WE ARE NOT ALONE

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

14 October 2001

For some time we’ve planned on today’s worship service being a celebration of Unitarian Universalism, our unlikely, indeed, our unique liberal faith. At our June General Assembly, held in Cleveland this year, we elected the first African-American head of a predominately white denomination. We also celebrated the thirty-ninth anniversary of the consolidation of the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association, forming the Unitarian Universalist Association of which we are a member congregation.

Those of us who attended that June gathering of our Association’s congregations thought about the nightmare of the 11th of September, and reflected on whether we should go forward with this planned service. We decided, yes we should. In the face of what has happened, it is a reflection on and a celebration of what we are about, and so it seems this is very appropriate.

At a time like this, only a month out from that dreadful horror on the 11th of September, it seems important to draw our attention to our relationships, to the mysteries of intimacy, and how we truly do connect each of us to the other, and all of us together. As we explore the mysteries of relationship, we stand a chance to come to more healthful responses to that calamity, to that tragedy, to that crime against humanity, than otherwise we might.

In reflections on church polity, on how we organize our religious communities, we call the organizational impulse that manifests within our liberal faith in North America as Congregationalism. This means the basic unit of governance for us is the congregation. Not me. Not someone in an office at 25 Beacon Street. The gathered congregation is the highest authority we have.

We are wary of centralized authority, seeing popes and mafia-like cabals in any apparent or imagined centralization of our denominational structures. It is a minor hobby among us to mock the denominational center. I admit I enjoy that small pastime myself. Even though the truth is, that the way we are set up, there isn’t much chance for very much central authority ever arising.

This all has to do with our particular understanding of human relationships. We cherish the individual in a sense rarely advocated within religious communities. We try to maximize the voice of the single person. To support this we keep our organizations fluid and open to new ideas and perspectives.

Stylistically, we North American Unitarian Universalists seek the novel over the tried and true, even when it sometimes leads us to foolishness. We’re willing to try things on, see how they fit. Fortunately, we’re also pretty good at throwing those things out when it turns out they didn’t fit.

This all reflects a perspective on life, on our human existence that I hope we’ll think about today. First and foremost it reflects a profound trust in the human being. While we have no creed, it is a common assumption among us that human beings can figure out what needs to be done, and given enough information will do it. This can be challenged, but most of us tend to believe this. We also tend to agree that in order for us to choose healthful and compassionate actions, we also need to see clearly as possible what motivates us in those actions.

On the one hand we see how this happens in our congregational need to discuss the issues that have flowed out of the events of the 11th of September. We meet and discuss, we send emails to each other, we call one another; we gather and struggle with a sharing of information and perspectives. We do all of this seeking to know enough to make wise decisions.

But, there is also coming to understand more of our character as human beings. We need to, and do challenge our basic assumptions, such as human beings will choose good, when given enough information. Here we also continue to talk. And more. We also engage those introspective practices, most of us continuously studying, many of us looking at our own hearts and minds in moments of silence; all seeking to understand what makes us tick.

We also see the need to examine the drives of the person, our needs for shelter and sex and love, as well as some kind of harmony and security in our lives. This is where I want to spend the greater part of today’s sermon. It appears there is a fundamental tension between two aspects of our humanity, both natural and ancient, visceral, biological. The one is our individuality, and our need to treasure our uniqueness, our singular existence. The other is our need to belong, to be a part.

We need to note these twin pulls of the human heart pull away from each other, toward differing truths although both truths; that manifest as our profound needs. We tend to start with an understanding of the individual. I find how our western culture at its best is in large part predicated upon a profound insight and celebration of our human individuality. I. Me. Important words, no doubt. Each of us has our identity, our self, as a precious gift. This emergence of individual identity is such an astonishing thing in the great matrix of biology, that of course we should celebrate it and cherish it.

Now we all know that through the larger part of the course of human history, there hasn’t been much of such attention to the individual. But in the course of time the modern west appeared, and with it, finally, some deep attention to the nature of the individual beyond the context of family and clan or nation. The United States has been in the forefront of this exploration of the possible person.

Our own Unitarian Universalist spiritual tradition also reflects this current; it is one devoted in large part to the care of that precious and unique individual. Small wonder the principal pamphlet introducing our denominational structures is called “Putting You First.”

In some ways, by no means all, the terrorists who struck at our culture were striking at this profound sense of individuality. This is not something out of the blue. The grand current of modernity has much to do with the consequences of this attention to the individual person. Of course there is also a cost to this attention to the individual.

The resultant libertarianism that has motivated much of our social policy has a cruel edge to it. To go only to this pole of the individual heart would, I am certain, create a hell on earth. The consequences of our quest for domestic comforts have been much ill elsewhere in the world. There are many critiques of our culture and the excesses of individualism, many written or spoken by us.

