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Newsletter Articles - 2000
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What Universalism Has to Offer, II
Class Diversity
Most of the early Universalist churches in Massachusetts were founded
in the 1770s and -80s in the hill-country between I-495 and the
Connecticut river (an area that until then was sparsely populated)
by middle-class people who had withdrawn from Congregational or
Baptist churches. Because of their founders’ middle-class tendency
toward egalitarianism, their independent-mindedness, the frontier
setting, and the Universalist doctrine that God loves everybody,
these churches tended to be places in which different social classes
could mingle in some comfort. Farm hands and bankers, mill workers
and mill owners, worshipped side by side.
Most of the early Unitarian churches, by contrast, were former
Congregational churches inside I-495 dating back to 1620-1750 that
became Unitarian in the 1810s and -20s. These were venerable, endowed
churches, attended by their towns’ most prominent families, and
they exuded what the Rev. Charles Gaines of the First Parish Church
of Groton has called “a kindly elitism.” The mill owners were in
attendance, but the workers usually found that they were more comfortable
somewhere else.
Then, in the middle third of the twentieth century, under the influence
of Humanism, many Unitarian churches stopped speaking of God, or
Jesus, or “the kingdom of God.” The unrelieved intellectualism of
these churches repelled many, but especially those with less formal
education. While Universalism incorporated Humanist insights as
well, it continued to speak the Biblical language of the majority
of religious people in North America.
Today, while there are certainly Unitarian-heritage churches with
numerous blue-collar members, and Universalist churches with few,
the generalization still holds that it’s the Universalist-heritage
churches where you meet people from all walks of life. And the richness
and diversity of experience in these churches provides fertile ground
for growing deep spiritual roots.
“Our Universalism may yet save us--” writes former UUA President
the Rev. John Buehrens, “from being elitist or complacent, from
being a ‘cold corpse’ or merely intellectual.” We of the New Massachusetts
Universalist Convention are working to see that our Universalism
does, indeed, save us. We are walking our UU movement’s Universalist
path, and we invite others to accompany us. |
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A God that Exists
“I don’t believe in God,” said a congregant. The wise minister--not
I--said, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. I probably
don’t believe in that God either.”
The second of the ten commandments tells us not to make images
of God. I think it’s good advice, though most of us find it hard
to follow. We form images of God in the form of concepts and then,
when these concepts prove inadequate, we say we no longer believe
in God--when all that we no longer believe in are our own limited
concepts.
A. J. Mattill, Jr., minister of a tiny Universalist church in rural
Mississippi, wrote: “ ‘God’ is my heart’s name for the mystery of
the universe.” That struck a chord with me. I thought, there’s
a God that certainly exists. There is a mysteriousness about
life, and that’s what people are grappling with when they use the
word “God.” “God” is the “X” of life’s equation, the meaning we
seek, the answer we long for. And that brings to mind another quotation,
this one from A. Powell Davies, longtime minister of the big Unitarian
church in Washington, D.C.: “We can’t throw away the term ‘God.’
It’s a symbol of people’s deepest needs and strivings.”
Universalists don’t throw away the term “God.” Our Declaration
of Faith, distilled from two hundred years of Universalist experience,
opens with an avowal of faith in God as love. Like the second commandment,
I think this, too, is good advice. What it affirms is that in our
search for life’s meaning, the experience of love can be relied
on as a sign that the path we are following is a right one. |
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We're Evangelists, Not Secessionists
Frank Robertson writes to express his wish "that a name more
positive should be chosen for this effort.... To name a new effort
to affirm our Universalist heritage and develop an outreach program
after a political body [the Massachusetts Universalist Convention]
that voted to merge with Unitarians into the UUA is to imply an
effort to separate our churches out of the UUA again. We need a
larger hope and a larger love."
We agree that an effort such as ours needs to take great care to
avoid the appearance of being secessionist. We are an organization
of individuals, not churches. Our by-laws restrict our voting
membership to members of UUA congregations. And we have applied
for, and received, Independent Affiliate status from the UUA.
Our purpose in fanning the flame of Universalism is to strengthen
the UU movement, not withdraw from it. |
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Why Be Good?
Why be good? For Calvinists--the Pilgrims and Puritans, for
example--the practical answer was: to assure yourself that you're
going to heaven. Calvinists believed that all humans were
totally corrupt, incapable of doing good and deserving of eternal
hellfire, but that God had chosen a few undeserving humans to go
to heaven anyway, and had given these "elect" a special
grace that enabled them, with much struggle, to occasionally
do some good despite their depraved natures. So the practical
reason for trying to do good was that, if you succeeded, that proved
that you were among the "elect" and so destined for heaven.
