WHAT MOVES US
A Tapestry of Faith Program for Adults
WORKSHOP 6: SOPHIA LYON FAHS
BY REV. DR. THANDEKA
© Copyright 2013 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/29/2014 11:53:39 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
The emotional impulses that urge [human]kind to be religious are a part of human nature everywhere and apparently always. We truly need to be religious. — Sophia Lyon Fahs
This workshop introduces Sophia Lyon Fahs' Theology of Religious Naturalism. For more than 80 years, Fahs developed and used her Theology of Religious Naturalism to show religious educators how to discover and nurture the emotional foundations of liberal faith.
For most of her professional life as a religious educator, professor, writer, editor, and public lecturer, Fahs developed and used her theological system to track basic human emotions and show how they become religious emotions. To this end, her Theology of Religious Naturalism, which she called her "natural humanism," explored five basic emotional urges and needs she believed were foundational to the religious experiences of liberal faith. She believed the task of religious educators in particular and religious professionals (clergy and laity) in general was not only to recognize these core, ever-present, human emotional states, but also to develop programs that could transform these basic feelings into religious experiences of joy and wonder and more: personal religious experiences, as she put it, of God's presence in the natural world.
As a Union Theological Seminary professor; as founding editor of The New Beacon Series in Religious Education for the American Unitarian Association; as creator of new experientially-based, progressive models for religious education; and finally as an ordained minister, Fahs revolutionized liberal, systematic theological reflections on the links among human emotion, faith, and science. By so doing, she helped to create the 1930s renaissance era of American Unitarianism. She worked tirelessly throughout her life to create a liberal theology that recognized human emotions and human experience as foundational building blocks for an enlightened, scientifically informed, liberal faith. Are these building blocks Fahs established foundational for our own Unitarian Universalist faith experiences today? This workshop tests the relevancy of Fahs' theological legacy for our lives as Unitarian Universalists today.
Please note that Fahs uses the term "man" inclusively to mean all human beings. You may choose to make her language gender inclusive whenever this change will enhance participants' understanding of Fahs' basic concerns and claims about all persons.
Before leading this workshop, review the Accessibility Guidelines for Workshop Presenters found in the program Introduction.
Preparing to lead this workshop
Read one or more of the following for background information:
Read Leader Resource 2, Why Teach Religion in an Age of Science? by Sophia L. Fahs. Fahs' basic answer to her title question can be summarized as follows:
Emotional needs and impulses create and sustain scientific explorations and moral concerns. Religious educators pay attention to such needs and impulses in order to help transform them into moral and religious values that create and sustain ethical behavior. The task of religious educators is to show children (and adults) how to kindle and sustain their own basic emotions for the sake of ethical action and universal empathy toward others. While physical and social science perspectives and insights must inform theological and moral thinking, the search for meaning is not a scientific task; it is a religious task.
Here are some guides to help you reflect upon Fahs' theological rationale and strategy as elucidated in Leader Resource 2. You may wish to write your reflections in your theology journal:
Fahs' definition of "religion in general" and her use of the term "God."
Fahs reminds her readers that she is not asking the question: "Why teach the Christian religion in an age of science?" She intends to study "religion" shorn of doctrine and tradition, putting aside the different doctrines that distinguish various religious traditions from one another, in order to discover what unites them today as religion in a scientific age: (1) basic human emotions (e.g. wonderment) and (2) human thoughts and expression regarding those emotional experiences.
Fahs rejects traditional biblically based doctrinal notions because they are often scientifically counterfactual. For Fahs, however, the ongoing use of the term God is not scientifically counterfactual because the reference for this term is flexible. (See Leader Resource 3.)
Basic human needs, impulses, and emotions.
Fahs distinguishes basic human needs and impulses from the religious emotions she believes emerge from them. Fahs characterizes each of five basic human needs and impulses that religion addresses at a basic emotional level: (1) an instinctive urge to keep alive and avoid death; (2) wonderment; (3) love and the dread of being alone; (4) the emotional need to resolve conflicting emotional impulses in an ordered way; and (5) the basic emotional need for idealized selves as heroes and/or divinity.
For reflection: Choose one of these five emotional needs (or a feeling within you that seems akin to it). Next, think of an emotional experience you would describe as a religious experience (e.g., awe, wonder, reverence). Can you think of an emotional experience that you would not describe as a religious experience? What is the difference? Compare and contrast the two personal emotional experiences. Why would you (or would you not) call one of the two emotional experiences a religious experience and, more precisely, a Unitarian Universalist religious experience?
Fahs makes a distinction between the two sets of experiences, believing that the role of the religious educator is to create the opportunity for a religious experience by helping a person think about and experience the same "general" emotion (e.g., wonderment) as a "religious" emotion. Based on your reflection on your own experience, does Fahs' distinction make sense to you? On what basis do you decide whether an emotional experience is a religious (or spiritual) emotional experience? Do you believe the basic distinction Fahs' makes between 'ordinary' emotions and 'religious' emotions is sound?
Religion is at risk of losing its relevance.
Fahs argues, "[Yet] if religion is to survive in a day of advancing scientific discoveries, it must find a way to be on the one hand intellectually sound, and on the other hand emotionally satisfying." She calls for a reformation of traditional religious beliefs about human nature, the universe, and the natural world and the discarding of antiquated doctrines, ideas, and dogma. According to Fahs, there is thrill, awe and mystery when our bodies and the rest of the universe are viewed at a subatomic level. The God of humanity, the God of gravitation, the God of hydrogen atoms, and the God of higher sentient beings is one and the same God.
For reflection: Have you ever had an experience you would call "mystical"? Do you agree with Fahs' assessment of mystical experience and her attempt to broaden the definition of mystical experience beyond the strictures of traditional religious doctrine?
Development of emotional empathy using personal experience.
Fahs believes that if we pay careful attention to a fundamental emotional feeling intently enough, with an open, reflective mind, we will move into a religious emotional state of empathy towards ourselves and towards others. She writes, "The development of moral and spiritual values today involves not so much the courage to fight for the right against the wrong, as the patience to understand the wrong, its causes and its meanings. It involves also learning the arts of negotiation and empathy."
For reflection: Consider an example from your own life in which you used the arts of negotiation and empathy to assess a moral issue. How did you develop this skill? What can help you strengthen it?
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Opening | 5 |
Activity 1: Recalling Emotional and Religious Experiences | 15 |
Activity 2: Introducing Sophia Lyon Fahs | 25 |
Activity 3: Testing Fahs | 25 |
Activity 4: Religious Experience and Unitarian Universalist Experience | 15 |
Closing | 5 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
Read Leader Resource 3, Thoughts on the Word God. Use these questions to help you find connections between your own theology and Fahs'. You may wish to write your answers 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 read aloud Reading 439 in Singing the Living Tradition, "We gather in reverence," by Sophia Lyon Fahs. Invite participants to join in reading aloud the opening words you have posted on newsprint, "We are here to abet creation" by Annie Dillard.
