unitarian universalism selected essays 2002 · 2002 - uuma selected essays 3 preface this volume of...

Unitarian Universalism Selected Essays

2002

Published by the Unitarian Universalist Ministers’ Association

Boston, Massachusetts

The Reverend Craig Roshaven, Publications Representative Kim R. Schmidt, Editorial Consultant

2002 - UUMA Selected Essays 2


Preface This volume of essays is the creative product of colleagues who have

challenged themselves to reflect at length on issues of importance to our ministry. This year ten essays were submitted to a three-member panel of peers, and five essays were selected. All of the selected essays were first presented to Unitarian Universalist gatherings or study groups. As is our tradition, the Berry Street Essay is included. The Berry Street Essay began in 1820 with an address by William Ellery Channing to a group of colleagues who gathered for mutual support and edification. The Ministerial Conference at Berry Street is now convened annually at the General Assembly at the conclusion of Professional Days and the beginning of the General Assembly in order to give the essay an appropriate hearing.

The Sophia Lyon Fahs Lecture, established in 1974 to honor one of our greatest religious educators, is also normally included, but this year it was not published because the presenter, Dr. Thomas Groome, spoke from notes.Although we have not exercised a heavy editorial hand with these papers they have all been copy-edited and then returned with edits to the authors for review.

We assembled a diverse panel of peers for review and comment. Each author’s identity was concealed from the reviewers in order to guard against bias. It is our hope that this process will ensure a diverse volume of well-written essays that accurately reflects the diversity within our ranks and engages our interest.

I want to thank this year’s panelists: Carol Huston, Earle Ramsdell, and Chip Wright. I would also like to thank this issue’s editorial consultant, Kim Schmidt, for her copy-editing, layout, and graphic design skills displayed in this volume of essays.

We encourage you to submit essays on topics of interest and relevance to our calling. Although we will consider with special favor essays that have been presented to a Unitarian Universalist gathering or study group, we will consider any essay that meets the required level of interest, relevance, and clarity of expression. The next deadline for submissions is January 1, 2004.

The Reverend Craig C. Roshaven

Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association Publications and Online Communications Representativeentative


About Our Contributors The Rev. Dr. C. Leon Hopper is retired and lives in Bellevue, Washington. This Berry Street Essay was presented at the UUA General Assembly in Cleveland, Ohio, in June 2001. The Rev. Daniel Budd is the Parish Minister of the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland in Shaker Heights, Ohio. This paper was originally delivered at the annual meeting of the Prairie Group in November 2001. The Rev. Dr. Tom Owen-Towle just completed a 24-year parish ministry alongside his life -mate, Carolyn, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego. This paper was originally presented in November 2001 to the Refugio UU Minister's Conference held in Santa Barbara, California. The Rev. Douglas A. Taylor is Assistant Minister of the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Maryland. This paper was originally presented to the Harpers Ferry ministerial study group in November 2001 The Rev. David Sammons is the minister of the Mt. Diablo UU Church in Walnut Creek, California. This essay was written for the Malibu Study Group. The theme of the meeting for which this paper was written was chosen before the events of September 11.


Preface.................................................................................3 About Our Contributors ......................................................5 Berry Street Essay 2001 ......................................................9 The Art of Ministry: Being and Doing Revisited The. Rev. C. Leon Hopper The Tragic Sensibility in Contemporary Unitarian Universalism ..................................................21 The Rev. Daniel Budd Ten Hallmarks of the Beloved Community........................47 The Rev. Dr. Tom Owen-Towle Mother, Moses, or a Spiritual ATM?.................................57 Archetypes of Authority in Contemporary Liberal Religion The Rev. Douglas Taylor The Tragic .........................................................................75 The Rev. David Sammons Guidelines for Selected Essays ..........................................93

Unitarian Universalism Selected Essays 2002


Berry Street Essay 2001

The Art of Ministry: Being and Doing Revisited The Rev. C. Leon Hopper

Fifty years ago I heard two calls of love and responded with covenants that have framed and informed my life. The first call and covenant was to marriage. In our pledge to each other, Dorothy and I took upon ourselves the commitment to relationship with each other, to a mutual responsibility for our children, and to the wider community. The second call was to the Unitarian ministry, and I responded by entering Harvard Divinity School to “prepare” myself for a minister’s life and work.

These two covenants forged fifty years ago—marriage and ministry—are the story of my life. The relationships which emerged from them have become entwined at times, divergent at times, and have always informed and enriched each other. From them I have learned the truth that deep covenantal relationships grow through acts of acceptance and entrustment. To entrust is to place the self or something valued in another’s hands for safekeeping. This is a risky act indeed. To take up the ministry and to enter upon marriage are investments of entrustment.

How simple, rational, ordered it all seemed half a century ago (1951) when gas was 20 cents a gallon, a stamp 3 cents, bread 16, and the average income $3,515. J.D. Salinger just published The Catcher in the Rye, and Mickey Mantle joined the New York Yankees. Remington Rand launched the first commercially-available computer.

It would be three more years before the Supreme Court would rule, in Brown vs. the Board of Education, that racial segregation violated the 14th amendment.

Out of somewhere within me emerged an unspoken sense of pilgrimage for my life, a quest for answers to the meaning of life:

Why?


Why prejudice, injustice, inequity? Why the hurt, pain, and cruelty people perpetuate against one another, and...

Why also the human capacity for Caring and wonderment... Compassion and love.... Beauty and creativity?

I strived to encompass the whole of life and its human

community, to experience its extremes of failure and frustration along with fruition and accomplishments. I was moved by the hope that in some small way I could do my part to make our community more creative and caring, and make the joint venture in which I engaged with others more loving.

The Unitarian, and then the Unitarian Universalist, church and movement provided the venue for living out the quest of an uneasy spirit.

Powerful teenage experiences awaken an emerging spiritual quest and a way to see the world. So it was with me. The summer just after I became 16, I worked for the US Forest Service as a fire lookout.

That summer, alone and isolated, dependent on my own skills for survival, I received two great gifts. On a remote mountaintop, humbled in the presence of the mystery of creation, I became aware, as never before, of the incredible vastness of the world.

I realized too, in that remote isolation, how dependent for survival I was upon a single strand of telephone wire stretching from tree to tree through the wilderness. Though alone, I was connected, inter-related.

There I experienced the art and wonder of solitude and realized that an essential element of my spirituality was grounded in the mystery, wonder, and power of the world of nature. A poet said, “When your spirit cries for peace, come to a world of mountains and canyons deep in an old land. Feel the exultation


Ministry Is in its Presence

Soon after I was settled in my first church, I quickly discovered all my learning did not equal being a minister. I begin to ask myself what qualities are needed for effective ministry.

From a practice and reflection of fifty years, I have learned that ministry is grounded in the quality of presence. Without a presence to persons; without presence to the moment; without congruity between self, word, and action; without authenticity; ministry can neither be nor become.

This insight came about early in my ministry in Petersham, Massachusetts a hilltop town with a population of 850 and a classic church—the First Congregational Parish Unitarian—on the town common. After a year in town, I thought I knew every road and every house. One wild and stormy Sunday afternoon I received a call from a person I did not know. She was not associated with our church, or with any church at all. From the other end of the line I heard a plea: “My mother is dying. She is restless, agitated. The doctor can’t do anything. Will you come? Now!”

“Yes,” I replied, for what other answer could I give? I asked for the location of their home. I thought the house was vacant.

The wind and sleet made the road slippery and did not help settle the queasy feeling churning between my heart and stomach. All the way I continued to wonder: if the doctor couldn’t do anything, what in heaven’s name could a young, inexperienced minister do?

Greeted at the door, I quickly realized the mother was not the only one anxious and disturbed. Being ushered to the bedside, I saw the mother was not just agitated; she was delirious, incoherent. There were probably a dozen family members

of high peaks, the strength of moving waters, the simplicity of forests and lakes, and the silence of growth.” The silence of growth.


gathered there. It felt like a hundred. They were in that darkened room, waiting; waiting for the pastor to do something, to intervene, to make it all go away. (All my rational humanistic Unitarian education had not prepared me in those pre-CPE days to deal with this moment.)

I looked about the room into the eyes of a caring and bewildered family. I touched the bedside of the thrashing mother and did the only thing possible to do: I prayed—a prayer of gratitude for the life which had been present, for the love which had been given, for a release from suffering and pain. It was not a long prayer. When it was over, the amen pronounced, a prayer in response came from the mother’s lips. Though we could not comprehend the words, we sensed by tone and cadence that the prayer had been heard and answered. Calmness settled into the room. I left.

Two days later the family called to thank me for my visit and to tell me their mother had died peacefully.

I am humbled to recognize that ministry at its core is a presence.

Presence in ministry emerges from a confluence of disciplines which I’ll spell out momentarily. Sometimes it comes in very testing circumstances. One such situation happened to me early in my ministry in Colorado. The church and ministry were not going well. During luncheon the board president commented, “Leon, I don’t think things are going too well. Would you be willing to meet with some of us to talk about it?” “Yes,” I responded, “let me know when.”

On the agreed-upon evening, I arrived at his home, apprehensive but hopeful, to be greeted by 24 men (yes, all men) who in turn carefully and succinctly spoke of their concern and the ways I disappointed and failed them. I listened as carefully as I could, and when it came to my turn, I acknowledged the lack of success we had in building a church, acknowledged my part in the problem, and added, “This is not just my problem, it is our problem. With your support and commitment, I believe that


together we will be able to turn things around.” What could have been a devastating confrontation proved to be the significant turning point in the life of the church.

Over the years I have tried to tease out the lessons from that engagement which contributed to a deeper understanding of the qualities of presence in ministry. They include: ♦ Holding the conviction that I went to the meeting with the

conviction that those present had the same hopes and dreams as I. All of us wanted a strong, viable, Unitarian presence in the community. They wanted me to succeed as much as I did. In fact, they had as much invested in me as I did in myself. And, probably, they brought as many anxieties to our gathering as I did;

♦ By good fortune I didn’t become hooked by my ego. Instead of focusing on my feelings (or theirs toward me), I worked to focus on the common issues before us—the life and program of the church;

♦ By my listening respectfully, acknowledging their discontent, and affirming them as persons, they in turn were able to listen to and affirm me;

♦ From an acknowledgment of common goals and deeper trust in each other, we agreed to work together; and from an exchange of trust, we entered into a deeper covenantal relationship for our congregation.

Two questions quickly come to mind: does presence evolve or change with the size of a church or institution, and how is the ability developed? A brief response for each:

The practice of presence is most readily felt and understood in the context of pastoral relationships of one-with-one, whether in casual conversation or moments of crisis and need. But it is also essential to recognize presence is practiced within the structured realities of large institutions: committee and board meetings, workshops and classes, community engagement, and—yes—the pulpit and public platform.


The art of ministry has a center which emerges from an exercise of vision for the Unitarian Universalist faith and church.

Without a clear vision informing, guiding the specifics of daily or weekly activities, there is the likelihood of being drawn into reactive responses to immediate demands and crises.

A vision establishes an overarching objective for a broad and engaging ministry, a dream that lures one on. For me it is using my skills and abilities to strengthen the Unitarian Universalist movement and its churches to ensure our world community and

The Art of Ministry is in the Vision

The “how” is more difficult to answer because presence, as I have experienced it, emerges from a way of being rather than the exercise of a set of skills. Thus I believe it begins with the acknowledgment that ministry exacts the quality of presence which is nurtured from a cultivation of quietness at the heart of one’s life—times for meditation and reflection. There must follow development of the virtue of awareness: awareness of setting, persons, and emotional climate—being attuned to the moment. And most critical is a realization that the self is a conduit for the wider purpose of wholeness and peace.

Martin Buber identifies this essential aspect of relationship when he writes, “…true community arises through [people] taking their stand in living mutual relation with a living Centre and second their being in living mutual relation with one another…community is built up out of living mutual relation, but the builder is the living effective Centre.” (I and Thou, p. 45)

Presence: presence to persons; presence to the moment; presence in congruity between self, word, and action. Without authenticity, ministry can neither be nor become. Presence is both reality and mystery, exacting perpetual nurture and awareness. The presence is in the person, not in the skills. And presence is not about self, but about love and wholeness. It is easier to talk about than to practice.


persons within it may become more whole and experience peace, equity, and justice. This is a wide vision for church and life.

However, such a global vision must be transformed from general to specific goals within the vision for each particular settlement, therein to further evolve through dialogue with both individuals and church.

Two brief examples from early ministries: 1) My first parish in Petersham: To assist them in grieving the

loss of their beloved pastor, and to support the church by developing renewed confidence in a future with a continuing presence for liberal religion and values in the town.

2) As Executive Director for the LRY: To ensure the integrity of a strong, credible denominational youth program; to secure support from adults for youth work; to develop programs for youth and adult leadership development; and to provide accessible resources for the program.

Having goals within vision gives direction and motivation for ministry. In can also lead to frustration and disappointment.

Upon being appointed UUA Director for Ministerial Education (1976), one of my goals to ensure the ongoing aliveness in ministry was to put a structure in place for ongoing continuing education support for the ministry. I left the UUA with a sense of failure with respect to this goal. The hope, the vision, the goal still persisted within me.

A few years after leaving the UUA, I was still lamenting my failure when Brandy Lovely, UUMA President, called to tell me the UUMA Exec made continuing education for ministry a priority. Would I be willing to chair a UUMA Commission on Continuing Education to develop a program/structure to address the continuing education needs of our ministry? An invitation I could not refuse. Six colleagues (Helen Cohen, Bob Doss, Junella Hanson, Patrick O’Neill, Ralph Stutzman, and Judith Walker-Riggs) joined with me to address this opportunity. Working together, our dreams for ministerial continuing education gave birth to CENTER. My vision, at last, had


After a quarter of a century in ministry, I was still pondering the keys to effective ministry and its art. From rumination on a series of candidate interviews with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC), I wrote a paper, Being and Doing: Reflections on the Changing Nature of Ministerial Identity (1979).

I introduced the paper with these lines: No matter how many times I hear the statement, it always evokes surprise when I hear theological students today (1979) speak about wanting to “do” ministry. When I attended divinity school at Harvard, I said that I was going to become “a” minister. Between these two statements there seems to be difference in perspective more subtle than clear. To become a minister. To do ministry.”

“I believe,” I wrote, “that there is a profound difference between these two statements.”

William Glasser, in The Identity Society (1972), observed that persons born before WWII found their identity from their goals; those born after 1945 found stronger identification from their roles. Pre-WWII: “goal before role.” Post 1945: “role before goal.”

