By Paul Britner

© 2004

As welcome as such images as Jiminy Cricket and Uncle Fred might be in most UU congregations, there still are some in which it is downright politically incorrect to refer to the ultimate reality as God.  Indeed, we UUs are known to be allergic to many religious words, including God, Jesus, prayer, and even hymns.  You may not have noticed this, but the book from which we sing each week isn’t labeled a hymnal.  It’s a song book.  

This tension over language reflects the tension in our religion between the secular humanists and the theists.  Even here, though, words fail us.  People often use the word humanism to describe a belief that places humans at the center of all values. That seems inadequate to me because it discounts our connection to the earth and to all other living things. Theism generally is used to refer to a personal God, a deity who intervenes in human history. By that definition, I am no theist. Yet, I still find myself drawn to language that moves me beyond the purely secular world in which I live and that connects me to something greater than the visible world. 

It would be inaccurate to try to put all of our beliefs along a straight line with theism at one end and humanism at the other end. Yet, many of us think of those terms as opposite ends of a continuum.  In a survey of UUs, 46 percent of us identified ourselves as humanists and 13 per cent of us identified ourselves as theists. The rest was made up of mystics, Buddhists, Jews, and a few other categories. 

We are united in our commitment to each other’s spiritual growth, but we lack a common language to express that commitment.  Secular humanist feel threatened by religious language that some would say discounts reason and experience by lifting up supernatural spiritual language. Others, though, find the sometimes cold and sterile language of science and reason inadequate to lift them beyond themselves and to connect them to the transcendent.  

If you follow UU news and politics or read the online reports from the General Assembly, you know that our denomination is engaged in a debate about our use –or the lack of it--of religious language.  Our President, Rev. William Sinkford, initiated this discussion  last winter with a series of sermons and speeches urging us to be more open to what he calls “language of reverence,” which  he defines as language that “names the holy.” I think religious language or language of reverence does that—it names the holy—but it can be understood more broadly as language that addresses the questions that come unbidden to humans about the ultimate reality.  What is the source of creation?  What is the nature of human beings?  What happens to us when we die?  Our challenge is to find a common language with which to talk about those questions that honors the individual paths each of has chosen. 

Of course, even though in casual use we use the words interchangeably, religious language is not necessarily reverent.  I bet everyone here has heard the one about the member who complained that the only time she heard Jesus Christ mentioned at her UU church was when the janitor fell down then stairs. That’s may be religious, but it is not reverent. For me, language is both religious and reverent if it addresses the questions I just noted in a way that evokes a sense or awe and wonder.  Put a mental bookmark next to those words awe and wonder, because I’m going to come back to them. 

Religious language always has been a big part of my life, sometimes for the better and oftentimes for the worse. 

My father was a Methodist minister until I was 16 years old.  The stereotype of preacher’s kids is that they often become the most rebellious.  There’s some truth in that, but not for the reasons you may think, at least not in my case.  Even when I believed in Santa Claus, I could not believe in the miracles in the Bible.  As a very young child, I lived in a small town in southern Indiana called Ellettsville with my two brothers, who were 7 and 10 years older than I was.  With a 6-year-old’s limited reasoning, knowledge, and experience of the world,  I could believe that a man really could visit every house on Christmas Eve. Yet, any kid who ever had jumped into a swimming pool as often as I did knew that people couldn’t walk on water. I don’t remember a time when I believed what I was hearing in Sunday school.  I remember being 10 or 12 years old and telling my teacher that I thought the people who wrote the Bible just made up all that stuff about the parting of the Red Sea or Jesus raising people from the dead—let alone raising himself. 

In hindsight, I can articulate what was happening to me, but as teenager I lacked the language to shape and then express what I believed.  What I had then, I know now, was a personal creed  based on the ultimate authority of reason, experience and conscience. That still is part of my credo. Try as I might, I could no more change my creed back then than I could change my race or my gender.  Moreover, as a teenager, I thought I was the only one in the world like me—the only one who could not believe and who, therefore, could not belong.  To put it more succinctly, the messages I got from religion in my youth were judgment and exclusivity, and the wounds left in me were shame and isolation.