ACTIVITY 1: RECALLING EMOTIONAL AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Project or distribute copies of Leader Resource 1. Introduce the workshop using these or similar words:
Sophia Lyon Fahs described the origins of her own theology, her religious philosophy of life as she put it, as an earnest attempt to learn how to lead worship services and religious education programs for children. She wanted these services to be based on the children's own experiences of life rather than on doctrinaire creedal claims and other religious dogma children did not understand but were nevertheless expected to learn, believe, mime, and espouse. She wanted children to have experiences that would lead them into the realm of religion. With this in mind, she called upon religious educators to "strive for a deeper understanding of the motives and emotional biases that the children bring with them into their religious study." To help children find the emotional foundations of religious faith, Fahs insisted that she and fellow educators must first find these feelings within themselves. Only then, Fahs concluded, will religious educators have the experiences and skills required to not only ask but also to help children recall "some of their own personal unforgettable experiences, which they may not have labeled as religious although they engendered deeper or more expansive feelings, emotions, and thoughts than usual."
For more than 80 years, Fahs developed and used her Theology of Religious Naturalism to show religious educators how to discover and nurture the emotional foundations of their own liberal faith. Fahs called upon all of us to explore personal, unforgettable emotional experiences with "the questioning mind." She urged all of us to observe our own emotional feelings and track how our emotions become religious emotions.
Invite participants to think of an emotional experience they would describe as a religious experience (e.g., awe and wonder). Now ask if they can think of an emotional experience they would not describe as a religious experience. How do they differ? Invite participants to write or draw their reflections in their theology journal. Allow five minutes for this exercise.
ACTIVITY 2: INTRODUCING SOPHIA LYON FAHS (25 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Introduce Sophia Lyon Fahs as a 20th-century progressive religious educator and one of the creators of modern American theological liberalism. Read or convey this biographical information:
Born in 1876 to Presbyterian missionary parents in China, Fahs embraced progressive educational principles when she was a graduate student at Columbia University's Teachers College, then as a divinity student at Union Theological School in New York. Following graduation, she joined Union's faculty in 1927. Fahs came of age as a major new force in liberal religious education as young liberal parents and disenchanted orthodox parents increasingly sought out new models of religious education for their children. She actively created and shaped the progressive Sunday School at Riverside Church in New York.
For more than 80 years as a professional educator, practical theologian and author, Fahs strove to create a theology that restored human emotions and human experience to their rightful place as foundational building blocks for an enlightened liberal faith. She devoted her life to the big questions rather than to the big answers.
Fahs was Children's Editor for the Unitarian "The New Beacon Series" from 1937, at age 61, until her retirement fourteen years later in 1951. As editor, author, or co-author of more than a dozen books, she "addressed children directly using vivid stories from around the world." She said: "We wish children to come to know God directly through original approaches of their own to the universe." Fahs devoted her life to discovering the questions that led to answers that included God-talk. She joined a Unitarian Church in 1945, and was ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1959, at age 82, in what is now the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Maryland.
Distribute Handout 1, which contains more detail about her life, and Handout 2, which is a story about her life written for fourth and fifth grade children, for participants to take home
Distribute the story, Fahs' Religious Education Experiences. Invite volunteers to read Fahs' anecdotes and her observations and conclusions. Explain that Fahs' goal in her work was to bring the whole of Nature into the area of ethical concern and religious appreciation. Fahs used this religious naturalism—or "natural humanism," as she also called this method of theological reflection—in order to address what she characterized as five basic emotional needs. Indicate the prepared newsprint as you describe them.
Explain to participants Fahs' conclusion that when these needs are attended to and encouraged, we become aware of a personal feeling of the greatness within ourselves that creates an ongoing questioning attitude of mind and leads us and our children to talk about God. According to Fahs, the word God includes two concepts: "A Creative Power entering from outside, and a Creative Power that has always been inherent and within." She believed that "Some word or group of words is needed to express this Creativity." The term God, for Fahs as a humanist, thus refers to the personal, emotional experience of an external and internal Creative Power.
Post the questions you have prepared. Invite participants to consider Fahs' stories with the questions as a guide, writing or drawing their responses in their theology journal.
Allow ten minutes for this exercise.
ACTIVITY 3: TESTING FAHS (25 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to move into groups of three and share their reflections about the two stories from Activity 2 with their small group members. Allow ten minutes.
Tell them when time is up.
Then, ask participants to consider once again the experiences about which they journaled in Activity 1. Invite them to use the questions posted on newsprint to reflect on their experiences. Ask them to respond first in their theology journals and then to share their reflections, feelings, and thoughts in their small groups. Allow 20 minutes. Remind participants to refrain from commenting upon or critiquing each other's personal reflections and encourage them to simply share their own personal reflections and listen deeply to one another from a place of heartfelt engagement. Remind them that after everyone has spoken, if there is time they might share in a final round their thoughts, feelings, and insights based on this small group exercise.
Signal when time is up, and re-gather the large group.
ACTIVITY 4: RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST EXPERIENCE (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Remind participants that Fahs moved beyond her conservative Presbyterian roots. She did not, however, become a member of a group called "religion in general," but instead became a Unitarian, a member of a particular religious tradition. Invite participants to take five minutes to reflect in their theology journals on the ways in which Fahs' theology speaks to contemporary Unitarian Universalists. Indicate the questions you have posted on newsprint, inviting them to respond to one or more of the questions in their reflection.
When time is up, ask them to compose a one-sentence statement to share with the large group, based on their reflections about Fahs' relevance to contemporary Unitarian Universalists. Allow two minutes for participants to compose the sentences. Then, explain that each person will have an opportunity to read their sentence to the large group—without elaboration. Invite volunteers to read theirs. To conclude, ask for final insights and reflections.
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 Reading 616 in Singing the Living Tradition, For So the Children Come, a beloved reading of Fahs, often read in Unitarian Universalist congregations at Christmas time. Note that Singing the Journey Hymn 1061 offers a musical setting of this poem. 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
The emotional impulses that urge [human]kind to be religious are a part of human nature everywhere and apparently always. We truly need to be religious. — Sophia Lyon Fahs
What core emotional needs of yours are foundational to your personal Unitarian Universalist faith? Reflect on how these needs might be better nurtured in your immediate faith community. Might this be a topic for small group ministry work or another kind of spiritual group work?
Are children part of your life, or do you know some children in your congregation? Pay attention to the way they engage with the world. Engage them in conversation, inviting their questions, thoughts, and feelings about the wonders of life.
Faith in Action
Reflect on what Fahs said about the dissolution of traditional human categories and dualities:
The ethical questions we must face almost never present merely two clear cut possibilities—the right and the wrong... The development of moral and spiritual values today involves not so much the courage to fight for the right against the wrong, as the patience to understand the wrong, its causes and its meanings. It involves also learning the arts of negotiation and empathy... The unique historical memories in our special religious cultures call today for less loyalty and more understanding, less praise and more honest self-criticism. Our direction needs to be forward.
Join an interfaith project in your community where you can explore and express with people of other faiths what you have in common. In their calling to the work you share together, do you observe some of the impulses and needs that Fahs described? Are these the same impulses and needs that drew you to commit to your Unitarian Universalist faith community?
