. Let that be the central focus of our celebration when we, as a diverse people, gather. And, let's not try to instruct one another on how to walk on water but learn how to choreograph our swimming.