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"Why I Became a Unitarian Minister"

One of my colleagues in the ministry asked me not so long ago, “Why did you become a Unitarian? You were not born into it, were you?”

“No,” I said, “I was raised in one of the mainline Protestant religions of the south and stayed in that denomination until I studied for its ministry. And that made a Unitarian out of me!”

I learned in seminary, as the song puts it, that “the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, they ain’t necessarily so.”

I loved religion. I loved my minister, too, and the people of the old church that I attended, but I had too many questions, and I could not believe as I once had. I could no longer accept the feelings of religious guilt. The church of my childhood had taught me to feel guilty about a lot of things: 1) guilty for thinking impure thoughts; 2) guilty for hating my brother when he punched me out; 3) guilty for not eating calf’s liver; and 4) guilty for not including every single relative in the nightly roll call with the “Now I lay me down to sleep prayer.” Just plain GUILTY!

Religious study, however, was a freeing if wrenching thing for me. There would be no putting all the pages back in the Bible the way they had been after seminary study, and that was all right.

I discovered from revered and scholarly professors of religion, that some of my guilts were unreal guilts. Furthermore, the Biblical foundation upon which the church of my childhood was established was flawed. Many Bible tales were myths.

The Red Sea did not part – but people could walk across the marshy reed sea, Yam Suph – more likely the place of action in the exodus.

Joshua did not knock down the Walls of Jericho because he got there 200 years later.

There are two stories in the Bible about how Judas died and they cannot both be true.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write the Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

And Jesus was not born of a virgin and, no, He did not get up and walk around again after he died!

These learnings and many more like them blew me away; rather, actually they blew my orthodoxy away.

“You don’t believe in Jesus anymore?” my family asked, their voices revealed their hurt.

If you are asking: Do I believe Jesus was God, a supernatural figure, a doer of miracles, a walker on water, a survivor of death who asked to have a doubting Thomas, then feel the wounds of his suffering. No, I don’t believe in that Jesus.

But do I believe in the man from Nazareth, the Galilean, the 1st century mystic who had a remarkable feel for “unitive experience” and called it Abba, “Father,” Daddy, who felt that he and his “unity” that he called ‘father’ were one – because we are all one – we and nature.

Do I believe in a Jesus who taught righteousness, and repentance, and brought to people the good news of love?

Yes, I believe in that Jesus, and that is part of what made a Unitarian of me. For Jesus was a man, not a monument. He was genuine, not a ghost. He was a Jew, not a Christian, and he would not have approved, I think, of what the church did with his memory.

“But why do you doubt what our church has taught?” I was asked.

Because of the evidence. Because I learned in theological school – and it burned into my mind, so deeply etched a place in memory there that I can never dismiss it: I learned about Mithra. And I have taught about him: Mithra, the mythical god of light, son of the sun god, who was worshiped 2,000 years before the Christ, and whose religion rivaled Christianity where it came along.

“I never heard of Mithra,” said my friend.

“But if you went to a good seminary you would hear of him,” I replied.

People ought to hear about Mithra as well as about Judeo-Christian figures, I thought. Mithra was born, miraculously, in a manger in a cave on December 25th, and shepherds came to adore him. The star stood overhead. When he grew up, he called 12 disciples and taught them. He died and was resurrected on the third day, ascended into heaven to sit on the right hand of God, the father. A church and a great following grew up around him. His ethics were taught.

There were priests to serve him and a high pontiff, a pope, and they sang hymns and lit candles and rang bells at this service of worship. And Mithra was worshipped at special services on Sundays, his days, the day of the sun.

All this before the time of Jesus. And so, I told my family and friends, “I can no longer believe in the miraculous and supernatural life of Jesus Christ, for much of his story is myth and borrowed from the earlier mythic religions, such as Mithraism.”

It was painful for me to give up the innocent beliefs of childhood. I had mixed feelings about it, and I would try to joke about it in the south where jokes about religion are highly suspect, repeating things like something Mort Sahl was to say, “I was afraid someone was going to burn a question mark on my lawn!”

For a while I left religion. I was disenchanted. Rather, I became a devotee of the religion of NO religion, the faith of NO faith, of the theism of atheism, for atheism can be a god, too, whose Dogma is “Thou shalt not believe in anything as a religion.”

