When I began my ministry, 26 years ago, the topic of belief was near the bottom of my priorities. I figured we are a non-creedal religious tradition in which each person has one’s own beliefs so I need not overly concern myself with belief.
Several experiences early in my ministry changed that for me. My most impactful was my sitting with a woman in her late 70s as she lay in the hospital near death, witnessing her emotional turmoil caused, to a large extent by her not knowing what she believed; she could not clearly say what she believed about death and meaning of life and god, or no god and this made her unnaturally afraid of death and very un-ready to let go.
I also observed that the majority of people joining the UU church were leaving other religious traditions they were rejecting; these new UU’s were terrific at saying what they did not believe about those traditions, clearly stating what they did not believe. Saying in positive terms what they did believe was generally beyond their ability.
I also observed that when UUs were engaged in the public forum, in political action and social change, they seldom expressed their motivations in religious terms—in terms of what they valued. Most often they had clear political opinions but they could not express motivation in terms of values/belief. This meant they could not be in conversation with people on the far right whose political opinions were often couched in religious terms—they had no way of communicating.
I also noticed that when I suggested people in our church write out their personal statements of belief—their personal creed – they often just sat staring blankly at pieces of paper.
I therefore felt urgency as minister, and made it a major part of my ministry, to help people to be able to clearly and concisely state personal belief. To do this I came up with a process:
First, write your own spiritual autobiography: include people and places and events which had great impact on your life and reflect on their meaning and what those experiences have led you to believe. To live and reflect on your life is to write one’s credo. Live; trust the journey; tell your story; your story is your creed.
To give the process a framework, I suggest you answer the five big questions philosophers and theologians deal with. Your own story will give you clues to your beliefs, as will words of wisdom from the world’s religions and philosophers and poets and reason and science and logic and your intuition and your check book, appointment calendar.
Write your five answers, put them together and you have your creed:
This process works best when done with others. Speaking your spiritual autobiography our loud is a challenging, intimate process which empowers you and connects you to others. I only had 2 rules I enforced in leading building your own theology groups: first it is not okay to tell another person her beliefs are bad, wrong or stupid. It is ok to ask clarifying questions.
Second, it is not helpful to say what you do not believe. When you face a life crisis or are asked to help another person in crisis or come to die, what you do not believe will not be helpful.
Once you have written your own creed, I have some suggestions for graduate work: write your own gospel story (gospel means good news) which includes your beliefs but those are revealed in the story and not in didactic form.
After that, think of current ethical questions with which you are wrestling and answer how you would act based on your belief.
For example: what is your position on capital punishment? In addition to your usual political, social, scientific response, try stating your response also in terms of your belief.
Then you are ready for the post graduate work: live your beliefs: Ralph Waldo Emerson nailed it on the head in an address he gave to a graduating class at Harvard divinity school. He told the graduating neophyte ministers: “The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life—life passed through the fire of thought.”
I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing those words to address the process of belief and suggest this to you:
Want to be a spiritually grounded, religiously authentic person? Live your beliefs/values, values based on your experiences in life, values you have arrived at by passing your experiences through the fire of thought.
What I have just described to you about belief and the process of believing is what I consider to be the essence of Unitarian Universalism.
Rainer Maria Rilke, in his “letters to a young poet” captured this process (excerpts, adapted):
You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel you and help you, nobody. There is only one single way: go into yourself. Search for your answer.
Then draw near to nature. Try, like some first human being, to say what you experience and love and lose.
Seek themes which your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and belief in some sort of beauty…describe all these things with loving quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory.
Live the big questions into your own answers.
“Live the questions now. Perhaps you will live along some day into the answer.”
I have had three very different distinct periods of belief in my spiritual journey.
The first was my period of fundamentalist Christianity. I led a good and decent life based on my values and if you had known me then you would have liked me—we could have been friends—although you would most likely have disagreed with my religious belief and you would have to excuse and forgive me when I told you you were headed straight for hell. This stage in my life was doomed to end mainly because I was following some other people’s beliefs and creeds, not my own. My life experience was out of synch with my personal creedal belief.