My goal was to be a minister. For me, “ministry is in the being” from which roles follow.

In the paper I wondered whether there was a trend of perceiving ministry to be reflected more in the doing (the roles)—the skills and duties—rather than a poetic, artistic concept of “being.”

In retrospect, I have come to believe that being and/or doing

Being and Doing Revisited

become reality. Vision and presence are essential to the art of ministry.


are not inherently generational, but twin lenses for understanding the practice and art of ministry. But I wonder if we seduced ourselves in a desire to define and describe the roles of ministry in order to ensure necessary boundaries to our “being” in ministry. It is easier to set limits to the doing of ministry than to the being of ministry.

By way of illustration, compare the first letter of call to Petersham I received to today’s standard “Letter of Agreement” between minister and congregation.

The letter informing me of my call to Petersham went

something like this: Dear Mr. Hopper:

I wish to inform you that on Sunday, May...1953, at a duly called meeting of the First Congregational Parish (Unitarian) in Petersham, you were called to be our minister by a vote of… You will begin your ministry on September 1. Your salary will be $2,000/year.

Sincerely yours, Ruth Coolidge, Clerk of the Parish

Contrast this rather simple letter of call with the multi-page documents now routinely exchanged between ministers and congregations, detailing the many roles and responsibilities of minister and congregation. I recognize that in today’s complex and ever-changing world we must give attention to the details, else our being will be consumed in the expectations of the doing. But it is hard not to believe these letters are contracts rather than covenants between minister and congregation.


In my exploration of being and doing in ministry 25 years ago, I neglected any thought of the minister in retirement. So, a few observations on the art of ministerial retirement from nine years of experience.

I pick up from the theme of being (goal) and doing (role) to suggest that “retired minister” or “minister emeritus” have neither goal nor role inherent in them. Exercising the goals and roles which served so well in the ‘active’ parish ministry will not leave space or presence for the new minister, our successor.

There is little being and not much doing in minister emeritus. This is not a lament, it is an observation.

I knew when I became a minister emeritus at East Shore that the covenant the congregation and I held dissolved. With the call to the new minister, I affirmed that my covenant would be with Peter Luton. During Peter’s installation, I stated my understanding of the covenant in these words: “Peter, my covenant...is to support you in your ministry here in whatever ways you may determine, to follow your lead, to encourage you in your hopes, to respond to your initiative and, above all, to stay out of your way.”

What is required, I believe, is nothing less than re- imagining self and ministry. The being remains constant. It is the doing that must change.

For some this is easy. They have become practiced in other ways of being: family, gardening, photography, reading, travel, and writing. What were once hobbies can now be full-time focus. For others, and I count myself in their number, our calling to ministry exacts from us some continuing (and appropriate) presence—being in ministry.

I have been fortunate to be able to pursue my calling and being with organizations and programs to further the vision and mission of the Unitarian Universalist faith and principles.

The greatest pleasure and challenge has been with creating

Being, Doing, and Retirement


Fifty years ago, it seemed so simple, so rational, so ordered, to respond to calls of love with covenants to marriage and ministry. Covenants which have framed and informed my life in ways I could not have imagined. Marriage and Ministry: both have taught me the pain and joy of constancy, tested my capacity for mutuality, and revealed that growing relationships evolve with time. Be this in a family with our children shifting with growth, age, and independence, or with a growing, evolving church. Yet the covenant remains grounding for family and church. Family and church grow with my capacity for presence with all the congruity of being I can muster. And presence needs also be coupled to a vision which stretches beyond the narrowness of self to a wider world of being and need.

I conclude with a word of deep gratitude for those with whom I walked these fifty years. Humbled by their support and love,

Concluding Notes

and developing the UU Partner Church Council. What began as a spontaneous response to an invitation to support and be present with our sisters and brothers of faith in Romania, emerging from the repression of a communist state, evolved into a truly grass-roots movement for global partnerships which engage the participants at the deepest levels of faith and mutuality. I am reminded of Drucker’s challenge: “Organize yourself to see the opportunity...the problem of organizing the new. It must be organized separately.” In the Spring of 1993, many of us were dismayed when the UUA decided it could not continue to provide service and support for the fledgling partnerships. Responding to the vision pronounced by Judit Gellerd (Zizi) to “Save Transylvania Unitarianism,” I joined with others to organize the new. Now, from initial partnerships with Transylvania, there has been expansion to global partnerships beyond Europe.

Looking back on nine years of retirement, I realize I have re-imagined my self in ministry. I feel profoundly blessed and humbled by the opportunities given to me.


drawn on by what still needs to be done. Ministry is indeed an art of both being and doing.


The Tragic Sensibility in Contemporary Unitarian Universalism

a paper presented to the Prairie Group 14 November 2001

The Rev. Daniel Budd

In him come together legend and truth; in him come together silence and the word.

His truth is made of legends, his words are nourished by silence.

- Elie Wiesel, “Job: Our Contemporary” (211)

Introduction

Mr. Zuss: Oh, there’s always Someone playing Job.

Nickles: There must be Thousands! What’s that got to do with it? Thousands . . . Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated, Slaughtered, and for what? For thinking! For walking round the world in the wrong Skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids: Sleeping the wrong night wrong city –

London, Dresden, Hiroshima . . .

(MacLeish 12)

…St. Louis, Tulsa, Houston, Chicago, Worcester, Boston, Cleveland….


Oh, there’s always Someone playing Job. – There must be Thousands! . . . Thousands . . . Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated, Slaughtered, and for what? For living! For taking the subway to work In the wrong building wrong floor,

On the wrong day in the wrong city – Washington, New York. . .or simply The wrong airplane. . .

Words become as empty as the plaza where the World Trade Center once stood, as elusive as the national innocence buried with thousands of lives in the rubble.

Words become as necessary as the hope and determination that digs through that rubble looking for signs of life, as needed as the reassuring touch of a loved one amidst the shock and grief, anger, and disbelief. Our prayers become as simple and direct as those of a chaplain in one of Cleveland’s neonatal units: “Help me find the right words. If not, help me keep my mouth shut.” (McEnery 7)

At a meeting of our ushers on the Saturday morning following

Cleveland

Friday, August 17, 2001: A stepfather sits on the stoop of his home, his face buried in his hands. About 10 p.m. the night before, his stepson was sitting on his bicycle when a car rolled past. Recognizing trouble when he saw it, Warren, a 12-year-old honor student, peddled away from the car. Mistaking him for someone else, the car turned around and gave chase. As Warren ran into his home, they opened fire. A bullet ripped through the wall of his house, striking him in the back. He died shortly thereafter.


the tragedy, a woman on our Sunday Services Committee, who helped prepare breakfast for everyone, sat at the table looking lost. We had just plated the lovely meal she and one other woman prepared, and sat waiting for someone to begin eating. She fumbled for words, only able to suggest we needed to begin with a greeting. Knowing very well that was not what she wanted, I greeted everyone, thanked them for their time, etc. I knew she wanted more; I even knew what she wanted. I just felt that she needed to say it. And I wasn’t going to let her off the hook.

“In times like this,” she eventually began, still staring into that faraway place where we all look longingly and anxiously for the words we need, “I find I need ritual. Ritual says for us what we cannot say for ourselves.”

How do Unitarian Universalists face injustice, suffering, and tragedy? Some face them stoically, some immerse in them fully. Some shed tears, some shed anger. Some cast about for blame, some accept it too readily. Some grope about, suddenly searching for what they abandoned as no longer needed, no longer essential to the enlightened mind. Some turn to ritual, however simple or elaborate.

The sanctuary of the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland was packed on the Sunday morning following the attacks, as were the sanctuaries all of our churches. I cannot remember the number of people who told me afterward that the service said what they had been trying to say all week. It gave expression for their sorrow, acknowledged their anger and frustration, gave voice to their sympathy, and nourished their hope. However else these 400 people dealt with this tragedy, one of those ways included attending church, with its simple rituals of saying words together, singing together, praying together. Being together. Simple – and profound – as that.

The questions the Program Committee asked me—How do Unitarian Universalists face injustice, suffering, and tragedy? Does Job still speak to us today?—are particularly poignant in the


Facing Injustice

I loathe, I spurn your festivals, I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies.

- Amos 5:21 (The Tanakh)

Let me begin by getting a cynical shot off the bow right away. One of the ways in which we face injustice is to select one out

of the lineup of all the injustices in the world today and address it at General Assembly as our “Injustice of the Year.” During the months prior to descending upon the host city, a few meetings are held with local clergy and interested laypeople to make it seem like the G.A. Planning Committee is interested in their input. Then the “public witness” march or rally, of the nature intended all along in spite of any input at those local meetings, is held sometime during General Assembly, lending the opportunity for wagging fingers and tut-tutting, telling everyone else how wrong

wake of September Eleventh. Yet the answers are much the same as they were before that beautiful blue and terrible morning, if perhaps a bit more clear, more real. Job definitely speaks to us today. Some Unitarians may still be too bibliophobic and liberally literalistic to hear what Job has to say, but this does not mean the story does not speak, for speak it does, as resoundingly as the Voice from within the whirlwind. As resoundingly as our diverse and united nation found its Voice from within a whirlwind of pain and hope. The story of Job most certainly speaks to us today. The more accurate question may be, Are we listening?

I have broken down the questions asked of me into four sections, addressing the issues of injustice, suffering, and tragedy separately, as they are separate issues, and concluded with some further thoughts on Job’s relevance to us, while raising some of my own questions for your consideration and discussion.


they are about thus’n’such and, of course, what the correct behavior is. It is nice, and fairly safe, after which all the G.A.’s participants can go home feeling righteous and accomplished, cleansed and atoned. Facing injustice as a social action tourist. Social witness as one activity on the tourist’s busy itinerary.

Now that is, as I said, admittedly cynical. But it is also a true representation of how I perceive one of the ways Unitarian Universalists face injustice. We are march-happy, witness-happy. Our egos long to parade before the offending citizenry in an overused and undereffective method of addressing issues of civic, national, and cultural injustice. In a faith which is minimalist when it comes to ritual, if there is any at all, this becomes the ritual for many of us.

Another example of how we as an association face injustice is the resolution process at General Assembly. An essay that appeared in the UU World over twenty years ago captured my own take on this curious process. It was written by a colleague who transferred in from another denomination. He wrote of his belief that every faith expression he knew had some ritual of confession and absolution. In the midst of his initial enthusiasm about discovering and then transferring his ministerial status to Unitarian Universalism, it dawned upon him that he had not located our ritual for this important liturgical act. Then he attended General Assembly, sat through the process of adopting a general resolution, and realized that he had found it. The ceremonial reading of the original text was the confession. The polishing and perfecting of the resolution was the penance. Then, through the mystery of voting, the delegates received vicarious atonement and absolution. They went home happy and relieved, accomplished and satisfied. The adopted resolution was then sent forth upon the back of a goat to drift mercifully into the desert of “past actions.”

There are other and far more effective ways we all know about in which we face and attempt to face injustice: we organize and operate food pantries and soup kitchens, volunteer in local public schools, assist at women’s shelters, open our churches to


homeless families, join with other congregations in renovating and building housing, to name but a few. We also join with others to explore and attempt to correct some of the systemic causes that create the need for these services. We participate in inter-religious organizations and dialogues and seek ways to increase communication across the faith divides, while working together on issues such as lessening the incidents of gun violence and hunger. All of us at one time or another have addressed issues of injustice from the pulpit, as well as engaged personally in direct activities that seek to ameliorate, and ideally eliminate, injustices in our cities, neighborhoods, and towns. All of us, at various times, stand up for our personal convictions and take action.

William Saffire writes that the meaning of Job is just that: to stand up for one’s personal convictions in the face of adversity. What the Book of Job teaches, he summarizes, is that

Human beings are sure to wander in ignorance and to fall into error, and it is better – more righteous in the eyes of God – for them to react by questioning rather than accepting. Confronted with inexplicable injustice, it is better to be irate than resigned. (Saffire 219)

The key word here is “inexplicable.” The injustices we are often addressing in our churches are very explicable. They are the result of wandering in ignorance and falling into error; of inequitable social policies; of racism and phobias of all shapes, sizes, and colors, as well as of basic hatred and greed. These, as Saffire suggests, must be met with questioning rather than acceptance, with being irate rather than being resigned. But what about inexplicable injustice? Are all of our activities addressing injustices of a Joban sense? I don’t believe so. While societal ills may cause and create situations where individuals seem and/or feel afflicted in a Joban sense, these situations are not the result of “inexplicable injustice.” This then raises the question: is a political view of Job, such as Mr. Saffire’s, sufficient?


To be fair, Saffire does seem to have moments when he realizes this.

Poet-Job’s genius, beyond his ability to conjure striking images, is to write with open spaces between the lines, tempting honest interpreters into conclusions they cannot prove and their disputants cannot fairly dismiss. Written on stretch papyrus . . . (Saffire 25)

This is a great image and a beautiful description of the author – indeed of myth and poetry in general. He also describes the author of Job as “the most courageous poetic genius of his time” (Saffire xvii), which is correct, but this overall assessment does not seem to influence his subsequent interpretation. He proceeds instead to ignore this genius, offering an ultimate interpretation of Job that contains little ultimacy. It is not unlike that of MacLeish at the close of J.B.

I do not believe it is. Yet I also believe it is the most common view we take when facing injustice. This political view and Saffire’s interpretation of Job leave a lot to be desired. The second chapter of his book, “The Dismaying Compromise,” seems to me better titled, “The Dismaying Interpretation.” I say this because, viewed from only a political perspective, the story of Job produces a shallow, ego-centered interpretation based in part upon the image of a petty, anthropomorphic god given to arbitrary and often adolescent manipulations of people, reminiscent of the whims of the Greek pantheon. Instead, the beginning and ending prose- legends of Job need to be read and interpreted as mytho-poetic prose-poems, not as newspaper reports. Furthermore, I would suggest that the wager between Yahweh and the Satan is a red herring, diverting our attention from Job’s behavior (more on that below). To treat these prose-poems literally, as Saffire does and as we too often do, is to miss the mark entirely. The legendary portions are poetry as much as the rest of the book, and need to be interpreted as such.


