PeaceBang has closed the comments for her post about the Excellence in Ministry summit, and probably with good reason. These things always seem to get out of hand.

But I’ve had one thought about our terminology here that seems relevant, without presuming to fully answer any of the questions she’s posed. The usual term, in a Christian church, for the person UUs usually call the minister, is “pastor.” This grates against UUs for all sort of reasons, some of them legit: it smacks of hierarchy and patriarchy, among other things.

But doesn’t it undermine our stated commitment to “ministry of all believers” to confine that name to the ordained? One of the churches I work with as an organizer lists in its order of service, “Ministers: All Members of ___________ Church. Pastor: Rev. John Jones.” Doesn’t something like that better reflect our ideal of ministry?

I think that this is a place where the UU compulsion to purge all things Christian has really damaged (what I would like to be?) our understanding of ministry.

Update: Christine Robinson is live-blogging the summit here.

I guess I have three closely related reasons (plus a new, stand-alone bonus reason — for a limited time only!) for being uncomfortable with this effort, and for being so immediately dismissive, as much as I generally like Karen Armstrong’s books.

1. There seems to be a reductionism at work here which I find annoying and dangerous. For me, for example, I don’t think that the Golden Rule is “fundamental.” as they say, to the Christian faith; I think it proceeds from certain theological commitments which are fundamental. It’s important to get these words right, since words seem to be all it’s about.

2. I think it’s a mistake to reduce the idea of good or redemptive works to the idea of “compassion,” a word which smacks far more of mercy than of justice. Again, important to get the words right.

3. “Jim”, in the comments to PeaceBang’s post on this, wondered about such derision of an “almost cloyingly benign” effort, AS THOUGH THAT WERE A GOOD THING!

What used to be called main-line churches (a term which is more usefully culturally than theologically, and which for me includes most Catholics and UUs) have made a fetish out of ineffectiveness. In terms of our prophetic ministry, we have taken impotence as evidence of virtue. So yes, anything that digs the Church deeper into fecklessness is rightly the object of derision.

4. This is supposed to a worldwide effort but on this site and in a search in several different languages, all of this material seems to only be available in English. I could be wrong, though.

(crossposted as a comment over at PeaceBang)

Sermon delivered at the UNMC on April 10, 2005.

I have always depended on the possibility of meaning in all experience. Nothing is so trivial that I don’t want to discern its significance and put it in a universal context. Every bite of an apple, every bus ride, every conversation, offers transcendent grace, if only we will choose to perceive it. The deeply-lived life is painted stroke by stroke.

In October I began my travels through Mexico and Central America. I was excited that my route through southern Mexico took me through the city of Oaxaca on last year’s Day of the Dead, November second. El Día de los Muertos is a very big deal in that part of Mexico — Memorial Day, Halloween, and a bit of Mardi Gras all in one — and is a vital event in the spiritual lives of many of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. For a person determined to draw meaning from the world, it offered an marvelous opportunity.

A few days before the holiday, I was already in Oaxaca, reading some of the books I’d brought with me. Among them were B. F. Skinner’s books Beyond Freedom and Dignity and Walden Two, which present his theory of deterministic behaviorism, the notion that all learned human behavior is attributable to conditioned responses.

For me, the personal and the philosophical inevitably intersect. The abstract conviction that there is meaning in existence had always been a very real guide and source of strength. It drew me toward ministry as a vocation, and gave me a context in which to understand and better myself. I knew that Skinner’s valueless world wouldn’t jibe with mine, but I thought I was prepared for that. Moderate mental tensions are the growing pains of the soul. So I read.

Well, those two books boil down to this: If Skinner is right, then all human existence reduces to pleasures sought and pain avoided — to mere hedonism, albeit with varying degrees of sophistication. Nothing can be left of human morality or goodness. Nothing remains but the accident of our existence and the evolutionary habit of survival. Nothing remains of our selves, and much less of the God of light and goodness and all-conquering love.

