WHAT MOVES US
A Tapestry of Faith Program for Adults
WORKSHOP 8: FORREST CHURCH
BY REV. DR. THANDEKA
© Copyright 2013 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/29/2014 11:55:38 PM PST.
This program and additional resources are available on the UUA.org web site at
www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
If our religion doesn't inspire in us a humble affection for one another and a profound sense of awe at the wonder of being, one of two things has happened. It has failed us, or we it. — Forrest Church (1948-2009)
This workshop introduces Forrest Church's Universalist Theology for the Twenty-First Century. Church developed this contemporary "theological universalism" to address what he called a principal challenge to the creation of a viable theology today: social fragmentation. As he put it, we live in a world "where togetherness is no longer a luxury but a necessity; [where] we are thrown together by realities that shape our common destiny." Those realities include the global economy, global communication systems, and global nuclear and environmental threats. At the same time, "centrifugal forces spin us farther and farther from one another, fracturing the one world we now experience and jeopardizing our common welfare." A response to these 21st-century challenges can be found in our own theological heritage as Unitarian Universalists. Church invites us to proclaim a faith that invokes the broad spirit of our Universalist forebears, while, at the same time, moving beyond their 18th- and 19th-century Protestant doctrinal biases and limits.
And thus the good news from Church: Our own theology today can "provide symbols and metaphors that will bring us, in all our glorious diversity, into closer and more celebratory kinship with one another as sons and daughters of life and death. For Church, we must "[posit] the existence of a power beyond our comprehension." Only then, says Church, can we begin to account for the miracle of being with an appropriate measure of the two feelings he finds at the root of all direct human experiences of the Holy: awe and humility.
As we explore Church's emphasis on awe and humility as well as his "one Light, many windows" theological metaphor, participants will develop their own responses to his Universalist Theology for the Twenty-First Century. Does it help us discover or acknowledge feelings of awe or humility? Does his theology give us a way to frame religious pluralism?
Before leading this workshop, review the Accessibility Guidelines for Workshop Presenters found in the program Introduction.
Preparing to lead this workshop
Read in this order the resources included with this workshop:
As time allows, read "Universalism: A Theology for the 21st Century" (at www.uuworld.org/2001/05/feature1.html)in UU World, November/December 2001. Use these questions as well as the spiritual preparation exercise and questions in this workshop to help you understand the Universalist Theology for the Twenty-First Century created by Church. You are encouraged to write your responses in your theology journal:
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Opening | 5 |
Activity 1: Experiences of Awe | 10 |
Activity 2: Introducing Forrest Church — Stories and Reflections | 30 |
Activity 3: Testing Church's Twenty-First Century Universalism | 20 |
Activity 4: Cathedral of the World | 20 |
Closing | 5 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
The questions highlight the personal experiences of life and death that helped prompt Church to define religion as "our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die." Use these questions to help you reflect on Church's writings about his personal experiences with life and death. Are there connections between Church's theology and experiences and your own? You are invited to respond to some or all of the following in your theology journal:
WORKSHOP PLAN
OPENING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
We are here to abet creation and
to witness to it,
to notice each other's beautiful
face and complex nature
so that creation need not play to
an empty house.
Description of Activity
Welcome participants.
Invite a participant to light the chalice while you share these words of Forrest Church:
Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die... for most of us, knowing that we are mortal inspires a search for answers that will remain valid in spite of our mortality. If religion is our response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die, the purpose of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.
Invite participants to join in reading the opening words you have posted on newsprint, "We are here to abet creation" by Annie Dillard.
ACTIVITY 1: EXPERIENCES OF AWE (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Introduce the workshop using these or similar words:
Can Forrest Church's Universalist Theology for the Twenty-First Century help us determine whether feelings of awe and humility are at the root of our own direct experiences of what we might call the Holy or the Life Force or the sacred? Can his 21st-century theological Universalism help us interpret and understand the religious meanings we link to these feelings?
Invite participants to recall a time when they experienced awe. Call their attention to what you have posted on newsprint. Invite them to draw or write about their experience and its relationship to their Unitarian Universalist faith.
Allow eight minutes for writing or drawing.
ACTIVITY 2: INTRODUCING FORREST CHURCH — STORIES AND REFLECTIONS (30 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Project or distribute copies of Leader Resource 1. Briefly introduce the Rev. Dr. Forrest Church as one of America's pre-eminent liberal theologians who has been called "the most quoted Unitarian Universalist of this era." The senior minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City for 30 years, he then became the congregation's Minister of Public Theology. Church at the time of his death on September 24, 2009 had written or edited more than 24 books. including Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, published in 2008, and his final book The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology both published by Beacon Press.
Distribute Handout 1, which contains more detail about Church's life, and invite participants to read it at home. Read aloud the bolded section of the handout to introduce Church's theology.
Distribute the story. Ask a volunteer participant to read aloud the first section of the story. Pause for at least a minute of silence to allow participants to absorb the story. Then, invite them to write feelings and thoughts in their theology journals. Allow three minutes for writing or drawing.