How did I discover the Unitarians? I lived in Richmond, Virginia where there was and had been a Unitarian Church since before the Civil War, but I had never heard of it. Actually, I heard about the Unitarians at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, where I was preparing for the Protestant ministry of my upbringing.

A fellow student, learning of my disillusionment with orthodoxy, said, “You ought to look into the Unitarian Church. They are non-creedal. They are non-dogmatic free thinkers.”

“Great,” I said, “why don’t you join them, too? You don’t believe in the virgin birth of Jesus anymore than I do.”

“That’s true,” he said, “I do not believe in the virgin birth, but if questioned about it by my church authorities I am going to say, ‘I do,’ because I can feel about it that Jesus brought a rather unique perspective to the religious world of His time – a gospel of love – something somewhat different from the past and, in that sense, ‘virginal’ and new, so I can believe within myself that the virgin birth is symbolic of this ‘virginal’ message of his, even though it has nothing to do with the human way in which he was born, which was just like the way all the rest of us are born.”

“But you don’t believe in the Resurrection either,” I said, “and that’s the foundation of Christianity.”

“You’re right,” he said, “It’s true I do not believe in the resurrection of this man, Jesus, no more than countless other claimed resurrections, but I think probably the experience of the disciples as such that they felt Jesus was still ‘with them’ after he died, that he just couldn’t be dead and gone. His words were still ringing in their ears.”

The resurrection was a “psychological” thing: the feeling the disciples had that Jesus was still there, in and around them. I believe they believed in the resurrection so I can say I believe in “THE” resurrection, too (psychologically). Such cynicism (it seemed that to me), that hypocrisy, I could not stand. I could not be graduated from that seminary and go out and preach things I no longer believed.

I could NOT do it. There must be a way to intellectual honesty in religion.

Unitarianism was the way for me.

I discovered, in my first, wonderful, freeing experience of Unitarianism that many others who were new to this religion had become disillusioned, disenchanted, disaffected from the religious theologies of their youth, too. Or they had found they wanted more than no-faith at all, the NO Religion they had lived with for some time or all their lives, and they were coming to Unitarianism to be with a fellowship of religious seekers. Too much of the wrong kind of religion – or having no significant religious perspective at all – could lead to the freeing faith of Unitarianism.

The first time I went to a Unitarian Church and heard the words of William Ellery Channing, a founder of American Unitarianism, I knew I had found a home in a religious society I could support:

Let not this house degenerate into a place of forms. Come here to worship intelligently, not prostrating your understanding.

The minister said only what he actually believed, no dancing around the rejected creeds. Just as early Christianity was Jewish, then became something different from Judaism, so early 16th century Unitarianism had been Judeo-Christian, then became something different from Judeo-Christian, a fourth faith and free. I discovered that literalism in religion could give way to a new depth dimension, resulting in deeper religion.

Recently I was enjoying a visit with a new young couple who have been coming to our church, and I told them that Unitarianism can be something like “marriage,” in the following respect: I believe that people do not truly get married or do not create an enduring companionate love relationship until they, in some sense, fall “out” of romantic love and have to climb back into the real thing.

Romance is great but it wears thin, and a deeper love has to be created out of it. To make love relationships continue to work, “we” have to work, we have to climb into them after the first falling in, then falling out of love. One of my colleagues, the Rev. Rupert Lovely, says falling in love is when all the marbles in your head roll over to one side – zonk – you have to get your head straight again.

Unitarianism helps you get your head straight again in religion. When you fall out of the naïveté of childhood faith or out of the too easy blandishments of NO FAITH and come to Unitarianism, you find a fellowship, encouragement to climb back into the companionate love of life. It is the religion that calls upon us to use our heads and make sense, while also maintaining our hearts.

There should never be a danger that the more one studies and learns about religion, the more one is driven out of a church. That was true for me as a young adult.

But, in Unitarianism, what we expect is that the more one learns and the more one is open to new experience, the closer one gets to authenticity in religion.

We do not ask people who join us to give up something they believe. We do not refuse them because of something they disbelieve.

We say “come on in.” Be with us. We want to be your friends. Bring an open and inquiring mind here. Bring a spirit hungry for the deeps of religion. Bring the real you. We want you here.

The more you learn, the more you know. The more you seek, the more you grow. And you cannot outgrow Unitarianism if you keep growing within its way as a spiritually open and inquiring way.