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 6:
STORY: FAHS' RELIGIOUS EDUCATION EXPERIENCES
Excerpted from Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds, by Sophia Lyon Fahs. Copyright (C) 1965 by Sophia Lyon Fahs. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
Two first-person anecdotes from Fahs' experiences as a religious educator, each followed by her analysis.
First anecdote
As long as I live I do not expect to forget that morning during one of our Junior Department services of worship when I had vivid evidence that some of the boys and girls, at least, felt an exhilaration in their realization of being linked with the ages. We had been discussing how old we were and when we really began. We traveled in imagination step by step back from our own birthdays to the time of our conception, then on to our parents' birthdays, and to our grandparents', and our great grandparents' and so on, and on. We decided finally that something now within our bodies must have been living hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago. We could never get back to our own beginnings. We must then all be very, very, very old; or at least something within us must be billions of years old.
Fahs' reflections
The experience was a thrilling one for me, but I had not expected to find it had been even more thrilling to some of the children. I learned later that, after the service was over, a group of boys in one class ran down the stairs to their classroom in order to greet their teacher when she arrived later, with the gleeful declaration "Hurrah! We are as old as you are! We are as old as you are!"
Such experiences may not come often, yet they are beyond price when they are experienced. Nor are they usually generated in children's groups through some generalized talk about the universe. Such experiences arise more often when some simple concrete meditation in questioning one thing or one event is elicited.
In some of our church schools it has become almost a habit for the leader of the services of worship to have some natural object, or objects, on an altar or table in the chancel or on the platform where it may become the center of attention and awaken curiosity. Perhaps the object is a branch of autumn leaves, a rose or lily, a flowering plant, an unusual stone, or a bowl of apples or oranges...
Sermonizing through object lessons for children is no newly-discovered art. It has long been known that an object that can be seen is highly successful as a device to awaken children's interests; and that from the visible, one can direct attention to the invisible.
If, however, we truly believe in a religion nurtured in [such] realistic natural experiences rather than in visions of supernatural events, we have a different reason for starting by asking questions of things that boys and girls can see and handle. Rather than using things in order to find spiritual lessons from them, we consider things in order to discover more of their own nature. In the terminology of today's philosophers, we would say, in order to know them "existentially."
Second anecdote
Wendell and Jimmie in our sixth-grade class could have helped me lead a service of worship, had I been sensitive enough at the time to see the possibilities. For one day in class Wendell had said, "Some one says that if you boiled all the chemicals in your body down and sold them, they'd be worth only seven cents. It's the way you're put together that's the hard part." And Jimmie had added: "just chemicals can't have children."
Fahs' reflections
We might have filled a table with containers holding samples of the different chemical elements in one human body. What dynamic questions might have been awakened! How reverently we would have felt as together we stood before the Great Mystery of Life!
We need not labor to reach up into another realm to feel the touch of Infinity. Although it is far off, yet it is also nearer than hands or feet. We can never know anything, even the most microscopic bit of matter or protoplasm, without facing what eludes our understanding and even our imagination. As Rufus Jones once said, "There is a more yet in our very being." There is a "more yet" in every being, in every thing. It is really not strange that what mankind has believed is in a "supernatural" realm can already be here in the natural.
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow... ," said Jesus. "Consider the flower in the crannied wall," said Tennyson.
"Consider anything you please," says the Zen Buddhist, "but just consider it not as a symbol of eternity, as God in miniature, as a moral lesson. But just consider it."
By way of summary, let us rethink the four needed revisions in our personal attitudes and philosophies that have been suggested if, in our generation, we can hope to keep our minds and hearts working in harmony together. First is the greater emphasis we need to put on understanding inner feelings, especially motivations and unconscious assumptions. Second is the significance of learning to face life's issues realistically and understandingly. Third is the need not only for a natural humanism, but also for a religious naturalism that brings the whole of Nature into the area of ethical concern and religious appreciation. And finally the need to question concrete bits of Reality until we feel the nearness of the Universal. Other equally important changes may have been omitted. These here considered, however, are worthy of much meditation and will require persistent learning in actual experiencing.
We are left with a feeling of the greatness of our unknowing, and with the need for a continuing questioning attitude of mind.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 6:
HANDOUT 1: INTRODUCING SOPHIA LYON FAHS
One of the creators of modern American theological liberalism, Sophia Lyon Fahs was also the progenitor of American Unitarian religious education as a modern theological science of human emotions.
Born in 1876 to Presbyterian missionary parents in China, she embraced progressive educational principles when she was a graduate student at Columbia University's Teachers College, and later, as a divinity student at Union Theological School in New York. Following graduation, she joined Union's faculty in 1927. Fahs came of age as a major new force in liberal religious education at a time when young, liberal parents and disenchanted orthodox parents increasingly sought out new models of religious education for their children. Fahs preached and stoked emotional enthusiasm. She was, in this way, deeply influenced by John Dewey and his interpreters at Columbia University and Teachers College. She also actively created and shaped the progressive Sunday School at Riverside Church in New York. She had learned from John Dewey that teaching, as he put it, "is an art [and that] the teacher's own claim to rank as an artist is measured by [the teacher's] ability to foster the attitude of the artist in those who study with him [or her], whether they be youth or little children." Teachers, Dewey insisted, must "succeed in arousing enthusiasm, in communicating large ideas, in evoking energy... the final test [of the teaching being] whether the stimulus thus given to wide aims succeeds in transforming itself into power, that is to say, into the attention to detail that ensures mastery over means of execution. If not, the zeal flags, the interest dies out, the ideal becomes a clouded memory."
For more than 80 years as a professional educator, practical theologian, and author, Fahs strove to create a theology that restored human emotions and human experience to their rightful place as foundational building blocks for an enlightened liberal faith.
Biographer Edith Hunter notes that by the time she was 90, in 1966, Fahs' life had "touched four distinct theological generations of American Protestantism:" (1) the period from 1880 to 1905 of missionary enthusiasm with its goal of "the evangelization of the world in [the present] generation;" (2) the Social Gospel Movement period from 1905 to 1930 which "sought to transform an unjust social order into a just one through the application of the ethics of the historical Jesus;" (3) the rise of a new theological orthodoxy between 1930 and 1955 spearheaded by liberal theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich whose idealism, sundered by the Great Depression and World War II, turned into a new realism that espoused social justice ethics linked to a traditional, conservative assessment of the fallen state of human nature through sin; and finally (4) the rise of the Radical theologians, the New Atheists, and the Death-of-God theologians who rejected the notion of a personal God who benevolently intervenes in human affairs. Fahs was "a product, an observer, a participant, and to some extent a creator" (or more precisely a co-creator with other stellar figures) of this modern history of American Protestantism.