When time is up, invite a second volunteer to read aloud the second section of the story. Invite them to note additional feelings and thoughts in their theology journal. Allow two minutes.
Finally, ask a third participant to read the third section of the story.
Pause for at least a minute of silence to allow participants to absorb the story. Then, invite them to write feelings and thoughts in their theology journal for three or four minutes.
ACTIVITY 3: TESTING CHURCH'S TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY UNIVERSALISM (20 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to form groups of three and to briefly, in turn, share thoughts and feelings they have written in their journals in response to the Forrest Church stories and reflections. Explain the small group process using these or similar words:
Each member of your group, in turn, will have two minutes to share briefly some of their journal reflections. Share with the group your own thoughts, feelings, and reflections and listen deeply, without comment, to the thoughts, feelings, and reflections of others. Your group is invited to appoint a timekeeper or to share timekeeping responsibilities to assure that all have an equal amount of time to speak.
Signal when six minutes are up. Ask participants to remain in their groups of three while you share these words written by Church:
If our religion doesn't inspire in us a humble affection for one another and a profound sense of awe at the wonder of being, one of two things has happened. It has failed us, or we it. Should either be the case, we must go back to the beginning and start all over again. We must reboot our lives until the wonder we experience proves itself authentic by the quality of our response to it.
Invite participants to recall the experiences of wonder and awe they described earlier in the workshop. Ask them to remain in their three-person groups and consider the posted question, and share, in turn, their responses. Explain that after all have shared for about two minutes each, each person will have another two minutes to offer additional insights and thoughts that arise from the initial round of sharing. Allow ten minutes for this portion of the activity.
ACTIVITY 4: CATHEDRAL OF THE WORLD (20 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
While participants remain in their three-person groups, distribute Handout 2. Read or invite volunteers to read each of the sections in turn.
Ask the small groups to consider Church's image of a cathedral, particularly whether they find it helpful in understanding their own theology. Invite participants to identify one element that stands out for them and, each in person in turn, explain why this is the case. Allow six minutes for this small group exercise.
To conclude, invite persons to write one-sentence statements about their thoughts, feelings, and sentiments about Church's theology and how it might relate to their own way of thinking about awe, humility, or another key element of Church's theology. Then, invite volunteers to read their one-sentence statements to the entire group.
CLOSING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Gather participants around the altar or centering table. Affirm the good work that participants have done in this workshop.
Distribute the Taking It Home handout. Explain that each workshop will provide a Taking It Home handout with ideas for continuing to explore the workshop's subject with friends, co-workers, housemates, and family. Mention that the Faith in Action activities included in the handout offer another extension opportunity.
Offer as a benediction these words of Forrest Church, delivered in 2008 when he received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Unitarian Universalism (at www.uua.org/giving/awardsscholarships/distinguishedservice/116927.shtml), the most prestigious award given by the UUA:
Let us never forget what a privilege it is to be part of this great movement and to pronounce its saving faith: one Light (Unitarianism) shining through many windows (Universalism). Let us continue our quest together, with awe and humility, with saving openness and saving doubt, never forgetting to honor those who charted our way.
Extinguish the chalice and invite participants to go in peace.
Including All Participants
Be inclusive of people with a variety of living situations—for example, living alone, with a significant other, in a multigenerational family, or with housemates—in the way you explain the Taking It Home activities.
LEADER REFLECTION AND PLANNING
After the workshop, co-leaders should make a time to get together to evaluate this workshop and plan future workshops. Use these questions to guide your shared reflection and planning:
TAKING IT HOME
If our religion doesn't inspire in us a humble affection for one another and a profound sense of awe at the wonder of being, one of two things has happened. It has failed us, or we it. — Forrest Church (1948-2009)
Forrest Church invites us to explore our own life experiences of pain, suffering, and humility, along with those of joy and awe. He posits that in our life experiences, we may we find the Holy. Reflect on your own life experiences, especially those that come to the fore as a result of this workshop's reflections and questions. Use your theology journal to dive deep.
Meet with your three-person small group for a meal or after a worship service to continue sharing thoughts, feelings, and insights about Church's theology and your own experiences related to it. Practice the small group principles of listening, reflection, and sharing used in this workshop.
Faith in Action
Resolve to take time to quietly reflect on the experiences of awe and humility (or feelings akin to them) that are linked to your own Unitarian Universalist faith. How can you enable these feelings to guide you in an encounter with another person? To guide your behavior when you work on a social justice project?
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 8:
STORY: FORREST CHURCH'S REDEMPTION EXPERIENCES
Stories and reflections from Forrest Church's book, Bringing God Home: A Traveler's Guide (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). Used with permission.
