WHY I AM A UNITARIAN
A Sermon by
The Rev. John C. Fuller
MAY
WHY I AM A UNITARIAN
I suppose it's a bit strange
for me to think I have to say why I am a Unitarian. I was born in
I grew up in
So, I am a born Unitarian and
a bred Unitarian; but only partially bred, for that brief Sunday school
experience lasted only three short weeks. I never set foot again in a Unitarian
church for twenty years. Needless to say, Unitarianism in the nineteen-twenties
and thirties in
So born or not, bred or not,
I am a Unitarian and a Universalist too, not by birth, not by breeding, but by
preference. It is this preference I want to talk about this morning. I have
talked the preference before, and each time I do so the reasons are somewhat
different. And that is as it should be in an open-ended religion for persons
who are always growing, always seeking.
I.
My preferrings
are simple ones and the are only three.
First, I am a Unitarian,
because this faith invites me to the adventure of intellectual freedom in
religion. I am encouraged by this faith to come to my own theology and
philosophy of life, not to the church's. Whatever I
come up with theologically is right, if it is right for me. And wherever I
happen to be on the spectrum of this adventure - whether I believe in a
personal God or in none whatsoever - whether I am theistic, agnostic, or
atheist - it is not wrong or heretical or un-Unitarian or irreligious. I am my
own authority in matters theological.
This has been called the
"free mind principle" and it only dates back in Western civilization
to the time of the Reformation, and then only to that part of the Reformation,
the left wing, which carried its logic of individualism to the necessary
conclusion. That part of the Reformation fought for this individual religious
liberty with its life. I have it today because men and women, long ago, died at
the stake or in prison for it, because once tasting it, they'd rather flee
their homeland, as did Joseph Priestley and John Murray, than to lose their own
soul and dignity in the land of their birth.
Individual freedom of belief
was the religious counterpart of the revolution of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries
- the revolution that brought to birth modern science, political democracy and
the rights of the individual person. If a man - any man - was to be free
intellectually, politically and personally, then he also had to be free
religiously.
It is this freedom
Unitarianism, and Universalism too, stands for. As Thomas Jefferson so well put
it, "I cannot be saved by a worship that I disbelieve." It is this
mental freedom in religion that Unitarianism invites me to. I have to do my
thinking theologically in order to be saved; which translated means that I am
made whole as a person by the conclusions and affirmations I come to in my own
mind, not in your mind, or my grandfather's great-uncle's mind, or in St.
Augustine's. Freedom means, or rather reflects, the basic proposition that the
truth about the universe and the nature of existence is never final, never
exhausted by one formulation and never to be imposed by one person upon
another.
Religion, or rather theology,
is an individual preference. It is a partial thing, not ever fully gathered up
and codified by anyone form of it. Theology is, further, the chief thing that a
man orders his basic thinking about life by. And I choose, as you do also, not
to order my basic thinking about life by a philosophy or theology alien to me.
I get the most out of it for my own wholeness when I do it myself, in my own
manner, at my own speed, and in accordance with my own prejudices,
perversities, needs and stages of life. My authority is myself. My disciplines
are the community of free thinkers to which I belong, called the free church and the free society. And the requirements are
always those of reasonableness, tolerance, and respect for persons and facts.
This freedom is a life adventure. Its patron is the Unitarian faith. Its saint
is the Prometheus without chains - a heroic figure who snatched the fire of
religious liberty from the gods, but without recrimination.
I am a Unitarian, because of
its invitation to me to be free as a god - as a god in a community of gods, as
a man in a community of free men. And there comes with the invitation, the
astonishing phenomenon of a church in which it is all right to dissent, all
right to be "revolting" in your thoughts, all right to come to your
own theology or to none at all, all right to be wrong.
I am a Unitarian, not merely
because I am invited to be individually free, but more significantly because
the invitation is to a community, a fellowship of free religious thinkers. And
sometimes I don't even want to think at all, and that's all right, too!
Freedom is
religious, and mark it well,
because it has to do with the dignity of a man, and with his chance to be a
whole person. Only those who prefer someone else's thinking to their own say
that freedom is not religious. The spirit bloweth
where it listeth.
II.
I am a Unitarian, second,
because this faith asks me to be happy. It asks me to be a certain kind of
person emotionally - to be free, not only intellectually - which after all is
easy once you catch the bug; but also, and far more important, the Unitarian
faith asks me to be free in how I feel about myself and others and life. I am
always forgetting this dimension of Unitarianism in the heady seriousness of
intellectual freedom and ethical concern.
I am often, like you, an exasperated
liberal, or an angry liberal, or a frustrated liberal, or a liberal who can't
stand others. I am jolted out of it every once in a while and learn once again
why I am a Unitarian. I was, most recently, down in
The Unitarian faith is not a
grim and exclusively serious venture. It invites us to wholeness and happiness.
It speaks, and always has, of the liberal personality. We used to call this
"character," salvation by character. Today we call it emotional maturity,
the mature mind, or something similar. I call it achieving the liberal
personality, the emotional counterpart to intellectual freedom. It is, when all
is said and done, what makes the free mind creative, affirming and happy. It is
what's there underneath all our Unitarian intellectual and theological
fireworks.
