I'm always amazed by the people I see who do crossword puzzles in pen.  Leafing through magazines on airplanes, or in doctor's offices, I'm astonished to see the crossword puzzles with smeared ink filling the little boxes.  In my family of origin, we never did puzzles in pen.  Too risky. might not be able to finish them, or change your mistakes.  Always, always always, do puzzles in pencil, at least that's how we went about it.  So to see some done in pen strikes me as the deepest blasphemy: no matter how sure you are that you are right, "clue 4 down" might cause you to rearrange what you felt quite so certain about.

I suppose I'd have to say that this sort of approach is about right for most things for me.  Oh, it's not that I don't use pens for lots of stuff, I sign marriage licenses in pen every time, for example.  And checks are the sort of documents that require pens to be used to fill them in, if one hopes to have any money left by the end of the month.  But for most things, I think a pencil works just fine.  It's there, but not permanent.  It's always possible to erase and begin over again, you can always shift your answers when new information comes along.

It seems that around Unitarian Universalist circles, that question about pens and pencils comes up pretty regularly.  We're a religion of the margins, with little to hold us together in the center.  In some of our clergy circles we're talking about this as hyphenated Unitarian Universalism: pointing toward people who identify themselves as Jewish Unitarian Universalists, or Christian Unitarian Universalists, or Humanist Unitarian Universalists, or Pagan Unitarian Universalists, or Atheist Unitarian Universalists, and a wide collection of other hyphenated possibilities.  As people identify themselves as one sort or another of UU, our movement begins to feel somewhat fragmented, split apart by our different designations.

And it's not better to think of ourselves as a bunch of folks who encompass all religions.  Occasionally at weddings here, I am asked about the banners that hang in our friendship hall.  The first question is usually asking the particular religious tradition of one or two of the symbols.  Those are easy answers: the many petaled flower is the lotus blossom of Buddhist tradition, the star is clearly the star of David representing Judaism, the crescent moon is Islam, the cross is Christianity, the curvy letters are the Sanskrit rendering of the holy word "om", and, of course, the flaming birdbath -- I mean chalice -- represents Unitarianism Universalism.  The question that follows is more difficult to answer.  Generally, people want to know if we include all of these religious traditions.  I generally explain that we honor and hold in high esteem all religious traditions, and seek to find the best of them in our search for spiritual truth, in our search for meaning.

Still, it feels to me that if we were to try to encompass all of those religious traditions, it would be hard work, and we might not survive. it's like the rancher who bought ten ranches and put them together into one giant spread.  His friend asked the name of the new mega-ranch.  He replied, "It's called the Circle Q, Rambling Brook, Double Bar, Broken Circle, Crooked Creek, Golden Horseshoe, Lazy B, Bent Arrow, Sleepy T, Triple 0 Ranch." "Wow," his friend said, "I bet you have a lot of cattle." "Not really," explained the rancher.  "Not many survive the branding."

We are a religious community, composed of people who work mostly on the margins, who
write in pencil, who don't necessarily want the certainty of the pen.

And what does that mean for us as a religious community?  What does that mean for us as individuals who are trying to live lives that are good and true under the eyes of eternity?

The first thing to say is that it makes being a religious community difficult.  This is not the easy path in religion -- to have a tentative and unfinished faith, to be open to change and new truth, to take on, a search that is both free to explore a wide variety of beliefs and practices, and is responsible to some standard of intelligibility and integrity is a challenge.  I personally believe that we are not the only ones who have taken on such a challenge, but we do take it on explicitly in our community, affirming and celebrating at least in word the blessing of diverse opinions in theological matters, affirming and celebrating that truth is not a commodity that is only in our domain, but can be discovered anywhere people are seeking truly to understand.

There are two more related consequences of having a faith that's written out in pencil.  This first danger was noted by a sociologist in the late 60's, a phenomenon that he called "Sheliaism".  Sheliaism is named after a young woman who proclaimed that her God was inside of her, and that there was no more to be said about it.  No one could question her beliefs, no one could suggest other views and visions, because they were her beliefs.  Having a faith that's done in pencil means that this sort of radical individualism has a home.  We celebrate and affirm the individual's search for meaning and truth, but that sometimes can degrade into simply everyone doing her and his own thing.  We don't want to question it too much for fear of causing offense, and perhaps for fear of violating our commitment to the integrity of each person's quest.  For Sheila, there was nothing that transcended her own individual perceptions, nothing, it seems, outside of the God that lived within her.