Church's Childhood Death Fantasy
Etched in my soul, and by far the most haunting memory of my childhood, is a fantasy of death. I date it to sometime after my family moved to Washington, D.C., when I was eight years old. I can't remember how often I succumbed to this fantasy, but I do recall what prompted it (a brutal argument with my mother), the time of day when these battles took place (right before bed), and the thing that triggered them (always a lie). When my mother caught me lying, not content to leave bad enough alone, I would fabricate more lies to cover up the first one. What finally piqued her anger into fury, whether my transparent mendacity or my panic-driven tears, I'm not certain. Given the premium placed on cheerfulness in our household, probably the latter. In either case, possessed by my favored demon (naked fear), I spun out of control, my mother's anger intensifying until it reached a fevered pitch. Invariably, the battle ended with me in total humiliation and banished to my room.
More vivid in my memory than the struggle itself is its aftermath. After sobbing uncontrollably for a few minutes, I would launch my mind into a sea of self-pity. Into this wine-red sea sailed my fantasy of death.
Running away from home, I crawl out of my bedroom window into the snowy night. Wearing only my pajamas, I wander in the bitter cold through the woods between our house and the elementary school. I fall into a snowdrift. Never have I felt so alone. And then I die. The snow stops and morning dawns. A schoolmate finds me lifeless in the snow, bursts into tears, and rushes off to tell my parents. "Come quickly. Forrest is dead." My parents hadn't missed me. They didn't even notice I had run away. Hastening to my side and falling to their knees to embrace my body, they beg me to awaken. My father becomes distant. My mother moans in disbelief. Through tears of self-recrimination and overcome by grief, she pities me with all her heart.
At this moment in my imagined melodrama, the floodgate opens once again, my self-pity magnified by the specter of me dead, my mother's lamentations almost too poignant to bear. But not quite, for with this I rewind my fantasy and play it back again, embellishing it yet further with loving detail: ripped pajamas, my beloved sock monkey frozen to my breast, my mother's raven hair blowing in the wind, the dark sun, the snow on my forehead.
And then, interrupting my fantasy, the bedroom door opened. A crack of light pierced the darkness, and in slipped my mother. Sitting down on the bed, she leaned over and hugged me, saying she was sorry, confessing how very much she loved me. We cried together. She cradled me in her arms, my tears subsiding. An inexpressible calm settled over me. I shut my eyes. My mother rocked me gently until I drifted off to sleep. When I awakened in the morning, my fantasy of death was but a distant dream.
Church's Reflections on his Death Fantasy
My waking nightmare and its aftermath... reflect the basic elements of a familiar tale of sin and redemption. First, I abandon love in a search for love, flee home to find the comforts of home, destroy myself in order to be saved. Then, through no act of my own, I receive love, find home, and experience salvation. My mother knew nothing of my fantasy. It was not by willfulness or self-pity that I found fulfillment. It entered my room uncoerced and undeserved, like grace. All I contributed to my own redemption was to long for it and to be willing to receive it when it came.
In this childhood drama my mother assumes the role of a traditional Judeo-Christian God. She punishes me for my wrongdoing and then forgives me, each as an act of love... .
... What impels us to run away in the first place? In the search for an answer, consider the broader question: Why would we run away from anything we seek: success, companionship, community, health, freedom, responsibility, even love? What would drive us to subvert our most cherished aspirations?
Church's Reflections on his Former Drinking Problem
"... when fear spurs our flight we are running away not from another but from ourselves. Having many times been prompted to flight by inner demons—muting life or changing channels and turning up its volume—I know this pattern well. Turning to the comforts of the bottle was for me itself (at least in part) a fear-driven attempt to escape pain, especially that of worry or regret. Only after years of mistakenly self-serving resistance did I finally learn that suppressing pain strengthens its grip... .
I have pondered why I drank so much and for so many years. To any but the most attentive observer, it would not appear to have been from a lack of healthy self-esteem, but looking back I wonder. I certainly used alcohol to subdue unwelcome feelings. I was afraid of looking too deeply within myself, for fear of what I might find there.
More prideful expressions of my egoism were more obvious in my drinking. I dictated my own set of rules and then slavishly followed them. Nonetheless, having counseled many addicts and alcoholics over the years, I didn't recognize myself in their glass. My work won me the respect of others, and my spirit—whether elevated artificially or not—contributed to the general bonhomie of most of the company I kept. For the most part, I lived life in the manner I wished and did what I chose to do.
To ease my conscience, I also prided myself on not being a moral perfectionist. I wrote books with titles such as The Devil and Dr. Church and The Seven Deadly Virtues. I edited a twelve-step book while drinking. I have discovered it to be useful to me now that I have stopped. At the time, however, I accepted drinking as a lubricant to creativity. If Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald could write drunk, who was I to question such a muse? It even appeared to work for me. I found that Scotch muted self-criticism and thus facilitated my productivity. I would never be guilty of committing a bestseller, but that was fine also. Until my awakening began to complicate matters (when the emptiness of my life became unendurable), I was enjoying a good time and hardly raising a sweat as I did so. My appetites for both indolence and gluttony were well served and, far from being a bad person, I was merely a self-indulgent one. I believed that the world, on balance, was a better place during those years of my residence within, and in retrospect I think it probably was.