My purpose here is not to argue for or against Skinner’s behavioristic determinism. That’s for another time. Here’s why I bring it up: Even before I exhausted Skinner’s pages, I’d started to panic. The implications of such a compelling and comprehensive determinism were devastating, not least of all because it rang so true. I was questioning whether or not I believed any of this, about the sacredness of Creation, the goodness of God, the reality of Transcendence. I doubted whether I wanted to believe. I doubted whether I really wanted this hard, complicated, illusory life to which I used to feel called.

The crescendo to the Day of the Dead outside my window echoed my internal stirrings. Before reading Skinner’s books, the holiday had promised understanding not only of Mexican culture, but of some small corner of Transcendence itself. Now all I could see were operant conditioners. Before, the fanfare of trumpets had honored the departed. Now they blew, and the walls came a-tumbling down.

Doubt is a particularly insidious form of suffering, because it robs the crutch that makes other suffering manageable. Nietzsche’s words ring true to the reluctant doubter: “[W]ho has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Who lacks it, he neglects to mention, cannot bear any.

I wrote a long e-mail to friends and family at home describing my unbearable disillusionment, and feeling blindly to reclaim some scrap of the purpose with which I’d come. Over three days, I stopped only to eat and to sleep. Writing helped me to think about my problem systematically, but sending it did not salve my sorrow. That night I found myself wandering the Oaxacan streets, passing tortillerías and mole shops, weaving back and forth among the parades and roving fiestas. An inescapable meaninglessness pursued me, darting and hiding behind puppets and tubas and drums.

Only later did I figure out that, despite my suspicions to the contrary, I was not going mad. Victor Frankl survived a number of years in Nazi concentration camps, and went on to found an influential school of psychoanalysis called logotherapy. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:

“Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of an existential frustration. I would strictly deny that one’s search for meaning to… existence, or even… doubt of it, in every case is derived from, or results in, any disease. Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. [D]istress, even… despair, over the worthwhileness of…life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”

Doubt, and its attendant discomfort, are not an illness. Worry over the meaningfulness of life is not an sickness. But my experience of doubt makes me want to go further. More than simply not being harmful, I believe that doubt is a healthy and necessary part of religious life.

The conventional argument for doubt is that it’s a means to a stronger relationship with the divine. Scar tissue is stronger than unwounded flesh, and doubt ultimately binds us more strongly to the divine. But I believe the real goodness and power of doubt has less to do with the strength of our bond with God than with its quality. The strength of our need for God is always absolute. It cannot be greater or lesser, only more or less recognized. But the nature, the quality of our need, and the way in which we satisfy it, changes. This is where doubt and uncertainty are indispensable organs of authentic faith. Doubt is a symptom of living religion, not its antithesis, because it breaks the artificial boundaries we have established and demands that we stretch toward the Infinite. Doubt is an idol-breaker.

It is possible to go too far. Modern Unitarian Universalists have avoided the historical error of looking on doubt at something to be avoided for a person of faith. We are unlikely to burn anyone at the stake for professing honest doubts, or to pull at their fingernails until they recant. We are unlikely to torment ourselves too much one way or the other. This is surely progress.

But in making our little, sophisticated universe safe for doubt, we have too often confused doubt and disconnection. Doubt is different than not caring, or than actively avoiding relationship. These do not serve us or honor our place as “divinely human” creatures. Both are endemic in our congregations. Though ours is a liberal orthodoxy, and not a conservative one, it is just as idolatrous, and just as unfaithful toward the Divine. To say that doubts of God preclude transcendence is to admit the truth of the very dichotomy we ought to be rejecting, that doubt and faith are opposite, irreconcilable poles.

The essential choice is not between faith and doubt. It is between relationship and separation. It is between seizing the Holy from every morsel, and ignoring the prospect of holiness. It is between breathing with two full lungs, and a slow suffocation unto death. It is between relishing all the flavors of awe, and numbness.