Fahs devoted her life to the big questions rather than to the big answers. As she put it:
In the great religions, especially those of the Western world, the accent has been upon beliefs and convictions, rather than upon questioning. In fact the distinguishing marks between the different religious sects have been, for the most part, the differences in their beliefs. Although beliefs are important we need to remind ourselves that they are the fruits of experience, and that in the natural world each new life begins with its own seed. As parents of children and as educators, we need to practice looking beneath the convictions to find the earlier experiences that awakened the questions which in turn called forth the answers given as convictions.
Fahs was Children's Editor for the Unitarian New Beacon Series from 1937, at age 61, until her retirement 14 years later in 1951. As editor, author, or co-author of more than a dozen books, she "addressed children directly using vivid stories from around the world." As one of her biographers observes, Fahs drew on "anthropological and psychological research... dedicated to one goal." Fahs summarized this goal: "We wish children to come to know God directly through original approaches of their own to the universe."
Although contemporary examination of Fahs' stories reveals that she oversimplified complex histories and peoples too readily in order to make them into children's fables and sometimes reduced complex lives to racial caricature, her work was ground-breaking in its time. Fahs' motto as a theologian, philosopher, and educator was: Emotional experience first. As she wrote in Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds:
Neither our classrooms nor our services of worship can profitably be turned in to debating societies. Neither will a silent evasion of all the issues encourage serious original thoughtfulness. The varied ideas that have been gathered up in to this three-letter word God are too pivotal in our study of religious history to be evaded. Thoughts of God are still too dominant in our Western society and too intimately [influential of] our common emotional life to be disregarded.
In what spirit then and by what techniques can we initiate and guide discussion of God among us?
Fahs devoted her life to discovering the questions that led to answers that included God-talk.
Fahs joined a Unitarian Church in 1945, and was ordained in 1959, at age 82, in what is now the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Maryland, as a Unitarian minister.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 6:
HANDOUT 2: LEARNING BY HEART — SOPHIA LYON FAHS
This story, written by Polly Peterson, is included in the fourth and fifth grade Tapestry of Faith curriculum, Faithful Journeys.
"Mama, Mama, why do we just keep going and going and not going anywhere?" asked little Sophie. Her family was crossing the wide Pacific Ocean on a big ship bound for America. Sophie Lyon was an American girl, three and a half years old, making her first trip to America. She and her older brothers and sisters had all been born in China where their father was an evangelical Christian minister and their mother had started a school for Chinese girls.
When they made that the long trip to America in 1880, Sophie's parents thought their family would go back to China after one year. But the plans changed, and Sophie never returned to China. As she grew up, her memories of China grew dim. But she hoped when she grew up she could go to other countries as a Christian teacher, like her parents.
In college, Sophie joined a club for young people who also wanted to become Christian teachers. She met another devoted volunteer named Harvey Fahs. They began writing letters to each other, and made plans to travel and teach together. Six years later, they were married. But instead of traveling to another country, Sophie and Harvey moved to New York City. Harvey had a job, and Sophia Lyon Fahs taught Sunday school and continued her studies, excited about the new ideas she was learning.
Sophia and Harvey's first child was born in 1904. In those days, many women gave up their outside work after they became mothers. But Sophia was determined to keep learning and to keep teaching Sunday school, and she did. As it turned out, being a mother also helped Sophia learn! She learned about children from being with her own children and listening to their ideas and questions. (You may want to pause here and solicit children's comments on ways children can teach adults.)
When her children asked questions, Sophia tried her best to answer them. Her children had very interesting questions, like "Where does snow come from?" and "Where are we before we are born?" As she tried to answer her children's questions, Sophia learned how much she did not know! You might think not having all the answers took away Sophia's faith, but it was the opposite. She started to believe that to have a strong faith, finding questions you really care about is just as important as finding answers.
One time when Sophia taught a religious education class, she told a lively story about a real person who had been a Christian teacher in another country. The children were eager to hear the story and eager to talk about it. Like her own children at home, the children asked questions — the interesting kind of questions that let Sophia know they were thinking and learning.
Sophia's ideas about religion changed over time. As a young person, she had thought Christianity was the one true religion and people all over the world should learn Bible stories. She grew to realize the Bible was not the only book with truth in it. She collected stories from all over the world, filled with truth and beauty to help children's spirits stretch and grow. She published the stories in a book called From Long Ago and Many Lands.
In those days, when most adults thought children's minds were like empty jars to fill with learning, Sophia thought differently. She thought children were more like gardens, already planted with seeds of possibility for learning and growing. She thought a teacher's job was to provide the good soil and water and sunlight a garden needs to grow. In religious school, a teacher could help children grow in their spirit and faith.
(Ask: What do you think would help a child grow in spirit? What should church school teachers like us give you, to help you grow?
Affirm or suggest: Teachers can give children a safe place to learn; tools, such as books and art supplies and music. We can show you how adults worship, sing, and celebrate together in faith. We can help you know when your actions are faithful ones, for goodness and justice. We can take you on field trips and tell you stories. But no one can give a child wisdom or faith or spiritual growth. These things can only grow from within. People learn by experiencing the world for themselves — by feeling their own feelings, and by seeing and touching and doing. That is what Sophia Fahs believed.)
When Sophia Fahs wrote about her beliefs, the president of the American Unitarian Association was impressed. He asked her to talk to Unitarian religious educators — people such as (insert your own name(s) and/or the name of your director of religious education). Unitarian Sunday school teachers liked her ideas very much. And that is why, when you come here, we encourage you to see, and touch, and do ... and to ask lots of questions.
When she was 82 years old, Sophia became a Unitarian minister. Her own life was a great example of her belief that every person in a congregation should continue to learn and grow, from the smallest child to the oldest adult. Sophia Fahs lived a long, long time — 102 years — and she never stopped learning new things.
If she were alive today and came to visit us, Sophia Fahs would want to know about our experiences, like the ones we have posted on our Faithful Journeys Path, and how they have helped us learn and grow. She would want to know what stories we have read and how they have helped to awaken our spirits. She would want to know how we ask questions, seek answers, and learn from each other. Imagine how happy she would be to see us watering one another's seeds of spiritual growth in Faithful Journeys today.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 6:
LEADER RESOURCE 1: SOPHIA LYON FAHS PORTRAIT
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 6:
LEADER RESOURCE 2: WHY TEACH RELIGION IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE?
This was Sophia Lyon Fahs' 1960 Rufus Jones lecture, published by the Committee on Religious Education, Friends General Conference, Philadelphia, PA, 1960. Used by permission.
We are gathered this evening to honor Rufus Jones—writer, philosopher, mystic, and, to those privileged to know him, a "radiant personality." His life was in itself a memorable symbol of the importance of teaching religion in an age of science. For forty years, to ten generations of students at Haverford College, he taught religion. Perhaps some here this evening were among his students and you may feel like saying as one student did, "Rufus Jones lighted my candle." To his colleagues in the philosophy of religion, he was the most noted scholarly interpreter of religious mysticism in his time. Through his courage and creative initiative, he was largely responsible for the organization and promotion of the early work of the Friends Service Committee in Europe. The effectiveness of his spiritual leadership is shown by the 12,000,000 [dollars] given by Quakers, in response to his call for food for the starving children of Germany. Rufus Jones' religion was of the mind and heart and hand; it was "an open religion"—open to what, in his poetic way, he called "the life-giving environment of the soul."