As things turned out, for me pride didn't lead to a fall; it simply took slow possession of my soul. Fortunately, when I awoke one day to discover that God was nowhere in my life, I knew enough to recognize that alcohol (thought symptomatic of more general self-absorption) was part of the reason. I wasn't humiliated into humility as so many others have been, merely lost in the desert of self. I felt an emptiness I could no longer medicate against and to which I had to either respond or succumb.
Love gradually turned me from the bottle, which had become a kind of mistress. I discovered that I could fulfill my own hopes only by answering the needs of those I love. Old habits are hard to break, but over time love's responsibilities tempered and deepened this awakening. At first I simply cut my drinking back, and my pilgrimage progressed, albeit slowly. Were it not for my wife, Carolyn, I doubt that I would have attempted to continue it sober, for to do so entailed the loss of fond and familiar comforts. Notwithstanding her concerns, comforted triumphed over love for years. I walked toward God with a half-full bottle in my suitcase. I tried to cut a bargain between my appetites and my responsibilities. As most drunks will tell you, this didn't work. So I swallowed my last bit of pride and, at long last, found my way out of the thickets of addiction.
In retrospect, I am grateful today not only for my wife but, in a strange way, for my addiction also. It established the parameters of a God-shaped hole that I could fill only with God. Each of us has his or her personal version of this hole, and we attempt to fill it in our own private ways. Yet no God substitute can fill the God-shaped hole. For this reason alone—since little contentments disguise our spiritual emptiness by taking the edge off our hunger for spiritual renewal—we should welcome discontent when it visits.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 8:
HANDOUT 1: INTRODUCING FORREST CHURCH
At the time of his death on September 24, 2009, Forrest Church was one of America's pre-eminent liberal theologians. UUA executive vice president Kay Montgomery called him "the most quoted Unitarian Universalist of this era." After thirty years as senior minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, he served the church as minister of public theology. Church wrote or edited more than 24 books, including Father and Son: A Personal Biography of Senator Frank Church of Idaho, God and Other Famous Liberals, The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State, and most recently Love and Death—My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, published by Beacon Press in 2008. His latest book is The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology (Beacon Press, 2009).
As newspaper columnist, visiting scholar, chair of the Council on the Environment of New York City for ten years, and media star through broadcast interviews beyond number, he gave liberal theology its contemporary credentials as a viable way of religious life for the American soul. Educated at Stanford University (A.B., 1970), Harvard Divinity School (M.Div., 1974), and Harvard University, where he received his Ph. D. in early church history in 1978, Church was a contemporary exemplar of our liberal tradition of the learned ministry.
Forrest Church was a self-proclaimed 21st-century liberal Universalist evangelist. According to Church, "a twenty-first-century theology needs nothing more and requires nothing less than a new Universalism." Nothing less will do, Church insisted, because we live in a world "where togetherness is no longer a luxury but a necessity;" where "we are thrown together by realities [e.g., a global economy, global communication systems, and global nuclear and environmental threats] that shape our common destiny" and yet "centrifugal forces spin us farther and farther from one another, fracturing the one world we now experience and jeopardizing our common welfare." According to Church, the only way we can make good on our theological heritage as Unitarian Universalists in the face of this new century is to proclaim a Universalism fit for the challenges of the 21st century. To this end, Forrest Church invoked the broad spirit of our Universalist forebears for his 21st-century inclusive faith, while at the same time reaching beyond the doctrinal Protestant Christian limits and divisiveness of American Universalism's original creators.
Forrest Church was the son of Frank Forrester Church III, who served as the United States Senator from Idaho for 24 years, which included most of his son's youth and all of his adolescence. As he freely confessed, he often boasted in his adolescence that he would die before he was 25, which is the age at which his father was expected to, but didn't, die of cancer. Church writes that although his father "survived his first bout with cancer, I seem somehow to have interiorized it. Perhaps... I viewed my own impending death as a sacrifice due the gods in exchange for my father's life. More likely, I merely enjoyed basking in the pathos of my mortality. Besides, since I was going to die before turning twenty-five, I could live a life of abandon in the meantime, untethered to future responsibility."
Diagnosed himself with cancer that went into remission after his esophagus was removed in November 2006, Church announced to his congregation in February 2008 that tumors had returned and his life would be measured in months, not years.
Death has always been central to Church's theology. As he put it: "I didn't become a minister in any meaningful sense until I conducted my first funeral. Of all things I am called to do, none is more important, and none has proved of greater value to me, than the call to be with people at times of loss. When asked at a gathering of colleagues what gives most meaning to my work, I replied that, above all else, it is the constant reminder of death. Death awakens me to life's preciousness and also its fragility." Moreover, Church's fundamental definition of religion marks death as well as life as its defining prompt. He said:
Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are not the animal with tools or the animal with advanced language; we are the religious animal. Because we know that we are going to die, we question what life means. Death also throws meaning itself into question, for some people rendering it moot. Yet, for most of us, knowing that we are mortal inspires a search for answers that will remain valid in spite of our mortality. If religion is our response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die, the purpose of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 8:
HANDOUT 2: FORREST CHURCH'S THEOLOGY
This handout summarizes and contains quotes from portions of Forrest Church's book, Bringing God Home: A Traveler's Guide (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002). Used with permission.