Doubt can serve us well; we mustn’t be afraid of it. Like all suffering, it is wasted if we fail to breathe it in deeply. God can handle our doubt of God’s goodness and grace, God can handle our denial of God’s presence in every being — if we use our troubles for deepening.

As Universalists, we are called to be receptive to the meaning in every experience, pleasant or not, to draw out its significance and make that our own. We are called from every direction, even through doubt, not by booming voices from the sky, but by the innumerable elements of a single reality.

I had a terrible fight once with someone I loved. I said some things I didn’t mean, she said some things she didn’t mean, and we found ourselves in the middle of a Montague-and-Capulet, I-don’t-even-remember-what-we-were-fighting-about fight.

There we were, furious but holding hands, loosely and more intimate for the distance
Our loose-locked hands left room for breeze, midwife to a common soul

All sin is separation, and separation is the only sin. Conflict, even detachment, when it is an intimate experience, is not sinful, but sacred.

Relationship demands more, and in unexpected ways, but that’s healthy, and appropriate for Universalists. Whether we perceive it or not, whether it is intentional or by some subtler design, the challenge and reward of all relationships — except dead ones — is in their shifting winds.

Existential crises are healthy. They keep us in a living, dynamic, and intimate relationship with the possibilities of existence. My panic in Oaxaca was partially a result of having allowed that connection to stagnate, and noticing it, catastrophically, only when I slowed down enough to let it catch up with me. All the stages of my doubt — heartbreak, uncertainty, and even avoidance — have been valuable. They have kept me from retreating to a new certainty. When I read B. F. Skinner’s books, the walls I had built, that had separated me from a vibrant connection with God, tumbled down.

To the extent that knowledge sparks these little revolutions, it is in the service of God. Faith and knowledge draw the same sleigh. Their real value is not in the contentment, but in the anxiety they provide, in the way they spur us to ever-deeper, ever-better, though perhaps more difficult, lives.

Being in relationship with the Infinite requires recognition of our own finite dimension. Not to doubt is idolatry because it requires a certainty that is, and must be, beyond us as created beings. As followers of Jesus, we are called to be eternally skeptical of any idol, even — especially — one hidden in the trappings of a beloved and all-too-certain idea of what our religion ought to be. The key to self-actualization, Victor Frankl writes, is self-transcendence. If we can transcend ourselves by not fearing doubt, then, paradoxically, we will overcome our attachment to our own narrow perspective and become closer to the Universal God.

Love is the most subtle of idols, but even love can suffocate a relationship with the divine. In my case it certainly did: I was so enamored of a theology, of an idea of God, that I lost the real pulse of Spirit. I thought I had lost my God, but I had only lost my idea of God, and the distinction is crucial. In Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lenny suffocates a mouse from love. He simply doesn’t know not to squeeze so tightly. Similarly, a part held too tightly keeps the Whole unknown to us. Only by constantly shedding ideas of God can the real, unknowable God be approached. Be not afraid. No soul is ever lost from God.

Our understandings of God are inherently inadequate, and even our cherished beliefs can become idols precisely because we cherish them. If our love of Christianity, or of the church, or of each other keeps us from that which transcends and includes all, we will have defaced Christianity, the church, and each other them by making them into merely the objects of our vanity.

So this is our challenge: to exist between the extremes of separation and ossification. We must learn to be serious but not self-important. A cult, after all, is just a religion without a sense of humor. We must seek a mature religion that is whole and of one piece, without ever being so idolatrously complete that it prevents evolution of our relationship with the ever-flowing Waters of Grace. God is not finished. The holy age continues. Revelation is not sealed. A living relationship, with all its doubts and dark crooks, is a surpassing beatitude.

“Ustedes universalistas”, dijo J.M. Pullam acerca del año 1900, “están ilegalmente ocupando la palabra más grande del idioma. El mundo ya empieza a querer esa gran palabra, y ustedes universalistas deberían mejorar la propiedad, o marcharse”.

En aquel entonces, la gran tensión dentro del movimiento universalista era si el universalismo sería una fe cristiana, y hasta que punto. Al respeto Brainard Gibbons en 1949 se preguntó:

“¿Es el universalismo una confesión cristiana, o es algo más, una religión verdaderamente universal? Este asunto es el más vital que hemos enfrentado nunca, porque el cristianismo y este universalismo más grande son irreconciliables. Un decisión grave debe ser tomado, ¡y pronto! Si el universalismo no significa algo distinto y afirmativo, caerá hasta ser naderìa. Ni amado ni odiado, sólo ignorado”.

El universalismo cristiano, o el “universalismo más grande”. No podían coexistir.

Esta congregación eligió el universalismo cristiano; la mayoría de nuestras demás iglesias ecogieron varios tipos de esa “religión universal”.

No vengo para convencerlos de que adopten su formulario; no ha sido ampliamente exitoso, y más relevante, los cristianos tienen una necesaria testificación. Pero mientras nuestro mundo se vuelve cada vez más interconectado, es cada vez más difìcil quedar satisfecho con nuestra manera vieja de hablar de Dios. Nuestro Dios ya no cabe dentro de nuestro cristianismo antiguo.

Quiero recontar una historia de Richard Hurst, que él contó el mes pasado. Ninguno de ustedes estaban, así que no me siento culpable por apropriarme de él. Trata de un capellàn catòlico estadunidense en Japòn, durante la guerra en Corea, y su asistente.

“El sacerdote se da cuenta de que cómo de lejos ha venido del apartamento estrecho en el barrio de Brooklyn en el cual creció. Siente la grandeza del mundo y cómo hay tanto que conocer y explorar. Las posibilidades son animadoras y espantosas. ‘Cuando yo era niño, me ensañaron que la religiòn cristiana le hacìa una diferencìa fundamental al mundo’, dice el cura a su compañero. ‘Pero más de la mitad de la población del mundo está en este hemisfero. Ni siquiera saben qué es el cristianismo, y están contentos sin él.’”

Un Dios universal es más grande de lo que podemos concebir. Dios es siempre más profundo y más amplio que nosotros, no importa cómo de profundo o cómo de amplio nos hacemos. Dios debe ser así, si no, no sería Dios. Hoy en dia, más que nunca, está claro que esta idea de Dios la cual hemos compartido, en el lenguaje particular de la Biblia, y en las ideas occidentales (y bíblicos y occientales prejuicios), no es adecuada para expresar enteramente la experiencia humana de lo divino.

Esto no es decir que no hay verdad en la visión cristiana de Dios; hay muchìsima. El cristianismo, como todo, salvo el Eterno mimso, puede ser verdad, y puede ser completo, aunque debe ser insufficiente en sí, porque sólo Dios no tiene límites. El estado natural de todo es anhelar.

El reverendo John Beuhrens ha escrito que “Dios es una esfera inteligible que tiene su centro en todas partes, y su circumferencia en ninguna”. Si Dios es una esfera, y si estamos cada uno en su centro, pues profundidad es amplitud. No podemos ir más profundamente en Dios sin ir afuera hacia su amplitud. Como el espacio extraterrestre, Dios tiene ni arriba ni abajo ni izquierda ni derecha, sino sòlo afuera, afuera, más y aún más grande.

Yo creo que no podemos ser profundamente cristianos sin ser ampliamente religiosos, sin meter nuestro cristianismo en la verdad que existe en otras religiones, y en otras partes de nuestra existencia, que generalmente no se consideran como religiosas, pero lo deben ser, o el universalismo no merece su nombre.

Nuestra religión debe ser universalista en fuente y en aplicación. Debemos tomar ventaja de nuestra perspectiva expansiva en cada aspecto de la vida, no sólo para ser consistente, sino también porque las particularidades revelan a lo Universal, y lo Universal alimenta a las particularidades.

