Dr. John Young                                                                                                                6/4/06

UUCJ

Finding and Nurturing a Spiritual Home

Unitarian Universalists, past, present, and prospective, are spiritual seekers. Our search for the truths of our lives is our personal and community quest. We are seeking a spiritual home that will encourage our particular spiritual growth. The standard brands of religion perceive people being converted from lives of sin and idolatry through divine revelation into the one true faith with its particular dogmas, sacraments, and prayers. We perceive people growing into lives of effective action and appropriate reverence. All of reality is our source of revelation. Love is our doctrine, the quest for truth is our sacrament, and service is our prayer.

We believe, in contrast to the standard brands of religion, that each human being has her/his unique experiences of mystery and wonder and deserve to find a democratic, inclusive, activist community where each member’s conscience can freely develop. In this open and responsible community, we seek to work together toward world community and toward a sustainable and interdependent natural world where we can concentrate on doing justice with love. We remain on our guard against idolatries of the mind and spirit, and we join in community in order to have the courage and fortitude to confront the powers and structures of evil with justice and compassion. We believe that humanity is worthy of affirmation not miserable sinners in the hands of an angry deity. We believe that the world is to be celebrated and respected not demeaned or rejected. We believe that our lives are the foundation for grace, not a veil of a tears or an FCAT exam so you can get into heaven. We believe that God helps those who help themselves, that Jesus realized that every person was a child of Creation, and that each human being can find meaning and value in life and will find peace in death. The Unitarian Universalist revelation is that there are communities for liberated and activist seekers like us, and they are called Unitarian Universalist congregations. They are our spiritual homes.

The Judeo-Christian Bible does not contain nearly enough relevant material about women. Only two of the Books of the Bible are named for women, Ruth and Esther. The Book of Ruth comes early in the Old Testament, in the period of judges before there were Jewish kings. Ruth is not a Jew, but a Moabite, whose husband has died, and whose mother-in-law, Naomi, is urging her to go back to own people to find a new husband and a life of her own. Ruth replies in the famous passage [1:16]: “Whither thou goest, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge, thy people shall be my people, and thy God will be my God.” Without children or husband, Ruth dedicated herself to follow her mother-in-law back to live with her Jewish tribe away from her Moab homeland. She ended up marrying Boaz, the most successful family relative of her mother-in-law’s clan, and bearing a son, Obed, who became the grandfather of King David.

Many of us, Unitarian Universalists, are like Ruth. We did not grow up as Unitarian Universalists. We grew through our life experiences to become liberated and activist people, and we chose, sometimes despite family resistance and cultural expectations, to become Unitarian Universalists. I realize that in our 21^st century environment it is tempting to put all our choices on the level of changing channels, or flitting from one display at the shopping malls of life to another. But choosing and nurturing a spiritual home is not a spectator or consumer choice. It is not random dabbling. It is a choice like getting married, choosing a vocation, deciding and being blessed by having a child. Yes, as some of us can attest from our personal experiences, sometimes we may choose a spouse or vocation that does not last a lifetime, and some parents never successfully bond with their progeny, but we need to consider our congregational membership to be like a marriage, vocation, or parenting decision. We need to be like the Biblical Ruth: we need to say to our congregation and our denomination, “where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay, your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.”

As anyone knows who has truly found and nurtured a home, we do not successfully find or nurture a home without this level and intensity of commitment, this courageous fortitude, this patient love, this enduring will to grow our selves within a growing community. At the heart of the agony of contemporary life is this critical error in judgment. Many people think they can just find a community and move in and if it does not meet all their needs move on in a few weeks, months, or years. These pitiful, lonely, isolated human beings wander from one group to another through lives of desperation and frustration because they never quite find a home. They don’t find a home because they don’t nurture a home. That is the secret: you only find a home by nurturing the homes you think you have found. You need to make your chosen into your own. You need to help them become what you need for them to be, and in that process, you need to transform and transcend the limitations, the idolatries, the powers and structures of evil, within ourselves that are getting in the way of our chosen communities actually becoming the spiritual homes of our dreams.

This doesn’t just happen once. Think of how you have had to adjust in the course of your lives with your birth family. I hope that your relationships are not just as they were when you were a child, for your sake and your birth family’s sake. Think of how you have grown in the course of your married lives. As we know, people who do not grow in their marriages are pitiful and depressing. Think, if you have had the blessing of children, how much your children have helped you grow and transform yourself as they grew and transformed themselves. If you have worked through generations in a single vocation, ponder how that vocation has changed through the years, and how you have been transformed through that process. So, of course, the congregation is not exactly what it was 40 years ago or 20 years or 10 years. Neither are you. You are older, different, perhaps wealthier and more conservative. If your Unitarian Universalist congregation has been doing its job, it is different and you are different because we are evolutionary people, activists trying to transform the world; so, why would we expect our chosen spiritual home to stand still, or to bow down to our prejudices, idolatries, and limitations?

            Once you have found a spiritual home, for instance, by becoming a member of this congregation, what do you do so that it truly remains your spiritual home? You need to nurture it in ways that nurture you, and you need to transform yourself in ways that help you grow and help this congregation to grow, not just in numbers but in depth, in power, in constructive and transforming influence. If it is not ‘meeting your needs,’ get to work and see that it does so again, both by helping the congregation to grow in ways that are good for you but also by helping yourself to grow in ways that good for you and for this community. Just as some people act like perennial babies in their birth family or even as life-long rebellious adolescents in families where they are supposedly the parents or grandparent; so, some people regress in their chosen congregations. Now, it is true a family is the place where you can go even when you don’t deserve it. Your spiritual home is not going to turn you away because you momentarily regress. We all have our regressive moments, even periods. But just as families end up rejecting or marginalizing the adult who remains a child or adolescent forever; so, any healthy congregation will end up rejecting or marginalizing those members who make a vocation of regression. That is our congregational covenant is all about: it provides our carefully and democratically constructed standards of appropriate behavior. In summary form, so do our mission and goals, and the second half of our spoken affirmation: to live in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, and to grow into harmony with the divine. This is not a one-time impulse; this is a life-long commitment.

            Like any Unitarian Universalist congregation, we welcome the full variety of seekers to our services and program; it not unusual for a fourth of our Sunday morning congregation to be visitors. We do our best to make quite clear what the expectations of membership are so that people who do join will know what they are getting into. We are and will remain a pluralistic community. Your ideas and your actions will be supported and inspired by some and challenged and criticized by others. That is what freedom means; that is how democracy works. As a Unitarian Universalist, your spiritual growth is never done. You can rest and go with the flow, but you cannot say: all right now I have the people here that I like and I don’t want any more. I don’t want to be nice to people I disagree with, and I don’t want to hear about things that don’t fit my current stopping place because it makes me uncomfortable, or it challenges me to live up to ideals that I had but have forgotten about, or have gotten too tired to do anything about. It remains just as hard to be a good Unitarian Universalist when you are 62 or 75 as it is to be a Unitarian Universalist when you are 21 or 38 or 50. That’s what freedom means; that how democracy works.