The Awe and Humility Life's Gifts Evoke in Church
Church calls the feelings of awe and humility, fundamental feelings born of our experience of life itself, personal experiences of the Holy, the Light of God, Truth, the sacred. These feelings have their source in a transcendental realm of experience beyond our rational minds. These feelings reveal the unimaginable, the mystery, the hallowed ground in which our life abounds. This is the case, Church says, because of our cosmic origins: "Spun out of star-stuff, illuminated by God, we participate in the miracle we ponder." This miracle, according to Church, is the gift of life. More precisely, the gift of our life. And this gift is our shared common text: He writes:
Our common text is the creation. Though limited by the depth and field of our vision, we are driven to make sense of it as best we can. So we tell stories, formulate hypotheses, develop schools of thought and worship, and pass our partial wisdom down from generation to generation. Not only every religion, but every philosophy, ideology, and scientific worldview is a critical school with creation as its text. By whatever name we call its author or co-creator, we are all interpreters of the poetry of God. ("Universalism: A Theology for the 21st Century," UU World, November/December 2001),
He implores us to really consider creation:
Life on this planet is billions of years old. Our span of three score years and ten (give or take a score or two) is barely time enough to get our minds wet.
By cosmologists' latest reckoning, there are some 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and ours is one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies. ... By my reckoning, the cosmic star-to-person ration is 1.6 trillion to one. ... Billions of accidents conspired to give [Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad, and more] each of these compelling teachers the opportunity even to teach. Knowing this—pondering numbers beyond reckoning—doesn't strip me of my faith. It inspires my faith. It makes me humble. It fills me with awe. (Bringing God Home: A Traveler's Guide, p. 232).
From such contemplation and experiences of awe and humility comes a corollary basic rule:
If our religion doesn't inspire in us a humble affection for one another and a profound sense of awe at the wonder of being, one of two things has happened. It has failed us, or we it. Should either be the case, we must go back to the beginning and start all over again. We must reboot our lives until the wonder we experience proves itself authentic by the quality of our response to it. I may not believe as Jesus did, but I should dearly hope to love as Jesus did, to forgive and embrace others as unconditionally as he. The principle challenge of theology today is to provide symbols and metaphors that will bring us, in all our glorious diversity, into closer and more celebratory kinship with one another as sons and daughters of life and death. ("Universalism: A Theology for the 21st Century," UU World, November/December 2001).
Theological Lens
Church urges us to use a theological lens to make sense of our feelings of awe and humility and offers us a theological metaphor. Church's theology describes the world as a cathedral with windows beyond number that represent different religious worldviews. The Light shining through each set of windowpanes is the same Light of God, which Church, at various times, also refers to as the life force, the Holy, Truth, or Being Itself.
Each worshipper in Church's theological metaphor cannot comprehend the truth that shines through another's set of windows because the Light is refracted differently. Each vision of the Light, nevertheless, is beautiful: Some visions are "dark and meditative, others bright and dazzling. Each tells a story about the creation of the world, the meaning of history, the purpose of life, the nature of humankind, the mystery of death." All of the visions, as this metaphor makes evident, are interpretations. They are ways of thinking and meaning-making ideas about the Light. And so lightness and darkness mingle in these visions because the images are refracted through particular sets of windows. The result, says Church, are partial clarifications of reality that emerge in the patterns and play of shadow and light as the windows become shrines for worshippers and for those who reject religion but nevertheless seek truth.
Church calls his theology a 21st-century theological universalism that not only promises both breadth and focus to its adherents, but also honors different religious approaches, while excluding absolutist truth claims. While the conflicting "theological passions" that accompany these different visions can lead people to reject religion entirely and distance themselves from those who attempt to interpret the meaning of the Light, such rejection carries the risk of rejecting the "deep encounter with the mysterious forces that impel our being." Church also observes that no one is "actually able to resist interpreting the Light."
Church developed his "theological universalism" to meet what he calls the principal challenge of theology today: Theology must "provide symbols and metaphors that will bring us, in all our glorious diversity, into closer and more celebratory kinship with one another as sons and daughters of life and death."
His own personal Universalism is Universalism modified by "Christianity, not the other way around... . The universalism I embrace... holds that the same Light shines through all our windows, but each window is different. The windows modify the Light—refracting it in myriad ways, shaping it in different patterns, suggesting various meanings—even as Christianity does my universalism."