My second period was my evangelical-atheist stage; I led a good and decent life based on my values and if you h ad known me then you would have liked me—we could have been friends—although you would most likely have had to excuse my intolerance. I would not stand for the use of the word ‘god’ and I felt people of religious belief were mostly misguided and uninformed.
Today I am in my third period, characterized by an open-mindedness and tolerance lacking in my previous periods. I lead a good and decent life and I live my values.
Does that mean that in the end it does not matter what I believe since that is likely to change? I do not believe that. I believe it is very important to hold strong beliefs, to b e able to articulate them and live them. I base my life on what I believe—look at my life and you will see what I believe. I do so with an open mind that my beliefs may change over time and I do so with a tolerance for others’ beliefs. By tolerance I do not mean grudging live-and-let-live; what I do mean is that I seem to understand the beliefs of others and to engage myself to the greatest extent possible in others’ journeys. For examples I fast on occasion during the Muslim month of Ramadan; I practice Buddhist meditation as my primary spiritual practice; I take inventory of my life during the Jewish days of awe and seek forgiveness of others; and I try to live my life as close to the teachings of Jesus as humanly possible.
In my 25 years of ministry I never asked the people to whom I spoke on Sundays to do anything I myself was not willing to do; hence for the past 26 years I have tried myself to live the five big questions and to come up with my own answers; here is my personal creedo:
I believe the universe is a self-governing process, it created me and it sustains me. My mother is the earth. What some call god I call the spirit of life. This spirit exists in all forms of life—animals, plants, humans and is manifest in this world through us and is experienced as love.
I am a child of the universe, formed form the atoms of many suns, sharing life-essence with all other life forms, in the interdependent web of existence. I am the earth, upright and conscious.
It is my spiritual, life-long joy to grow into the fullness of my human potential. I want to leave the world a better place for my having consumed the earth’s resources; to warrant my carbon footprint.
Through reflection on my life experience, science and logic, intuition, learning and national public radio I make sense of life as it unfolds its truths for me.
When I die I shall return to mother earth; my physical being will rejoin the wider stream of existence. My spirit will abide in the larger spirit of life which contains the spirits of all life. What I have been and done will live on for better and for worse in the echoes and ripples I have set in motion in the lives of others.
This is a work in process. In the 25 years I have been doing this I have found no other person who agrees with this 100%; I have found no other person’s beliefs—and I have heard hundreds express theirs—with which I agree 100%; and I was impressed with and admired each and every one of their expressions.
Having recently retired from active ministry I have lots of time to do whatever I want. I tell people I am leading a seinfeldian life: it is about doing nothing.
That leaves me lots of time for spiritual contemplation and reflection. So I am spending my golden years doing what Einstein did: searching for the unified theory of everything. He, famously, searched for a scientific theory which simply stated a formula for all forces in one equation. He failed.
I have been searching for a unified theological theory of everything—a one sentence answer to the five big theological questions. I have succeeded and I shall share my revelation with you.
First, I will share with you a cartoon titled “pearls before swine:” it features a rat and a goat:
Paul Tillich, early twentieth century protestant theologian, is one whose work had a profound effect on my theological development. He did not claim to have the definitive unified theological theory but he did say this: god loves me. God loves me as a separated part of itself. God wants to reunite me with itself.
Tillich did not like to use the word god. He thought it had no meaning because every person who used that word meant something unique to that person. He suggested each person come up with one’s own expression in the place of thee word god. For examples: the ground of my being; love.
I have chosen spirit of life, which is bigger than the traditional biblical god of wrath, anger and judgment. My god is the spirit of life which lives in the plants and all animals and in you and me and it is expressed in the world as love.
To say I love someone is to say I care for their well being as much as I care for myself. When the itinerant rabbi said two thousand years ago we are to love our enemies and to love our neighbors he did not mean, as I understand him that we are to have sex with them or to even like them but that we are to care for them as we care for ourselves. For example, we are to care for the well being of Osama Bin Laden. (That is the Universalist part of Unitarian Universalism.)
Okay, here is my unified theory, theological, of everything, which is my restatement of Paul Tillich’s theorem:
The spirit of life, expressed as love in this world, loves me, loves me as a separated part of itself; wants to reunite me with itself. Okay—that is one simply compounded sentence, and that is what I believe.