unitarian univeralist

December 22, 2013December 23, 2013

No isolation of opposites

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by Ray Perreault

Having dogs has changed my routine, now I’m out in all four seasons and in every type of weather. This has reopened my eyes to the changes in the plants and animals that create and recreate our living landscape.

Each bird, every animal, is a point of view, a unique set of eyes, part of a long delicate thread that stretches backward to the beginning of time. Each is also a restless movement into the future. It is a future we can no more predict, than the great lumbering dinosaurs could dream that their descendants would someday fly effortlessly from tree to tree and continent to continent. I see more mystery in everything.

A few years ago, during a West Nile Virus outbreak, I found a dead crow on the ground. I cradled it in my hand. It had the sheen of blackened steel, a rainbow iridescence of blues, green and violet.

In living, it was loud, raucous, territorial, fierce, wise and fearless. Lying silent and still, it seemed to weigh barely more than its own shadow.

There are a million, million invisible workings that make such a marvel possible. My whole life, these birds have flown above, but their existence still seems like a magicians crepe paper trick.

This is a world where magic is commonplace and taken for granted.

Truest alchemy is taking place every day. The golden sun is transmuted into green leaves, crimson cardinals, blue jays, goldfinches, all the animals, flowers and fruit.

It is a play with a cast of trillions over 300 million years in the making. It here on the well-worn paths of an urban park because it thrives wherever it is given space.

In our living world, there is no isolation of opposites: no inner and outer, abundance and scarcity, past and future, or life and death. All are cycling or seamlessly connected and mutually affirming. Spectacular endurance and greatest delicacy exist together, not side by side, but wound into beings that are fully both.

My renewed sense of wonder has become a place of peace and contemplation in the middle of restless activity.

I have to remember to thank my dogs.

December 15, 2013December 16, 2013

Call to Worship: Just a Little More Light

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Looking at continuities between past and present, Audrey Greene reflects on the “religion of light”

Religion of Light
by Audrey Greene

I can imagine that ancient woman, huddling in her cave, above the village. The harvest had been good enough, she thought.

But with the harvest came the darkness. The sun still came each day but then left, sooner and sooner. Where did it go, why did it go? The cold was coming again, as it had before. What, what could be done? They still had the fire, that gave them warmth and light. It could not grow the crops, but it would have to do for now. Then she remembered, they would light bigger and bigger fires each night, as they had done during the last dark time and perhaps the sun would return as it had last time.

I can see that woman, and all the other women and men like her, huddled in terror as the sun died away and the cold came again. And what could they do but keep their own small lights burning? To warm themselves, to chase the darkness to the edges of the cave, to keep out the marauders, to see each other’s faces. When the harvest was in, there was nothing left to do but huddle together around the fire in the growing darkness and tell stories.

That’s it, isn’t it? The cave, the cold, the fire, the stories we tell each other. Very little has changed. Sure, the cave looks a little different, but the stories are essentially the same, there are not that many plot lines.

We face the growing dark and cold again. It’s difficult not to feel the fear. But when I see all these stories of solstice, from ancient Saturnalia though Santa Lucia to Kwanzaa, I see people looking for just a little more light.

And that’s why we come here, not just for the warmth of community but for light…the religion of light, not radiated from a single source which seeks our unending obedience and praise, not filtered through a rigid hierarchy or translated into immutable laws, but from each other!

How great is that? We each have some light.

Some of us are incandescent, some of us are positively luminescent, we all flicker once in a while. But we know that together, our light is more than enough to get us through the dark. With music and words, with memories, and myths, let us celebrate our light.

December 8, 2013December 8, 2013

Unitarians and Universalists

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Who exactly are Unitarians and Universalists? From the active congregation on Benefit Street to our spunky chapel off Broadway, the following reflection from Brian Kovacs suggests that this modern faith is actually very old, is defined as much by who we are not, as much as by who we are, and suggests there are some lessons from uncertainty.

Unitarians and Universalism

From the beginning, the strains of Unitarian-Universalism have formed a protest against core principles of Christianity — the religion of the dominant culture. Unitarian-Universalism has rejected in turn fundamentals of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Anabaptism, Anglicanism and Protestantism, to name just some. Unitarian-Universalism has been and can be defined, to this day, by what it doesn’t believe as much as by what it does. And that is true for many modern Unitarian Universalists as well.

For most of my life, I’ve begun any statement about what I believe with what I reject. I think many people come to this denomination and this church, rejecting what they can no longer accept. The core belief is disbelief. We define ourselves by what we are not.

Universalist scholars trace its origins back to the early Christian church, to the fourth century theologians Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. They held that no one was damned and no hell awaited anyone at death. Later, Universalists rejected all claims to an exclusive revealed truth. They therefore rejected biblical authority and institutional inerrancy. Everyone’s spiritual salvation is a product of their spiritual quest and rational search. No revelation can supercede the genius of the rational mind. On the contrary, revelation must always be subject to reason.

In America, Universalism grew with the new country, with John Murray and Hosea Ballou (who family has RI connections), among others — two names that be familiar to some Bell Streeters. It aligned itself with social reform and renewal: its principles included the abolition of slavery, gender equality, separation of church and state, and spiritualism. The first American ordained woman minister,

Olympia Brown, was a Universalist. The year was 1853. In later years, Universalists actively sought inspiration in religious literature and practice outside Christianity and Western culture. Spiritual insight was sought in the Bhaghavad Gita, the writings of Lao Tsu and Confucious, the Koran, Jewish Mishnah and Haggadah, and elsewhere.

Unitarianism sprang up in multiple locations in mid-fifteenth century Europe: Poland, England and Transylvania. That was the era of the Reformation. In Transylvania, the Unitarian movement got its first legal status, protection and institutional legitimacy. Unitarians rejected the divinity of Jesus, the doctrine of the Trinity, election to grace, predestination, authoritarianism in religion and special

revelation through scripture.

Unitarianism flourished in America following the Revolutionary War. At Boston’s King’s Chapel, settled minister Rev. James Freeman led the congregation in rewriting the Book of Common Prayer, excising all Trinitarian doctrine and references to a divine Christ. Numbers of congregational churches soon followed in asserting a strict monotheism that excluded a privileged role for Jesus except as a good man and teacher.

Non-creedal churches, Univeralism and Unitarianism had no fixed beliefs, no doctrines, no statements of faith. They believed what their members believed, taught what their churches and their schools taught, and preached what was spoken in their pulpits. It was democratic, diverse, rational and rabidly individualistic. That’s hardly changed.

Brian Kovacs

Religion of Light by Audrey Greene

Religion of Light
by Audrey Greene