Church provides us with five guidelines for a Universalism for the Twenty-First Century:
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 8:
LEADER RESOURCE 1: FORREST CHURCH PORTRAIT
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 8:
LEADER RESOURCE 2: RECOVERING TRANSCENDENTALIST UNIVERSALISM — FORREST CHURCH
Reproduced from The Making of American Liberal Theology (C) 2006 Gary Dorrien. Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press. www.wjkbooks.com
Liberal theology as a formal tradition began with Schleiermacher, but as an institutional North American tradition it began with the New England Arminians who, having called themselves liberal Christians, came to accept the name Unitarian. In the 1980s Forrest Church emerged as a leading advocate of the typical twentieth-century Unitarian rationalism, but later judged that liberalism without God makes a poor religion. The son of U.S. Senator Frank Church, he was educated at Stanford University and Harvard Divinity School, earned a doctorate in early Christian history at Harvard University in 1978, and immediately landed a high-profile perch as senior minister of All Souls Church (Unitarian Universalist) in Manhattan. By 2005, Church had served at All Souls for twenty-seven years, written or edited twenty books, and became his denomination's leading advocate of recovering its early spiritual sensibility in new forms.
In his early career he stressed what he did not believe, writing books with slightly cheeky titles (The Devil and Dr. Church. and the Seven Deadly Virtues) that took pride in his minimal theology. Thomas Jefferson was his model of a good Unitarian rationalist. At the age of ten, Church had been given a Jefferson Bible by his agnostic father, who received it as an election gift; he later recalled that his belief in Jesus the Son of God died upon reading Jefferson's expurgated version of the Gospels. Jefferson separated the teachings of Jesus from those about Jesus, an approach that still made sense to Dr. Church. As a youthful pastor of a prestigious congregation he wore his "rational aridity" proudly, believing only what he comprehended. He could believe in a Jeffersonian version of the ethics of Jesus, but not the Emersonian Oversoul (1).
For several years he preached like a taxidermist instead of a worshipper, as he later put it, taking the same approach to personal demons: "I muzzled as many as I could, all the while doing everything possible to keep those that eluded me from hiding under my bed and haunting my sleep." Consumed by literary ambitions and a desire for public recognition, and a bit unnerved by his quick ministerial success, Church drifted into alcoholism and a messy, very public end to his first marriage, all the while using alcohol as a lubricant to creativity: "If Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald could write drunk, who was I to question such a muse? It even appeared to work for me." He medicated his first stabs of spiritual emptiness with heavier drinking, all the while writing trade books with a ministerial bent, even editing a twelve-step book. Eventually the emptiness of his life became "unendurable," though not until he was well into a second marriage. Church's marriage to Carolyn Buck Luce and his awakening to a "God-shaped hole" in his life allowed him to crawl out of alcoholic darkness. Gradually he converted to the view that not much of a religion came from the taxidermist approach to it. "Nothing is emptier than a life in which God is palpably absent," he later wrote. "How lost I was, and how profoundly I needed God's help to find peace." (2)
He was not at home in the universe, nor in himself. Church began to look for a home in the universe before he faced his personal demons, taking a transcendental turn. Since he still shared the rational Unitarian distaste for God-language, his range of options was limited: "God is on the label of every bottle of religious snake oil I have ever tasted." To become more religious, he had to reimagine God, or at least clear a place for mystery "on the altar of my hearth, which before I had crowded with icons to knowledge." Something besides Unitarian humanism had to support his sermonizing that life is worthwhile and good. Instead of the eighteenth-century classical lithographs of architectural drawings that he had favored as a graduate student, he needed "something more arresting and humbling, something like Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night." He found it in the twin strands of his own tradition, Unitarianism and Universalism. (3)
In 1989 Church coauthored a primer, A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism (with John A. Buehrens), that signaled his transition to a more personal, Emersonian universalism. Most of his beliefs had not changed, but now he emphasized the spirit of his believing, not the letter, declaring that religion is a human response "to the dual reality of being alive and having to die." The inevitability of death gives meaning to human loving, he wrote, for the more love that human beings find and give, the more they risk losing: "I have no idea what will happen to me when I die, but I know that I will die. And I know that the choices I make in this life affect the way I live. It is in this crucible, mysterious and uncertain, that my religion must be forged." (4)
That was traditional Unitarian Universalist music, but later in the book Church used the word "God" more often than many UUs liked, describing God as a name for "that which is greater than all and yet present in each." He also offered a universalist creed: (1) there is one Reality of Truth (God); (2) this Reality shines through every "window" in the "cathedral" of the world and out from every perceiving subject; (3) it is never perceived directly; (4) yet it is reflected and refracted in a myriad of meaningful patterns on the floor of the cathedral and by every perceiver; (5) thus, every window illuminates Truth in a different way, leading to different truths. The same light shines through all windows. Church explained, but every window is different, refracting the light in different patterns that suggest different meanings. He favored "liberal religion" over "religious liberalism" because the latter reduced religion to mere adjective, like too much of Unitarian Universalism. A decade later he sought to head off the problem of relativism by adding to the fifth point that the various truths deriving form Truth differ in measure "according to the insight, receptivity, and behavior of the beholder." Truth is personalized in ways by which it can be judged; individual and collective acts that harm our collective well-being are sinful; acts that serve our collective well-being are saving. (5)