When the joy and enchantment
of the magic and release of freedom wear off, as they always seem to do after
you've been in Unitarianism awhile, then you come to the emotional or spiritual
underpinnings; or you don't come to anything at all. You can develop these
underpinnings and it is equally as important an encouragement of the Unitarian
faith to do so as is the bid to think freely.
What is the free personality?
What kind of character can we call Unitarian? Who is the happy liberal? He is
not the person who insists to others that he, and only he, is a liberal; not
the person who calls his position liberal and all others illiberal. He is not
the person who tells you what he is emancipated from or who is skillful in
seeing what is wrong with what other people do and think. He is simply, in the
lovely words of Bonaro Overstreet, the kind of person who wants to see things
grow and people grow. He provides room about himself for the growth he wants to
see. You can tell a liberal by what he puts forth on the human scene; and what
he puts forth can be felt in what other people feel able and encouraged to do
because he is around. He releases you. He allows your tentative ideas to come
into the open to be tried out. He doesn't make you feel stupid or a fool. He
makes you a little less shy, a little more confident. You know he has a sense
of life that has room in it room for differences, room for variety, room for
turning around, room for you.
The happy liberal, then, is
the one who tries to see what the other fellow thinks he is thinking. He tries
to feel himself into the frame of reference of a person whom he is tempted to
say otherwise is wrong or stupid. The happy liberal has learned to stand still
and feel the spaciousness of the scheme of things, the spaciousness of time and
place, the spaciousness of the unknown. He measures himself with what is yet to
be known, not only about the universe, but about that stranger universe of
human mind and heart, and that stranger yet universe of human society always
seeking to find out how to reconcile our social being with our uniqueness as
individuals.
And because he has a
spaciousness in him, the liberal person knows how to listen and then to speak
as a very human being. He knows, too, and is at home with the fact, that it is
human to make mistakes - for himself to make them as
well as others. It's a funny thing - do you know how you feel when you make a mistake? I know
how I feel, which is usually not very much at home with myself. The liberal is
the one who can relax with the fact of error, and then go on with self-respect
or respect for others.
The genuine liberal has a
sense of the future. Any situation has in it somewhere, he feels, a potential
worth looking for, worth trying to do something about. He says, “let there be,”
“let there become,” for he feels there are always possibilities - in himself,
in others, in history, in life's darkest moments or years. He feels he can go
out toward the future, go out toward other people. He wants to run the risks of
approach. The drama of understanding life, of understanding other persons is
the one he loves in preference to the old, tedious dramas of despair and
conflict which have already exhibited their little, mean possibilities centuries
ago.
I am a Unitarian because I am
asked by it and all it stands for to be such a happy and whole person, to be
free, liberal and spacious.
Socrates said, long ago, to
the cynic, “Whether or not such a city exists, in heaven, or on earth, or ever
will exist, the wise man will live after it.” And Jesus said, “It has been said
of old, hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, despair of no man and your reward
shall be great.” And Emerson said, “I look for the hour when that supreme
Beauty which ravished the souls of those eastern men, shall speak in the West
also.”
III.
And last, I am a Unitarian
because of a very great big thing that is added by our faith to all this mental
liberality and emotional tolerance. It is something which apparently
contradicts the openness and broadness of freedom. It is something which is
impatient, imperative, and seemingly dogmatic. I couldn’t be much of a
Unitarian without it. What it is, is the ever restless
demand for human dignity. This demand for dignity is carried by the Unitarian
faith, but its origin lies in us, lies in human life. Our Unitarian merely says
"yes" to it - yes, now; yes, for all mankind and each man in
particular; yes, for others as well as for myself.
The cry for dignity comes
from the souls of men. Sometimes it is loud, as in the cry, “Pharaoh, Pharaoh,
let my people go,” and it comes from a whole people in slavery or segregation,
or from a whole world caught in the war system or the population explosion. At
other times it is soft and weak, as in the muted whispers of the many caught
individually in the jungles of their own guilt or despair or helplessness. And
sometimes the cry comes from us, ourselves, from our own hurt or from our
wounded aspirations.
The cry is heard by the free
mind and the liberal heart, which is one of the reasons for his freedom. But
the cry always needs an answer from us. The achieving of human dignity always
demands our commitment and our action. We must take a stand, perhaps in anger,
perhaps beyond liberality. We must work as if to move mountains, for people and
institutions do live off the profits from the indignity of other people. It is
then that our Unitarian faith invites us to go beyond looking at alternatives,
beyond being spacious and generous, beyond to taking sides. This is the great
drama of justice beyond the drama of understanding. And in this great drama
Unitarianism has always taken part, for to the faith of freedom, the
enhancement of life by means of worship, fellowship, education, service, and action,
has always been the chief sacrament. Because of this, almost above all, I am a
Unitarian.
And, in the end, I am a
Unitarian, I know, for the same reason that Pierre van Paassen became one of
us. He wrote, now twenty years ago: "In our time when we see the world
more and more becoming one, the Creative Spirit, which has built suns and
flowers and corals and anthropoids, now wants to build the human community, and
poses us an ultimatum:
Now
institute the holy commune of mankind;
Now
begin the new era;
Now
become human at last, or else perish!"
_________________________
Prepared for web page display
on