A Faith for All Seasons

"When we give ourselves significantly to others and to causes, we open our existence and we unclog the arteries of being. Existence turned inward toward the self is ever a death warrant; while existence turned outward toward the world enlarges us and gives meaning and purpose to our life."

-The Rev. Dr. Peter Raible

I confess I can’t figure out why the Pope is picking on us. There seem to be so many more obvious evils in our world than moral relativism! What about greed and lust, two of the oldest and most persistent sins to beset our troubled and troubling world? Or I would actually have thought that nationalism might rate higher on the scale of evils than moral relativism, given the grisly evidence from the recently-completed 20th century. And what about genocide, Pope Benedict?

Maybe I just don’t understand what the new Pope means by "moral relativism." It just doesn’t seem that threatening to me, not when there are those who are willing to kill me because I happen to disagree with them. What about hatred and intolerance? Why didn’t the Pope mention those far too common evils? Aren’t they more of a danger in our fragile, overcrowded, and multi-cultural world than moral relativism?

Funny, I haven’t heard about many Unitarian Universalists blowing up family planning clinics, or crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. Could it be we just don’t care enough? Or could it be that moral relativism simply doesn’t arouse the kind of deadly passion that allows one to dehumanize and victimize innocent people with whom one doesn’t necessarily agree? People generally don’t murder in the name of moral relativism.

Perhaps what the new Pope really meant to say was that the greatest evil in the world is people who have no values. That I could understand, and I could even agree with him. But that is certainly not the case with most of the moral relativists that I know. Rather, most of the moral relativists that I know see the complexity of issues facing the world today. They understand that, for the most part, the world is a place of competing truths. They understand that the world is a place of tremendous diversity. They mostly have a high threshold for ambiguity and paradox and nuance. (Paradoxically, the most sophisticated theologians have always understood the paradoxical nature of the Divine Truth. They know that to attempt to put too fine a definition on God is to risk missing the reality of God completely.)

Would that the new Pope had taken a page from one of his predecessors, Pope John XXIII, who once made the statement that "authoritarianism suffocates truth" and who, as Globe columnist James Carroll recently wrote, "affirmed liberty, freedom of conscience, the right of all believers and non-believers to be treated with respect, not only as individuals, but as members of other faiths and movements."

These thoughts occur to me on this day when we welcome new members into the fellowship of our church community. They occur to me during the visit of our Unitarian friends from faraway Transylvania, whose long and often tragic religious history, dating to the Protestant Reformation of the 1500’s, has been marked time and again by the efforts of those who claimed to possess "Truth" to repress and destroy them. Their founder, Francis David, once made the amazing and radical and almost unthinkable statement that "we need not think alike to love alike." He was imprisoned and died in captivity for his efforts. One of his central affirmations had to do with the toleration of religious ideas. He was open to the possibility of change and even welcomed it. Remarkably, and almost uniquely for his time, he believed that you cannot murder conscience or kill ideas. Freedom, reason, and tolerance in religion were his central ideals, and so they have remained in Unitarian Universalism right down to our own time.

I wish that the new Pope had said more about compassion than about moral relativism. I wish that he had done more to unstoke the fires of the contemporary culture wars. Because I believe that compassion is what the world--and poor, suffering humanity in it-- really needs, perhaps more than anything else. It certainly needs compassion more than moral absolutism! The world does not need more uniformity of belief or of doctrine. The world does not need every one to toe the party line. The world, as Francis David knew, does not require that we all think alike. Perhaps--dare I say it?--the world does not even need God, especially if it is a God of intolerance and hate, a God who declares Holy War or a God who is invoked on behalf of those who wage it.

What the world needs now, as the song from my far-off youth had it, is "love sweet love." What the world needs now is compassion and empathy, not only for the poor and downtrodden, though God knows they need it, but also for those whose ideas and lifestyles are outside of the mainstream, for those who disagree about what constitutes Truth, for those who think outside the box of tradition and authority, for those with a finer sense of the gray areas of life than most, for those with a recognition of ethical complexity.