Nada es tan pequeño que no debemos intentar ponerlo en su contexto universal. ¿Qué lugar tiene tu desayuno en la vida religiosa? ¿Cómo te conectan tus pantalones a la Presencia Divina? ¿Cómo le afectará el color de tu pared a tu relación con el Cosmos? Estas parecen preguntas tontas—y lo son en algún sentido—pero así como el poema está compuesta por palabras, y el año se compone de días, la decisión de vivir significativamente se pinta por momentos innumerables de la gracia trascendente.

Hace como un año, yendo a casa de la escuala, yo estaba parado en el semáforo. Por casualidad me toqué el lóbulo.

Naturalmente exploramos el cuerpo desde muy niño. Me imagino un regocijo similar al decubrir que tenía dedos, o eyebrows. Pero no tengo memoria de esa novedad. Y seguramente en viente años había tocado antes el lóbulo. Sea cual sea su fuento, esto fue un toque inculcado con significado.

¿Una revelación grande? Quizás no. Pero como cualquier experiencia religiosa, fue una fuente, aunque sólo brevemente, de entendamento trascendente, por lo cual es una experiencia que vale cultivar.

Asì como cada experiencia nos ofrece este entendamento, cada tradición religiosa es una respuesta a las corrientes vivas de la Eternidad. Meremente existir les da legitimidad como fuentes de la divinidad, y que comparten algunas verdades, se le hace un poco más fácil a nuestras mentes humanas pueblerinas.

El dilema es qué hacer con las diferencias entre estas tradiciones. Podemos inventar un ecumenismo que les quite el filo y que encalaca sus colores más brillantes, pero esto nos deja insatisfechos. Sí hay diferencias entre religiones, no sólo las debidas a la cultura, sino también las de su ética y de su espiritualidad. Además, las diferencias no son pequeñas, a veces hay contradicciones directas. El encalacar fracasa porque estas diferencias nos ayudan a entender su fuente común.

Para un Dios infinito, es preciso la paradoja. No hay una manera única de ver y entender al Trascendente, así como no hay unicamenta una manera de ver y entender una flor. Hay muchísimos poemas que tratan de flores, pero no es necesario que algunos sean “falsos” para que otros sean “verdadosos”, aunque se contradigan a sì mismos, o entre sí. Los poemas no necesitan ninguna unidad excepto en aquella flor que describan.

Así Dios viene de todas direcciones a la vez, y es por eso que el universalismo y el cristianismo son no sólo reconciliables, sino mutuamente necesarios. Así como un poema señala a la flor, pero no la es, el cristianismo señala a Dios, pero no lo es. Un Dios que no le trascenda al cristianismo debe ser demasiado pequeño para ser el Dios cristiano. Es en Dios mismo, y no en las religiones que lo gesticulan a Él, que la unidad se encuentra.

“Cuando conozcas al Buda, mátalo.” El Budismo ensaña que la religión es el obstàculo final a la Iluminación. El dedo que señala a la luna, según el dicho Taoista, no es la luna. Si permitimos que nuestro amor al cristianismo nos impeda señalar al cielo, habremos desfigurado al cristianismo por hacerlo ídolo.

Como tantos dedos señalando a la luna, ideas religiosas pueden ser paradójicas, aun contrarias entre sí, pero todas son dirigidas al Dios, en el cual encuentran su unidad. Esta tensión no es dañosa. Al contrario, es una fuerza vital en nuestras vidas religiosas. La paradoja nos vigoriza, porque es un Poder paradójico que nos sostiene.

Michael Stewart, un miembro de la Iglesia Unitaria Universalista de Arlington, Virginia, ha escrito de las paradojas que lo mantienen:

“En este punto de mi propio viaje, me considero como místico, ateo, diosa-afirmante, rationalista, casado, bisexual marido y padre. ¿Hay unidad en my diversidad? Para mí, el Unitario Universalismo me da una zona de lo ‘no examinado, por amor y de propósito.’ Dentro de las paredes de mi iglesia y dentro del corazón mío unitario universalista, no tengo que justificar mis contrasentidos, como insiste el mundo exterior—or abandonar partes de mí—sino puedo celebrar mis paradojas internas y ganar fuerza de ellas.”