Sarah: …You wanted justice and there was none – Only love. (151)

There’s no justice on earth guaranteed from on high. But there is a morality that we work out, as best we can, for ourselves and each other. That morality begins with the obligation to hold fast to our integrity. . .by protesting injustice against all the odds, no matter how distant and remote its source may seem. (Saffire xxix)

While suggesting different solutions to help us endure inexplicable injustice, both MacLeish and Saffire agree on this: Life is not fair. We know that. Many years ago, one of the matriarchs of my former church gave me a quotation she had clipped from the Reader’s Digest. It was from an author unknown to me but whom I am told is a Detroit talk show host by the name of Dennis Wholey. He wrote

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you’re a vegetarian.

Life comes with no guarantees concerning justice or fairness. We know that too. It is one of the reasons love is so necessary. Love and mercy and compassion are the very things that keep our humanity intact in the face of injustice and unfairness. There is also a morality we have to work out for ourselves and each other. Protesting injustice, even against all odds, is as noble as it is necessary. But what is the nature of an integrity that holds fast in the face of inexplicable injustice? Is this integrity merely the maintenance of personal convictions against such injustice? It is merely maintaining our boundaries? And to what are we holding fast?

Job believes he is holding fast to his integrity, to his personal convictions, in the opening scene of the legend. He is a man of perfect integrity, we are told, who fears God and avoids evil.


Then all hell breaks loose, and he comes to the very painful conclusion that maintaining his personal convictions, that doing everything by the book, will not guarantee happiness and justice. After enduring the boorish arguments of his so-called friends, he learns in his encounter with God his real place in the scheme of things, which, as Saffire notes, is “a far cry from the vision presented elsewhere in the Bible of the human being as special, the only being in the universe created in God’s image.” (Saffire 16) Job learns that his personal convictions of correct and proper behavior will not stave off bad things from happening to the good people he knows and loves.

Being on top of the food chain, having the largest brains, sometimes gives us the notion that we can control life’s events. We develop illusions that if we just do the right thing in the right way, that if we think the right thing with the right words, all will be well. We develop illusions that we can make people love us if we do things just right, or that we can keep our loved ones out of harm’s way by being upright and perfect ourselves. We develop illusions that we can guarantee happy endings because we have been good and have done good things and wished only good for everyone everywhere. We develop and believe in illusions that right behavior, right thought, and even right action will result in trouble-free, happy living. And we can easily develop the illusion that certain rituals, performed in just the right way, will guarantee us what Life will not.

Rituals, even purification rituals such as Job performed, do have their place in all this, but not as a means of warding off evil and misfortune. Rather, ritual is a participatory act that serves as a reminder of what is of ultimate importance for us. It serves as a means to link us, to reconnect us, to acknowledge and even strengthen our relationship with that ultimate concern, with what matters, with the animating Spirit of Life, with God. Ritual gives voice to our deepest longings and desires, a place for our sorrow and pain, a transcendent moment for our joy and love.

Ritual is not some magic one performs to keep bad things from happening, as Job and his friends seem to believe at first.


And the message of Job’s story is not that ritual is empty and worthless. Like anything else, it can be used for purposes and reasons less than that for which it is meant. Ritual also does not have to be perfect; rather, it needs to be heartfelt. As Jelalludin Rumi points out, it is not the perfection of the act, or the precision of the words used, but the burning desire within the heart that gives ritual its meaning and efficacy. (ER 166)

The legend of Job speaks to this as it is a story, a metaphor, of a moral, rather than a natural misfortune. It is a story of an ancient ancestor of ours who thought that he could control his life and the lives of those he loved by being correct in his behavior, proper in his ritual observance, and perfect in his very being. Job thinks life and worship and living his faith means doing everything just right. That is his personal conviction. In a way, it even seems as if he can keep God at bay through his excruciatingly upright and correct behavior.

It eventually took God to tell him—and through Job, to tell us—that perfection is not enough. What is needed, what is sought, what is desired, is a trueness of being, a wholeness— which is what I understand as integrity. Having integrity is not simply maintaining your personal convictions against an adversary, however near or distant, but rather in the midst of adversity, tragedy, and even inexplicable injustice; trusting your whole being without overrating your being, trusting yourself fully without being full of yourself. It means ultimately trusting “in a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.” (Emerson 195). It means trusting in our “higher or spiritual nature,” in the “supreme gift” which is our “likeness to God.” (Channing 146-7)

Rabbi Harold Kushner, echoing the earlier gospel of Paul Tillich, writes in his book, How Good Do We Have to Be?

To be whole before God means to stand. . .with all of our faults as well as all of our virtues, and to hear the message of our acceptability. To be whole means to rise beyond the need to pretend that we are perfect, to rise above the fear that we


will be rejected for not being perfect. And it means having the integrity not to let the inevitable moments of weakness and selfishness become permanent parts of our character. ...the challenge of being human is so great that no one gets it right every time. (Kushner 180)

Job thought he could get it right every time. He had to experience, as did Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “down to the marrow of his bones, the glory and the terror of the universe, all creation and all destruction” (Mitchell xxvi) before it sunk in that his illusions of perfection did not guarantee anything. Job did not hold fast to his integrity. I believe that he discovered it.

I suggest to you that our UU rituals of facing injustice are similar to Job’s early rituals of purification. As well- intentioned as they are, one only needs to scratch lightly beneath the surface to reveal them as rituals of confession and atonement, even (in some cases) as attempts at maintaining the illusion of control over human living. Meanwhile, back in our individual congregations, our hands-on, selfless efforts get much closer to the integrity Job’s story illustrates.

Facing Suffering

Job is in a sense the type of any and every man who experiences the mystery of seemingly senseless and undeserved suffering. - Marvin Pope (xxx)

How do Unitarian Universalists face suffering? Like most people, I think we try to avoid it as much as possible. We’re not really comfortable when it arrives at our doorstep. We respond with stoicism, or with westernized Buddhism, or by taking drugs (prescription or over-the-counter, of course), or by calling a therapist in hopes of exploring ways around it, if we cannot make it go away all on our own. Some of us might even call our minister. We know we need to do something.

Then again, there are those among us who go directly to guilt.


Elaine Pagels has observed There is a human tendency to accept personal blame for suffering. People often would rather feel guilty than helpless. If the reason for misfortune is moral rather than natural, we can persuade ourselves that we can control it. If guilt is the price to be paid for the illusion of control over nature, many people have seemed willing to pay it. (Kushner 14)

There’s that control issue again. We all know this manifestation of it as the If I’d Only... game. If I’d only done this instead of that.... If I’d only gone here instead of there.... If I’d only said one thing instead of another....

I imagine there is a lot of guilt floating around with the survivors of September Eleventh’s horror. It is natural. Laments of lost moments, the last-minute change of plan that led one away from disaster instead of into it. The burden of the senselessness of it all, the affront to decency and humanity, all of which can only add to whatever personal guilt may be felt about any number of actions taken or not taken at such a time. We do often prefer to feel guilty rather than helpless. We often prefer to maintain our illusion of control instead of surrender to suffering.

Job instructs us differently. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham capture the essence of this in a brief discussion about how spirituality cannot be born if we insist that we are in control.

Spirituality begins in suffering because to suffer means first “to undergo,” and the essence of suffering lies in the reality that it is undergone, that it has to do with not being in control, that it must be endured. We may endure patiently or impatiently, but because we are human beings, because we are not at each and every moment in ultimate control, we will suffer.

…The reality of that lack of control, the sheer truth of our powerlessness in the face of it, makes


available the fundamental spiritual insight that insists on the necessity of kenosis – the ancient Greek term that signifies an “emptying out.” Expressed in modern vocabulary, kenosis points to the need for “surrender”…. (21)

This is the lesson of Job. As Stephen Mitchell points out, “Job’s final words issue from surrender; not from submission….” (xxvii) His is not a weak submission, but the strength of surrender, a giving up the illusion of control. A. Powell Davies, in a sermon entitled “Of Joy and Sorrow,” makes a similar observation:

Sorrow is not a thing to seek, nor yet a thing to cringe from when it comes….

When sorrow comes, let us accept it simply, as part of life. Let the heart be open to pain; let it be stretched by it. All the evidence we have says that this is the better way. (109)

How well do we do this? I don’t know. I have seen those who have surrendered and reached an inspiring strength and serenity. I have also seen those who kick and scream, or who whine, or who find anyone or anything to blame. So have you. It’s a mixed bag. As Mitchell implies, suffering is not a question that needs addressed, but an experience to which we must respond with our whole person, our whole being. (xv, xix) Whatever the differing and varying responses of our parishoners, however, we must remain steadfast in allowing for and even creating opportunities for such a Joban surrender. This means consciously ministering to the soul, that integrity which is deeper than personal conviction, that place where the divine spark and the human ego meet.

“The parishoner comes to the minister with another set of expectations than those he brings to the analyst,” writes James Hillman. “The minister’s task . . . is devotion to the soul.” (I 46) Elsewhere he elaborates upon a major aspect of what this means:


The study of our lives and the care of our souls means above all a prolonged encounter with what destroys and is destroyed, with what is broken and hurts…. (RP 56) Gods reach us through afflictions. (RP 104)

This goes against the stream of popular, contemporary culture. So much of our living is spent in the quest to feel good about ourselves, to be happy, to be fulfilled, to reach the light, that we rarely admit all these goals are only met through a willingness to engage in that “prolonged encounter…with what is broken and hurts,” through afflictions, explicable or inexplicable.

After a lifetime of studying the soul, with all its trials and tribulations, in all its brokenness and affliction, through all its striving for wholeness and oneness; after studying the symbols and dynamics of religion and ritual, of alchemy and dreams, Carl Jung was asked, in 1961, by none other than Good Housekeeping magazine, what his definition of God was. He replied,

To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse. (Edinger 68)

MacLeish echoes this observation toward the end of Scene Two of J.B.

It’s from the ash heap God is seen Always! Always from the ashes. Every saint and martyr knew that. (MacLeish 50)

It is through affliction, suffering, even tragedy, that we have a profound and real opportunity to know God, to experience that which is beyond us and yet as close as our beating heart. In this sense our individual spirituality may be born. Out of this birth, the community of the church may be created. In his 1985 Berry


Street lecture, the Rev. John Wolf noted that The church, you see, is not a body of doctrine, or of reasons; or of explanations. It is a community of those who have known the deepest valley and who have passed through it to the other side. ( JBW 11)

Jelalludin Rumi joins the host of witnesses to this reality of human living:

Learn the alchemy true human beings know: the moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door will open.(The Glance 65)

Much of Unitarian Universalist culture seeks the same goals as our popular culture. And we, too, often want to reach them without being broken, without being hurt, without suffering or affliction. If we just think correctly, speak correctly, act correctly—all in accordance with what being a good liberal, a good Unitarian Universalist, currently means—then salvation will be ours, wholeness will be achieved.

As ministers to the soul, however, we must address the reality of suffering. We must face it in ourselves and with our parishoners. This we may do primarily through pastoral care.

Pastoral care is most often assumed to be the one-on-one encounter we have in our office, on the telephone, at the coffee shop, in a quiet pew following a service some Sunday morning (while we are thinking, I should be in coffee hour!). This is pastoral care, to be sure. But I would also suggest that we can view liturgy and ritual as pastoral care. The hymns we select, the responsive readings we invite our congregations to join in, the prayers or meditations we offer, the words we use to call our congregants to worship, and those with which we bless their departure—all these, as much if not more than the sermons we preach, offer pastoral care to our people. We acknowledge the deepest valleys and offer the opportunity to gain the courage to pass through to the other side. Then the buildings that house us indeed become sanctuaries, our time together truly sacred, and


our suffering an integral part to our growing a soul. Facing Tragedy God’s aloft the winds are raging; God’s aloft the winds are cold… - Keith Reid (Procol Harum)

A tragedy may be understood as an event that is unexpected, painful, and life-altering. The word tragic is defined as something that is extremely mournful, melancholy, or pathetic; an event that is dreadful, calamitous, disastrous, or fatal. It has its origins in the Greek word for goat, and the word tragedy derives from the Greek for goat song. It arose, according to Will Durant, “from the mimic representations, in dancing and singing, of satyr-like Dionysian revelers dressed in the costume of goats.” (Durant 231) Before some plays, a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus, the goat song perhaps being the chant which accompanied the sacrifice. While tragedy and the tragic have been a lively topic of discussion in theater and philosophy ever since, I simply wish to note here, along with Durant and others, that Greek drama grew out of religious ritual and to suggest that how we face tragedy is still a matter of how we incorporate and involve ritual in our lives.

Sensibility is defined as the capacity for sensation or feeling, acuteness of apprehension or feeling, keen consciousness or appreciation. The word derives from the Latin, to feel.

The questions here then are: do we have an acuteness of feeling, a keen awareness and appreciation for what is extremely mournful or pathetic? What is our capacity for consciousness and appreciation of the calamitous, disastrous, and fatal? Is a tragic sensibility what Job wound up with at the end of the story? Do we have such a tragic sensibility amongst our communion, or do we mostly cater to the Culture of Victimhood? Do we know what “inexplicable injustice” is? Is it a wife or a husband, a mother or a father dying on American Airlines flight 11, or while trying to help a fellow office worker down the staircase of Tower Two? Is it the death of an infant child to SIDS?


Am I trying to speak the unspeakable? Am I trying to grasp the infinite? Well, if I think I can answer any of these questions, then yes. But I have no answers. All I can do is wonder, listen, and ponder. All I can do is allow it all into my own experience, accept it, and hope that in some small way, my heart may be stretched by it. All I can do is be with people in their moments of personal tragedy, to pray with them, and if the words do not come to keep my mouth shut.

This much I can suggest to you: tragedy is the soul’s drama. Tragedy is the life stage upon which the soul is given the opportunity to deepen and become more real, or (on the other hand) to cower and remain one-dimensional. To repeat Mr. Hillman’s words:

The study of our lives and the care of our souls means above all a prolonged encounter with what destroys and is destroyed, with what is broken and hurts…. (RP 56) Gods reach us through afflictions. (RP 104)

Have the gods reached us? Does tragic sensibility does lurk amongst us? Do we have opportunities to engage in the soul’s drama in our churches? I believe that it does lurk to some extent, and I believe that, to some extent, we do engage it. One place we may find this sensibility is in our hymnal. For example, such songs as “Precious Lord,” “Abide With Me,” and “Every Night and Every Morn,” represent hymnody that reflects a “tragic sensibility.” Some of our responsive readings also embody this. (Interestingly enough, one such reading is by Mr. MacLeish, “The Young Dead Soldiers.”) The materials for fleshing out the forms of our worship exist here and elsewhere. As we drew upon them for our services September 16th in order to create a temenos (a sacred space to contain the tragic, a sanctuary for the soul), as we draw upon these sources and resources to whatever degree is needed and necessary for the services of worship we conduct, so we minister to our congregants; so we give voice to the tragic sensibility that lives in our midst, so we give place to the ache and pain and hope in their hearts and in our own; so we offer


devotions for the soul. Does Job speak to us today? Mr. Zuss: Well? - Archibald MacLeish (18)

Of course it does. There is no question about that in my experience. The real question is are we listening? Are we engaging the story and the image of Job in serious and meaningful ways, other than those times when it hits us over the head and demands recognition?