He loved his adopted UU tradition, but worried that it would shrivel and die if it did not make something like his own spiritual and intellectual course correction. Church's subsequent writings featured the five principles of his credo, sometimes explaining that the idea of the one light is Unitarian, while that of many windows is Universalist. Addressing the Unitarian Universalist Association's General Assembly in 2001, he accented the positive: "We Unitarian Universalists have inherited a magnificent theological legacy. In a sweeping answer to creeds that divide the human family, Unitarianism proclaims that we spring from a common source; Universalism that we share a common destiny." But he also warned that the UU tradition had little hope of flourishing if it did not become more "evangelical" in its theory and practice. Historically, Unitarianism was about the reality of a single God, and Universalism was about the promise of a shared salvation. But Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists had a pronounced tendency to divide over disagreements. They stressed their negations, assumed that only one person can be right in an argument, and mustered passion only for division. Church exhorted: "To make good on our theological inheritance, we must find a way to come together and proclaim a Universalism fit for the challenges of the 21st century." (6)
He reminded rationalist colleagues that he, too, had preached a gospel that clipped God's wings. Like a blindered lepidopterist he had netted, chloroformed, and mounted butterflies for observation, concluding, after long examination, that "butterflies don't fly." But mere Enlightenment empiricism had not worked for him, and it wasn't working for Unitarian Universalism. "To give my universalism full play, I had to make room in my theology for a more capricious, if unfathomable, power." He did not believe that UUs had to return to "the old universalist God," the name "God," or even to Emersonian mysticism, because Church did not believe in single answers. His credo honored many religious approached, excluding only the truth claims of absolutists. Moreover, he argued elsewhere that Emerson's sovereign individualism and "aversion to human intimacy" were non-starters for a progressive faith. But the UU tradition certainly needed an "affectionate relationship with the ground of our being." Otherwise, it was destined to "succumb to the temptation to divide it between our own and others' feet." (7)
He liked the metaphor of the holograph, describing three-dimensional holograms—laser recordings of images on a photo plate comprising thousands of tiny lenses—as analogies of divine reflexivity and transcendence. A single shard of a shattered photo plate contains the plate's entire image, just as each human cell contains the full genetic coding for a person's entire being: "The holograph suggests God's reflexive nature in a way that transforms our relationship not only with the divine, but with one another as well. Spun out of star-stuff, illuminated by God, we participate in the miracle we ponder." Noting his kinship to process theology, Church stressed that the best evidence for divine reality is within ordinary things and everyday experience: "The surest way to find the sacred is to decode our own experiences, not only of beauty ('heaven in a wildflower') but also in the sacraments of pain by which we commune with one another." (8)
Religious truth is very much like the truth of poetry, he argues. The text of both fields is creation, which theologians and poets strive to comprehend with limited tools and vision. If a poem can be validly interpreted in many ways, how can the same thing not be true of religious reality? Moreover, the human interpreters of God's poetry are always part of the poem itself. Church issued a warning: "If we Unitarian Universalists are unable to recognize the ground that we share, we shall remain only marginally effective in helping to articulate grounds on which all might stand as children of a mystery that unites far more profoundly than it distinguishes one child of life from another. To the extent that we fail in this mission, we betray our Universalist inheritance." (9)
Modern theology was a story of doubt and negation, and Unitarianism was an extreme example; Church compared modern theology to peeling the layers of an onion in search of its seed: "Eventually, nothing is left but our tears." When rationalism negates or displaces mystery, "our imagination and sense of wonder are just as likely to die as are the gods we pride ourselves for having killed." (10)
Equally committed to personal and public religion, Church wrote prolifically on both topics, fashioning sermons into book chapters. He was fond of saying that God is "the most famous liberal of all time." Like liberalism, God is generous, bounteous, and misunderstood, he explained. Every word that describes God is a synonym for liberal: "God is munificent and open-handed. The creation is exuberant, lavish, even prodigal. As the ground of our being, God is ample and plenteous. As healer and comforter, God is charitable and benevolent. As our redeemer, God is generous and forgiving." Above all, Church analogized, "God has a bleeding heart that simply never stops." Though "liberal" is not a big enough word to describe God, he allowed—God is far too liberal for that—the word "illiberal" never fits God: "God is not miserly, parsimonious, penurious, or stingy. God is not narrow or rigid." (11)
Church did not want his tradition to go all the way back to William Ellery Channing, who described himself as a Unitarian Christian, not as a Christian Unitarian. Only a small minority of Unitarian Universalists considered "Christian" an important modifier of their religious identity. Church spoke for that option. He was a Christian universalist, not a universalist Christian. Believing in the Light that shines through all windows, he allowed Christianity to refract and shape its meanings, modifying his universalism. There is such a thing as Buddhist or humanist universalism, he reasoned, but one cannot be a Universalist universalist, for it is impossible to perceive through every window. Universalist Christianity is another impossibility, because in that case the thing that modifies one's faith becomes its nominative: "Primary allegiance is relegated to one part of the whole that encompasses it." Church's ambition for Unitarian Universalism was to recover, with a multiperspectival and outward-reaching consciousness, the best parts of Emersonian transcendentalism. The best way to do that was to "band together, cultivate interdependence, build strong institutions, support them generously, and become more fully accepting and embracing of one another." If twenty-first-century Unitarian Universalists could do it, their traditions would finally emerge from Emerson's shadow into his light. (12)
ENDNOTES
(1) Forrest Church, Bringing God Home: A Traveller's Guide (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002), 190-91, "rational aridity," 236; Church, the Devil and Dr. Church: A Guide to Hell for Atheists and True Believers (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986); Church, The Seven Deadly Virtues: A Guide to Purgatory for Atheists and True Believers (San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1988).