Profundizar nuestras paradojas nos lleva más hacia el alma verdadera de Dios. No es solamente permisible, sino necesario, examinar nuestras paradojas, ver que se contradigan, y amarlas de todos modos, porque ellas son los dedos que señalan a la luna.

No necesito escoger entre ser hermano y ser hijo, o entre ser amigo and ser amante. Lo soy todo. Tengo que andar por todos estos caminos a la vez, y permitir que cada cosa y cada experiencia me guíe al rincón de Dios que radica allì. ¿Somos universalistas, o cristianos, o budistas, o ateos, o poetas, o hermanos, o maridos, o amantes? El universalismo cree en no escoger, con tal que seamos honrados en amar, compremetidos al mejorarse, y abiertos a la verdad que hay in cada ser.

Andar tantos caminos puede parecer fácil, si ignoramos la carga tremenda de la libertad, pero en realidad es el trabajo más difìcil y más noble de los seres humanos. El universalismo no debe ser cómodo. Dios es grande, y nosotros somos pequeños, y el universalismo es la convicción de que para acercárnoslo a Dios debemos crecer nuestros espíritus para siempre.

Imitamos a Dios por andar tantos caminos, porque en realidad esto es lo que hace Dios: filtrarse por todas las grietas al mismo tiempo. Nos queda solamente percibirlo. La gran carga del creyente liberal es que la libertad nos priva de excusas. Tenemos la _libertad_ de escoger unicamente lo que nos haga còmodo, y no preocuparnos por el resto, pero nuestra llamada es negarse a escoger. Es insistir que Dios no está sólo en algunas partes, sino en todas, en cada persona, en cada experiencia, y en cada momento. Cuando no tenemos gobernadores, salvo nosotros mismos y Dios, el confort de fronteras nos abandona. No tenemos ninguna autoridad para protegernos de la luz tremenda de la Integridad.

Esto es el mensaje que comparten el cristianismo y el universalismo: la eliminación de todo obstáculo a una experiencia auténtica y amplia de la Divinidad. Yo creo, como creía John Murray, que “Jesucristo era el más gran universalista.” Como Cristo, el universalismo más amplio debe venir no para abolir, sino para cumplir.

Pues es hora de mejorar la propiedad, o marcharse. El envangelio cristiano exige movimiento, no más allá del cristianismo, sino hacia una renovación de él, por una fe màs amplia y universal. “Universalismo” es todavía “la palabra más grande del idioma.”

Que así sea, para siempre. Amén.

Sermon delivered at the UNMC on August 15, 2004. See also the associated pastoral prayer.

“You Universalists,” said J. M. Pullman around 1900, “have squatted on the biggest word in the English language. Now the world is beginning to want that big word, and you Universalists must improve the property, or move off the premises.”

At the time, the great tension within the Universalist movement was whether, and to what extent, Universalism would be a Christian faith. Brainard Gibbons asked this very question in 1949:

“Is Universalism a Christian denomination, or is it something more, a truly universal religion? This issue [he continued] is the most vital Universalism has ever faced, for Christianity and this larger Universalism are irreconcilable. A momentous decision must be made, and soon! Unless Universalism stands for something distinctive and affirmative, it falls in[to] indistinguishable, negative nothingness—neither loved nor hated, just ignored!”

Christian Universalism, or the “larger Universalism.” You could not have both.

This congregation chose Christian Universalism; most of the rest of the Universalist churches are now Unitarian Universalist churches like the one in which I grew up, and they chose some version of this “universal religion.”

I’m certainly not here to try to persuade you to take their formula; for one thing, it hasn’t been universally successful, and more to the point, Christians have a necessary witness. But as our world grows more interconnected, it’s becoming more difficult to hold onto our old ways of talking about God. Our God is getting too big to remain within the constraints of our Christianity.

