Faithful Roots: Confessions of a Humanist

© Jim Verschueren 2009

 

 

Let me start by acknowledging how appreciative I am that we are all here today. This spiritual community requires our faithful presence for its strength and its beauty. It also requires that we COME to church. I urge you to join me in thinking of coming to church as a core spiritual practice.

 

“Being present” is another spiritual practice, one that affords multiple rewards. Some are very practical.  Each time I have done a sermon, I have relied on something someone else has said or done in church in the weeks before. This time is no exception.

 

For example, Just Because I am a redhead, doesn’t mean I can’t wear pink.

 

So, as advertised, my first confession:

You will find here no reference to the past three Sundays.

I confess to having missed all three.

 

South Church is central to my life, but it is not the only centrality.

 

I offer this first confession as a humility check and a statement of faith.

 

My humanist faith may be most simply stated as a compelling belief that our primary faith must be in each other.

 

We are all flawed human beings, doing the best we can. That is a first and core expression of my humanist leap of faith. We are all flawed human beings, doing…the best…we can.

 

I have not always been a humanist. I have had my bouts with organized religion.

 

My parents came together in what was then typically referred to as a “mixed marriage.” My father was a practicing Catholic, my mother a casual Methodist. She agreed that I be baptized and raised Catholic, though she never converted herself. She was too angry at the priests for insisting the marriage be in the rectory, not the church.

 

When I was about six, I was in first communion class at St. John’s. One day my mother caught me in a lie. I told her it was OK, I could just go to confession and it would be fine. I don’t believe I ever went back to that class and I never made my first communion. Because I was pulled from the church, my father stopped taking communion for the next 45 years.

 

In about the 5th grade I started going, on my own, to Loomis Park Baptist Church. In junior high, I was saved. I came to the age of accountability, answered the alter call, was baptized a second time, this time by immersion, and remained a fundamentalist Southern Baptist through my freshman year in College.

 

After a great deal of serious religious exploration in that freshman year, I decided I was an agnostic and gave up the quest. Religion just wasn’t worth the trouble, all the answers seemed contrived, and from what I’d seen of how Catholics and Southern Baptists often actually behave, I didn’t care to be part of either.

 

 

My second Humanist Confession, and my title “Faithful Roots,” spring from a reading that didn’t occur, a time none of us were present here, thanks to one of those major January snowstorms.

 

I was supposed to have read:

 

Before you deride the faithful, consider carefully where you will put your roots

            From “Crab Grass’ by Rev. Lynn Ungar

 

So I confess: When I abandoned my traditional Christian faith, those traditional religions, I planted very deep roots. TOO deep.

 

I still work hard to overcome my hostility to Christianity. And my aversion to virtually all other religious traditions. I could offend everyone here with thoughts I have or have had on their religious practice.

 

You are a Buddhist? How quaint.

 

You are a Christian? How could anyone be?

 

Your Catholic heritage still has a hold on you? Take your head out of the sand and grow up.

 

You wear a yarmulke, cover your head with a scarf, worship cows, speak in tongues, turn to the four directions and speak of wind, fire, water and earth, think that Joseph Smith was a profit, believe in a paradise full of virgins? Please.

 

Did I miss anyone?

 

For a long time, I lived in a spiritual desert. I fell into one of the great traps of those who turn away from religion. I was not yet a Humanist – I only knew that I had no traditional faith. I believed in the primacy of reason and the absence of any God with a capital G. Traditional religions so often require a suspension of reason and belief in the primacy of God. When I abandoned traditional religion, I also abandoned access to the spiritual.

 

Perhaps the most striking example of that spiritual desert was my reaction to tragedy. In 1976 I was 29. Two dear friends and colleagues were killed in a plane accident, leaving a very young daughter orphaned. I didn’t cry. My wife, Donna, was perplexed, mystified and I think somewhat appalled by my lack of feeling. My only response was that life begins and life ends. Peggy and Grant were gone, there was nothing we could do about it, and our job is to move on, do the best we can with our lives, and accept the truth that loss is a part of life.

 

We are flawed human beings, not always able to recognize, appreciate or acknowledge the blinders we put on…or know what we miss when we belittle human experience.

 

So what am I doing here at South Church? How did I get from there to here?

 

My third confession:

I came for the family. I would have gladly stayed home.

 

But two young boys needed exposure to values and morals and deeper teachings than I could give them.

 

I am more grateful to be here the more present I am.

 

Here’s what being present at UU services has meant to me.

 

Just a month ago, our youth did the service, using the phrase Just Because…to convey thoughts, beliefs and emotions in a very powerful way. One young man, Cairn Smith said

Just because I am an atheist, doesn’t mean I don’t believe in something and he went on to articulate rock solid values.

 

The next speaker was a young woman, Emma Wager, who said

Just because I believe in God doesn’t mean I am a homophobic, Bible-reading evangelical.”

 

She went on to talk about a point of light within her that she calls God, capital G, and she concluded with a promise:

If you don’t categorize me, I won’t categorize you.

 

This seems to me to be a wonderful expression of core UU principles, exemplary of how we come together as a community of wildly diverse beliefs.