Again, I believe we may best and, given our calling, most appropriately listen to and acknowledge this story, this sensibility, through liturgy and ritual. There we may offer the acceptance and acknowledgment of tragedy, suffering, and darkness. And I believe we are better off if we do not wait until tragedy is upon us, but observe or create the opportunities to accept its reality and acknowledge its part in our living. One of our colleagues has made what I find to be the most succinct and accurate observation about the tragic sensibility in general, and in Unitarian Universalism in particular:

Liberal theology, if it can be said to have an overriding weakness, tends toward a sometimes unrealistic optimism; hope is its central virtue. But essential as hope is, it is insufficient unless grounded in something deeper. A potent religion must address the darkness, inner and outer. That darkness is real. Moments of grace do come, but not easily or often, and it is most often those who acknowledge the darkness who recognize the grace. . . .Winter merely precedes spring, but Good Friday is the very pathway to Easter. (the Rev. Earl K. Holt III)

For many years, I have included these words on the back of the order for the Tenebrae service I conduct every year. They describe what I strive to craft every Good Friday evening. I offer a brief description of this service as an example of what I am


suggesting about the efficacy of liturgy and ritual in helping us and our parishoners to live with and face suffering and tragedy in our lives.

I schedule and time this service so that the participants will enter in light and leave in darkness—enter from light into a lighted sanctuary, leave from the darkness inside the church into the darkness of the evening. The service begins with words from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “O dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark . . .” A litany is read, again from Eliot (from the conclusion of Choruses from “The Rock”). “Every Night and Every Morn” is sung (the only hymn of the evening). After some introductory words, the names of those who have died during the past year are read. This is followed by the beginning of a series of readings. These readings change somewhat from year to year and include portions of the Passion according to Mark and poetry by Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Mary Oliver, Theodore Roethke, Ric Masten, Kathleen Norris, Wendell Berry, and others. There are four sections of readings, separated by music (we use the English horn each year for the mournful, distant, and dark quality it conveys). With the conclusion of each section of the service, some of the lights/candles in the sanctuary are extinguished. Finally, toward the end of the concluding prayer, the last of the candles are put out, leaving one. A sharp, loud noise is made (called the strepitus, traditionally symbolic of the rending of the temple curtain at the moment of Jesus’ death), and the benediction is offered. We then leave in silence and in darkness.

For me, and for many who have faithfully attended this service year after year, this is one of the most powerful and moving moments of worship in the entire year. It takes on a life of its own, and I am in service to it. It takes us into that space, that place, that sensibility within us and in our midst where we encounter the tragic, where we may acknowledge and surrender to suffering, where we as a congregation may symbolically pass through the deepest valley, eventually to emerge on the other side.


There are other opportunities to acknowledge this tragic sensibility. They include (but certainly are not limited to) All Soul’s, Ash Wednesday, Memorial Day, and (of course) each and every funeral and memorial service that we conduct. These and other times help prepare us to respond to the unexpected, even to inexplicable events such as those that occurred to so many thousands on September Eleventh. As we develop and live with rituals that help contain and express a tragic sensibility, so may that sensibility deepen and become a source of strength and courage for us all.

Concluding Remarks

The problem of theodicy continues to thwart all attempts at rational solution. - Marvin Pope (lxxiii)

Part of my instructions from the Program Committee were to look at the Job tradition from “our perspective” and stimulate discussion. As to the former and to honor the latter, I suggest to you that Archibald MacLeish was absolutely correct when he wrote, “The candles in the churches are out” (MacLeish 153). However, it is not because we are acknowledging the darkness. It is because we are not. Unitarian Universalism in general does not deal sufficiently with the Job experience intellectually or ritually/liturgically. After all, it is difficult to deal with something that is barely, if at all, there. For the most part, as I noted earlier, we are too bibliophobic to engage and listen to the Job story in any serious and meaningful way. In fact, previous examples notwithstanding, I would suggest that in general, we do not have much of a tragic sensibility in our “movement” at all. Ever since our beginnings in the United States, kick-started as they were by a heavy dose of enlightment thinking and continuing through the early 20th century with the optimism of “onward and upward forever,” we have been a church of the Light (or as some have more recently criticized, Church Lite).

Much of this I will further venture into the depths-of-no-


return to say has to do with an adolescent image of God. Sadly, we continue to hold on (again, in general) to such a narrow image of the Holy, defined for the most part by people with whom we disagree, assuming as others do that God is a Great Puppet Master in control of everything, or a vengeful and arbitrary deity on par with Zeus. It is no wonder to me we reject it. I reject that image also, as do many others. But in the rejection process we relinquish our historical place in the evolution of theology by clinging to such an adolescent image. Liberal and progressive Christians, such as Bishop John Spong, have long since surpassed us and have gotten beyond that one. Witness for example the Rev. William Sloane Coffin who, in a sermon delivered in 1983 just ten days after the death of his son due to an auto accident, said,

…nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with his finger on triggers, his fist around knives, his hands on steering wheels. …the one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, “It is the will of God.” Never do we know enough to say that.

He could have been speaking to any of Job’s so-called friends. He was speaking to many of his fellow Christians. He is speaking to us. Until we get beyond mere refutation of the arguments of the descendants of Job’s friends, we will continue to project our anger and distrust and skepticism like mad upon this image of God and reject it again and again, accepting any number of inadequate substitutes (in Emerson’s term, “half-gods”) to fill the gap.

In his “Answer to Job,” Jung wrote of the evolution of the God-image from a psychological perspective. It seems to me we could use a bit of God-evolution ourselves from a liberal theological perspective. Jung made several observations and suggestions (in “Answer to Job,” as well as elsewhere in his volume, “Psychology and Religion: West and East”) that could


continue and advance the work begun by Channing, Emerson, and others. Were we to embark consciously upon such a venture, perhaps we could even recover our historic position as the “liberal interpreters of the Gospel,” which we have long since abdicated to the likes of Spong and Coffin. We are still in a potentially unique position to do this, with our Judeo-Christian roots watered as they are in the images and insights of the world’s faith traditions, philosophies, science, literature, and poetry. The decision is ours. Will we continue to listen to and argue with Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar? Or will we heed the Voice in the Whirlwind?

Coda/Benediction

I conclude with a quotation from a colleague of ours whose series of soul-trying events inspired this group to tackle the subject of Job this year. I asked him to respond briefly to the questions I was asked to consider, which he kindly did. After noting the many highs and lows that inevitably come with parish ministry—the mean-spirited people, the loving people, the indifferent, and the supportive—he wrote this:

There was never a time that I or [my wife] recall when either of us felt that God had given us a ‘dirty deal.’ We never entertained a sense of bitterness or anger for what had befallen us. I, on the one hand, continued to speak prayers of gratitude for the many people who helped me through those difficult times. I was also quite sure that I had been thrice-blest by being given a life partner who could stand with me through such pain, suffering and loss. (Knost)

We would all be fortunate even to be once-blessed in such a rich and ennobling way. May this example stand as a beacon to all who wish guidance to face injustice, suffering, and tragedy.

May the Grace of God be with us all. Amen.


SOURCES AND RESOURCES The Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, Oxford University Press, NY:1962. The Tanakh, the Jewish Publication Society, New York:1985. William Ellery Channing, Selected Writings, David Robinson, ed. Paulist Press NY:1985. F. Forrester Church, “Our Universalist Mission,” privately

published presentation to the 2001 UUA General Assembly, Cleveland OH:2001. (The Nov/Dec UU World contains an expanded version of this paper.)

- - - - - - - -, Life Lines, Beacon Press, Boston:1996. A. Powell Davies, The Faith of an Unrepentant Liberal, Beacon Press, Boston:1947. Tom F. Driver, “JB” The Christian Century, 7 January 1959. Will Durant, The Life of Greece, The Story of Civilization: Part II, Simon & Schuster NY:1966. Edward F. Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, Inner City Books, Toronto, Canada:1984. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essays, Books Inc. NY:no date. James Hillman, Insearch, Spring Publications, Dallas:1979. Re-Visioning Psychology, Harper Colophon Books, NY:1975.


Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Bolligen Series XX, Vol. 11, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ:1975. Jan V. Knost, private correspondence, July 2001. Ernest Kurtz & Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection, Bantam Books NY:1994. Archibald MacLeish, J.B., Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston:1958. Regina McEnery, “Tender Mercies,” the Plain Dealer, Cleveland OH: July 29, 2001. Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job, North Point Press, San Francisco:1987. Dorothy B. Phillips, et al., eds. The Choice Is Always Ours, Re-Quest Books, Wheaton IL:1982. Marvin H. Pope, Job, The Anchor Bible, Doubleday & Co. Inc., NY:1973. Jelalludin Rumi (Coleman Barks, trans.) The Glance, Viking/Arkana NY:1999. - - - - - - - - - - - , The Essential Rumi, Harper SanFrancisco:1995. William Safire, The First Dissident, Random House NY:1992. Murray Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, Chiron Publications, Wilmette IL:1985. Samuel Terrien, “JB and Job,” The Christian Century, 7 January 1959. Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God, Summit Books, NY:1976.


John Burton Wolf, “Religion, the Church, and Our Mission in the World,” the Berry St. Essay for 1986, in Unitarian Universalism 1986:Selected Essays, Wayne Arnason, ed., Charlottesville, Virginia:1986.


Ten Hallmarks of the Beloved Community The following

essay was delivered at the 43rd Annual Gathering of the

Refugio UU Ministers’ Group Retreat

(November 7, 2001) at La Casa De Maria in

Santa Barbara, California.

The Rev. Dr. Tom Owen-Towle One of the formative moments in my religious journey was

going to Selma, Alabama, back in 1965 as a San Francisco seminary greenhorn. I had never been in the South, and our sole job as students was to clear the fields of cow-dung every day, followed by setting up huge tents for the civil-rights marchers led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every night we enjoyed the incredible protest-entertainment of Dick Gregory; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and other such activist luminaries. And I’ll never forget Andy Young, then one of King’s lieutenants, shouting, “Hey, we’re here to love the hell out of Alabama!” That is clearly what we were there to do: “to love the hell out of Alabama!” In the same vein, we would all huddle together and belt out the traditional civil rights song:

I know one thing we did right, was the day we started to fight, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on...

These fellow-Americans marched, picketed, and demonstrated to bring about an end to legal segregation. Some of them, like Andrew Goodman and Unitarians Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb, were killed in the struggle. But in the end of this period, legal equality was won for persons of color. It is critical to remember that all the social movements of the sixties and later—the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, and the sexual orientation movement—followed in the wake of the civil rights movement.


The words of that song still ring relevant in the current struggles for full dignity at home and abroad. Whatever battle is being waged throughout the globe—whether internal, interpersonal, international, or some combination thereof—we would do well to keep these valiant words in mind:

“I know one thing we did right, was the day we started to fight”—fight not for injury but for impact—yes, to battle for what we still consider fair and compassionate, for right relationships at home and work, during play and in society. Remember the nonviolence of Martin Luther King was not passive but tough-minded and strong-hearted. It did not brook indifference. It resisted wrongdoing and challenged slothfulness. King’s brand of nonviolence was forceful; that is, full of Gandhi’s truth and soul-force.

So being a laborer in the vineyards of compassion and justice is a fight indeed, a never-ending struggle; and although there will be modest successes along the way, complete victory is unlikely during our lifetimes. It certainly wasn’t likely during King’s. So we must keep on keeping on. “Hold on, hold on,” reprises the song!

The civil rights campaigners whom I met in Selma, Alabama, 36 years ago were Americans who joined the struggle. They were willing to risk their jobs, their homes, and even their lives, to create an extraordinary movement that, despite setbacks, has never abandoned the pursuit of the beloved community—a reality that includes yet always transcends our own skins, clans, congregations, collectives. In truth, the Beloved Community is rarely embodied in one place or one time or with one group, but ever-widens its embrace to include outsiders and anawim—the marginalized.

The concept of the Beloved Community ever reminds Unitarian Universalist laity and religious professionals that rugged individualism is not our goal. Our independent wills are instrumental values in pursuit of our terminal purpose: weaving a viable interdependent web. We are embedduals (individuals


embedded in circles of meaning), to use Robert Kegan’s phrase. We are communitarians, to use Amitai Etzioni’s term.

Too frequently, Unitarian Universalists major in personal theologies while bypassing the critical pursuit of a healthy, effective ecclesiology (the art of churchpersonship). First and foremost, we religious liberals are called to be leader-servants of our congregation’s well-being.

The 19th century American philosopher, Josiah Royce (1855-1916), who coined the phrase, explored it in his book entitled The Beloved Community:

The future task of religion is the task of inventing and applying arts which shall win all over to unity, and which shall overcome their original hatefulness by the gracious love, not of mere individuality but of communities. Judge every social device, every proposed reform, every national and every local enterprise, by the one test: does this help towards the coming of the universal community?

Can you imagine a more germane imperative to heed than that of Royce, given our personal ennui and international travail today? What would be necessary to incarnate a version of the Beloved Community wherever your Unitarian Universalist congregation is located?

I offer the following ten hallmarks as an evocative, not exhaustive, list for our local parishes on their similar yet distinct journeys toward resembling the Beloved Community. I urge you to produce your own particularized amendments to my notions.

I. Beloved Community Means Holding to the Difficult As Unitarian sister May Sarton put it, “Now take the chisel

and make for the bone! Difficult love, you are the sculptor here. The image you must wrest, great and severe.” Authentic religion, you see, has nothing to do with light and comfy promises. Rather it adheres to what I call “hard blessings.” Especially in these


times of societal terror and angst, we must eschew any politician or guru or TV infomercial or, for that matter, our own liberal religious platitudes that might unwittingly proffer sweetness and pabulum.