This is, the Alban Institute tells us, a growing concern in all congregations, not just Unitarian Universalism.  Our culture at large is struggling with the effects of intense individualism in all matters, and it is especially clear in the arena of religious life.  We hear the consequences of our individualism described by the religious right and conservative politicians who want to find an external, solid, written in pen sort of moral code and religiousness to counteract the fluid individualistic, free-floating, and idiosyncratic sense of religion and morality that is prevalent in our culture.

As an aside in this conversation, Michael Learner, the rabbi who edits Tikkun magazine, and is one of the leaders in the movement called the Politics of Meaning says that this is the place where liberal politics has failed to reach people.  In the assessment of the problems of the country, the left has routinely offered up practical and pragmatic responses to concerns, while the right has sought to make ontological responses.  Put more simply, the right has sought to describe the problems as growing from the nature of the very fiber of the universe, as the left has suggested offering classes to better educate everyone better.  Whether Learner has adequately described either the right or the left, I think he is pointing toward this dynamic that is so present in our congregations, and in our culture at large.  If, in conversing about religion and morality, our final word will be that our beliefs are simply our beliefs, and there's nothing more to be said about them, and no means for questioning if they are or could be true for anyone else, then we have fallen into the worst of relativism and individualism.

Related to that is an uneasiness about discussing our religious beliefs.  Majorie Bowens-Wheatly as she described the preliminary lectures in her week long workshop suggested two stumbling blocks that we find in discussing our personal theologies.  First, "many of us define theology too narrowly assuming that it is based on a belief in God and/or the doctrines of the church; and [second] that theological dialogue often poses a communications problem, one element of which is that when we enter into dialogue with people who are different from us theologically, we test our listening skills, our empathy toward other views, and our faithfulness to our UU principles."

Majorie's further description of her process with the folks at that week suggests that this is a significant struggle for us. As she discovered, and as I suspect we would discover if we were to take on a similar process, our filters are hard to shut off.  If we are hoping to truly hear one another, we have to be able to step away from those filters and listen with an open heart, and an accepting mind -- we have to show our commitment to theological diversity, we have to live our belief that diversity of belief is something we cherish and value and which can enrich us.

A hospital chaplain I met once expressed astonishment that a member of a congregation I served was facing death without a belief in an afterlife.  "Well, the evidence is all there," he told me, "the reports of what people experience when they are near to death are compelling, and I don't see how anyone in this day and age could believe anything but." I suggested to the chaplain that indeed it was not only possible for the man in the room to believe as he did, but we had some clear evidence that he faced Ins death without that belief because he explicitly said that he expected nothing more.  It was not a time for theological dialogue: there was a death coming and caring for the dying was a more important matter than theological understanding, but it pointed up to me the deep difficulties in having those sorts of conversations.  While the chaplain couldn't imagine anyone believing as did that member in the hospital room, I could not imagine anyone believing anything but.  That was one moment in which I discovered that the pencil I thought I was holding was much more like a pen, and the filters that I employ when talking about religious matters are very vigorous.  As soon as that chaplain stepped beyond the bounds of this life and experience and pointed toward personal immortality, and a trip to heaven after this life, I wasn't able to listen with any real openness, but only able to defend a position, to begin to bring out my barricades of logical argument against his perspective.

What makes this so difficult, I believe is that what we're talking about are life and death matters.  Our religious perspective, our theological foundations are the standards that we use to judge our lives, to see if we are living a life that is good and true and worthy.  These are not simple matters about angels dancing on the heads of pins, or finely wrought arguments about the existence of God.  Our own theological positions are those truths and beliefs that ground in this life, they give our days and months and years shape and meaning, they connect us to the larger powers of the world.  Why I leapt to the barricades with the chaplain was because his belief in an afterlife challenged my belief that there is no such thing, and even if there is such a thing, it matters little to our lives here.  How I understand the world to be constructed is a deeply held belief for me -- for all of us, I believe -- and it shapes how I live, my expectations about my life and the lives of those around me, it is the frame in which I work, and to challenge it, is to shake the foundations of my faith.

