First Parish Unitarian Universalist"Loving Alike"
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
January 13, 2002
My sermon title this morning is taken from a quotation often heard in Unitarian Universalist circles, "we don't have to think alike to love alike." Dating back to the 16th century, I doubt it was heard with the twist I want to suggest today. So goes the march of time!
I want to extend this 16th century declaration to mean that we also don't have to love alike to love alike. That is, we don't have to love (as in mate) alike to love (as in care and understand) alike.
But first lets go back in history to the original quotation. It comes from the writings of Francis David, who was the court preacher to John Sigismund, King of Transylvania, the only Unitarian king in history and the first king to promote by law religious freedom. In the end, though, David was a martyr for his religious beliefs.
Unitarianism in Hungarian Transylvania had its public beginnings in 1568 when the anti-Trinitarian Francis David beat out his opponents--the Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists--in an official religious debate before a young king, John Sigismund. Francis David then convinced the king not to impose his new form of religion upon his subjects, as was the tendency in those days, but to issue an Edict of Religious Tolerance, permitting his subjects to follow their conscience and practice whatever form of religion suited them. David believed "faith was the gift of God" and therefore could not be imposed by others. David called for a "continuing reformation" of the church and preached non adoramus Christus, to not worship Jesus, but to follow him.
Three years after his famous edict the young king tragically died, only 31 years of age, in a riding accident. He was succeeded by a Catholic ruler, who threw Francis David in prison where he died a few years later. But the movement he founded survived and has endured through periods of struggle and oppression for more than four centuries. Today there are 70,000 Unitarians in Transylvania, in what is now Romania, despite the extreme religious repression of the Ceausescu regime there that ended in 1989.
This idea that we don't have to think alike to love alike is a persistent theme in our history, possibly because both Unitarianism and Universalism were minority views and, as such, targets for intolerance, repression, and even persecution unto death. A minority often preaches tolerance as a form of self-preservation, if nothing else.
But, as we see with King Sigismund's Edict of Religious Tolerance-and with the very public stand of contemporary American Unitarian Universalism in support of religious freedom for all-we proclaim tolerance to benefit others as well as ourselves.
In addition, we look to practice it amongst ourselves. Believing in each person's inherent worth and dignity, and right and ability to engage in his or her own search for religious truth and meaning in life, our congregations-and First Parish in Canton is no exception-have welcomed people of many different religious backgrounds or none, as well as people of even more varied current religious beliefs and spiritual practices or none.
It's as the American Universalist preacher of the late 18th/early 19th century Hosea Ballou once said, "If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not (agree in love), no other agreement can do us any good."
Perhaps what it all boils down to is this: We don't have to think alike to love alike, but we do have to love each other if we are to be together in this religious community thinking differently. To be together in religious community thinking the same.why, that would be easy. But, to be together thinking differently. that requires love.
Thinking differently is just the tip of the iceberg as differences go. Yet, we here at First Parish know that it is a challenge to welcome even the range of thinking among us, say for example, in regard to the war in Afghanistan. About that issue the range of our thinking goes from radical pacifist to militarist and many kinds of thinking, ambivalence and confusion included, in between!
Therefore, we are learning that those whose thinking is in the majority have to make a conscious effort to allow the voices of the various minority views to be heard and-more than heard-understood. Ideally, each person (whether he has the majority or a minority viewpoint) truly feels he or she has benefited by understanding someone who thinks differently.
As challenging as that is, thinking differently is just the tip of the iceberg as differences go. Beneath the surface, the iceberg is huge with the kinds of differences that are weighted by oppression. So that racial and ethnic differences, differences in physical and mental ability or health, age, class differences, and differences in sexual orientation and gender expression are far more challenging to navigate. Each of these differences has been weighed down by a history of misunderstanding, discrimination, even persecution.
To be together thinking differently, we said, requires love; but to be together with these differences requires perhaps a more radical love.
A story. This past week, Lyn Stangland Cameron our Director of Religious Education and I attended a joint meeting of the UU ministers and DRE's in our Ballou Channing District, which is comprised of UU congregations in Southeast MA, the Cape, Islands, and RI. The subject was how to minister to children with learning disabilities. One of the questions posed by the presenter was How do we create an ideal community around the suffering of one child? One wise and practical DRE spoke up to say, "You approach the child with compassion and curiosity. The compassion conveys to the child that you care and the curiosity helps you understand him or her so that you can do something to be helpful."
Parker Palmer writes, "The mind motivated by compassion reaches out to know as the heart reaches out to love. Here, the act of knowing is an act of love, the act of entering and embracing the reality of the other, of allowing the other to enter and embrace our own [reality]. In such knowing we know and are known as members of one community, and our knowing becomes a way of reweaving that community's bonds."
True understanding, especially of the ways in which we don't think alike or don't share the same race, health or class status, or don't love (as in mate) alike, comes about in this way, by the act of entering and embracing each other's realities. The more we are known to each other, the more we know the details and intimacies of each other's lives, and are able to embrace each other's realities as both similar and different, the stronger the bonds of our community will be.
Congregational life is an ideal setting for this entering and embracing each other's realities. As Laura Davis mentioned in her reflections, First Parish is beginning to explore the possibility of engaging in a process of self-education that would help the congregation be expressly welcoming of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people. A delegation of parishioners and I, plan to attend an upcoming workshop to learn more about that process that among UU's is called the Welcoming Congregation Program, with a capital W, capital C. The workshop takes place on Saturday morning the 26th and anyone interested is invited to go along. There are flyers available in the Parish Hall.