In Robert Bly’s book Iron John, the lead figure arrives in town and immediately asks, “Hey, is there anything dangerous to do around here?” Note he doesn’t say: Is there something foolish or deadly to do around here, but is there something dangerous, and if dangerous is too big a leap for you, then is there something demanding or difficult to do around our UU premises? For as Rilke reminds us, “Love means holding to the difficult.”

Hence, responsible stewards (“keepers of the hall”) of the Beloved Community would be prudent yet adventurous in service of the prize.

II. Beloved Community Produces Where It’s Planted I like what Alice Walker says: “I imagine that when Martin

(referring to King) said to agitate nonviolently, he meant to start at home.” That’s right—among the chosen folks with whom we awake every morning or work every day. As Unitarian Universalist process theologian Bernard Loomer used to say, “We are called to tend and mend that portion of the cosmic web where we’re planted.” It is so tempting to spread compassion in a surrounding province while shirking our responsibility to be change-agents within our own households or congregational life.

I’ve come to believe we cannot have a religious locus in our lives without having a territorial one. We cannot discover who we really are without surrendering fully to where we are. We simply cannot live grounded lives without being rooted in a specific place. Every one of us has sufficient tilling ground—sacred ground, battleground, growing ground—right where we’re planted.

III. Beloved Community Requires Vigilance Colleague Gordon McKeemon reminds us that the derivation

of the word community, although related to communion and


communication, comes literally from the Latin munio, meaning “to arm.” Therefore, with the prefix com-, meaning “together”, community actually happens wherever there is shared growth and security, a context of mutual assistance and vigilance.

Hence, authentic UU beloved community is comprised of compassionate arms— arms that engage in firm, fair, friendly wrestling matches rather than blood baths or back-stabbing; arms that huddle together in times of sorrow and swing open in rejoicing; arms that reach outward in justice-building and peace-making and not merely inward in narcissistic embrace.

In a genuine beloved community, arms are watchful to guard against any behavior that would undermine the shared covenant. Church members band together to defend one another against arrogance and shallowness, outside agitators, or internal saboteurs.

So when we weave our local beloved UU communities, may we envision our tapestry in terms of intertwining hearts and heads, souls, and arms.

IV. Beloved Community Honors the Law of Respectfulness As Catherine Attla puts it, “There’s a really big law that we

have to obey. That law is respect. We have to treat everything with respect. The earth, the animals, the plants, the sky. Everything.”

Respect means literally, “to look at something or someone again and again.” Respect is the only virtue sizable enough to hold “the wholly other, caringly in our sight, realizing that our mission remains to forge a discipleship of equals, within and beyond the walls of our chosen faith.” Imagine what pervasive respect might mean if manifested in the policies and programs, liturgies and encounters, of our local congregation?

V. Beloved Community Declares the Meeting Open A beloved community is responsive to the stranger, the

newcomer, the outsider who arrives bringing either attractive or odd gifts. “Hospitality to strangers is greater than reverence for


the name of God,” recounts the Hebrew proverb, and the Christian scripture confirms the same sentiment when it declares, “I was a stranger and you took me in.”

African American poet June Jordan cuts to the quick when she asserts, “My hope is that our lives will declare this meeting open.” However, our Unitarian Universalist circles possess an average track record with otherness. While tolerating differences of theology, class, orientation, and race in theory, in practice we gravitate in practice toward homogeneity of lifestyle, social behavior, and rituals. For example, UU humanists, mystics, Christians, and pagans often join in frustrating dances in our tribes, clumsily stepping upon one another’s toes or bumping into one another.

Additionally, if we aren’t careful, our passion for inclusion can grow thoughtless, plunging us headlong into the pit of Jonathan Swift’s “anythingarianism” where we stand equally for everything, without limits or boundaries, thus standing for nothing.

The Beloved Community doggedly inquires: How whole is our singular family of faith; who is being left out; what voice is not being heard; who needs to be consoled or goaded? Our peculiar way of doing religion spells spaciousness, size, thickness, width. Theodore Parker talked about ministry as essentially a matter of entering a “wide place.”

Others echo this sentiment. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke penned, “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, but I give myself to it.” And novelist Barbara Kingsolver writes, “If there is a fatal notion on this earth, it’s the notion that wider notions will be fatal.” And then there is our old Universalist hymn that resounds, “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy,” emboldening us to embrace those who live on the outskirts of human favor.

Consequently, the Beloved Community would not have us ask people what they believe or what might be their political preference or sexual orientation, but rather inquire of their


singular story and how goes it with their spirit, deep-down, really. And as our loving grasp expands, a marvel occurs: the universal supply of love is replenished; we are personally refueled, our chosen community is enhanced, and the deities begin to dance. Active love is a form of transcendence. “It leaves stretch marks,” as poet Marge Piercy puts it.

In beloved community we are summoned to greet one another in Hindu fashion: Instead of saying hello or goodbye we would say namaste: “I honor the light that is within you,” or, “the divine in me greets and embraces the divine in you.” In effect, namaste reminds each of us that our neighbor is always our teacher, knowing well that our stinging critics are also our rabbis.

VI. Beloved Community Undergirds its Members The Rissho Kosei Kai movement, liberal Buddhists from

Japan, would encourage us to follow their example where every member of the congregation is an active participant in a small affinity group. These intentional support circles, called hozas, exist solely to thicken the overall “interdependent web” of our local parishes—soothing us when we’re down and goading us when we’re sluggish.

In the Church Aspiration we voice every Sunday in my liberal religious outpost, we make two interwoven promises: we affirm “service is our prayer” as well as vow to “help one another in fellowship.” You see, social justice and interpersonal caregiving are as Siamese twins—when you tear them asunder, both wither and die. Inreach and outreach are married in mature parish life.

Our caregiving mission also creates a beloved community that reflects backward even as it marches forward. Durable religious community travels back and forth in time, honoring and upholding those faith-comrades who have sauntered before us and bequeathing those yet to be born with the gift of tomorrow.

The congregation celebrates communally the entrance of babies into its midst, pledging its troth out loud. Coming-of-agers are heard and embraced along with their families in full worship celebration. The dead are paid personalized homage, noting that


the biblical phrase for dying means “to be gathered to one’s people.” There are rites-of-passage to welcome newcomers and tributes of farewell for those moving away.

A robust parish finds meaningful ways to lift and caress the members of its circle. Continually.

VII. Beloved Community Members Fight Fairly for Impact not Injury

Growth is expansive and disruptive. It spells change that in turn causes anxiety that precipitates conflict. Conflict is not only inevitable in a beloved community, but also desirable. Hence, discomfort becomes a spiritual discipline, as colleague Alma Crawford urges. Healthy turmoil serves to sharpen issues and elicits new perspectives. But in a community where the members feel the organizational structure is tenuous or shaky, everyone avoids conflict like the plague.

On the contrary, mature, hardy communities tangle for impact or resultant change rather than injury or retaliatory damage. They struggle openly in order to minimize the lying and cruelty that often contaminate our communal life. Universalist forebear Hosea Ballou’s words uttered in 1805 still ring relevant: “Let brotherly and sisterly love continue. If we have love, no disagreement can do us any harm; but if we have not love no agreement can do us any good!”

VIII. Beloved Community Balances Justice with Joy “And what does God require of us, but to do justice, and to

love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God?” wrote the prophet Micah. This question marks a watershed in the evolution of religion when we migrated from animal sacrifice to human service, from ritual worship to social righteousness. If we pay heed to Micah’s threefold imperatives of justice, kindness, and humility, our houses of devotion will definitely stand in good shape.

Micah contends that these ethical demands appear from beyond our ego or imagination. They come from the Eternal One,


from the Creation. They aren’t intriguing, optional challenges we’ve dreamed up. They are transcendent claims on human life. They are what is expected—make that, required—during our earthly adventure.

The first imperative is to do justice. Not to think or visualize justice, but to do justice every waking day of our lives, not merely when we feel like it. Justice entails mending a broken world by making sure what belongs to people gets to them, be it freedom, dignity, or resources.

But justice needs to be braided with joy in the sustenance of our beloved clans. Authentic community-weavers take their mission seriously, but never grimly, recalling that the German word for blessedness, seelisch, is directly related to silliness in English. For as Edward Field reflected, “If someone is to lead us, let it be a small person who doesn’t ask us to follow but just goes for their own heart’s sake, someone who talks a little silly sometimes.”

Did you know that those in Martin Luther King’s inner circle often remarked how comical and zany King could be? This giant moral activist was also a prankster. Imagine that. Remember that. Go and do likewise.

Indeed, keeping our eyes on the prize of the beloved community requires a great struggle, but not a humorless one—rather a tussle mixed with abundant mirth, poetic grace, and serendipity.

IX. Beloved Community is Semper Reformanda “Semper reformanda” was the rallying cry of our 16th-century

Transylvanian Unitarian kin, Francis David, and seconded by the affirmation of modern-day Unitarian sage, e. e. cummings, who mused, “We can never be born enough.” In short, an expansive Unitarian Universalist web remains permeable and fluid rather than tight and set.

We free-thinking mystics with hands belong to a springy venture, not a static organization; a movement anchored to no


single moment, no particular guru, no one vow, but tied to innumerable events, persons, and scriptures.

X. Beloved Community Is Ultimately Held in an Eternal Embrace

A closing Universalist hallmark: we were created by a loving God; we are buoyed by that same transforming power along life’s pathway, and we will finally return to its kindly, tender grasp. As Paul put it, “Love will never come to an end.” The Universalists harbored a poignant phrase of their own: “Rest assured!”

My fellow colleagues, it is certain knowledge that we will neither experience nor embody perfect love—personally or communally—during our ministerial sojourns. The Beloved Community remains an unrealizable ideal for all earthlings. Hence, we clergy must practice creative detachment, acknowledge we are all interims-stewards-for awhile, wayfarers.

So, at the close of our vocational tenure, we would be brave enough to release our noble outcomes and heartfelt contributions back to the flow of history. Indeed, at the conclusion of our lives, to surrender our bodies and spirits into the arms of a loving God. For as St. John of the Cross wrote, “In the end we shall be examined in love.” Not only examined in love but, moreover, embraced with love.

Rest assured.


Mother, Moses, or a Spiritual ATM? Archetypes of Authority in Contemporary Liberal Religion

a paper delivered to the Harpers Ferry Ministerial Study Group

November 2001 The Rev. Douglas Taylor

There is a story I am sure most, if not all, of us have heard

before about six wise blind men who are brought to an elephant. Each grabs hold of a part of the elephant and declares the nature of ‘elephant’ based on this limited experience. “An elephant is like a wall,” “No, it’s a fan,” “Wrong, it’s a rope,” and so on. I think this was a story first told by Buddha, where the blind men represent different religious practitioners, and the elephant is religion or God or Buddha-nature. The ‘blindness,’ ironically, is used as a metaphor for a lack of wisdom in these wise men. Well, what if we wrote an adaptation where the wise persons with sight impairment were our parishioners and the elephant was the minister! Attending each Sunday, one might say, “A minister is one who inspires us with words.” Another might see the minister only at meetings and say, “A minister is one who runs the church and manages the business.” A third may have taken a course the minister offered and say, “No, the others are wrong. A minister is one who teaches and guides us into understanding.” A quiet voice may say, “No, truly a minister is one who brings comfort, a listener and healer.” And yet another may chime in, “You are all wrong. I have seen a minister in the protest lines and at the housing projects. A minister is one who brings justice and goads our conscious.”

And of course we are each the whole elephant. A good systems theologian will tell you we must not be partitioned down to one role or another. You need to be the whole elephant. Nonetheless, how we are perceived in ministry is of equal importance to who we really are when it comes to issues of power and authority in leadership among our people. Generally speaking, the leadership style each of us uses is a reflection of


only one or two facets of who we are as ministers. But those few facets of us weigh heavily in the perception of the people. Perception is, I believe, a crucial element to this discussion of authority and leadership. So, how does your congregation see you? Are you Mother, Moses, or a Spiritual ATM? Perhaps they see you as a Manager, a Messenger, or a Martyr. Or maybe a Mentor, a Mediator, or merely the Master of Ceremonies. How do they see you, and how does that help you or get in the way of your ministry.

The concept for this paper began last year on the ride up to Harper’s Ferry with a colleague. Somehow we fell into talking about titles like “Reverend” and “Doctor” and I said that I occasionally introduce myself as “Pastor” because the primary focus of my role at the church is pastoral care. Our senior minister is the preacher, the minister of religious education is the teacher, and I am the pastor. My traveling companion replied that he avoids the title “pastor” because it is no longer a meaningful title. Generally speaking today, the word “pastor” means “the minister who cares for and tends to the relational and spiritual affairs of the congregation.” The word “pastor” is Latin and is usually translated as “shepherd,” but it literally means “feeder,” which I think fits. Back when there were shepherds in the dominant culture, religious leaders spoke of themselves as shepherds of people, or they spoke of God as a shepherd of people. The leader and authority figure would meet the spiritual hungers of the people by being a feeder, a Shepherd. It was a metaphor connecting religious authority and a leadership style to a common function of the culture: taking care of livestock. We don’t have shepherds in our dominant culture anymore. We don’t need shepherds because we have fences. The only connection to shepherds we have is history and, of course, the Christian religious language in the abstract. The concept of ”shepherd” or ”pastor” is abstract nowadays. It is no longer attached to a common everyday concept of regular people. This was my friend’s point. So I started wondering: if not shepherd, than what? What are the authority and leadership models in


contemporary culture to which we can appeal? And more specifically, how does my congregation perceive me; what role do I fill?

Right after the first worship service I ever did at the church I serve, a healthy middle-aged woman came up to me through the receiving line, gripped my hand, and said, “I want you to do my memorial service.” I said, “Oh, are you ill?” “Oh, no, I’m fine,” she apologized. “I can just tell that you would do a great job.” She continued filling my ear with praise while I held my tongue and my breath (I hear flattery is alright so long as you don’t inhale.) I decided not to tell her I never officiated a funeral or memorial service before. Why burst her projection so soon? A few months later, we apparently reached a compromise when I did her daughter’s wedding. And it is here I want to draw a distinction between projections, stereotypes, and archetypes.

Surely we have each experienced that time when someone first meets you as “the minister” and you get the immediate feeling they have drawn instant conclusions about you. For good or for ill, they have put you in a box based on perhaps a few visual cues and the fact you are “a minister.” So what box did they put you in? Different folks will put you in different boxes. This is usually projection, such as happened between me and this congregant who wanted me to do her memorial. Projections are generally easy to spot if you are paying attention.

