Do Our Seven UU Principles Still Capture What’s Essential?

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

October 7, 2007

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

 

Every so often we need to reassess who we have become – who we are now.

“Someone has said that middle age is when you pick the temptation that gets you home earlier.” [1]

We are ever-changing.

“’I went to my high school’s twentieth reunion recently,’ said one man. ‘How was it?’ asked a friend. ‘Oh, it was awful,’ the man replied. ‘All my friends are so old, fat and bald that none of them recognized me.’” [2]

The need to reassess our identity is certainly true of us as individuals. It’s also true of us as a religious movement.

We use our seven principles widely, but do they still capture what is essential about us?

Telling a little of the history of how these principles came to be emphasizes how seriously we UUs take democracy. These principles did not come from God’s hand; they didn’t come from a group of authorities thought to have better access to the mind of God than you and I have. They came out of a grass roots process that invited input from every Unitarian Universalist.

As I mentioned last Sunday, our movement honors the merger of two religious denominations in 1961. When these two movements merged they hammered out a statement. Here it is, as of 1961:

As the feminist movement emerged among us in the 70’s you can imagine the anger at the sexist language. In 1977 a “Women and Religion” Resolution was passed by the General Assembly delegates unanimously. (General Assembly is an annual gathering of representatives from UU congregations all across America.) That resolution among other things committed us to removing sexist language wherever it was found. So women drafted a revised version of our UU Principles, which started a process of grass-roots study that led eventually to our current Principles and Purposes that we’ve used for more than 20 years. 

One of the brilliant ideas was to separate the principles from the sources that influenced our history. Whereas the 1961 version included Judeo-Christian heritage in the principles (after heated debate), “no one objected to language about the ‘Jewish and Christian teaching which call us to respond to God’s love’ when it appeared as part of an uncontroversial summary of historical influences on UUism.”[3]

“After further revisions based on the 1982 discussions, the committee circulated a draft to all congregations that was debated in 1983, and after some additional changes submitted its final draft to the General Assembly in 1984, where it was adopted by a wide margin…. At the 1985 GA, it came up for a second vote, as is required for bylaw changes and passed with only one dissenting vote. Edward Frost has described the GA’s response to passage as “loud applause, sighs of relief, tears, and a few shrugs of “wait and see.”’”[4]

I tell you all of this to emphasize that our Principles and Purposes were developed with maximum input from Unitarian Universalists all over North America.

Do they still describe us?

More than 20 years have gone by, since they were adopted. It is time to do an identity check. The Commission on Appraisal, an independent, autonomous body, elected directly by delegates from UU congregations, has undertaken a review of our principles to see if they still describe who we are in the year 2007.

This is consistent with who we are as a dynamic organism. As Warren Ross writes:

… No one at the moment is suggesting any drastic revisions. And yet the commitment to “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” as the Fourth Principle puts it, carries the seeds of its own obsolescence. Just consider: well into the 20^th century, our Unitarian predecessors used to proclaim and teach their children that we believe in “The Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, the Leadership of Jesus, Salvation through Character, and the Progress of Mankind Onward and Upward Forever.” [And the neighborhood of Boston!] …The people who did say them were just as intelligent, as in tune with their times, and as committed to reason and free thinking as we are. In 2020 (when everyone presumably will have perfect vision), our current Principles and Purposes may also be perceived to have inadequacies that demand radical rewriting.   And therein lies our genius. It’s a process that is rightly called renewal or regeneration. And this is what has not changed and, let us hope, will remain unchanged 20 or even 100 years from now.[5]

 

So it’s appropriate that we ask if our principles capture who we are today.

What do you think? There will be an opportunity for you to contribute your thoughts and feelings during this afternoon’s workshop. To stimulate your thinking, I share my reactions.

The principles are great…as far as they go. But I suggest that they are missing a critical piece of who we are today.

 

In preparing this sermon, I read the words of Eugene Pickett, President of our UUA during the time that launched the process leading to our seven principles and six sources.  He said in 1979:

“They testify to no intimate acquaintance with the depths themselves.”

Some twenty years later, our current President, Bill Sinkford, challenged us to find a “language of reverence.”   Does that not come from a similar sense that the old descriptions miss the depths of who we would be as a religion?