A goodly number of years ago, after I had given one of my first talks to an audience of Friends in Philadelphia, one of George Fox's very forthright and honest disciples shook my hand vigorously, and said: "I don't believe a word thee said this evening, but I believe in thee." This was one of the most memorable and appreciated compliments I ever received. In that short moment I discovered in an unforgettable way what it means to be a true Quaker. Since that evening I have never been afraid to speak my mind to an audience of Friends. I mention this memory because some of you this evening may find yourselves in a position not wholly unlike that of this unforgotten Friend. You may find yourselves much dissatisfied with the ideas I shall express. I am far from being satisfied with them myself. All I desire of you is that you turn them over in your minds with sympathy, trusting my primary intent, and that you will, if you feel the need, discard them with full candor.
THE IMPORT OF OUR QUESTION
The question "Why teach religion in an age of science?" we may regard merely as an opening to lead us into other questions. You will note that we have not asked "Why teach the Christian religion in an age of science?" This might have been a very worthwhile subject. Other groups, with equal pertinence, might ask: Why teach the Buddhist religion? Or why teach Judaism? Or the Moslem religion? We have, however, used the general term "religion" because from our point of view the educational process in an age of science should no longer be regarded as the transmission of one faith in order to seek commitment to it. We are assuming an open-ended education in religious thinking and living which makes room for intelligent change, in response to new knowledge and new insights. We are really asking: Do we need to educate in the general field of religion in the same spirit that we use in other areas of knowledge? Shall we nurture religious living through free, open and direct observation, experimentation, and imagination?
You realize, no doubt, that this is not the usual way of teaching religion. Even in our own country, where we have established what we call "freedom of religion," each separate religious sect or church, for the most part, regards its educational responsibility to be to teach its particular form of religion. The Jews teach Judaism. Christians teach Christianity. To educate children, or even adults, in religion, without pointing the process definitely toward the acceptance of one religion, would seem to most people to be unthinkable. It is my purpose, however, this evening to show why a non-sectarian intent is needed in an age of science if man is to preserve the values "religion" has for his evolving life.
WHAT THEN CAN WE MEAN BY THE GENERAL WORD "RELIGION?"
If then we do not limit our goal to the achieving of adherence to a specific religion, to discipleship to one teacher, to the acceptance of one Savior, to loyalty to one recorded heritage, or to obedience to one God, how shall we define religion?
If a general concept of even some simple, tangible thing, such as a chair, for instance, is to be gained, it is needful to see at least several objects like it and yet a little different from it. But the significance of the differences between the objects can not be adequately assessed unless one finds out what the thing is for and why it was made.
So in considering what we mean by the general term "religion," we should examine different religions to find out their likenesses and their differences. Yet we can not discover the significance of these until we find some answer to the more basic question. What emotional and practical desires and needs did these different religions try to meet? What were these religions for?
When a given object or movement has a long history, it is usually most profitable to examine first of all the reason for its origin. What functions did it perform during the earliest stages of its development? Such a question is especially important when we are dealing with so subtle and complicated a human activity as "religion." So we must ask: Why did human beings ever start being religious? Was early man impelled to try out certain religious beliefs and practices because of his very nature, and the actual problems he faced in his efforts to exist in this natural world? Or did the first man and woman become religious because they were told to do so, because they were able to see God walking in the garden of Eden beside them and he explained to them what was right and what was wrong? Putting the question in another way: did the first humans create their own religious beliefs and practices naturally because they needed them, or have mankind's religions been given him by divine and supernatural revelations, since God knew man needed religion?
With this audience I shall assume that we share the point of view, taken by all (or almost all) present-day anthropologists, archaeologists and historians, namely that the religions of the world grew out of man's "existential predicament," as Dr. Paul Tillich would say. Man was impelled to be religious because he felt he needed something he had not yet found. He needed to try out ways of doing things he had not yet tried. I am, therefore, making bold to name five of these most basic needs or impulses. Others might well be added had we more time to discuss them. These five, however, I believe are crucial and so may give us some clue to an answer to the question "Why teach religion in an. age of science?"
FIVE BASIC NEEDS IMPELLING MANKIND TO BE RELIGIOUS
The first, and possibly the most urgent need that impelled early man to become religious was his instinctive urge to keep alive and avoid death. His earliest painted prayers, so far discovered, preserved for us from fifteen to twenty thousand years on the rocky walls of caves and cliffs, were the serious experimental efforts of our early ancestors to increase their food supply, and to protect themselves from the hostile assaults of the animals about them, and from the destructive powers in the large elemental forces of nature.
This basic human impulse to save one's life in the presence of danger has been shared by all other living species; yet insects, birds, fish and other mammals do not pray so far as we know. Why not? Because, as it is now quite generally believed, Homo Sapiens had inherited a much more capable mind than any other species; and in the process of his evolution he had kept his powers of adaptation more flexible. Man was more able to change, than were the other species, to meet his needs and he used his better and larger brain imaginatively. He did not merely run from fire. He learned how to make his own fires. Death must have frightened him, but he did not frantically surrender to his fears. He began wondering what it was like to be dead. Where had his woman gone, now that her body was stiff and cold? In his dreams he heard her talk to him. He could not see her. She may have scolded him, or blamed him for her dying. So perhaps, half out of love for her, and half out of fear, some man in that long ago time was the first to put some kind of gifts beside her body before he covered it over.
Even thus in those most primitive days, man began sensing a Mystery in Life—in himself, in his comrades and even in the animals he slew for food. He began wondering. Did the animals also keep alive after death? Were they angry at him for killing them? But what could man do? He had to hunt to survive, and yet even in those earliest times, he began feeling guilty about it. The interpretation given by modern scholars is that the wonderful animal paintings and sculptured forms found in these ancient caves in France and Spain are man's painted prayers to the animals for their forgiveness. If this be so, it is then evident that man's earliest forms of religion grew out of his deepest and most instinctive impulse to survive, in spite of the threats to his life that he had to face.
In the second place, early man seems to have had an impulse to know more than he was born knowing. Like Kipling's Elephant's Child, he had a "satiable curiosity." His first why's and how's and what for's probably began even before he could put his questions into words. Wise Old Nature seems to have hidden her secrets everywhere, as if to lure living minds to wonder and explore. Like a mystery story billions of years long it has held the minds of men in dramatic suspense. Always, from the beginning until now, it has been the unsolved problem, the unknown factors, the invisible, intangible elements that have kept man's wondering and questioning alive. His basic impulse to know more and yet more has been at the root of the development of religion.