Those were some things I was finding as a new Unitarian, years ago, things I have continued to find.

But why, why on earth would anyone want to become a Unitarian minister? No one in my family had ever done such a thing. Who would want to do a thing like that?

Because I wanted to spend my life – all of it – in a religious adventure. There was 1) a gnawing hunger in me; 2) a craving for unity; 3) a thirst for a meaningful theology; 4) a longing for the experience of a loving trust that was potential in existence and real in experience.

Later on I read in Dag Hammarskjold’s book, Markings, something that sounded like the journey I had already traveled. What Hammarskjold wrote was this:

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Real religion has to do with “wonder.” It should be reasonable but in more than reason. Perhaps the language of the heart calls that which evokes “wonder” the “eternal,” the Great Spirit, or God. Mystics call it unitive experience. Pascal said of the discovery that it come from the heart, and “the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of it.”

Augustine said of it, “Restless is the restless heart until it finds its rest in thee.”

These experimental statements have nothing to do with creeds or orthodoxies. They have to do with openness to Ultimate Reality.

I wanted to be a minister to follow that experience, to try to grow in it, teach it, to trust it and celebrate it in response to the religious impulse.

I returned to seminary to become a Unitarian minister. I chose heresy, which word comes from the Greek word “hairesis” and means a choosing or choosing for oneself of one’s own faith. A Unitarian chooses for herself or himself “a glorious heresy.”

I am still in love with religion but only if it can be, and can remain, a religion based on the free-mind principle a choosing, based on experience of mind and heart.

And the future?

What is the future of this wonderful religious movement going back, as it does, to the Reformation, to free thinkers like Michael Servetus, who saw the errors of the trinity and was burned at the stake for his freedom of thought. A faith indeed going back to the free mind wherever it has appeared in the history of the religious of humankind?

What is the future?

Unitarian Universalism will endure and continue to be significant, out of all proportion of its numbers, because the world needs such a faith as ours.

Our churches are “neighborhoods” of the free mind.

Our churches are communities where we celebrate the great events of 1) life and death; 2) marriage; 3) child naming in creative freedom; and 4) places where we do deep and poetic and warm human things to celebrate such festivals as Christmas and Easter and their pre-Christian and pre-Jewish roots: places of celebration in freedom.

The world needs our religion because it brings together those who “think” and those who care to program for human growth and faith in life and in freedom.

And our churches exist for regular worship and wonder in Sunday services where people come bringing their freedom with them – and their belongings – to hear our history, to learn of the spiritual life, to seek wisdom and truth.

We come not to find a religion free from faith but a religion free from faking. We drink from a deep well and go back out into the world sustained, ready to meet another week. We will always have a future because we will always be an oasis for those who are thirsty but cannot find the water they need in the old places.

Unitarians demand of themselves SINCERITY. Therefore we do not demand uniformity.

We come from many origins – some from backgrounds in no religion at all. Some from Unitarianism and Universalism in other places. Some from Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, from Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. We come from a world that, in Walt Whitman’s words truly “was never half religious enough,” seeking a faith where we can mean it and not be guilty and not be afraid.

We have origins and should “own” them gladly enough, without being stuck in them. We may be stuck with them but not “in” them. We say, come along with us. Come with us to the deeps of religion newly understood. Let us draw from the well of authentic life and faith.

Many of you, as I have done, have drunk cool fresh water from deep country farm wells, pull the bucket, clanging up and take the dipper by the well to quench our thirst.

Wells are fed by underground rivulets, many many of them. Once we draw water out of the well, these little underground streams fill it again.

But if you stop using a well altogether, it is likely to run dry from disuse. When water is no longer taken out, the rivulets close up. Such wells fail not from lack of water but because no one draws from them.

It is that way with religion and it is that way with the future of our religion, too.

We have a deep well – fresh water – the deepest, freshest, coolest water from which to fill our cups. The well of a free faith and free thinkers who love religion will never let that well run dry. Religion doesn’t give up on you unless you become indifferent to it. Indifference is the way of deadness. Choose life!

I know I need our faith.

I remember how painful it was to get here.

I cherish the meaning that keeps me here.

I trust the deepest that sustains me here.

I invite others to come often to the well, bring your dipper, and draw from the well of honest religion to meet your thirst in freedom – in freedom – in freedom!

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jake wrote

jamoore wrote

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