The Island of Doubt

Mr. Hayden, my high school librarian, used to toss me out of his bailiwick every few days for "pontificating," and I'm still trying to make up for lost time. So when a local congregation of the Unitarian Universalists asked me to deliver the equivalent of a sermon the other day, I didn't hesitate to accept the invitation. Though I never thought anyone associated with an organized religion, even one as non-orthodox as the UUs, would ever ask me to take part in their service, I am not one to turn down a platform from which I can ... well, pontificate.

"What would you like me to talk about?" I asked.

"Oh you know -- intelligent design, the separation of church and state -- that sort of thing," was the reply. Oh boy...

So I headed down the highway the next Sunday morning to the Tryon Youth Center, where the Thermal Belt UU Fellowship meets. After helping my hosts move the pool table out of the way, I whipped out a copy of a PowerPointless speech drafted the night before and proceeded to hold forth from a lectern standing in front of a window with a great view of the Blue Ridge mountainside. About three dozen UUs politely listened and then grilled me with another half hour of pointed and learned questions. Questions after a sermon. Imagine that.

(I did rather well, if I don't say so myself, although I was fairly chastised by one member of the congregation for referring disparaginlgy to the Baptists. In my own defense, I didn't do it first -- it was in response to a question and I just got caught up in the language of the moment. But I concede I should have been more careful.)

I'm not going to share excerpts from my sermon -- which the UUs would not call a sermon -- or describe the rest of the service. Instead what I thought was most interesting was the poem printed on the back of the day's program. It serves as a wonderful illustration of just how non-orthodox the Unitarian Universalists really are. Until then, I knew very little about them. My only previous exposure to the "church" was a talk I delivered a few months ago to the local Trout Unlimited chapter, which meets in the bottom of another UU hall. (The topic, in case you were wondering, was climate change.)

Here's the poem, "Responsive Reading #657: It Matters What We Believe, by Sophia Lyons Fahs"

Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.
Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.

Some beliefs are like shadows, clouding children's days with fears of unknown calamities.
Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of sunshine.

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.

Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one's own direction,
Other beliefs are like gateways, opening wide vistas for exploration.

Some beliefs weaken a person's selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcesfulness.
Other beliefs nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.
Other beliefs are pliable, like the young saplings, ever growing, with the upward thrust of life.

I'm not ready to embrace the UU "religion" just yet. For one thing, their pamphlets still refer to "God." To be fair, they do so rather ambiguously, equating the deity with plain old "enlightenment," and they acknowledge the multitude of paths that will get you there. And the fact that the fellow who invited me is trying to start a chapter of the Secular Humanists was also intriguing. But the UU articles of faith, which go back to 1790, include "We believe in one God" and they continue to describe themselves as a faith.

Still, if you had to choose a service of sorts to attend every Sunday, one that respects science and reason as much as anything else, you could do a lot worse that the UUs. One more quote from the literature left out for the likes of me:

"We believe that facing this real and known world with integrity is preferable to yearning for an imagined and unknown one later on."

You know what I say to that, don't you?

Amen.