A third basic human need that has impelled man to form religions for himself (put negatively) has been the dread of being isolated and alone and the frantic fear and sense of helplessness associated with it. Put positively, is the deep and unending need to be loved by someone else and to be able to give love in return. Again this seems to be an instinctive craving that dates its simple beginnings in lower animals, in an urge for some kind of togetherness. Even one-celled animalcules have been found to thrive better and to live longer when nurtured in groups than when each is kept in isolation. The human baby's need for sincere and loving contacts has often been confirmed by modern scientific research. It has become an axiom among pediatricians that "tender loving care" (t.l.c.) is even more important to a young child's healthy growth than is the proper milk. The tragedy of feeling isolated because of neglect, rejection, or hate, is clearly evidenced in our mental hospitals and in our prisons. Sometimes one human friend alone who can be depended upon is able to change the whole course of life for a delinquent youth. In rare instances, belief in a divine lover has partially satisfied the longing when human lovers were not to be found. But when no human friend can be found, it seems to be very difficult for anyone to believe in a loving God.
The most ancient images of human deities as yet found, are images of pregnant mother goddesses. Images and orgiastic temple ceremonies and dances have been created primarily to arouse and to satisfy physical love. On a higher level of character development, the great moments that many of the saints have described as mystical have been rapturous with love. George Fox described one of his unforgettable mystical experiences in this way:
I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and. death, but I saw that there was an infinite Ocean of light and life and love that flows' over the ocean of darkness.
To George Fox this was a vision. Described in the psychological terminology of today, we might say that George Fox had delved so deeply into the darkness of his unconscious that he felt that not only he himself but all things were embraced by a Love that was of cosmic proportions. There is much evidence to show that the religions of mankind, from the most primitive to the noblest and most spiritual, have arisen out of a universal yearning or desperate need for something that is covered in the general word Love.
A fourth basic need that led mankind to become religious was the need to organize and integrate his life. On the one hand there was the personal need to build some kind of hierarchy of values so that conflicting emotional impulses might be harmonized and actions controlled. This need led man to formulate his ethics into codes of law, and to find, if possible, some higher authority than the individual conscience, or even higher than the conscience of humanity itself, in order to maintain this controlled order.
This need for organization also led mankind to formulate some kind of cosmology, or theology, that would give him a unified picture of himself within his world. For Christians, the Old Story of Salvation did this. Believers could see themselves as real actors in a cosmic drama. To strengthen themselves, they could rehearse the scenes in ritual and dance. They could relive the great crises in the long centuries of struggle, and they could learn to expect a final frightening destiny or the glory of everlasting salvation. Many even in our generation still find this old cosmic drama emotionally compelling.
This need for organization is another primary need, so ageless and universal that it has been found even in the lowest forms of life. The biologist has found organization in the simplest single cell; the psychological scientists have found organization essential to the health of the psyche or spirit. The sick mental patient is the one whose impulses are disorganized, or whose impulses are organized around a hostile or mischosen center. Life necessitates some organization, and in mankind's religions he has endeavored to help himself, or to find help beyond himself, to gain this end. It is therefore not strange that students of history have found that the gods that men have imagined were from early days ethical guides, law givers and rulers.
A fifth basic emotional need which has deeply influenced man's religious development is the personal need of every man for some kind of super-ego, or internalized ideal. Most of humanity, if not all, need to have this ideal or super-ego incarnated in some actual person who can be admired or loved. A historical person may serve as the symbol, if no relative or friend or contemporary hero is available, and provided the historical character can be resurrected in the imagination to live again in the present. The influence of this basic emotional need is dearly apparent in the great and long-lasting religions of the world. For this reason men have instinctively clung to the memories of their great innovators and heroes, and many times, have transformed these ideal personalities into gods.
These then are at least five of the basic human impulses or needs that have constrained humans to form their religions. First, the fundamental impulse simply to keep alive and to avoid death; second, an impulse to know the unknown, to peer through the seen into the unseen—to delve into the mysteries of existence; third (stated positively), the need for friendly companionship, or the yearning to love and to be loved, and (stated negatively) the need to escape isolation and the frantic despair it brings; fourth, the basic need for some degree of organization of life in order to establish some central control over conflicting impulses, both for the sake of the individual's own mental health and for the sake of community harmony. This need for organization also led man to seek some kind of over-all theological picture of his longer destiny within the ongoing drama of life. Finally, the fifth need is for an internalized super-ego, imaginatively created through contact with some one other than the self, who incarnates, at least in a measure, the desired better self.
THE DYNAMIC KINSHIP OF ALL RELIGIONS
If then we accept these findings of historical study and assume that the urge to be religious is the fruit of man's basic impulses and needs in the natural world, then we have a dynamic set of criteria by which to examine and gather up into one large concept the different religions.
Even though religions have been monotheist, and polytheist and humanist, some with supernatural implications and some without, when we look at them from a long time perspective we can see them as a series of bold and creative experiments—all initiated from the same basic natural needs and fulfilling the same purposes. Man has been experimenting with his religions just as truly as he has been experimenting with his scientific assumptions. It should be expected that these experiments will be changed as man's understanding of his own needs and his understanding of the nature of the universe change. The important issue is not whether or not our present religion will change. The significant questions to ask are: by what processes may they be most advantageously changed? And how shall they be changed? And how fast?
IS THE FAITH OF OUR PRE-SCIENTIFIC FATHERS ADEQUATE IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE?
These five fundamental human needs are still impelling man to want to be religious, but the old religions of the world, worked out in pre-scientific days, no longer fully satisfy those who are today imbued with the spirit of science or who realize how drastically the findings of science have changed man's picture of the universe. There is a great deal of outmoded science mingled with the religious teachings of our Judeo-Christian Bible. Up until about one hundred years ago, probably most Christian people really believed that God had completed His creation in six days, possibly extending each of these days to a thousand years. They really believed that floods, droughts, plagues and infertility were signs of God's anger and forms of His punishment. Our generation, however, relies more on building dam and reservoirs and irrigation canals than on prayers for protection against floods, and we have more faith in the doctor's prescriptions and in serum shots against infectious diseases than in prayers for healing. A generation ago the best book on love, called The Greatest Thing in the World, was written by Henry Drummond, a minister. The greatest book on love to be written in our decade is The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm, a psychiatrist. The ancient Psalmist cried out in prayer:
Search me, 0 God, and know my heart!
Try me, and know my thoughts:
And see if there be any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.
(Psalm 139:23, 24)
Modern psychotherapists, in contrast, are trying to help persons who want to know themselves, to learn how to do more of the searching into the depths of their being for themselves. They are teaching us how to listen to our own inner voices that speak to us in our dreams, in our fantasies and in our unexpected compulsive kinds of behavior. More and more people of our time who feel themselves lost in mental turmoil and want help, are going to these scientists of the psyche, and they are often finding more release and healing than their ministers know how to give.
Will then the physical, psychological and social sciences soon be taking the place of religion?
"Is Science Enough?" Rufus Jones made this question the title of a chapter in his book Pathways to God. His answer was a firm "NO." He regarded as tragic what he called the "shrinkage of religion on the part of both professors and students in institutions of higher learning."
"This shrinkage," he added, "is due in about equal measure to the immense expansion of science, and to the feebleness and failure of the interpreters of Christianity to square their message of faith with the known and proven facts of the universe as they have been discovered:"
Albert Einstein stated his position on this matter in an especially arresting sentence. "Science. without religion," he said, "is lame, and religion without science is blind."