Perhaps my faith isn't written as much in pencil as I usually think.  Perhaps yours isn't either.

However, I believe that it is a necessary part of our religious life with one another to engage in conversations about those deeply held beliefs, to explore with one another the experiences and hunches and intuitions that have brought us to that particular point at this particular time.  I believe it is essential because it is in those conversations that we truly test our openness to one another and our affirmation that our faith is a tentative one which can grow and change.

Roy Phillips found a language to speak of that sort of dialogue, and a grounding of those conversations in the deepest of all realities.  The question that Henry Nelson Wieman posed is indeed one which we might ask in our reflection today: "what transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves, to save us from our self-destructive propensities and to bring us to the highest good of winch we are capable?" It is not, as Wieman clearly says, a force or power that exists outside of us, but that power that we create between ourselves when we join in a certain kind of relating to one another.

That relating has to be characterized by several feature.  First, it has to begin with a recognition of the wholeness and worth of each person in the conversation.  Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, spoke of this as the experience of I-Thou, in contrast to an I-It experience.  In many -- if not most of our dealings with the world, we fall into patterns of relating that don't take into account the mystery that dwells within us and within any other to whom we relate.  Buber suggested that we were best served by relating not to things and objects, but to that mystery that encompasses us all, that lives within each one of us.  We must begin any conversation about those deeply held beliefs with that attitude of respect and awe -- knowing that we are all enfolded in a greater reality.

Secondly, those conversations must begin with the recognition that all of us have only a partial vision of the world.  None of us stand in a place so elevated that we can see all and know all.  Our vision is limited by many things: our place in the world, our gender, the deep wounds that still bleed when bumped, the pleasures that fill our hearts, our race, the money in our pockets or invested in stocks.  We are limited by the ways we've been taught to see the world, and limited by our own need to feel that our lives are good and right and true. without the recognition that our experiences are not universal, and our vision is constrained by factors that we are not even aware of, without those recognitions, transforming interchange is not possible.

Wieman believed, and I agree with him, that without that sort of creative interchange occurring between people, we would be faced with spiritual death: living without the vivid qualities of original experience, without the full exercise of personal resources, without a deep sense of our own constructive potentialities, and without a deep sense of the worthwhileness of life.  Can you come up with a better description of the spiritual crisis that confronts us now, that is being answered with books on angels and new age philosophies that seek to do just what Wieman called us to do nearly 50 years ago: to listen genuinely to another's experience, to prize original experiences even though they may be different than our own, to relate to the world knowing that it is sacred even if broken, to remain open to the truth that might break through to us in the midst of honest, deep conversation with one another.

We are a religious community composed mostly of margins, there is little in the center of our religious faith that is commanding to all of us. There is no authoritative scripture that we relate to, and our beliefs are, we hope, strong, but written in pencil, tentative, available for revision when new truth becomes apparent to us. if there were to be something in the center of our community, some shared sense of what it is that binds us together, I would hope it would be something like a trust in and a commitment to that sort of creative interchange that Wieman suggests.  It isn't pronouncements from on high that our faith grows, or that our understanding deepens, but in the working our of what we know and believe: in the daily interactions, the views and visions that we see from our own spot in the world, and the wider view that we can see when engaged with other human beings.

We are all working a puzzle: seeking to live lives that are worthy and good and true, watching for clues and answers and pieces that will fit.  We are best served in our puzzling by working in pencil, knowing and trusting that there is more wisdom to be found, more answers that may speak to our hearts, more light and truth to be found, most especially when we can join with one another in creative interchange, in the common search.  May it be so with us.




Any typos in this document is not Linda's, but rather a result of the scanning process which coverts the typewritten copy into editable text.  Sometimes it introduces goofy little errors that I probably missed.

-Ye Editor-