There’s a great moment in a show I’ve been watching called Silo. For more than 300 years in the program, 10,000 survivors of an ambiguous apocalypse have lived deep underground. Two men, who have spent their entire lives hundreds of feet below ground, emerge for the first time into a post-apocalyptic landscape of dust and bones. It is night. The only light is from the stars themselves. One man says, “There’s just, just nothing.” The other doesn’t seem to hear him. He’s looking up, where the Milky Way burns across the sky. There’s no human light pollution. No moon. Just stars.
“It’s so much bigger than we thought,” he says.
How has religion, in general, changed my life? It’s the constant reminder: it’s so much bigger than we thought. It’s so easy to think the smallness of our individual lives is the point of it all, that our silo is all that matters. Religious community reminds us there is so much more. In ever-expanding rings of concern, there’s a community needing our care, a culture needing our influence, a political structure requiring our involvement, and a planet needing our care. Some religions emphasize the supernatural. Between community, culture, politics, and planet, we as Unitarian Universalists believe we have enough on our plates to argue too much about that.
It’s just so much bigger than we thought.
Well, there’s the sermon. I’m going to get my coffee now.
Seriously—the question of “how UU has changed my life,” was asked of me exactly 15 years ago this week, when I was invited to speak at the Southwest UU Institute as a featured speaker. At the time I was approaching mid-career. Now that I’m further along, I thought it’d be fun to revisit the question. Have my answers changed? I hope it prompts you to ask the same questions of yourself.
How has Unitarian Universalism changed your life?
My answer back on August 21, 2011, focused on our denominational identity—how, as UUs, we often thought ourselves more enlightened than other religions. In other words, I dodged the actual question and talked about how religion generally shaped my life. I didn’t address how our unique blend of reason, curiosity, justice, and inclusion shaped me.
The question felt a little elitist at the time. The Rev. Victoria Weinstein, known then to me only as Peacebang, wrote in her blog that Unitarian Universalism at the time was suffering from “terminal uniqueness.” We hunger too much to be different from all those “other” religions focused on belief and faith, she proposed. I remember one minister at General Assembly quoting the old Apple commercial: we UUs are “the crazy ones,” he said—the misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently and have no respect for the status quo.
Yes, and yes. But in our pursuit of terminal uniqueness, we missed something. The inclination to feel more enlightened than others is a trap every religion falls into. Church, in its essence, Weinstein wrote, is a “place of peace, where you can ask questions, admit mistakes, and hope for answers.” By that measure, we aren’t functionally unique. We have something special, and our voice deserves to be heard—but it’s one path among many. The power of faith comes into focus when different religious views blend into a larger panorama of where human and divine influence converge.
That’s a message not just for one group of believers, but a message for everyone.
This skepticism about our own uniqueness isn’t new, and it’s probably healthy. William Ellery Channing, who gave us the name Unitarian in his sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” resisted naming us anything for decades fearing it would create barriers. Up until 1819, in a New England town there would be the Congregational church and that “other” one that broke off over the conservative/liberal controversies of the time. Channing preferred calling us “the church universal” rather than “Unitarian.” Eventually he gave in—and that’s how the leopard got its spots, as it were. A contemporary of his, Rev. Arthur Buckminster Fuller, believed that naming ourselves “Unitarian” and being anything other than the local church drives a wedge between us and the people we serve.
These early ministers wanted us to be a message, not an institution—a message the world needed of universal religion, universal salvation, and a divine love so powerful it transcends scripture and human institutions.
Apparently, I’m very good at complicating, and avoiding, a simple question. How has UU changed my life? I speak easily about how religion has shaped me. In UU spaces, when asked my theology, I say I’m Unitarian Universalist Christian with a Buddhist practice and a cherished grounding in religious humanism. This question, however, asks me to set aside the Christian, Buddhist, and religious humanist pieces to name what’s distinctly UU. I hope you’re asking the same of yourself.
Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, I often wind up in the woods seeking better answers. That happened this week. I was supposed to be at an Army base in Michigan for a training conference. As I was ready to hit the road, I saw an email I’d missed that the training wasn’t happening this week—and I’d missed the memo. Being an Air Force guy, I don’t sleep in Army barracks, so my camper was loaded with a week of food and water. So, with my T-Mobile hotspot ready, I headed north for a working week in the woods.
Just like that, my week went from a trauma ministry course to a week of writing in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, with a day of remote church work in the middle. And honestly, Army billeting jokes aside, I didn’t want to go to Fort Custer.
Out there in the woods, completely alone by a dispersed lakeside camping spot, I realized three significant ways Unitarian Universalist thought has influenced my life: 1) the way our transcendentalist tradition connects nature with God; 2) the way nonjudgemental communities of faith can be places of healing and wholeness, not places of harm; 3) the way our faith offers each of us a container in which to put all the pieces of your individual theology, discovered in a process of ongoing revelation. These are the authentic UU pieces I missed 15 years ago.
My grounding in Unitarian Universalism begins with the transcendentalists. There is no mystery why I went alone to the woods for these answers, not a library or monastery. Henry Thoreau once said he went to the woods to live deliberately, but the rest of the quote is often dropped. He was searching “to front only the essential facts of life,” he said, “and see if I could not learn what it had to teach… to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.”