I’d like to recount (in English) a story that Richard Hurst told at last month’s Spanish-language service. None of you were there, so I don’t feel bad about appropriating it. The story is about a young Jewish chaplain in Japan during the Korean War, and his young Catholic assistant:

“The rabbi realizes how far he has come from the cramped apartment in the ethnic neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up. He senses how big the world is and how much there is to know and explore. The prospect is frightening but also exhilarating. ‘I was taught when I grew up that the Jewish religion made a fundamental difference to the world,’ he says to his companion. ‘….[But] more than half the world is on this side of the planet. They don’t even know what Judaism is, and they’re content without it.’

“The two of them … notice an old man, standing before the railing of an altar. He has a long white beard that lays upon his chest and seems possessed of a life of its own, like a waterfall. It catches the soft lights of the candles and glints of the sunlight that come through the door of the shrine. His body sways slowly back and forth, back and forth, as he prays.

“‘The rabbi says [to the priest:] ‘Do you think our God is listening to him, John?’

“‘I don’t know, chappy,’ [says his friend]. ‘I never thought of it.’

“‘Neither did I, until now,’ says the rabbi. ‘If God’s not listening, why not? If God is listening, then—well, what are we all about?’”

A universal God is bigger than we can manage to conceive of. God is always wider and deeper than we, no matter how wide or deep we manage to stretch. God has to be, or there’s no point in it. Now more than ever, it is clear that the idea of God that we have shared, couched in Biblical language and Western ideas (not to mention Western and Biblical prejudices), is not adequate to fully express the human experience of the divine.

This is not to say that there is not truth in this vision of God; there is a great deal. Christianity, like anything other than the Everlasting itself, may be true, and complete—but it must be insufficient, because only God is unbounded. The natural state of all things is yearning.

The Rev. John Beuhrens has written that “God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” If God is a sphere, and we are each at its center, then depth is breadth. We cannot go deeply into God without going out into the wideness of God. Like outer space, God has no up or down, left or right—only out, out, and ever larger.

I believe that we cannot be deeply Christian without being broadly religious—without engaging our Christianity in the truth that is to be found in other religious traditions, and in other parts of our existence that are not generally considered religious—but must be, or Universalism is not worthy of the name.

Our religion should be Universalist in its sources and in its application. We must engage our expanding perspective in every aspect of our lives—not just for consistency’s sake, but because the particulars reveal the Universal, and the Universal feeds the particulars.

No item is so small that we shouldn’t seek to put it in its universal context. How does your breakfast fit into your religious life? How are your pants connected to the divine Presence? How will the color of paint on your bedroom wall affect your relationship with the vastness of the Cosmos? These sound like silly questions—on some level, perhaps, they are—but as a poem is composed of words, and as a year is composed of days, the big decision to lead a meaning-full life is painted by countless small moments of transcendent grace.

Perhaps a year ago, I was driving home from school, and while I was stopped at a light, I happened to touch my earlobe.

oh brave new World
of Earlobe
I have known You not before
You End of new-found explorations
You vestigial Edge of skin
and soul

We all naturally explore our bodies from when we are very young; I imagine a similar glee when I first discovered that I had toes, or eyebrows. But I have no memory of that novelty. And surely in twenty years I had touched my earlobe before—but never like this. Whatever the source, this was a touch infused with significance.

Hang You there so
loosely
so soft and limp and cold
You final Stop of blood and breeze
You Flesh that bends
and knows

A major revelation? Maybe not. But like any religious experience, it was a source, albeit only briefly, of transcendent understanding, which makes it an experience worth cultivating.

Just as any of these everyday experiences are opportunities for communion, every religious tradition is a response to the stirring currents of the Eternal. The mere fact of their existence grants them legitimacy as conduits for divinity; the fact that they share certain truths makes it a little easier on parochial human minds.