This vivid statement reminds me of an old story from Uganda, about a blind man and a lame man. Everyone else in the village was occupied in fighting off an attack from an enemy tribe. As a result these two handicapped men were forgotten; yet if they did not get out of the village quickly, they would both probably be killed. Finally the blind man offered to carry the lame man on his shoulders, provided the lame man would guide him to the next village. So the lame man became eyes for the blind man, and the blind man became legs for the lame man, and the two together found their way to safety.
So it may be with science and religion. Each is incomplete in itself, representing but a part of our human potential. Science and religion need one another as partners. They need to learn how to talk frankly together, to exchange their values, and to give their criticisms without causing offense. When two estranged partners wish to renew their intimacy, changes of attitude on the part of each one are usually needed.
A RELIGIOUS REFORMATION HAS BEGUN
I agree with Rufus Jones that the "shrinkage of religion" among the intelligentsia of our time is tragic. The emotional impulses that urge mankind to be religious are a part of human nature everywhere and apparently always. We truly need to be religious. Yet if religion is to survive in a day of advancing scientific discoveries, it must find a way to be on the one hand intellectually sound, and on the other hand emotionally satisfying.
As a supposedly educated generation, we are appallingly naive and primitive in many of our religious beliefs and practices. Yet our youth are being educated in the sciences to a degree and with an efficiency never before known in history. This is a dangerous situation. If we need creative and well-qualified teachers and professors of the philosophy of science to help us develop our science, we also need equally well-qualified teachers and theologians to help us develop a religion that can be a worthy partner of science.
The reformation is now only in its beginning. It cannot be accomplished hurriedly. In fact, if man ceases to reform his religions in the light of his advancing knowledge, they will become sterile. Not only do we as adults need to enlist in this reformation, but we need to prepare our children to carry on after us.
So we have now reached the complex and most difficult problem toward which our original question has been leading us. How educate for a changing religion in a changing universe? Although our time this evening is now almost exhausted, I shall gather up a few of my concerns into four small bundles so that you may perhaps want to carry them away with you for further thinking. Some, as stated, may sound to you like affirmations; I ask you, however, to take them as questions.
HOW EDUCATE FOR A CHANGING RELIGION IN A CHANGING UNIVERSE?
1. Let us keep continually in the foreground of our study of religion the basic emotional needs that any acceptable religion must satisfy in some degree. If in our reformation we merely change the outward forms, the words, ceremonies and methods of persuasion, we will but camouflage the significant issues. The changes needed in?volve attitudes and depths of understanding. Taking the five basic impulsive needs already mentioned one by one, we can begin to forecast some of the questions we must be asking. (1) When is life worth preserving? How may a scientifically minded, religious person face this universal dread of death? What does death really mean to us today? (2) How may we keep alive in ourselves and in our children the urge to be curious, to want to know the unknown, to keep on asking questions? Can we find a kind of openness of mind that will add to our zest and our efficiency in living? At how early an age and how often shall we share our uncertainties with growing children? (3) How can we better fulfill for more people the basic need for love? What evidences have we; if any, of a cosmic love, and what might this mean? (4) How are traditional theologies and cosmologies and thoughts of God hindering or helping the processes of organization and integration of personal impulses? (5) Have we made the symbols of our ideals too perfect? Have we built our super-egos too exclusively from one image? When we delve deeply and consider richly these basic emotional needs, we find ourselves asking the kinds of questions that really matter.
2. The second thought I venture to propose is this. Let us no longer be timid about turning to the physical scientists for help in the process of changing our cosmology, and let us exchange even our theological thinking frankly with them. Let us encourage our children to look for evidences of divinity within this natural universe. Let us bring science study into our schools of religion. Although these scientists may not care for the title, I am beginning to think that some among them are today our greatest .mystics and our greatest cosmic philosophers.
Dr. Henry Morganau, Professor at Harvard University both of physics and of natural philosophy, has said that an electron is as elusive as one of Thomas Aquinas' angels, and as intangible as love. Yet electrons are everywhere in every animate and inanimate thing.
Dr. Donald Andrews, Professor of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, writes that electrons are more like musical vibration than like pieces of matter or small mechanisms, but the music being played is in octaves outside the limited range of our human hearing. Dr. Andrews is not intentionally being poetical when he writes of the music of the electrons. He is describing physical reality as clearly as he knows how to do.
Dr. Andrews asks: "Where do you think you are?" Sitting relatively still, right here now? But where is here? And when is now? You are really moving through space at unthinkable speeds in at least five different directions at once. Your common sense is deceptive. Your body in itself is an organized universe of revolving, vibrating atoms, some whirling in and out of you all the time. He even suggests that "your force of gravitation also reaches to the moon, to the sun, and every other atom in the universe." Where are you?
Dr. Richard Feynman, Professor of Biology in the California Institute of Technology, writes that the radio-active atoms of phosphorus in our brains are continually being replaced by new atoms, so that these atoms are completely renewed every few weeks. "So what is this mind?" he asks. "What are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! That is what I now can remember was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long since been replaced."
"The same thrill, the same sense of awe and mystery," he continues, "comes again and again when we look at any problem deeply enough. It is true that few unscientific people have this particular experience... Is nobody in?spired by our present picture of the universe? The value of science remains unsung by singers."
What are we? The sum of the trillions of atoms that our bodies are made of? Or are we something that transcends all of the atoms of our bodies-something that can not be measured with the instruments of space and time? Scientists today are looking for more adequate answers than have as yet been given. I believe that the rest of us have much to learn from them if we would but listen and talk with them. I believe the scientists might broaden the scope of our mystic experiences or deepen our moments of insight. It is not merely with other human beings that some of these scientists are finding communion. They are feeling a sense of kinship with many forms of living things, and some can even feel a kinship with dust and rocks and stars. They are reaching for a cosmic perspective in their mysticism. Dr. Harlow Shapley, dean of American astronomers, has asked theologians to "take seriously our insistence that the God of humanity is the God of gravitation and the God of hydrogen atoms as well as the God of the higher sentient beings that have evolved elsewhere among the myriads of galaxies."
3. Third, let us give the psychological and social scientists as well new opportunities to contribute to our religious and ethical insights. If we felt more flexible in our habits, and were more ready to change our old paternal patterns of "character education" and preaching, and if the psychiatrists and sociologists in turn were less fearful of giving offense by entering the sacred precincts of theology and would talk with us frankly and humanly about religion, I foresee great things happening. These psychological scientists have been dealing with the "inner life" of the spirit and with the perplexing problems of ethical relationships, fields which until a century ago were regarded as the exclusive responsibility of religionists. Their new insights suggest deep changes. They are challenging much in our old moralities; and even more they are challenging our ways of motivating ethical behavior. For them hostilities, hates and unrealistic fears are symptoms of sickness calling for the healing medicines of understanding and loving respect, rather than being occasions for condemnation and punishment. I see profound reforms being called for, far more drastic than those made in the days of Martin Luther. Unless our religious societies learn how to inject therapeutic understanding for the old judgmental and moralistic ways of religious training, I foresee young people rejecting religion in increasing numbers. And unless we secure more help from the psychotherapists and the specialists in the study of child life, I foresee the moral foundations of our society crumbling.
