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.

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” – Matthew 10:16

Bill Sinkford, president of my estranged religious home, the Unitarian Universalist Association, has decided he wants to have a dialogue with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran. There’s a great debate going on about whether this, and the crowing press release from the UUA, was a good idea. I think it was a bad idea, not just because it was with the president of an oppressive regime, but because it reflects a misunderstanding of what it means to be prophetic which is wrong and naive.

What makes or breaks a democracy is not “public dialogue,” but widely distributed political power. Ahmedinejad can “dialogue” precisely because an oppressive political system means that he is never forced to be responsive to anything that may emerge out of the dialogue. This doesn’t hold anyone accountable because it doesn’t force them to be responsive.

The prophetic voice is one that builds organized, strategic power to hold power people accountable for their bad actions. Instead, we put out press releases and pass resolutions. This episode is not a prophetic stand. This is masturbation, only more dangerous. (And probably messier.)

To be prophetic we don’t just want a relationship — “king-to-jester” is a relationship — we want a relationship of mutual respect. I would want my (future) kid to talk to bullies, yes — but to stand up to them, not to “ask them questions,” and certainly not for the fleeting thrill of poking some other bully in the eye. We get respect with public officials by being powerful.

To be prophetic, we have to talk as equals. In other words, not “dialogue,” but negotiation. Moses didn’t go up to Pharaoh to get to know him better, he did it to negotiate: “Do this, or else.” And he could do that because he had power to back it up. In his case, God’s plagues; in ours, the power of organized people.

President Bush may not hold as many press conferences as I like, but he is accountable for this as for other things in a way the Iranian president never has been — witness the initial failure of the bailout, or the 2006 congressional elections. And Bill Sinkford and the UUA have never done anything I know of that has made any public official more accountable.

As for the idea that we should have a relationship with them for “pastoral” reasons, i.e. to help him see the error of his ways, this is (1) stupid, given that UUs don’t even count as “people of the book,” and are thus unlikely to be listened to by a conservative Muslim, and (2) is better done in private anyway, if we really care about the state of his soul.

Updated: a couple of times for clarity and typos.

Updated again: My further comment on this issue, in response to this comment by Fred:

There is a need to develop some level of talking points in any conflicted relationships. There is a need to have some sort of level playing ground from which to build to those more difficult points of disagreement. The current adminstration has stated that no conversations with Ahmadinejad would occur without some sort of pre-conditions. Of course, then Condi Rice did meet with his representatives so one has to wonder what were the pre-conditions if any, to allow that meeting. Some of those pre-conditions might occur at a lower level of interaction. Enter the Peace and Reconciliation folk.

They have no authority to alter current foriegn policy with Iran but they can show a different face to that country. It is the same strategy used when we invite or are invited to a cultural exchange or to have a student exchange. It is a grass roots development that allows for human interaction at the human level not the political level which is conflicted.

Me again: But, Fred, the problem is that if you want human, not political, interaction, than the last thing you should do is go meet with a political leader.* All meetings with political leaders are inherently political, and call for a prophetic stance, not a pathetic one.

[*You should go meet with regular folks. I’m told that the FOR does arrange for this, which is good as far as it goes.]

I also think it’s impossibly naive to think that political conflicts are primarily motivated by a lack of “understanding,” and if we only showed each other “different faces” our problems would be solved. Political conflicts primarily arise from serious — and legitimate and real — disputes about resources, self-interests, and values.

And I want to be clear — I think the prophetic failure here is not just that Sinkford et al. entered into dialogue without holding Ahmadinejad accountable, but that they do so having also, over many years, failed to hold our own government to a more rational, compassionate and progressive relationship with Iran (among other places). By being more concerned with ego than with being both ethical and effective in the public sphere, the UUA has enabled the current problems in our Republic no less than they have enabled Ahmadinejad. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a pragmatic stance in politics but is a sorry basis for prophecy.

Like Scott Wells, I’d been reluctant to wade into the discussion about youth and young adult funding within the Unitarian Universalist Association, mainly because I care only slightly more about intradenominational politics than other people do. And most of you who read this aren’t Unitarian Universalists, anyway.

But this whole mess is a nice excuse for me to talk about organizing, which I love. Back to youth and young adults in a bit.

In organizing, we spend a lot of time talking about self-interest. Self-interest is distinct from selfishness (concern exclusively about the self) and selflessness (concern exclusively with others); a working definition might be “concern for the self in relation to others.” I have short-term self-interests: I’m hungry, so getting some food is in my self-interest. I have other, deeper self-interests: I want to have a family. I want to be respected. I want to be right with God.

The only way to relate honestly with other people is by finding common self-interests. Read that sentence again, and then again until you believe it.

A simple example: It’s in my self-interest to eat. It’s in the self-interest of the grocer to sell me food. So we come to an arrangement that satisfies both self-interests (namely, me buying food and paying for it) and then we’ve had an honest interaction. Viola! Our self-interests are different, but they come together in ways that are mutually satisfactory. The same is true of all honest interactions; they’re just more complicated or subtler. With me?

Now, power is just the ability to engage other people’s self-interest. The power that large groups of people have relative to elected officials is that officials have a self-interest in not ticking off people who vote for them. The power that my boss has relative to me depends (in part) on my self-interest in not being fired.

All of that stuff is in the first day of organizer training. So what does that have to do with Unitarian Universalist youth and young adults? If y/ya want to be “empowered” – which I can only assume means to be, well, powerful – they need to stop whining and find ways to engage the self-interest of the rest of the Association. Funding is being cut because y/ya “leaders” have not managed to engage the self-interest of the people who control the UUA.*

So what would a process leading toward real y/ya empowerment look like? Well, off the top of my head, it would involve introspection, one-on-ones, small group meetings, etc. — whatever was necessary to identify the individual and collective self-interests of UU Youth and Young Adults. It would, as Scott said, involve “creat[ing] institutions that create the desired goals.”

Then, with a clear understanding of what they want, they would meet with the key power people in the Association, and try to figure out how they could make what they want be in the self-interest of the power people in the denomination. They would need to be very clear in their own minds that denominational politics, like all politics, is about power. And political power is the ability to induce and/or engage the self-interest of whomever can give you what you want.

* This resolution uses the language of “investment” in y/ya programming, but doesn’t tell the rest of us what the dividends will be. It could be any number of things: Maybe the self-interest they engage is our desire for there to be strong UU institutions after we’re gone. Maybe it’s something else. But to be “empowering” for everyone involved, it will have to be negotiated out of our respective self-interests, not whined into existence.

“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.