My oversized teardrop camper isn’t exactly Spartan, but it is the same size as Thoreau’s cabin. Not an accident. I’m such a transcendentalist geek I specifically looked at trailers with a 15-foot box. The exact length of Henry’s cabin. Henry didn’t have a bathroom or shower; he had the woods and a lake. He didn’t have a fridge; his mother carried pies out to Walden Pond for him. He didn’t have a hotspot, but he also didn’t have a day job. What both Thoreau’s cabin and my camper have in common, aside from size, is both lack so many of life’s distractions. It takes some doing: except for scheduled calls, the phone stays locked in my truck’s glovebox. Thoreau built a cabin; I built a little Raspberry Pi computer that only does word processing. After a day or two, my whole experience becomes the woods and what I need to write down. For days I don’t talk to a soul. I let my soul talk to me.
It was Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, a lapsed Unitarian minister, who connected God with the direct experience of nature. I say Unitarian and not Unitarian Universalist for two reasons: first, our Unitarian and Universalist churches didn’t merge until 1961, and second, it was the Unitarians who were eventually drawn to what transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau were exploring—God and nature, Christianity and other wisdom traditions, scholarship and direct experience. They did not have to reject Christianity to appreciate Buddhism and other faith traditions. They didn’t violate their covenant with God by seeing God everywhere. They didn’t see reason as more elevated than tromping down muddy roads in spring. Lydian Emerson reported much mud being tracked through her Concord parlor.
The second way Unitarian Universalism changed my life was giving me a community that accepted all of me. My first Unitarian church was the Unitarian Church of St. Louis. I had no idea it wasn’t a Christian church since the minister was one, at the time, of our few Christian-identified ministers. I loved his take on the Bible and life of Jesus. Yet he wove in other sources. The choir wore robes, processing and recessing during preludes and postludes. Yet no topic seemed too informal or secular to be unworthy of reverent attention.
The moment of connection that sealed the deal was at coffee hour, when a member asked, kindly and curiously, why we hadn’t joined yet. I was singing in the choir, my son was in Sunday School, Cindy was volunteering. But we hadn’t joined. I told her I wasn’t ready to fully leave behind my upbringing in New Thought religion. I’d left behind prohibitions against medicine and the cult-like devotion to Mary Baker Eddy, but twenty-five years is a lot of belief to set aside. I still held onto some of my core theologies—such as the feminine divine and Jesus being fully human rather than God incarnate. She listened without judgment.
“I don’t know when I’ll be ready,” I said.
She said, gently, “You know, we have UU Christians, UU Buddhists, UU Pagans, UU just-about-everything. You can be more than one thing here.
She offered me coffee and radical acceptance, and made things even more complicated. How can you be more than one thing at once? But I joined the church.
As Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh reminded us in our reading, from the moment we join we are all members of this family until the moment we leave. When you come to this gathering, what he calls the Sangha River, you find a community of friends who practice harmony, awareness, and compassion. You may even feel the energy of people who’ve been practicing this religion for a very long time. He writes religious community is a “boat that transports us and prevents us from sinking into the ocean of suffering.” This has nothing to do with belief but practice. We show up. We engage. We grow and help others.
For me, the question of how religion has changed a life—your life—comes down to three questions: First, what do you worship—because, as Emerson said, a person will worship something. Second, what saves you in your darkest hour from overwhelming despair? And third, what calls you to your best self?
As I said, own personal faith blends following Jesus, Buddhist meditation, and scientific reason. And it’s the Unitarian Universalist tradition that holds it together, that lets us be more than one thing at once. I’ve found the way in which our tradition points to the divine everywhere” worthy of reverence and awe. For example, while I never stopped being a Christian, it’s the Unitarian Universalist container that shapes the Gospel stories into a message that doesn’t need to be literally true to be true. That combo has dug me out from under a mountain of despair throughout my life. It changed my life. Thanks UU!
With Buddhism, my UU faith guides it into a practice not about my own enlightenment alone, but about being grounded and aware enough to be of better use to others. It calls me to my best self. A personal theology provides us a framework of stories, practices, and sources to draw upon. This community and our tradition invites us to put it together so our best selves are of benefit to others. Thanks UU!
I hope I’ve answer the question better today than I did 15 years ago. And now I want to ask you the same question. Get comfortable and let’s spend our last few minutes this morning focusing on your journey.
What are the stories, practices, and sources you draw from? Your understanding of the universe is source material. When you look up at the stars, what do you see? The books you’ve read are source material. What wisdom teachers have moved you? The retreats you’ve taken, the sermons that invited contemplation or action—those, too, are source material. How do all these sources converge in your answer of how Unitarian Universalism has changed your life?
Now consider how this church has shaped you. How has this community and its teachings changed your life—pushed you toward your best self, even saved you in your darkest hour, when others challenged the truth that you have inherent worth, dignity, and goodness, just as you are?
That’s how Unitarian Universalism changed my life, as I pray it is changing yours.
The question? How has Unitarian Universalist changed our lives?
“It’s so much bigger than we thought.”