As ministers, we get a lot of stuff projected on us. There is an excerpt from a very good book, Lying Awake by John Salzman, that touches on this. There is a great deal of good fictional literature which illuminates Archetypes for us. This story is about Sister John of the Cross, a cloistered Carmelite nun who has the spiritual gift of visions, only to discover she has also developed a neurological disorder which might explain away her gift. The paragraph I offer to you is about the reaction of the other people in the waiting room when Sister John shows up for her first doctor’s appointment.

... several patients in the waiting room stared


openly. Sister John kept custody of her eyes, letting her gaze settle on the floor in front of her. She did not need to see the faces to feel the mixture of curiosity, amusement, and hostility directed toward her. This was why so many nuns in the nursing and teaching orders had chosen to abandon the traditional habit. In the cloister, the habit eliminated distractions, out here, it created them. Sister John considered the irony: the habit was originally adopted by nuns to make them inconspicuous in the world. In the Middle Ages, a plain serge tunic, linen wimple, and veil was the outfit favored by widows. A true habit now, Sister John thought as she glanced around the waiting room, would be a nylon jogging outfit worn over tennis shoes. (Salzman, Lying Awake. p 41)

Sister John noticed that people react to her outfit and what they think it represents. This is projection. It gets in the way. I would guess this character’s models for authority are Jesus, St. Teresa (the founder of her order), and her current prioress; but the one she embodies in herself is the archetype of the hermit.

Archetype can get garbled up with projections, as we saw when she walked into the doctor’s office. They can also easily slip into caricature and stereotype. The stereotypical cloistered nun or hermit is quite different from the archetypal nun or hermit. A stereotype as studied in sociology is “a simplified and standardized concept or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group”(from the Pocket Webster Dictionary.) Alternatively, an archetype as studied in Psychology is seen as “an unconscious idea, pattern of thought, or image inherited from the ancestors of the race and universally present in individual psyches.”(Ibid) So they both deal in images and ideas, but stereotypes are bound by a cultural group or sub-group, where as archetypes are universal and timeless. Therefore, when I say my title is “Archetypes of Authority in Contemporary Liberal Religion,” I am creating an oxymoron. I realized this a


little over a month ago. I am looking for archetypes as timeless as our pop culture and as universal as our little corner of the religious landscape! (“By page three he tells us he was trying to do the impossible!”)

But I remember a book by James McClendon, Jr., entitled, Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology, which I read for a history course I took in seminary. The premise of the book is that our lives are sometimes representative of something larger. In the book, McClendon wrote about four individuals in recent history and how “each possessed of certain characteristic images ... by which each understood himself, faced the critical situations in his life, and chiseled out his own destiny.” (McClendon, Biography as Theology. p 69) These images were the root of a new way of doing theology according to the author:

“Our biographical subjects have contributed to the theology of the community of sharers of their faith especially by showing how certain great archetypical images of that faith do apply to their own lives and circumstances, and by extension to our own.” (McClendon, Biography as Theology. p 75)

The one individual I remember best from McClendon’s examples was Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a Moses figure. Like Moses, he brought a message of freedom from oppression. Like Moses, he was a mouthpiece for the oppressed to the oppressor. Like Moses, he stirred the people to change. Like Moses, he saw himself as, or at least let himself be seen as, an agent of God. And like Moses, he never reached the promised land with the people. He was a messenger; he spoke for justice. He led the people out from the social and spiritual bondage of that day.

I believe we are dealing with more than just projections and perceptions. “Moses” can work as an archetype when archetype is defined as an image inherited from our ancestors. It doesn’t


work when archetype is defined as “universal” or “timeless” because Moses was a historical figure from a particular culture. Therefore, this somewhat historic, mostly mythic, figure known as “Moses” must point to a deeper archetype. I have not studied this long enough to tell you what that deeper archetype is. I have never heard Gandhi referred to as a “Moses” figure. But Gandhi and Martin Luther King are strongly connected in what they achieved and how they achieved it. Ergo, there must be a deeper archetype here that would include King, Gandhi, and Moses. “Moses” is a stepping stone, an arrow pointing deeper. I am not looking for that deeper archetype in this paper. I want to find those stepping stones from within our current culture. The “shepherd” is a culturally-bound model of leadership and authority as well. And I want a replacement for that mythic figure in today’s milieu.

My search for mythic figures led me to, of course, Joseph Campbell. Campbell used to say that myths serve several major psychological and social functions. One of those functions is that they tell us about how we fit in the universe. “Myth,” he would say, “tells us that wherever we are in time, space, or culture, the rituals of living and dying have spiritual and moral roots.” (Houston, A Mythic Life. p 100) So the shepherd is a mythic model that used to tell people how they fit in the universe in relation to their minister and to their God. But it doesn’t quite fit anymore. Campbell talked about that a little too. He said when the myths “no longer work, a pervading sense of alienation from society often ensues, followed by a desperate quest to replace the lost meaning of the once-powerful myths.”(Ibid) We need to tap into these archetypes and find the ones that touch reality and move us forward.

A second source I found helpful was Jean Houston who wrote a book entitled, A Mythic Life. In it, she describes the way myth and archetype can affect a life.

Myths have such power because they are full of archetypes. Archetypes are many things – primal forms, codings of the deep unconscious,


constellations of psychic energy, patterns of relationship. Our ancestors saw them in the heavens, prayed to them as Mother Earth, Father Ocean, Sister Wind. They were the great relatives from whom we derived, and they not only gave us our existence but also prompted our stories and elicited our moral order. Later, they became personified in mythic characters and their stories – the contending brothers, the holy child, the search for the beloved, the heroic journey. As major organs of the psyche, archetypes give us our essential connections, and without them we would lose the gossamer bridge that joins spirit with nature, mind with body, and self with the metabody of the universe. (Houston, A Mythic Life. p 99)

With all this background in mind, I started making a list (Appendix A.) I tried to include every possible authority figure in contemporary culture, as well as a few of the supposedly timeless ones. I was trying to poke at what roles were also captured up in archetype. I have some on there that connect strongly with Judeo-Christian scripture, like Lord, Judge, Father, and Servant. I have some that are more secular, like CEO, President, Cop, and Pop Star. Then I have a big list of what I just called “other possibilities,” like Explorer, Teacher, Elder, Used Car Dealer, and Architect.

I noticed that most of the items I was drawn to on the list, those models that point toward what I think I see happening in our churches were not the traditional authority models. King and Queen, Lord, Cop, and Boss were not in my short list of real possibilities for mythic models of authority in our churches. I was drawn initially to those that seem to represent me. But I figured rather than try to avoid that bias, I would jump into it, claim it, and then move on.

So I jumped in. I started looking through my own sermons


and newsletter columns for any patterns in how I presented myself. I tried to uncover indications of a leadership style or anything remotely archetypal. I looked for confirmation of the things I was drawn to from my list. Here is one that leapt out at me. In a sermon I called “Turning and Returning,” I wrote,

We have within each of us, echoes of memories beyond us. There are traces of lives and loves which are not ours, and yet belong to us and shape who we are and how we see the world. I am a fourth generation Unitarian Universalist. My personal religious and spiritual history would be incomplete without saying something about the echoes of the lives and loves I carry.

My mother’s mother’s mother, Cora Arvilla Beadle Miller, was one of the founding members of the Old Stone Universalist Church of Schuyler Lake, NY. That is the same church where my mother’s mother, Marie Elizabeth Miller Strong, played the organ and was superintendent of the Church School, and where my mother’s father, Ashley Walter Strong, was Moderator and then President of the New York Convention of Universalists in the mid 1950's. It is the same church, the Old Stone Universalist Church, where my mother, Elizabeth May Strong, now a Minister of Religious Education, grew up and began teaching when she was in eighth grade.

We have, within each of us, echoes of memories beyond us, traces of lives and loves which are not ours, and yet belong to us. My mother’s mother’s mother was a church builder. May I be so blessed as to be the same.

I remember I was trying to present a sense of rootedness in this sermon. I appealed to the authority of tradition and my place in it. I then connected my story to how all of us can tap into that


long shared history of the lives around us. The “we can all be at home in the journey” sort of thing. I have heard it said the best sermons we preach are the ones we need to hear ourselves. Such was the case with this sermon for me. I wanted to find my rootedness because I was feeling very unrooted. I wanted to see myself as a “Church Builder” because I was feeling too much like a gypsy. I was trying to create a certain perception. I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, but I was, I admit, also trying to change the way I perceived myself.

Now there are other things that jump out in the way I present myself in this sermon. I present a strong connection to the feminine side of my family. The ministry position I currently hold as “the pastor,” if you will, was held previously by only women. Someone from the church commented upon the announcement of my candidacy that it was very bold of the search committee to select a man for this position. Luckily for everyone involved, I turned out to be a nurturer, which is sometimes viewed as a very motherly trait.

I am sure many of you are aware that a large portion of the people in our churches are working out their mommy and daddy issues on us through projection. The mother and father archetype are very strong archetypes but can easily fall into projection. The mother archetype is a nurturer, sustainer, and a comforter. The father archetype is a founder and creator. They are both very powerful, and many images of God contain all these characteristics. I think it is interesting that I appealed to a mother figure in my ancestry whom I characterize as a founder.

But I must admit here that, in practice, people do not really view me as a mother figure at the church. Many see me as “son.” Some of them openly admitted to it, which helped. Now the “son” thing, I think, is mostly projection. There is not much archetypal authority there, which is why, during the Sunday morning receiving line, I won’t let them pinch my cheek anymore.

I did receive a great sermon from Judy Welles, our colleague


from Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania. The sermon was titled, “Asking the Right Question.” Her premise was that one of the dominant tasks of liberal religious folks, such as the people in her church, is to be helpful to one another. This is a very broad statement which she helped focus by sharing the mythic tale of the Fisherking to illustrate “helping” is often a job of “asking the right questions.” Parsifal is the character in this Arthurian tale who eventually saves the Fisherking from his suffering by asking the right questions. Parsifal is the mythic hero and represents the journey of personal spiritual deepening and the quest for wholeness and sanctity. I was looking for authority and leadership styles from my mythic figures, and this myth seemed to be more about personal growth than leadership. But it gave me a big hint about a style that took me a while to name. It is a style of ministry where you ask the right questions. It is one that I occasionally do in my sermons. I sometimes will offer an unresolved situation, articulate it as clearly as possible, and then point toward more meaningful questions rather than resolve the issue. I eventually decided to call this authority and leadership style “the Witness”

By way of example, I gave a sermon a few years back about the Catholics and Lutherans presenting a joint declaration to put to rest the doctrinal dispute of justification by faith versus justification by works. It was interesting and all, but to keep things from staying academic I always try to have a “so what” statement no later than three quarters of the way into sermons like this. So what; why does this information matter to us? In this particular sermon it came out this way:

So, what does this all have to do with us? Why should Unitarian Universalists care if the Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church decide to take the ecumenical dialogue beyond the level where we all agree to disagree? Why should we take note? Well, other than the obvious importance of being informed of major shifts on the theological and ecumenical landscape, I think this line of


theological question is worth some thought. I’m not so much interested in the question of salvation. Our Unitarian Universalist perspectives do have a lot to say about salvation. But I’d like to work a little with “Faith” because I think we understand the “Works” part well enough. But faith is one of those words we have begun using again, with poetic license. And so I feel it is good to dig into this “faith” we talk about.

I called this model The Witness because I felt it was grounded in the authority of direct experience. I point to what I see and share the relevant parts of my perspective. Eyewitness News is a big deal these days. The reporter is there on the spot reporting what is going on. There are several other applications, like a witness for a criminal case, and there is also still a religious connection of being a witness to the faith.

Witness is on my short list. My short list consists of twelve models I offer for consideration. Twelve is a significant number to juggle, but in exploring them, I found it easy to pair them up. For example, I put Witness together with what I’m calling Weaver. The Weaver image uses the metaphor of bringing together the disparate threads of our lives and weaving them together into meaningful patterns. I remember a fantasy book I read when I was a teenager where the two heroes in the story were wounded and need to rest. And, of course, they got lost in the woods and ended up in this little valley tucked away from the rest of the world. The old woman who lived there dressed their wounds and gave them a place to sleep. The next day, they found her working at a loom making a huge tapestry. The patterns in the fabric were hard to make out, but if they stared at it long enough they would start to recognize themselves and the events of their lives in the shifting patterns. The old woman eventually explained she was weaving the history of the world. There are various characters like this in these kinds of books, someone who is watching everything and writing it down in a big book or


weaving it all into a vast tapestry. This Weaver character is similar enough to the Witness that I could pair these two up. The two models support and inform one another. Plus, by pairing them up, it amplifies the ambiguities I am told are a necessary part of myth and archetype.

The other models on my short list are Manager and CEO, Prophet and Radical, Celebrity and Cheerleader, Teacher and Guide, and Shepherd and Pastor. I decided to keep the Shepherd/Pastor model on there, and I’ll talk about that in a little bit. I also have the Mother/Father archetype on the list, which the only comment I will say about that is you can’t really avoid it. I don’t think it makes a good model for church leadership, but neither can you ignore that it’s out there.

The next one on my list after the Witness/Weaver is the Manager/CEO. This, of all the models I offer, is the most clear model of leadership and authority. I was initially thinking of the CEO model of church government when I put this one on my list, but this possibility is not just for the big senior minister types. Looking at it closely, an administratively-minded MRE could fit this model, because the goal of this model is to make everything come together well. Alban Institute puts out a bimonthly magazine called, Congregations. The Sept/Oct 2001 issue was on Transforming Leadership. One article called “Pastors and Managers,” by Scott Eblin, talked about the differences between the results-oriented style of a manager and the relationship-oriented style of a pastor. His premise, however, was “that a well-grounded approach to achieving results combined with a sincere relational orientation is the foundation of both healthy businesses and healthy congregations.” (p23) The Manager/CEO is a model where you do a lot of background work to keep the program running, which results in increased relationship building.

After that I have listed the Prophet/Radical model. This is a deeply traditional model. The Biblical Prophets were truth-tellers; they stirred people toward justice and right relation. Often they were considered radicals by the societies they tried to save. Certainly most of our favorite Unitarian Universalists from


history were radicals! This model, with its focus on truth and justice, has a strong tie- in to our way of faith. Every democracy needs its social critics. The struggle for this model is to stay engaged with the community you critique. Distance is needed to be able to think outside the dominant social paradigm. Most Radicals do not represent the majority of people around them. But all true prophets must be members of the community they seek to charge.