At the workshop, I want to ask the members of congregations that have gone through this Welcoming Congregation Program.is it true that the more we enter and embrace each other's realities, the stronger our community will become?
Congregational life may be an ideal setting for this entering and embracing each other's realities. But, some of us feel sexuality is not a religious issue, or that talking about sex in public makes us uncomfortable. And, some of us are more private than others, about everything. And, some of us have wounds or fears or secrets that make it difficult for us to allow others to enter our realities. Others talk, but not about what we really think and feel. Some who are gay prefer, like Laura said earlier, to emphasize the similarities. And some who are straight feel that way, too.
So, another question I want to ask at the workshop is "How do we create an environment in our congregation in which it is safe to be honest, safe for the straight person who has reservations about welcoming gay people. to express and explore them and safe for the gay person who doubts the congregation can be trusted. to express and explore that? Safe for any kind of person to take risks of self-revelation, self-education, and change.
For I am convinced that it will be honest self-reflection that enables us to move--individually and as a congregation-- from whatever fears and doubts hold us back.into hope and trust, and therefore toward a more wholehearted embracing of the reality that we don't, in fact, all love alike. With compassion and curiosity, we can enter into and embrace the different realities in regard to loving that are, or one day will be, among us.
UU preacher Amanda Aiken, back in 1993 when she was trying to move her congregation along the path toward welcoming gays and lesbians, told them what the Unitarian Universalist church had meant to her in her coming out process. She said I could quote her.
"My coming-out process, my process of becoming who I truly am, has had three main phases. The first was in college when I became aware of the feelings that I had for women, and first-terribly painfully-came to accept myself as a lesbian.
The second phase was when I was 31, when I came out as a spiritual person, joined [a] church, and came to accept my religious self. This also was a painful process for me-I had been the radical lesbian in my 20's who marched in the Gay Pride March in NY every summer and demonstrated in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral: "2-4-6-8! Separate church and state!" Now I was going to an actual church every Sunday, my God, wearing dresses even, singing HYMNS. It was pretty weird. But the spirituality of that church was feeding a part of myself that was starved for meaning, peace, a deep feeling of connection with the universe.
A lot of my lesbian friends thought I was nuts-especially when I said I wanted to go into the ministry. There were a lot of gay people in my church, but no one ever talked about homosexuality of homophobia-no one ever named it, any more than anyone ever named any other social issues, such as racism. I didn't even think at the time about how fragmented I felt. I had my religious life where I was loved and accepted as long as I didn't talk about my lesbian identity. And I had my life in the women's community, where no one wanted to hear about my religious life.
That was the second phase of my coming out. The third phase was when at 35 I discovered Uuism, and came out as a spiritual person who was also a lesbian. Finally, all the pieces of myself fit together. I had come at least to a safe [place] where I could relax and be myself totally."
What a gift! But, you know, this safe place where we all can relax and be ourselves totally is a gift we all give to one another. It's not just something heterosexual people do for homosexual people. It goes the other direction, too, and it benefits us all.
I know I have found it to be liberating for me to enter and embrace the realities of some of the lesbians and gay men I have known, and to allow some of them to enter and embrace mine. Letting go of stereotypes has helped me to see others and myself as the more complex, interesting, and awe-inspiring individuals we all are. I have made mistakes; we all do. I haven't always been able to make up for my mistakes, but I have tried not to repeat them and to do better in the next situation.
I remember one Sunday not last winter but the winter before, I was shaking hands with people after the service. I had earlier observed two new women sitting together in a pew and when they came up to me in the line, I was eager to find out a little about them. One said to me appreciatively, "I never heard the `L' word from the pulpit before."
I really had to stop and think. What word did she mean? That four-letter word, Love? Couldn't be! Ah, Lesbian! But the sermon hadn't anything to do with gay issues. Then I remembered, I'd used a poem by May Sarton and introduced her, without thinking, as an American lesbian poet (which she was, and a UU, too).
But the women didn't come back. It wasn't due to lack of friendliness, as I remember seeing many of you greeting them, as is almost always the case with visitors. Maybe there wasn't enough of a critical mass of lesbians here for them to be sure they could be comfortable long-term. Or maybe someone said something offensive. We may never know.
As we find out more about what is involved in the (capital W, capital C) Welcoming Congregation Program, let us remember (and rejoice!) that First Parish is already a friendly community. Though single people-gay, and straight too probably-find it more difficult to connect here on a personal basis, let's remember that we are already welcoming (lower case w) of lesbian couples, and those with children. And we have the benefit of being a member congregation of a denomination with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender members and even clergy, so gays and lesbians know to check us out and do.
What is still ahead of us, in my humble opinion, is to achieve a pervasive, congregation-wide comfort-ability so that First Parish will be not only friendly, not only welcoming (lower case w), but also expressly inclusive of gay and lesbian people, single or partnered. Whether engaging in the capital w, capital C Welcoming Congregation Program will be a good way for us to achieve this remains to be seen. I for one hope so.
However we do it, our Unitarian Universalist principles call us to more than mere tolerance and more than simple friendliness, more than advocacy for gay rights even. we are called to a vision of joyful embracing of all those-- with whatever differences--who enter our bright yellow doors on a free and responsible search for truth and meaning and want to help us build a loving and diverse community.
We don't have to love alike, to love alike! Amen.