I’m struck by the popularity of the song, “Spirit of Life,” among us. It is probably the most popular hymn sung among us. Many UUs know the words by heart. While I know there are some who find its repetition in our service boring, many find comfort and inspiration in singing it.

At the risk of dissecting a living organism, I venture the following. I think it expresses a deep yearning for spiritual intensity shared by many. 

Too many of us live too much of our lives in a spiritual void. We rush this way and that, trying to accomplish all that we should to take care of our children and ourselves. But there’s a part of us that longs for an intimate connection with life. We weary of skating on the surface of life, rushing toward our death. We long to really sink into a life experience – to feel it with the depths of our being, and to know that it is good in the deep sense, an awesome sense. “Oh my God!” we might exclaim. “This really matters!”

We have tastes of this awesome mystery – a child’s birth, the instant a last breath is drawn, “what has become of this loved person so precious in my life?”, a moment when we feel overcome with the beauty of the night stars or the mountains or the sea.

But we long for more, even as we chase our tails.

“Spirit of life, come to me.” “Fill me up, animate me, may each moment be sacred.”

“Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.” It’s not “Motivate me through guilt, or add to my responsibilities list”; it’s “sing in my heart all the stirrings…” Let my heart sing. Let it be stirred, so that compassion follows as naturally as water overflowing a spring.

“Blow in the wind, rise in the sea.” May the spirit that moves throughout everything, through the wind, the sea, the plants, the animals, the earth and the universe itself move through me. May I be spacious and responsive enough to be yet another reed through which the universal wind sounds.

This sounds like what I said last week. We are a religion of joy.  Where is that reflected in our principles? 

I’m greatly influenced by the concept that we humans have two kinds of consciousness: what might be called “critical consciousness,” and “appreciative consciousness.” Critical consciousness is the skeptical, questioning, analytical, side of our minds. It is the part of our minds that propels science and our critical understanding of the human and natural worlds. In contrast, appreciative consciousness is the part of us that is touched, moved by poetry, metaphor, story, music and dance. The part of us that feels connected; and experiences connections with everything. It is the part of our mind/body that is fed by religion and spirituality.

Last Sunday Maria Nielsen spoke of the spiritual quality of knitting.  She mentioned enjoying the feel of each distinct wool, reflecting on the animal it came from, and where the knitted shawl or cap was going - to comfort the sick, the newborn. That’s fostering appreciative consciousness.

Rev. Marilyn Sewell, minister in Portland, Oregon, of one of our largest UU congregations, writes this:

The void at the heart of American culture is a spiritual one, and the void in the hearts of seekers today is also a spiritual one – people visiting our churches may not want the dogma of their childhood faith, nor the fear of hell and damnation, but they do want to grow spiritually, and they want to apprehend the spiritual dimension when they enter our churches and fellowships. If seekers … sense … ambivalence about [our] identity as a religious institution, what are they to think? Why would they risk their deepest questions and concerns with such a group? …They are coming to a [congregation] because their souls need feeding. [7]   

What strikes me in general about the principles is that they appeal to critical consciousness. But they don’t engage appreciative consciousness. They don’t speak to the void.

How might we express our purposes so as to appeal to the appreciative consciousness within us? Entertain this: “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote:”

These “virtues" or qualities of being spiritually alive can be placed in a variety of theological/psychological frames, depending on which moves you. You could tie it into a God image, or into a human potential image, or some other religious language.

We might summarize these spiritual virtues.

I remember a summary of our faith, which included “a sense of humor about absolutes, and zest for living.”

Yesterday Gini Courter, Moderator of the UU Association, reported that Rev. Rob Hardies summarizes UU as the “love that will not let us down, will not let us go, and will not let us off.” How about, then, our principles including something like “…affirm and promote love that transforms us and the world.”

What matters to me is that we focus our worship on strengthening these spiritual qualities among us. I think that fostering appreciative consciousness should be as central to what we are about as critical consciousness. I find appreciative consciousness missing from our current principles and purposes. It may be implicit in what we have. I would like it to be explicit. And how about you?

Are there principles that you would change?

Are there principles that you would add? That would speak to your deepest longing?

What captures the essence of who we are as Unitarian Universalists in the year 2007?

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