After the Prophet/Radical, I have listed a model I struggled with a lot. I’m calling it Celebrity/Cheerleader. I found one story of a celebrity minister which is kind of fun. It is about how Henry Ward Beecher “secularized the pulpit” by doing away with the pulpit itself and

…replacing it with a kind of runway into and over the pews. The new arrangement brought him physically closer to the congregation and lent itself to a more dramatic presentation of his message. Gone was the high pulpit of the authoritative colonial preacher. Instead Beecher moved back and forth on the stage he had projected into the congregation, watching their faces to measure the command of his presence. When his brother Thomas substituted for him one Sunday, large numbers left the church as Thomas, rather than their idol, entered the chancel. Thomas sought to stem the tide by announcing: “All those who came here to worship Henry Ward Beecher may now withdraw – all who came to worship God may remain! (Schultz Transforming Words. p95)

But there is something more to this mythic model beside just self-centeredness. This model exudes charisma. People are drawn to the Celebrity because he or she is exciting and passionate. But I went back and forth with this one, because just having charisma is not enough to make you a leader. It helps, but it is not sufficient in itself.


The next mythic model is perhaps my most solid. The Teacher/Guide is a deep model, and I suspect it is a true archetype. I looked all year for a myth that would illuminate the archetypal model of a Guide, because I felt this one was strongly represented in our churches. So often we hear people talk about “the spiritual journey” or “the faith journey.” Well, a leader to a person on a journey would be a guide. Certainly teaching is ”guiding” according to the religious education philosophies behind most of our church R.E. programs. One minister told me he sees himself the same way Luther saw himself: as a preacher turned teacher. Luther’s reforms include an accessible Bible for the people. Rather than everyone listening to the Bible in Latin and then hearing the priest comment on it, Luther wanted the Bible read in the language of the people. One of the techniques he used during his reform was to give up the standard priestly outfit and put on the clothing of academia: a black robe. Luther was appealing to a new image of ministry and he recognized, like Sister John did in the waiting room, that the clothes you wear go a long way in creating the image people have of you.

And then there is still the Shepherd. The Shepherd/Pastor is still on my short list because, after putting together this far-from-exhaustive list, I felt that the role of the leader as the one who comforts the afflicted was unrepresented. The Witness/Weaver model comes closest, but it is not really the same thing. So after all that effort to come up with something new, I am unwilling to give up the old model completely.

I made a chart (Appendix B) which breaks down the six models I am offering for our consideration, with a word or two defining their functions, what this model would see as the biggest problem people face, the solution, and what this model has to offer in a crisis. The Witness/Weaver sees what is going on and tries to makes sense out of it all. This model would see the biggest problem as apathy and responds by bringing meaning. In a crisis, a Witness can offer perspective. The Manger/CEO keeps things running smoothly and on an even keel. This model would see the biggest problem as chaos and responds by bringing order.


In a crisis, a Manager can offer sound, responsible decision-making. The Prophet/Radical speaks truth to power, and does a new thing; this model would see the biggest problem as stagnation and responds by bringing truth and innovation. In a crisis, a Prophet can offer critique and inspiration. The Celebrity/Cheerleader excites and drives others with charisma. This model would see the biggest problem as dryness and responds by bringing passion. In a crisis, a Celebrity can offer motivation. The Teacher/Guide helps people change, grow, and improve. This model would see the biggest problem as ignorance and responds by bringing understanding. In a crisis, a teacher can offer wisdom. The Shepherd/Pastor tends to and cares for the people. This model would see the biggest problem as suffering and isolation and responds by bringing comfort and connection. In a crisis, a Shepherd can offer solace.

Now, I said this at the beginning, and I’ll say it again, if only because I like saying it: you need to be the whole elephant. No one can be partitioned down to just a few facets of her or his full self. Further, there is no ‘one’ model of authority and leadership that works for all ministers in all situations. And I am not suggesting one model is superior to another in any holistic sense. I am suggesting all of us have a predisposition toward one or more of these mythic models and archetypes, or maybe toward one I didn’t recognize during the months this occupied my attention. Consider the options I have presented. Explore how these might fit you. Find your mythic model and lean into it.


Biblical: King Lord Judge Father Rabbi Host Healer Shepherd Servant Prophet Priest Preacher Pastor Voice in the Wilderness Burning Bush Chosen/Called Witness Secular: President Congress Specialist CEO Doctor Manager Boss Supervisor Mentor Mediator/Diplomat Cop

Commander Celebrity Pop Star Robert Moore’s Male/Female Archetypes: King/Queen Warrior Magician Lover Other Possibilities: Mother Elder Trailblazer Explorer Guide Companion Chef Conductor Coach Car Dealer Fool Messenger Teacher Architect Therapist Martyr Radical Exemplar Artist

Master of Ceremonies(MC) Cheerleader Entertainer Scholar Spiritual ATM Shaman Weaver The Short List Witness/Weaver Manager/CEO Prophet/Radical Celebrity/Cheerleader Teacher/Guide Shepherd/Pastor Mother/Father

Appendix A: Some Models of Leadership and Authority that may also be archetypal


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Bibliography Elbin, Scott. “Pastors and Managers” (from Congregations. Bethesda, MD: Alban Institute. Sept/ Oct, 2001, pp 22-4) Houston, Jean. A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. McClendon, James W. Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology (2nd edition). Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990. Salzman, Mark. Lying Awake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Schultz, William F. Transforming Words: Six Essays on Preaching. Boston: Skinner House, 1984.


The Tragic The Rev. David Sammons

The original draft of this paper was written before the events

that took place in September 2001, so it was not meant to be a response to what happened. Certainly most people would consider what happened then as tragic, but human history is filled with things at least as tragic and often worse. In fact, “The Tragic” seems to be an unavoidable element of life. For some it seems so pervasive – and so personal - that they become what the inventors of the Enneagram call “Tragic Romantics.” Tragic Romantics are people who tend to notice all the things others have they’d like to have, but instead of trying to do whatever they would need to do to get them, they seem to prefer to long for them. They’re always longing for what seems out of reach. According to an Enneagram Web Site, “They see the best of what they don’t have and the worst of what they do have.”1

Such people have, as Miguel de Unamuno puts it, a “tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself.”2 They tend to see life as “a vale of tears” rather than as something to enjoy. In part, our Unitarian and Universalist forebears believed they were rebelling against such a view when they talked about “salvation by character.” Though it might take a lot of work, if people were “virtuous,” said William Ellery Channing they would not only be happy in this life, but in whatever it was that followed.3

The Transcendentalists were especially wary of a tragic sense of life. As Emerson put it, “the bitterest element in life” would be a

… belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the belief that the order of nature and events is controlled by a law not adapted to man, nor man to that, but which holds on it’s way to the end, serving him if his wishes chance to lie on the same course, crushing him if his wishes lie contrary to it, and heedless


whether it serves or crushes him.4

This “terrible idea,” says Emerson, is the foundation of Greek tragedies and turns figures like Oedipus and Antigone into such objects of compassion. Emerson says, “They must perish, and there is no over-god to stop or mollify this hideous enginery that grinds and thunders and takes them up into its terrific system.”5

This is the perspective adopted by a playwright like Shakespeare when he wrote what we think of as his “tragedies.” According to a guide for those studying Shakespeare, the difference between the comic and tragic in Shakespeare is

In tragedy, life goes on; in comedy life goes onward and upward. In the tragic vision, the possibility of a happy ending is unrealized, although it is sometimes suggested, as when Lear is briefly reconciled to Cordelia. When tragedy pauses to look at comedy, it views such a happy ending as an aborted or bypassed possibility. At best, it acknowledges, “what might have been” as an ironic way of magnifying “tragic waste.”…. In the tragic vision, something someone does cause them to lapse into a “winter of discontent.” 6

The author of this guide argues that when they are writing from the standpoint of a “Tragic Vision” playwrights want us to believe

• The conclusion of the events they are portraying is going to be catastrophic, and the conclusion is also going to be inevitable.

• The protagonist won’t be able to do anything about it because of her or his human limitations, and the protagonist will suffer because of this.

• The suffering will seem out of sync with whatever it is the protagonist has done, but there may be something redemptive about the suffering—or at least something to learn from it.


• Finally, the suffering may show the ability of the protagonist to accept the moral responsibility for whatever it is he or she has done.

What these professors are saying is that in situations that are tragic there are forces that are beyond the control of the limitations of the people who are involved. Yet in the face of something that’s tragic, like what took place in September 2001, those involved may also discover they have more endurance and strength then they ever thought they had—and even if they can’t change things they at least accept responsibility for their own actions. Tragedy is often like a morality play. It’s meant to tell us things about ourselves.

As John Morrell puts it in his book Comedy, Tragedy and Religion, those who write both comedies and tragedies agree that life is full of “folly, disappointment, vice, mistakes, danger and suffering – and that we humans are on our own in handling them.” As opposed to Christian apologists who say that if we just “come to Jesus” things will be all right, or the proponents of the religions of New Thought who tell us everything can be made all right by positive thinking, the writers of classic comedies and tragedies believe: “Whatever powers or forces may control the universe, they are doing little or nothing to guarantee our happiness.” Morrell says:

In the tragic view … all activity is serious, and is usually done to accomplish something. Life is hard work. We struggle solemnly, emotionally engaged with everything that happens to us. In the end we are doomed to failure, but at least we can show heroism in the struggle.

In the comic view … much of our activity is for its own sake, and much of it is not serious. We play as well as work. And even when we are trying to accomplish something, taking risks can bring delight, whether or not we meet our goal. The adventure is rewarding in itself. When we are


striving for a goal, too, we should not be emotionally engaged by every negative event, for emotions often make us less able to cope with problems. Besides, it feels better to laugh than cry.

The tragic vision embodies an attitude similar to the old motto: “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. It’s how you play the game.” This motto also fits the comic vision, I would add, but what the two visions look for in the game is quite different. For the tragic view, in struggling through life’s twists and turns, the best I can achieve is individual nobility or grandeur. For the comic view, which puts no stock in the sublime, the best we can achieve is adventure with friends: we can take delight in the many shifts of thought and fortune we can get through. We can experience life as fun.7

Ed Friedlander, in talking about Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus the King, says that what we can learn from a tragedy things like:

• In our world, very bad things do sometimes happen to very good people. Our security comes from what people know we can do well. This results in turn from our natural abilities, our effort and our good character. It’s safest and the best strategy to try to be a good person.

• It’s fun to be scared at shows and to cry. We shouldn’t want to be rid of these emotions but feel them intensely. Perhaps we can also bring back from a tragic play or movie something that will help us make sense of our neighbors, our world, and ourselves.8

Morrell says how one feels in response to a tragedy is important to the playwright:

The audience’s tragic emotions are not meant to be felt during the performance and then be forgotten.


A good tragedy, like any worthy literature, does not simply evoke certain emotions toward particular characters and events and leave it at that. Rather, it offers those situations-cum-emotions as paradigms, and so teaches us how to handle situations of failure, suffering, and death in our own lives. We should react as tragic heroes react, and as we react to them in tragedies. Participating in a worthwhile drama of any kind, like reading literature, educates our emotions. That is a big part of why children in all cultures are educated with stories and drama. It’s to show them how to respond to various kinds of events in life.9

Most of those who comment on tragedy as a form of literature say something similar to what Morrell and Friedlander have said. A few take it further. Joyce Carol Oates claims that tragedy is written so that it can appear in our dreams. It’s meant to enter into our subconscious so it can show us the limitations and obsessions that plague humanity and warn us about our human inclination to respond to what’s superficial and immediate instead of what’s essential and eternal. Oates says:

The hero at the center of tragedy exists so that we may witness, in his destruction, the reversal of our private lives. We adjust ourselves to the spectacle of an art form, we paralyze our skepticism, in order to see beyond the artifice of print or stage, and we share in a mysterious dream of the necessary loss of self, even as the self reads on or watches, losing ourselves in the witnessing of someone’s death so that, in our human world, this hero may be reborn.10

I thought of this when I saw the film Gladiator. I’d resisted seeing the film, in spite of all of the awards it won because I didn’t want to watch heads and arms getting lopped off and swords driven through people’s bodies. But it was on HBO one


night in a hotel room in which I was staying and I had nothing else to do, so I watched it. I discovered I had underestimated the intention of the people who made the film. The film wasn’t really about killing. In the style of a Greek, or perhaps Shakespearean, tragedy – though I wouldn’t claim for it such exalted literary merit – the film portrayed a tragic situation from which a protagonist couldn’t escape. A Roman general, who had removed from his command after the death of the Emperor who had appointed him, comes upon his wife and son after they have been brutally killed by his opponents. He, himself, is then captured and sold as a slave to a man who has a stable of gladiators. The new Emperor, son of the one who had been loved by the general who is now a slave, summons the man with his stable of gladiators to Rome. To establish favor among his subjects, the new Emperor decides to reinstitute the gladiatorial games in which men must fight and be killed. But the film isn’t about how good the former general is as a gladiator or even about how bad are the games. It’s about how dedicated the gladiator is to the civic ideal of the now-dead Emperor he loved.

The Emperor’s daughter is committed to these ideals as well, and it’s her son who is in line to become Emperor after his uncle. But she is compromised by her brother’s threat to kill her son if she doesn’t do what he says, including having sex with him. He’s an evil one. He’s conniving, cheating, and incestuous. The only salvation for the woman and her son – and for Rome itself – lies in the hands of the gladiator and those who are willing to help him because of the nobility of his quest, including, eventually, the man who owns him. But, like in any tragedy, those who are watching the film know from the beginning, at some level, that if the gladiator is going to be able to achieve his goal it’s going to cost him his life. This isn’t going to be a film with a happy ending, but the bad Emperor is going to be thwarted.