(2) Church, Bringing God Home: A Traveler's Guide, quotes, 213, 148, 149, 150, 151.
(3) Forrest Church, "Universalism: A Theology for the 21st Century," UU World 15 (November/December 2001): 18-25, "God is," and "on the altar," 22; Church, Bringing God Home: A Traveler's Guide, "something more," 214.
(4) John A. Buehrens and Forrest Church, A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), quotes 8.
(5) Ibid., quotes, 84, 86-87, 160; Church, Bringing god Home; A Traveler's Guide, "according to," 222.
(6) Church, "Universalism: A Theology for the 21st Century," quotes 18, 19.
(7) Ibid., quotes 22; Forrest Church, "Emerson's Shadow," UU World 17 (March/April 2003): 29-31, "aversion," 30.
(8) Church, "Universalism: A Theology for the 21st Century," quotes 23.
(9) Ibid., quote, 25.
(10) Church, Bringing God Home: A Traveler's Guide, 214, 216.
(11) Forrest Church, God and Other Famous Liberals: Recapturing Bible, Flag, and Family from the Far Right (New York: Walker and Co., 1996), quotes, 3, 4.
(12) Church, Bringing God home: A Traveler's Guide, "primary," 217; Church, "Emerson's Shadow," "band together," 31.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 8:
LEADER RESOURCE 3: CHURCH'S THEOLOGY IN THE CONGREGATION
This is a 30-minute activity.
Materials
Preparation
Description
Distribute Handout 2 and invite participants to read (or review) it. Explain and summarize the ways in which Church draws from Unitarian and Universalist theological roots, using these or similar words:
Church calls upon us to look through our own theological Unitarian Universalist windowpanes. Tell them that according to Church, traditional Unitarianism posited a single God. Traditional Universalism offered the promise of a shared salvation. Universalism as well as the mystical Unitarianism of Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, Church insists, gave us an inclusive faith. For Church, awe and humility become the principal handmaidens of Universalism as a religious tradition inclusive of theological differences. Birth and death become the sacraments that unite us all in the shared mystery of life. And the surest way to find the sacred, Church insists, is to decode our own experiences—the beauty and the pain: "We all suffer. We are broken and in need of healing... Illumination shines from heart to heart. We discover the healing and saving power of the holy within the ordinary.
Invite participants to define in their own words what Church meant by the term "holy," writing their definition in their journals. Explain that they are not being asked to agree with him, but rather to state his claim in their own words. Allow five minutes for participants to reflect and write.
When time is up, invite participants to move into groups of three and read what they each think Church means when he uses the term "holy." Next invite them to reflect on their various definitions and establish how each of these definitions are linked back (for Church) to the emotional experience of awe and/or humility. Allow ten minutes for sharing.
Ask participants to remain in their small groups and consider, in silence, the question you have posted on newsprint and respond briefly in their journals—ideally, with a single sentence. Allow three minutes for reflection and writing. Then invite participants to share their sentence with the other members of their small group.
Re-gather the large group. Invite participants to share personal and small group insights about Church's use of the term "holy" and whether it makes personal sense to them to link this term to their own personal experiences of awe and humility as positive experiences. Ask: Is Church's idea of the "holy" reflected in the life of your congregation (whether or not Church's term is the one used)?
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 8:
LEADER RESOURCE 4: ENGAGING AS RELIGIOUS PROFESSIONALS
This is a 30-minute activity.
Materials
Preparation
Description
Forrest Church's personal stories concern two spiritually and emotionally charged topics: death and addiction. Distribute the story and invite participants to read (or review) it. When they are done, invite them to consider and discuss these questions:
Addiction
Death and Dying
FIND OUT MORE
Being Alive and Having to Die: The Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1534) by Dan Cryer (St. Martin’s Press, 2001).
A list of links to Forrest Church’s articles (at www.uuworld.org/about/authors/forrestchurch.shtml) can be found on the UU World website.
Forrest Church, "Universalism: A Theology for the 21st Century (at www.uuworld.org/2001/05/feature1.html)," UU World, November/December 2001.
Forrest Church, Bringing God Home: A Traveler's Guide (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002).
Gary Dorrien, "Recovering Transcendentalist Universalism," in The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony Postmodernity, 1950-2005 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).