 

That point of light which Emma described as the divine resonates deeply with the Humanist sense of the spiritual which I have developed over the years.

 

The divine is within us.

 

That’s a concept on which to build a faith ~ a faith in each other.

 

Similarly, Kari Pritchard’s testimonial of a year or so ago, about why she is a Christian, was an important turning point for me. The teachings of Jesus are worthy to follow.

 

Two statements of spirituality that I heard…truly HEARD…only because I was here, in this holy place, present and open to my fellow travelers.

 

 

Yet I am a product of my past. And so my fourth confession:

 

Though I have grown enough to hear, truly hear, when others articulate their spirituality, I still cringe when the word God is spoken with a capital G.  

 

Many of you probably know my favorite joke about UUs.

 

Why are UUs such bad singers?  They are too busy looking ahead to see if they agree with the words. I certainly fit that stereotype.

 

“May the love of God surround you, everywhere, everywhere, you may go.”

 

Well, maybe some of us just plain can’t sing. In any case…

 

Anyone else admit to changing the words as we sing our children out?

 

Three weeks ago Carlo and I were in Chicago and went to the Frank Lloyd Wright designed UU church in Oak Park. They sing:

 

May the spirit of love surround you…

Susan Treleaven sings “May the love of the world surround you.

And I sing:  “May the love of all surround you…”

 

I’ll keep on working on this – the question of the G word was actually the genesis of this sermon, and the writing has already moved my needle on the question.

 

YET the truth for me is that God with a capital G is too loaded with traditional religion and carries too much baggage about what is done, still today, in the name of God. I have to work too hard to translate it to something spiritual. When God is called upon to lend us a hand, make us better people, comfort us in our time of need or rejoice with us, I bristle. We can do these things for ourselves and for each other.

 

 

Now back to Humanism, which for me is the spiritual, which encompasses faith and brings meaning into my life.

 

The Rev. Frank Clarkson once described me as faithful, and, well aware that religious language is not my cup of tea, waited for a lightening bolt to strike him down. None did, for which we both are grateful.

 

Spiritual language, however, is very much my brew, ever more strongly as I remain present in this spiritual community, come into this holy space, give both my care and my love here.

 

Take the word Faithful. What is faithful?

I take it to mean, in its best sense, to act on one’s values consistently over time, especially when it is inconvenient or fearful to do so.

Faith has become an easy one for me. My humanist faith is just as much a leap of faith as another's belief in the traditional Christian God or any other divinity or spiritual practice.

As a humanist, I believe in the progress of the individual person and of humankind as a whole. Some with whom I've had these conversations believe that my faith is as irrational as belief in the resurrection of Jesus. And I agree that there is plenty of empirical evidence, throughout history and, sadly, in our world today, that makes such faith in us, as individuals and as a species, seem unreasonable, naïve, perhaps even foolish. I just choose to believe otherwise, to look at the glass as half full, to believe in us

.

 

 

 

Take the word Spiritual. What is spiritual?

I take it to mean an openness to the lessons of life, the continuous search for meaning.

 

I share the thoughts of Rev. Ben Fowler, a fellow traveler on the spiritual journey: Ben writes:

I have come to a place where I am open to hear when I listen, to look for the deeper feelings and meanings when people speak. And that's where I think we as UUs have such a hard road in our communities, and perhaps especially at a larger church, such as South Church, in a community where the UU church becomes known as the place to go for spiritual freedom. People are not used to the kind of spirituality we practice.

He goes on:

My own experience has been that it took a very long time for me to feel more than lip service to the kind of spiritual diversity we have and how that needs to be honored and cherished and nourished. It's hard work. Maybe we need the word god because some people still need it to be a part of the dialogue.

And He says:

It is my experience that we have seen incredible turnover in all the years I have been at South Church. I think that is in part because people do not come with the expectation that such hard work is required. Freedom of thought, individual accountability for doing that hard spiritual work for oneself, while hearing and respecting the multitude of other paths people are on, is not easy. I think people come expecting it to be. When they find that we are flawed, that freedom takes work and that they are challenged, they burn out, they drift away.

I quote Ben at length because he so well encapsulates my own evolution and sets down the challenge for all of us here at South Church.

 

Being present is a spiritual practice…it’s not enough to be here. It’s not enough to listen, even to HEAR. If we are to grow spirituality from our diversity of spiritual practices, we will need to do the hard work, individually and together. For me, that means controlling the bristling, being open to hearing what people mean when they use words I would prefer to avoid, searching for the connection, the common thread that will bind us together, even when what I hear first builds a wall that keeps us apart.

 

I am on that journey; I know many of you are as well.

 

And so, I can’t resist, a final confession:

 

I cannot be a Humanist alone. I cannot progress on my journey if I walk solely with other Humanists.

So…I thank all of you who follow other spiritual paths, turn to the four corners of the earth, light candles to contemplate, study the teachings of the Bible, or rely on any of the…myriad…other…spiritual practices that inform our lives here at South Church. You are a gift to me.

And I will be present here as long as that journey continues.

 

Blessed be.