This happens, I think, because there is that other pole of the human heart, calling out for recognition and attention. And this is important. Because when not attended to, there is always the possibility of disease, of a cancer like the Taliban, like al Qaeda. There is that other deep need of human beings: which is to belong, and which cannot be ignored. We are individuals, you and I, unique, never to be repeated. But, we find our being, indeed our very identities, are woven out of each other. There is no “I” except differentiating out of a “we.” So “we” is also a precious word.

Sensing this larger need, among the thoughtful there has been considerable criticism of reckless individualism, even by us, its most fervent advocates. But among others, there has been a horrified recoiling. Islamic fundamentalism, and it should be noted Jewish and Christian fundamentalism; each reacts in horror at the consequences of a true celebration of the individual.

Those who fall to the unmitigated lure of that other pole of human need also create hells. What these hells look like become most obvious, most dramatic, among the fundamentalists, those who consciously reject modernity in favor of some mythic understanding of the past. At heart they are rejecting the individual in favor of a group identity. Ironically, as they do this with their appeal to history and traditions, it is not to one that actually ever existed. They are calling themselves and us, whether we like it or not, to a vision of community that rejects the individual.

Their targets are very revealing. Women come immediately to mind. In our English language, as for many others, Arabic for example, the term for the generic human is the word for a male. When women are assumed to be human enough that there is a call for a change in usage, the old herd instinct, the need to not rock the boat of community can rise in very ugly ways.

Among the standard characteristics of fundamentalisms, whether Islamic, Christian, Jewish or Hindu, is their adherence to a strict hierarchy of relationships, with women at the bottom. While within our Unitarian Universalist societies we’ve sufficiently embraced the ideals of inclusive language that it is extremely rare for us to speak of “men” and mean “people,” this continues to be the more common use within our culture.

The poisoned seeds of collective certainty live right here, waiting the chance to grow their own poisoned plants. Not Islamic culture, North American Christian culture taken away from a celebration of individuals forward to the mythic past in its forms of fundamentalism is also a call to tyranny over individuals.

Similarly, this fear of the individual and individualism, of the rights of persons, quickly becomes a call to suppress or exterminate sexual minorities. What do you mean you want the right to be married, to share insurance, to be visited by your intimate love when you’re dying? These are things that cannot be done without a right to marry. But the voice of righteous indignation, celebrating the old whole continues: How dare you rock the boat, and challenge our ancient comforting knowing of just how we should be.

In the hell created by those who would extinguish the light of the individual for the light of the group, the other among us must be eliminated. Anyone that denies the sweet certainties of “us” and challenge the comfort of knowing who we are, must be stopped. Socrates asks too many questions, and needs to be killed. And so should that uppity woman, or that pushy homosexual. And any identified other.

But this doesn’t mean there is no collective wisdom. It means that our profound human need to belong when carried to extremes creates evil. Just like individualism, when carried to extremes creates evil.

But here is the good news. The individual counts. And so does community. In that knowledge lays great hope. As we celebrate each other, as we protect each other, and as we talk with each other, we find what freedom really is.

Our liberal faith models the possibilities. We see this in our commitments to pluralism. We see in it how we cherish women and sexual minorities. We see this in our conscious reaching out to people of different colors. As Unitarian Universalists, we even see it in the broadness of our theological perspectives.

And we know we aren’t done. Our faith is open and evolving. We consciously open ourselves to challenge. Two examples. We are painfully aware of our classist inclinations. And we often are flat out ashamed of how few people of color we count among us. So, we continue to struggle. And we move forward. We educate our children to be better than us, more open, more loving, and this is important too: more critical.

We open our hearts and pocketbooks; we give our hands and attention to real needs among real people. We support AIDS orphans in Africa. We support the fight to end slavery for all time. We feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and help to educate those who are deemed uneducable right here in greater Boston. And at the same time we constantly look within, questioning, searching; seeking to know ourselves better.

The tensions between the needs of the individual and the needs of community are many. But, if we are willing to hold them, to not lapse into a blind fervor for one perspective over the other, we might see something good, we might even find the necessary ways to engage such things as the 11th of September.

Let us remember the cautions; let us not turn away from the criticisms. But, at the same time, let us celebrate the good in us, the knowing of a tension between our individuality and our communal needs, and our willingness to find ways to join these poles of the human heart. As we do so, we can offer something different than the voices of unfettered individualism or unfettered collectivism.

Today we honor the thirty-ninth anniversary of our denomination. We honor the messy gathering of individuals struggling to understand community. We come together in a community of faith in both the “I” and the “we.” As we do this we can find, we can demonstrate, we can show forth to the world a graceful way, one of freedom for all. It is the dream of our nation, and it is the reality of our community. Here we are: always human, frequently falling short; but constantly struggling for the good, for true freedom. Let this freedom shine before the world, a beacon of light, dispelling the dark.

Amen.