Why be good? For the early Unitarians, the practical answer
was: to earn your way into heaven. The Unitarians rebelled
against the idea that one's ultimate fate was totally outside one's
control. Everyone has some capacity for doing good, they felt,
and those who succeeded in developing a high moral character would
be rewarded. Though their position in this regard was not
very different from that of Catholics or Episcopalians or Methodists,
the Unitarians stood out as liberals because at the time there were
relatively few Catholics or Episcopalians or Methodists in New England.
Why be good? For Universalists, the practical answer was:
to be happy. Since Universalists felt that eventually
everyone got to heaven, the focus of their religion shifted
to this life. Being good, they felt, maximizes our changes of being
happy now. The answer was light-years ahead of the
answers provided by other religions. It was radical, and controversial.
It still is! The passage of more than 200 years hasn't written
a wrinkle on it. |
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The Meaning of the Cross
Jean Hopkins writes,
- "This is a request that the symbol of torture and persecution
be removed from the circle of Universalism... Jesus would want
us to remember his message of love and to live as he lived.
He [would] not want to be remembered with a symbol of violence
as the way he died."
We use the off-center cross for two reasons. One is that
it was adopted as symbolic of Universalism by the original Massachusetts
Convention, whose work we seek to carry on. (The off-center
cross seems to have been, in fact, the only symbol ever officially
adopted by any Universalist body.)
The more important reason is that we support the symbol's message--that
we acknowledge our Christian roots, while leaving room for other
points of view.
But Ms. Hopkins' point is well-taken. The cross is
a symbol of torture. This is why the cross is used so much
by mainstream Christianity, with its belief that by his death Jesus
"atoned for" the sins of humanity.
There is another possible interpretation, though, which some UUs
find helpful. The horrible death represented by the cross
was reserved by the Romans for non-citizens judged to be threats
to the empire. The cross is accordingly a reminder of
the radically subversive nature of Jesus' vision of a kingdom of
equals. |
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Giving a Different Kind of Finger
I had encountered it the year before, carved on the 19th century
gravestone of Universalist missionary Hope Bain in eastern North
Carolina: an index finger pointing up. The message seemed
to be, "I'm in heaven"--not only a reassurance to loved
ones, but also a final proclamation of the 19th-century Universalist
faith that eventually everyone goes there.
Now here the finger was again, on three century-old gravestones in
a Universalist cemetery on a hilltop in northeast Pennsylvania.
It was early on a raw and windy Sunday morning in the fall of 1997.
I had come up alone to visit the graves and study the view.
There are no Unitarian graves in these hills. Unitarianism
tended to hop from city to city, an ethnic religion of transplanted
New Englanders. But Universalism sent missionaries into the
countryside, where it spread like wildfire.
Universalism had a message everyone could understand, and Universalism
spoke to the heart. God is a loving God, it said, who will
somehow find a way to save everybody. We're all in the same
boat. There's nothing to fear after death. Religion
is about loving one another in this life.
It was an optimistic message, fittingly represented by that cheery
finger pointing up. It is a message that the world still needs
today. |
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Universalists Leading the Way
Child Dedications
The old canard that Universalists were backward Unitarians is reinforced
when modern UUs read Unitarian historical material in the innocent
expectation that they will hear about both sides. In Channing,
the Reluctant Radical by Jack Mendelsohn (Skinner House) for
example, we read (p. 143) of how, in 1818, the Unitarian leader
came
- to propose a new interpretation of the ancient rite [of baptism].
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- Why baptize a child, he asked, before the child can understand
or want it?...He preferred to think of the rite as pointing its
primary meaning toward parents, reminding them of the "great
ends for which a human life is given."
Channing's modified baptism is recognizable as what we now call
a "child dedication," and the reader can easily infer
that Channing originated our current custom. But John Murray,
the Universalist leader, anticipated Channing by 36 years, and even
used the term "dedication."
With the practice of dedicating children, as with so many other
features of the UU movement, it was the Universalists who led the
way. |
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Walking the Knife Edge
The New Massachusetts Universalist Convention is turning out to
be a disappointment to some (but not all) UUs who describe themselves
as "Christian" and also to some (not all) who describe
themselves as "humanist."
The latter are unhappy that we seek to recall the UU movement's
Christian heritage; the former, that we seek to keep that heritage
"at arm's length," picking and choosing from it as we
would from any other world religion.
This tells us that we are doing the job we set out to do.
Universalism walks a knife-edge, balanced above partialisms (exclusive
or limited views) of every stripe. It acknowledges its roots
but seeks to stay open to insights from every source. |
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