I was a history major in college, which is to say that, when I graduated at age 22, I was unemployed.  So, just for a lark—something to do before I got a real job—I took a seasonal job working for the guest services company at the Grand Canyon National Park working in one of the hotels there.  Though I went there expecting to stay a few months, I  met my future wife there and worked there for almost three years. It was a life transforming time for me, even though I didn’t know how at the time. So, I’m going to jump ahead in my story and come back to the Grand Canyon.

When I walked into my first meeting, I was an angry agnostic.  Twelve-step programs are spiritual, but not religious—two things I could not distinguish back then.  There was something at work in those rooms that was greater than the sum of its parts. It took several years, but I eventually came to call that something God, though as I suggested earlier, God is just one name among many that I use to describe the ultimate reality. 

Psychologists who study group dynamics may have their own words to describe how 12-step groups work. Yet, I choose to use religious language to describe how these groups work because I want to evoke something in me that is greater than a description of group dynamics.  What I experience in 12-step rooms seems bigger than that to me, and includes something that today I would call a saving grace.  I found salvation and redemption in those rooms. Yet, it doesn’t look anything like the salvation and redemption described to me as a teenager.  Scientific language may explain how my body changed, but science can’t describe what happened to my heart. 

Within 10 years of my first 12-step meeting, I had become a classic example of the person who had everything and felt unfulfilled.  I was in my mid-30s. I was working as a lawyer for the U.S. General Accounting Office in Washington, D.C., and my wife was an accountant for another Federal agency. I wanted more. Twelve-step groups are not religious bodies. They make no attempt to answer questions about the ultimate reality.  I wanted to be part of a religious community.  But, I had this little problem. I still didn’t believe in the Christ of the creeds or in the church that had so wounded me as a young man. 

Then, one day in 1996 I was sharing this frustration with another 12-step friend of mine who invited me to attend the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville, Maryland. And the rest, as they say, is history.  To explain what that experience meant to me, let me return to my story about the Grand Canyon. 

When I was living in the Grand Canyon, I knew I was changing.  Something was different. Yet, I didn’t understand what that something was until I studied our UU sources.  I recognized this experience immediately, though, the first time I saw our first source: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” When I read that, something in me said, “yes—this is what I experienced at the Grand Canyon.” 

In the years since then, I also have learned there that there are many ways to understand Jesus, some of which fit very well with my sense of reason and my experiences.  I even came to really like the guy.  When I was able to get all those chips off my shoulder and give myself permission to take what I want and to leave the rest, I found a whole source of wisdom and truth in the very same Bible that I had disowned as a teenager. 

If I never had lived at the Grand Canyon, I might never have known what I missing. Yet, when I read about the transcending mystery of awe and wonder in sources, I longed for the last time I really felt that kind of awe and wonder, and I knew my days as a Washington lawyer were numbered. It took awhile for me to build up the courage to leave the safety and security of my civil service job. Yet, the faith I found in my church gave me the courage to follow my bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say. Sadly, the spiritual path I found myself on was one of many factors that led to the end of my marriage of 16 years. So, here I am, just days after turning 45, a third-year seminary student, living in the Richmond, Indiana, and loving every minute of it.

When it comes to religious labels, I prefer to limit myself to Unitarian Universalist.  When my first UU minister was asked if was a Christian, he would say, “at least.”  I take the truth where I find it, and I have found truth in many places.  To understand that truth, though, I need understand where it came from, and that includes the language that shaped that truth.  So, I use words like creation and incarnation, and I can use words like sin and salvation, even though I don’t use them the same way others may use them.  I need to affirm my belief that each us belongs to something that is greater than all of us. I call that by many names, including the spirit of life, the one beyond the many, and the eternal spirit. 

Most importantly, I need to affirm that I am worthy and that I am not alone. And, I want to assure each one of you here that may have been wounded by religion or who may have felt isolated by your inability to believe what others expected you to believe that you have a home here, and you need not ever be alone again.

Blessed Be.

© 2004 Paul Britner