The moral is that good outcomes often require a sacrifice, sometimes the ultimate one, but it’s worth it. The gladiator gives up his life to kill the new Emperor so that the ideals of the old


Emperor can be restored. The only happiness for the gladiator lies in the image of his joining his murdered wife and son in the fields of Elysium, having redeemed both their lives and his. As D.D. Raphael puts it in his book, The Paradox of Tragedy, tragedy snatches a spiritual victory out of defeat. But the victory is different from the kind often talked about in the stories of the Judeo-Christian and other religious traditions since it’s human beings like the gladiator rather than God who must do the snatching. In spite of the image of the Elysium fields, the gladiator fights for human ideals and human dignity and doesn’t ask for divine intervention to help him in his quest. In this film, as opposed to Sparticus, an earlier one about gladiators, there are no prayers, no illusions to Jesus, and no conversions. The gladiator may want to join the spirits of his family, but there’s nothing theistic about his quest. On the other hand, says Raphael:

Judaism and Christianity take it for granted that God must be just, and that the problem of innocent suffering must have a solution. If a tragedian insists upon such a solution (as Aeschylus seems to do), his approach to the problem is compatible with the religious spirit. But if, as more often happens, he simply pinpoints the problem without offering any solution, his attitude is not that of religious faith but of the religious questioning that leaves open the gate to skepticism at least as wide as the gate to faith. 11

As Karl Jaspers put it, “Christian salvation opposes tragic knowledge. The chance of being saved destroys the tragic sense of being trapped without chance of escape. Therefore no genuinely Christian tragedy can exist.”12 It takes more to be a tragic hero than it does to be a saint, unless you think the gladiator imagining he will be able to rejoin the spirits of his wife and son in Elysium is reassurance enough for him to risk death. For true believers, a place in heaven may be worth the price, as we see with Christian martyrs of old and the modern followers of Osama bin Laden, but there aren’t many of us who court death as


something positive. This is because for most of us there is no assurance of

reaching the Elysium fields, which is why tragedy touches us so deeply. Says Raphael, death is “deinos – dreadful, awesome,” yet “nothing is more sublime,” than the death of those who give their lives for a cause,13 meaning there is nothing more noble than being willing to do what our deepest selves, our highest ideals, compel us to do, even though we have no assurance it’s going to land us in heaven. One of the reasons I prefer our Unitarian Universalist view of Jesus as a real person is that to put him on the Cross as a God who’s guaranteed Resurrection reduces the meaning of his sacrifice and turns his story from that of a tragic hero into one in which death loses its sting.

There are some, like George Steiner, who believe that tragedy as an art form is dead, because most who live in a country like the United States have either adopted the view that whatever goes wrong in life is the result of divine retribution for moral failings, as Jerry Falwell suggested was the cause of September 11th, and can be fixed by “getting right” with God, or they’ve adopted the attitude that if people can ignore the bad things in life and just think about what’s positive, things will turn out all right. A sense of the tragic, however, says Steiner:

… tells us that the spheres of reason, order, and justice are terribly limited and that no progress in our science or technical resources will enlarge their relevance. Outside and within man is l’autre, the “otherness” of the world. Call it what you will: a hidden or malevolent God, blind fate, the solicitations of hell, or the brute fury of our animal blood. It waits for us in ambush at the crossroads. It mocks us and destroys us….

Things are as they are, unrelenting and absurd. We are punished far in excess of our guilt.

“It is a terrible, stark insight into human life,” but, says Steiner:


… in the very excess of his suffering lies man’s claim to dignity. Powerless and broken, a blind beggar hounded out of the city, he assumes a new grandeur. Man is ennobled by the vengeful spite of injustice of the gods. It does not make him innocent, but it hallows him as if he had passed through flame. Hence there is in the final moments of great tragedy, whether Greek or Shakespearean or neo-classic, a fusion of grief and joy, of lament over the fall of man and of rejoicing in the resurrection of his spirit. No other poetic form achieves this mysterious effect; it makes of Oedipus, King Lear and Phèdre the noblest yet wrought by the mind.

From antiquity until the age of Shakespeare and Racine, such accomplishments seemed within the reach of talent. Since then the tragic voice in drama is blurred and still.14

Steiner is obviously not a fan of Arthur Miller, perhaps because he chooses protagonists without the nobility of a Lear. Steiner is also not like the minister who often has to deal with the “Tragic Romantics” who are addicted to a negative view of life or the congregants forced to cope with unavoidably tragic situations, like the mother of a son killed when a drunk driver swerves across the yellow line and plunges his vehicle head on into the son’s car, or the wife of the husband who pulls out of their driveway on his way to see their newborn son for the first time and is hit by someone who doesn’t see him backing out and is driving too fast to avoid a collision.

Tragedies aren’t restricted to the stories of those who are noble or lead heroic lives. Trying to be more realistic with their art, it’s often less-than-noble people who modern playwrights want to bring to life. As Raymond Williams puts it in Modern Tragedy, in the plays of someone like Arthur Miller:

Individuals suffer for what they are and naturally


desire, rather than for what they try to do, and the innocent are swept up with the guilty, with epidemic force. The social consciousness has now been changed, decisively. Society is not merely a false system, which the liberator can challenge. It is actively destructive and evil, claiming its victims merely because they are alive. It is still seen as a false and alterable society, but merely to live in it, now, is enough to become its victim. In Death of a Salesman the victim is not the nonconformist, the heroic but defeated liberator; he is, rather, the conformist, the type of the society itself. Willy Lohman is a man who from selling things has passed to selling himself, and has become, in effect, a commodity which like other commodities will at a certain point be discarded by the laws of the economy. He brings tragedy down on himself not by opposing the lie but by living it.15

We’ve all seen people live like this, and we want to say to them: “Cut it out. Don’t you know you don’t have to live like this?” The tragedy is they can’t hear or can’t change. They have the kind of tragic personality that John Morrell says won’t let them behave in a way that’s more constructive. He says: “Once they choose a course of action, they tend to stick to it no matter what happens” and their downfall “is made inevitable as much by their locked wills as by any external force.”16

In his book, Tragedy and Comedy, Walter Kerr says there are even some who are only happy when they’re suffering. There are people who fear freedom and lack confidence in their ability to take control of their lives. In telling the stories of people like this an author or playwright is trying to get us to investigate the meaning of our own freedom and to explore what’s possible for us. Authors of tragedies want us to believe that it’s worth it to take risks, even risks with our lives. Kerr says: “Tragedy proposes that the door is open” and we “may walk through it.”17 Morally,


says Kerr, we always have a choice about how to respond to the situations in which we find ourselves, even if it means having to suffer as a result. And suffering can be worth it if there is a kind of dignity that comes with it.

So if Steiner is right in saying that we’ve lost a sense of the tragic, then Kerr is also right in saying we should do whatever we need to do to regain it. Doing so may not be easy. Kerr says:

Tragedy, which is affirmation of the will at its fiercest, depends very largely upon the psychology of the historical moment. Doubt will not give it to us. Determination, however hotheaded, may. The philosophical outlook of recent years is in the process of creating a new psychology. Man is reevaluating himself, possibly readying himself for a test of strength that simply cannot be avoided. Certainly, if he is listening, he cannot help hearing the drumbeat of a new theme, a drumbeat which Mr. Barrett paraphrases from Heidegger in this way: “Man … is a creature of distance: he is perpetually beyond himself, his existence at every moment opening toward the future.”

Or, to seize upon Karl Jasper’s formulation: “One can take courage to try to do that which passes beyond his strength from the fact it is a human problem, and man is that creature which poses problems beyond its powers.”

Such news may quite possibly, at some not too far distant time, alert the slumbering tragic hero, who is invariably eager to be the first man beyond himself. [Or the first woman!]18

The people I’ve been talking about so far have been looking at tragedy as a form of literature in which there’s a moral to the story. Religions ask the question about whether it has to be inherent to life. The answer of Buddhists is that suffering is so basic to life that the only escape from it is detachment. As Diana


Eck puts it in her book on the non-Judeo-Christian religions of our country, A New Religious America, many American Buddhists believe, “It is not only the overt suffering of old age, sickness and death which are the standard human inheritance,” but such unavoidable suffering as that which “comes from losing what we love or having to stick with things we don’t like.” Eck says that suffering, in this sense, “is intrinsic to the human condition,” no matter what our situation in life.19

The Bible often seems to suggest that it’s not life that’s tragic, what’s tragic is that God, in God’s mysterious way, chooses to cause suffering for some and not for others – and though we can try to get God to change his mind about the suffering he inflicts on us, there’s no guarantee that our prayers are going to work. Like Job, we’ve just got to accept this. After all it’s God, not us, who knows best. As Morrell puts it:

The sting of tragedy is that someone’s suffering does not serve a higher purpose, but is unredeemed, pointless. In monotheism, on the other hand, God is provident: He controls all events for our good. In the big picture, nothing is out of place or wasted. Even when human beings rebel against God, their actions fit in with His master plan. Whatever happens, including all instances of evil, is the will of God, and is ultimately for the best. Even the innocent suffering of children is not pointless. As humans with limited knowledge we may not understand how this or that suffering is for the best. But we believe that it is, and that no one is mistreated by God.20

Even Job eventually gets let off the hook. A later writer, wanting the story to have a happier ending than it’s original tragic one, gives it a happy ending with Job being rewarded for being so patient with God.

Most of those who look at life from a secular perspective would also like to believe that tragedies can have happy endings.


They don’t like the images Annie Dillard presents in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek of everyday kind of happening of things like a water bug floating by a stream by which she’s sitting, slowly, very naturally and inexorably, sucking the life out of a frog.21 Most secularists would like to believe that life is benevolent and full of possibilities, turned into something else only because of the greed and uncaringness of those who unintelligently want to exploit it.

But there is something inherently tragic about life, no matter what the perspective from which we view it. The tragic in life is epitomized by the fact each of us will die. What more tragic and unavoidable reality can there be? No matter what we do, no matter how carefully we eat, or how strenuously we exercise, in the end none of us is going to be able to live forever. It’s to get us to think about this that Annie Dillard writes about seeing the life being sucked out of the frog as though it were an everyday happenstance, which it is. As Dillard puts it, “I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained alter stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouthful of blood. Death: W.C. Fields called death ‘the Fellow in the Bright Nightgown.’ He shuffles around the house in all the corners I’ve forgotten, all the halls I dare not call to mind or visit for fear I’ll glimpse the hem of his shabby, dazzling gown disappearing around a turn…. It’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.” 22 But it’s the way the world works.

But the tragic doesn’t make Annie Dillard a pessimist. Dillard, who is Unitarian enough to have a goldfish named Ellery Channing, says there isn’t anything that can be done about the tragic, whether it’s in the lives of frogs or our own. So, she says, a person should “walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can. After seeing something like what happened to the frog, she says, “like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says: ‘Glory,’ and my right foot says: ‘Amen’ – in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.”


Like Emerson, Dillard believes: “He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain.”24

Yet there’s a balance to the pain, to the tragic for, as Dillard puts it: “Unless all ages and races of [people] have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.”25 It’s this grace that gives balance to the tragic in life and makes life worth living, no matter how much suffering there may be in it.

Mindful of this, Pam Abbey, a Methodist colleague of mine, wrote a column for her church newsletter in which she talked talking about a pinball tournament in which she took in an attempt to raise some money for a group she supported. In the column Abbey wrote:

If you were at the pinball event last July, you probably realized one thing very quickly. I may love to play pinball, but I’m really very bad at it. Plus, I don’t understand the rules very well. Pinball machines have a habit of giving free balls every so often but if there’s a logic to when or why, I haven’t been able to discover it. I’m playing along, I miss, and for some reason I’m given a free ball. It’s great, but I don’t understand it. Grace is like that. We can all look back over our lives and find times when we received “grace upon grace” as the Gospel of John describes it. All of a sudden, for no good reason, there it is.26

“Grace Happens,” as the bumper sticker puts it—at least, sometimes it happens—and when it does it’s a marvelous antidote for the tragic. Again quoting Abbey:

There are days when our prayers stop at the ceiling beam. There are days when our acts of mercy seem to have little effect. There are Sundays when worship seems long and boring. But those are the days we flip the paddles of the spiritual life and if we stop… well, that’s the end of the game.27


The tragic is a part of life, our lives, including the most tragic thing of all: we’re going to have to die. There’s no way around it. But, we have a choice about how to respond to this reality. We can approach life with thankfulness and hope, or we can give in to a tragic view. We can live our lives with nobility, no matter what the situations in which we find ourselves, or we can live the life of victims, with no nobility at all. The poets, playwrights, novelists, and essayists who write about the tragic, are trying to tell us that no matter how the game is going we can still flip and, who knows we may get a free ball.

I appreciate a faith like Unitarian Universalism that believes that even though we may end up like the frog about which Annie Dillard writes, and even if we don’t will eventually end up dead, it’s worth it to be alive. As Rilke puts it, and I’ve got no footnote for this one, it’s just buried in my mind: “Birth and death are the landmarks, but what’s important is the field in between.” Though the tragic exists in life, it’s not the only thing in it.


1. Anonymous. “Point Four: The Tragic Romantic.” Ennagram.com, 2001, p. 1.

2. Unamuno, Miguel de. Tragic Sense of Life. New York: Dover Publications, 1954.

3. Robinson, David. The Unitarians and the Universalists. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. pp. 9-24.

4. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Tragic,” from The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy and Religion. New York: Russell and Russell, 1961, p. 2.

5. Ibid. 6. English Department. “A Guide to the Study of Literature:” A

Companion Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of Literature: New York, Brooklyn College, 2001.

7. Morrell, John. Comedy, Tragedy and Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999, p. 39.

8. Friedlander, Ed. “Enjoying ‘Oedipus the King,’ by Sophocles.” Pathguy.com/Oedipus.htm, 2001, p. 10.

9. Ibid. p. 11. 10. Oates, Joyce Carol. The Edge of Impossibility. New York:

The Vanguard Press, 1972, p. 4. 11. Raphael, D.D. The Paradox of Tragedy. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1960, p. 37. 12. Jaspers, Karl. Tragedy Is Not Enough. London: Galloancz,

1953, p. 38. 13. Raphael. The Paradox of Tragedy, p. 68 14. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1961, pp. 8-10. 15. Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1966, p. 105. 16. Ibid. p. 27. 17. Kerr, Walter. Tragedy and Comedy. New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1967, p. 122. 18. Ibid. p. 308. 19. Eck, Diana L. A New Religious America. San Francisco:

HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. 20. Morrell, p. 76.


21. Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Bantam Books, 197, pp. 7-8.

22. Ibid. p. 178. 23. Ibid. p. 279. 24. Emerson, “The Tragic,” p. 1. 25. Dillard. p. 8. 26. Abbey, Rev. Pam. Reprinted in Ministering Together, July-

august, 2001. Walnut Creek, CA: The Interfaith Council of Contra Costa County, p. 4.

27. 27 Ibid.


Guidelines for Selected Essays

We invite you to submit original essays and presentations for publication in the next volume of UUMA Selected Essays. Essays presented before a Uni-tarian Universalist gathering or study group will be favored, however any es-says that are of interest and relevance to Unitarian Universalist ministers and are well written will be considered for publication. The next deadline for sub-missions is January 1, 2004.

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