4. Fourth, let us no longer be satisfied with a religiously divided world. No longer can one religion appropriately proclaim its supremacy over all others. Loyalty to inherited religions of the past, no matter how wonderful they have been, must become secondary to loyalty to new and growing truths from whatever sources they may come. It would be deadly if the whole world conformed to one religious pattern. It will be almost equally destructive, I believe, if we insist that the old religious groupings must be maintained, based either upon the continuance of ceremonial patterns or upon conformity in beliefs. It is tragic that so many persons today feel isolated from their fellows, and regard themselves as irreligious, simply because they can no longer give assent to the religion they inherited.
The world we now know is one. The universe is one. Mankind is one brotherhood. We even belong in the family of atoms and stars. Reality can no longer be divided into clear-cut contraries, the material and spiritual, the animate and the inanimate, the temporal and eternal, the body and mind, good and evil, today and tomorrow, Jew and Gentile, Christian and Pagan, the secular and religious, even the Creator and the created. The dividing walls are down. All things are blended and interdependent. Truth, goodness, love, freedom—all are relative and mixed up with falsehood, evil, hate and slavery. The ethical questions we must face almost never present merely two clear cut possibilities: the right and the wrong. These varied choices call for weighing the partly good over against another partial good. The development of moral and spiritual values today involves not so much the courage to fight for the right against the wrong, as the patience to understand the wrong, its causes and its meanings. It involves also learning the arts of negotiation and empathy.
Let us then walk forward rather than backward. The unique historical memories in our special religious cultures call today for less loyalty and more understanding, less praise and more honest self-criticism. Our direction needs to be forward. It is not our ancestors who will be changed by what we do. It is our contemporaries, and our descendants for generations to come, for whom we should be feeling responsibilities. "For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday."
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 6:
LEADER RESOURCE 3: THOUGHTS ON THE WORD GOD
Excerpted from Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds by Sophia Lyon Fahs. Copyright (C) 1965 by Sophia Lyon Fahs. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
No matter how much of a humanist one may be, it would seem impossible (at least to me) for a thoughtful and sincere person who is trying to be a citizen of the world, who knows sympathetically something of man's religious history, to feel it necessary to discard completely all the ideas or concepts that have at one time or another been a part of the generalized thought symbolized by the word God. [One] may call the old God dead who favored Abraham and destroyed the idol-worshipping Babylonians. [One] may call that God dead who sent the plagues upon the Egyptians and saved the Hebrews. [One] may call God dead who died on a cross to save mankind. [One] may call that God dead who prospers the righteous and keeps the wicked poor, who changes the laws of Nature in order to show his power or to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. [One] may believe that the universe is neutral to human needs or even unjust. [One] may refuse to try to imagine God as belonging in a supernatural world. Nevertheless, after all such denials, there remain still other thoughts for which the word God has stood, and that deserve serious consideration and respect.
Or perhaps there are new meanings that now need to be embodied in the word God.
Anthropologist Loren Eisley writes of that "delicate, elusive mysterious principle known as organization which leaves all other mysteries concerned with life stale and insignificant by comparison... Like some dark and passing shadow within matter, it cups out the eyes' small windows or spaces the notes of a meadow lark's song in the interior of a mottled egg. That principle—I am beginning to suspect—was there before the living in the deeps of water."
A modern Psalmist, "having pressed his hands against the confining walls of scientific method," sings his own reverent poetic song to the ineffable, unutterable reality, both beyond and within all. To call this by the word God is in no deep sense an answer. The word merely suggests that there must be an answer even though we may never know fully what it is.
To be agnostic simply to save ourselves the mental trouble of further delving or because we have grown weary of trying to think hard, or because we are afraid to run the risk of finding that life is not after all what we want it to be, may well dull our alertness in general. The kind of agnosticism worthy of an intelligent and courageous person is the kind that is ceaselessly trying to decrease the range of its unknowing. It is not the freedom to live in a world of [one's] own dreaming that the person of integrity claims. It is rather a hardy freedom to insist on the liberty to dare to risk trying to live in truth.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 6:
LEADER RESOURCE 4: FAHS' THEOLOGY IN THE CONGREGATION
This is a 30-minute activity.
Materials
Preparation
Description
Indicate the posted list of basic human emotional needs that Sophia Lyon Fahs identified. How does the congregation strive to meet these basic emotional needs, for people of all ages? In which ways does your congregational life reflect Fahs’ theology and her understanding that people are impelled to be religious?
Invite participants to form groups of four. Ask the groups to identify ways Fahs’ theology and educational philosophy are reflected in congregational life. Suggest they consider your congregation’s worship life, educational ministries, and social justice ministries. Do the insights that Fahs’ theology offers point to aspects of congregational life that can be strengthened and improved?
Give small groups ten minutes to work, then invite the larger group to come back together. Invite each small group to share a summary of its reflections. Are there common observations among the small groups? Are there items participants would like to bring to the attention of the congregation for follow-up?
As a large group, consider the Fahs definition of God: “the ineffable, unutterable reality, both beyond and within all.” According to Fahs, the word God includes two concepts: “A Creative Power entering from outside, and a Creative Power that has always been inherent and within.” Is the use of the word “God” a subject of conversation or discussion in their congregation? If so, would articulating the Fahs definition enhance the conversation?
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 6:
LEADER RESOURCE 5: ENGAGING AS RELIGIOUS PROFESSIONALS
This is a 30-minute activity.
Materials
Preparation
Description
Share this quote from Fahs’ Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds:
A modern Psalmist, “having pressed his hands against the confining walls of scientific method,” sings his own reverent poetic song to the ineffable, unutterable reality, both beyond and within all. To call this by the word God is in no deep sense an answer. The word merely suggests that there must be an answer even though we may never know fully what it is.
To be agnostic simply to save ourselves the mental trouble of further delving or because we have grown weary of trying to think hard, or because we are afraid to run the risk of finding that life is not after all what we want it to be, may well dull our alertness in general. The kind of agnosticism worthy of an intelligent and courageous person is the kind that is ceaselessly trying to decrease the range of its unknowing. It is not the freedom to live in a world of [one’s] own dreaming that the person of integrity claims. It is rather a hardy freedom to insist on the liberty to dare to risk trying to live in truth.
Invite participants to form groups of three or four and reflect on Fahs’ ideas, using the posted questions as a guide.
After 20 minutes, signal that time is up and invite participants back into the large group.Lead a discussion, using these questions as a guide:
FIND OUT MORE
Sophia Lyon Fahs, Today's Children and Yesterday's Heritage (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952).
Sophia Lyon Fahs, Worshipping Together With Questioning Minds (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).
Edith F. Hunter, Sophia Lyon Fahs: A Biography (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)
Christopher L. Walton, "Sophia Lyon Fahs: Revolutionary educator (at www.uuworld.org/2003/02/lookingback.html)," UU World (March/April 2003).