The real dilemma is what to do with their differences. We can invent a cheap ecumenism that sands away their corners and whitewashes their brightest hues, but this leaves us dissatisfied. Different religions do differ—not only culturally and aesthetically, but ethically and spiritually. There are not just subtle differences—there are outright contradictions. The whitewash fails because the very fact of their differences helps us to understand the complexity of their common source.

For an infinite God, paradox is essential. There is no single way of understanding the Transcendent—just as there is no single way of understanding a flower. There are many poems about flowers, but none of them has to be wrong for another to be right—even though they may contradict one another, or contradict themselves. The poems don’t need any unity except in the flower they describe.

This is how God can come from all these directions at once—and why Universalism and Christianity are not only reconcilable but mutually necessary. Just as a poem may point to a flower, but is not a flower, Christianity points to God, but is not God. A God who does not transcend Christianity is too small to be the Christian God. It is in God itself, and not in the religions that nod toward it, that unity is found.

“When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” Buddhism teaches that religion itself is the final obstacle to enlightenment. The finger pointing at the moon, the Taoist saying goes, is not the moon. If we allow our affection for our Christian heritage to get in the way of pointing heavenward, we will have defaced Christianity by making it into an idol.

Like so many pointing fingers, religious ideas may be paradoxical, even conflicting, but they are all directed toward the God in whom they find their unity. This tension, far from being damaging, is a vital force in our religious lives. We are invigorated by paradox because it is a paradoxical Power that maintains us.

Michael Stewart, a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, has written of the paradoxes that help sustain him:

“At this point on my own journey, [he writes] I consider myself a mystic, atheist, Goddess-affirming, rationalist, married bisexual husband and father. Is there unity in my diversity? For me, U[nitarian]U[niversal]ism provides a ‘zone of the lovingly and intentionally unexamined.’ Within the walls of [my church] and within my own U[nitarian] U[niversalist] heart, I do not have to justify my contradictions, as the outer world insists—or abandon parts of myself—but can celebrate my own inner paradoxes and gain strength from them.”

The deeper our paradoxes go—perhaps not unexamined, as Mr. Stewart says, but not artificially reconciled, either—the deeper they go, the deeper we find ourselves in the very soul of God. It’s not only okay, it’s necessary, to examine our paradoxes, find them contradictory, and adore them anyway, because they are the fingers that point to the moon.

I don’t have to choose between being a brother and being a son, or between being a friend and being a lover. I am all these things. I must tread all these sundry paths at once, and allow each to guide me to the corner of God that resides there. Are you Universalists, or Christians, or Buddhists, or atheists, or poets, or sisters, or husbands, or lovers? Universalism means that you do not have to choose, as long as you are honest in your loving, committed to your growth, and open to the truth that inhabits all things and all people.

To tread so many paths can seem easy, if one ignores the terrific burden of freedom, but in truth it is the hardest and noblest task of human beings. Universalism ought not be comfortable. God is big, and we are small, and Universalism is the conviction that to approach God we must grow our spirits evermore.

We imitate God by walking so many paths, because this is what God does—seeps in through all the chinks at the same time, if only we will perceive it. The great burden of religious liberals is that freedom strips us naked of excuses. We have the freedom to choose the part that makes us comfortable, and ignore the rest; but our calling is to refuse to choose—to insist that God isn’t just in one of those places, but in all of them—in every moment, in every person, in every experience. When we have no governors but ourselves and God, the comfort of boundaries deserts us. We have no earthly authority to hide us from the blinding light of the Whole.

This is the message that Christianity and Universalism share—the removal of all barriers to an authentic and expansive experience of Divinity. I believe, as John Murray did, that “Jesus Christ was the greatest Universalist.” Like Christ, the broader Universalism should come not to abolish, but to fulfill.

It is time, in short, to improve the property, or move off the premises. The Christian gospel demands movement—not beyond Christianity, but to a renewal of it in a larger, Universalist witness. Universalism is still “the biggest word in the English language.”

May it ever be so.

Amen.