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Aug. 26 , 2007
Misakes of Liberalism
“Honey, minds are like umbrellas. They only work when they are open.” I bet you have heard this familiar adage. Karen Schubert gave me permission to share this story of when her mother used this phrase to chide her. “Well mom, I don't think you are all that open-minded,” Karen responded. When her mom protested, Karen told her, “But mom, you don't really listen to people who think differently than you do,” Her mom paused for a moment to consider the accusation and then conceded -- “Well, yes, but only about religion and politics.”
Now let's see, do any of us ever fall into that trap? We consider ourselves open-minded, but when it comes to differences in religion and politics, we (lots of us) have a hard time being open to the other side.
For decades, we have used the term “liberal” to describe our Unitarian Universalist faith. We used it proudly because it called to mind two very important American traditions. The first is liberty -- where the word liberal derives from. Liberty was the call to rebellion against the English monarchy at the birth of our United States. Individual liberty is the reason for the Bill of Rights. Liberty is fundamental to the way Americans think about themselves. In the same way, Unitarian Universalists have always stood for the right of conscience, and individual discernment in religious matters. What made those first Americans believe that men were capable of governing themselves was the same belief that led the first Unitarians to claim that people did not just have to accept faith as handed down to them, but could trust their own hearts and minds to discern matters of religion.
Which brings us to the second great meaning of liberal. Liberalism also means openness to new ideas and different perspectives. It means not being closed off to change or new thought. The emergence of Unitarianism in this country could be described as liberalism versus orthodoxy, because it claimed that revelation was still unfolding and that religious belief could and should be informed by the revelations, discoveries and new insights of human learning.
But recently, the word liberal has come to mean something to fear -- like when people call someone more liberal than Hillary Clinton. Today, some liberals prefer to call themselves progressives, rather than use the tainted word. Because here is what liberal has come to mean amongst conservatives -- it means elitism, and it means people who think the government ought to be responsible for fixing all the ills of society.
And liberals hold some culpability in turning the word that once stood for an idealism about human nature and human autonomy into a word that now represents arrogance and the idea that an educated few know better than everyday people about their own lives.
So, as a liberal church, offering a liberal religious message -- where do we come down? Are our minds open like umbrellas? Do we enter into relationships with one another and those we meet with curiosity and respect? Or with the arrogance, pompousness and indifference that passes as tolerance?
This year, we will adopt a mission statement and do the work to become a Welcoming Congregation, meaning learning how to better welcome and support gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. In this work, we will be learning how to become mission oriented, not personality oriented. We will be pushing open our doors to welcome more people, and people not just like ourselves. In order to do this we will need to enter into these new relationships, not with the presumption that we already know everything, but with the acknowledgment that we still have a lot to learn.
When I was ordained to our ministry, my minister, the Rev. John Robinson, who led my parents' congregation for the first 27 years of my life said this to me in his charge. He reminded me how educated our congregations tend to be. He reminded me I would be preaching to doctors, nurses, lawyers and teachers, to PhD's and MBA's. This is the way of the professional class, we study and study until we know more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing. And his charge to me was to remind my congregation and to remember myself, that there is still much we do not know -- and that some of the most important things we do know don't come from books, and don't come from degrees.
The things we learn only when we have lost a dear loved one, the things we learn only when we find ourselves barely getting by, struggling to give our kids the life we want for them, the things we learn when we see our neighborhood deteriorating around us and we don't know how to stay and make it better, the need for faith that we find only in those moments when we feel the full weight of our loneliness and sorrow, the truths we learn only when we see our children or our spouse or our parent slowly destroy themselves with drugs or alcohol or violence. These are stories from our lives -- in ways they are stories from all of our lives -- and they express our very humanity.
Our liberal faith cannot be one that seeks only the intellectual freedom to critique and question religion -- it must also be one that speaks to us in our lives, that speaks to our longing, thirsty souls.
The great Unitarian Universalist minister A. Powell Davies once wrote:
“Let me tell you why I come to church. I come to church--and I would whether I was a preacher or not--because I fall below on my own standards and need to be constantly brought back to them. I am afraid of becoming selfish and indulgent, and my church -- my church of the free spirit -- brings me back to what I want to be.”
Part of who we must be, part of what our standards must measure, is our humility. We too often feel proud of the way we have thrown off the dictates of traditional religion, proud to be free of the fear of God, and the fear of Hell -- but what we must not throw off is a true humility, a true acknowledgment of the precarious nature of human life, the reality that we cannot define ourselves, nor our success, separate from the people around us. That as religious liberals, religious humanists -- humanity must be at the center of our faith -- and that means being in relationship to humanity -- not just those who vote like us or who think like us -- but to everyone.
Remember, Jesus -- who we don't see as Christ -- but rather who's life and teaching we do respect -- remember how he intentionally went to eat with the prostitutes and the tax collectors (those who sold out their people and went to work for the Romans)? He went to them to hear their stories not so that he could provide the answers to their life's struggles, but only to walk with them and to share his and their common humanity. So too, are we called to push ourselves outside of our comforts and to reach out in relationship to one another and share from that place of common humanity our stories of love and loss, struggle and regret.
It is because of the strain of human living that we seek out acceptance, inclusion and similarity. Coming into a church where the people seem to have similar views and similar experiences to our own is a great comfort -- it can provide a type of home, of sanctuary, of safety. But that security can also become a trap of thinking ourselves open minded, when instead of umbrellas, we have created a place that is more like a coffin. A place where we stop reaching outside of our walls and even where we grow so comfortable we do not push ourselves to welcome that new person who themselves is also looking for acceptance, who is also looking for a place to call home.
Our free faith, our liberal faith, must constantly call us out of our smallness, beyond our own thoughts, to connect to one another -- to rely not on assumptions of polarity, but the search for common ground. And that common ground lies in the stories of our lives, the stories of struggle and success, the place where heart communicates with heart. And the relationships built on the sharing of those stories have the power to change us -- the power to helps us become the people we want to be, the people we are called to be.
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