Becoming a Unitarian Universalist does not automatically make you a better person. It certainly does not guarantee your salvation, whatever "salvation" is. But Unitarian Universalism, with its non-creedalism, with its affirmation of freedom of conscience, with its belief in religious toleration and the use of our God-given human reason, and, yes, with its terrible and apparently threatening "moral relativism," offers a way to be in a complex and challenging world. No, it does not offer The Answer. No, it does not offer certainties. No, it will not send you to athletic events carrying signs proclaiming "John 3:16," as if that biblical passage were the answer to all of your own and the world’s problems (it hasn’t answered them yet, and don’t count on it to do so anytime in the near future). It will not cause you to set up bomb-building factories in your basement (I hope!).

But if you work at it and take it seriously, it may cause you to engage with ideas and to weigh competing claims for truth. It may cause you to be more compassionate and loving toward others, particularly those who are different. It should help you to gain a new sense of the sacred in the ordinary, and a conviction of that spark of the divine which is inside each and every one of us. I hope that it will help you to be more tolerant of others and to be more open to the possibility of change, and it will definitely require you to make decisions for yourself and not to depend on someone or something else to make them for you. Perhaps it will inspire you to want to make the world a better place for all, and to be more grateful for the gift of life.

The late Peter Raible wrote in the morning’s reading that "When we give ourselves significantly to others and to causes, we open our existence and we unclog the arteries of being. Existence turned inward toward the self is ever a death warrant; while existence turned outward toward the world enlarges us and gives meaning and purpose to our life." It seems to me that this is the greatest challenge of our lives: to overcome our inherent selfishness or self-centeredness and to answer the call to service on behalf of others and our world. It is to live an outward as well as an inward life. It is to take up a worthy cause and to support it with our time, talent, and treasure.

I truly believe that Unitarian Universalism offers us an opportunity and a place to do this. It offers us a vision, however flawed, however short of our dreams, of a beloved community where we might live and grow and become the people we are truly meant to be. At its best it offers us a place where we can be accepted, in the words of the old gospel hymn, "just as we are." It may even, as the morning’s reading suggested, help us to live longer!

I’m sorry, but moral relativism simply does not top the list of things that make me fearful or keep me awake at night. Are you a good person? Do you care about others? Do you believe that you have a responsibility to them and to the earth which supports each and every one of us? Do you believe in the redeeming power of love? Is not love the only absolute that really matters? Would you rather believe in a God who enforces absolutes or in a God who is absolutely loving, a God who condemns or a God who forgives? These seem to be the questions that really matter, to me, at least.

Our Universalist forebears erred on the side of love and forgiveness, and so must I. Our Unitarian forebears believed in the innate goodness of human nature. Though their faith in humanity and human perfectability has been tested by many of the events of our time, I would still prefer to believe that human beings are basically good if given the opportunity to be. They don’t need the threat of hell to make them good, nor do they need moral absolutes. The history of the world is replete with examples of the failure of absolutism.

I prefer to remain a relativist, at least for the foreseeable future. That is my faith for all seasons: a faith of compassion, reason, tolerance, and freedom, a religion of openness, a religion of fresh air, a religion, in singer Iris Dement’s words, willing to "let the mystery be," a religion which values tradition, but in the words of one of our hymns, "trusts the dawning future more." It is a faith that believes in small-t truth, not in the large-T truth-claims of all the principalities and powers. It is a faith which can sustain you through the bad times as well as the good, in the face of death as well as in the midst of life, even without moral absolutes. I have seen it do so. May it become your faith as well, if it isn’t already. May it provide you, if not with The Answer, then at least with the answers that you need to help you along the ever-perilous way of life.

That is my wish, not only for our newest members, but for all the rest of us as well, relatively speaking. May it be so. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock