When I found the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, I was first impressed with the apparent intellectual level of the congregation Then I began to see that my estimation of their intellectual prowess was only exceeded by their own. I felt right at home, immediately, except for that continuous problem: how can they recognize my mental superiority when they are so convinced of theirs? It is not my nature to compete in these areas -- I shouldn’t have to.
My understanding of what Unitarianism was about was the product of reading letters from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, Joseph Priestley, and others, plus the debate I had tried to initiate with my father for many years about the difficult concept of The Trinity. It was my contention that if you attribute omniscience to Jesus, his story loses all its interest. I mean what even borderline humanitarian, with any ego at all could resist the opportunity to die like Jesus did if we knew that: (1) our death would insure for all of humanity the opportunity to live blissfully for all of eternity and avoid damnation; (2) we would be up and around again, none the worse for the experience, three days later; and (3) millions of people would worship us, die for us, and generally wax fanatical in our memory? My argument was always that in order to really appreciate Jesus as a special guy we need to strip him of all that deification. Palestinians choose to die every other day or so with much less of a sure thing about their future and their place in history. And I wanted to think of Jesus as a special sort of guy.
The other thing that I admired about Jesus, apart from his ability to carry on a conversation in King James English (I could never sustain it for more than two or three sentences), was his brilliant repartee - his rapier like wit: “Then render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s; Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” The Scribes and Pharisees were clearly outmatched. In the battle of wits, they were relatively unarmed. But if he knew for thousands of years that he was going to be asked those questions, well, how could he not be prepared? It just took all of the fun out of it for me.
Then there was the Holy Ghost. I was always afraid of him (her?) -- not because of the ghost thing as much as the Biblical injunction against blasphemy. Every sin was forgivable except blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. I couldn’t quite figure out what blasphemy was but I thought maybe that if I just ignored the Holy Ghost I probably wouldn’t blaspheme. It was an uneasy truce but I could usually rest at night without being afraid that I had committed, “The Unpardonable Sin.”
But then I did. I married a Catholic and we started attending the Unitarian Church. Actually it was The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Newark, Delaware. Having been a disciple of Thomas Jefferson for so long, it seemed natural, and right. We were finding certain truths to be self evident. That was before my Catholic mother-in-law and Fundamentalist father got involved. Well, “involved” is a strong and deceptive term. What they did was to ignore our spiritual commitment (like I had ignored the Holy Ghost). Mom-in-law started scheduling family events at 11:00 A.M. on Sunday mornings. Of course, she could (and did) attend Mass at any time. If you miss the Eleven O’clock Coffee hour at the UU, your week is spiritually deficient. It’s our little communion, le petite [last] diner. My father started quoting Scripture: “No one gets to the Father but through Me;” and talking about some historically insignificant event at which someone, who called himself a Unitarian, said something to cast doubt on the divinity of Jesus Christ. Well, what did he think the Unitarian name came from? We were not impressed; embattled, yes, but not impressed.
We hung in there. And we discovered the second “U” of the UU movement: Universalism is the heart while Unitarianism is the head. I was converted, galvanized, evangelized, (uncircumcised), within days of beginning the class on UU Roots and Branches. It sounded like Walt Whitman but played out like Mother Teresa. I loved it. The Universalist component apparently arose as a counter-theory to the Puritanical, Jonathan Edwards’ “You-are-all-miserable-sinners-and-God-will-get-a-big-kick-out-of-sending-you-straight-to-Hell,” theology. The theme is Universal Salvation or, if you are not eternity-oriented, universal goodness, universal worth, universal blessing. . . .
This lined up with my inclination to take Jesus (the man) as a really special guy whose primary message was that we should be nice to each other. So I think Jesus was a Universalist and, I suspect if you could ask him, he would say that he was Unitarian too - or pantheistic. He taught that God is in all of us, not just in him.
So I found a spiritual home in the creedless, humanitarian teachings of the Unitarian Universalist Church. I never really believed in original sin. I’m not sure that there are any really evil people. Bad things happen - true; and some people do really bad things. Misguided they are and morally deficient, but evil?
All of this led me back to the contemplation of God, The Good, The Unmoved Mover, the Greater-than-Which-Cannot-Be-Thought of Philosophers, and Theologians: I thought of the Cartesian approach to God. COGITO ERGO SUM. (Actually, DesCartes probably said, “Je pense, donc Je Suis,” but I can’t say that I ever read him in the original.) I am attracted by the idealistic approach, however, and began to seek a way to adapt it to the UU experience.
First of all let me posit, as they say, my belief that Unitarianism, Universalism, and Clowerism can all trace their roots to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The other components or beliefs that have come to be respected, if not embraced by all good UU types, such as Buddhism, Paganism, Shamanism, etc. came later and found a home there because of the liberal “theology” of the Unitarian Universalist Church. It is time to insert the following disclaimer:
The author of this piece is not a Unitarian Universalist Minister, Theologian, Sunday School Teacher, or ANYTHING.
I’ve only been a member for a few months. (Why do they say, “A few short months?” Do they pick out February, April and June?) So these observations are only that -- observations. I do not speak for anyone in authority.
Anyway, considering the ego and intellectual self assurance of most of the members, I began to construct or create the UU approach to God. As well as I could remember and reconstruct the Cartesian, Ontological Approach to the proof of God’s existence, it fell into the belief that because something is thinkable, and the greatest thing that can be imagined, and because we all have this idea, it exists. It has to! Talk about your bootstrap argument. . . But I understood the proof of the belief system as saying that there is something greater than we are because there must be something greater than we are. Which gets into the chicken/egg argument of whether man created God or God created man.
So what I worked out is that for UU’s there must be a God out there because there must be something, some being, who is intelligent enough to understand us. And that Being, Greater than Which Cannot Be Thought, is our intellectual equal. It must be God. Q.E.D.
Dennis S. Clower
CIRCA 1996
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