WALKING TOGETHER
C. Welton Gaddy
I am grateful for this occasion that brings us together. My meetings with Unitarian Universalists have always been challenging, rewarding, and fun. I revel in this opportunity to say to you face-to-face that no group has been more supportive of The Interfaith Alliance and The Interfaith Alliance Foundation than the Unitarian Universalist Association. Without exception, you have supported our work and encouraged our commitment to it with your letters, your cooperative ventures, and your money. Devoid of financial contributions from your institutions and your individual members, we simply could not have done the work that is now a matter of record. However, my gratitude for you goes far beyond a recognition of your generous monetary contributions.
Supportive actions on your part abound. Unitarian Universalists have been founding members of Interfaith Alliances in Florida, North Carolina, and Mississippi. Unitarian Universalists serve in key leadership positions in our organizations in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland, Colorado, and Idaho. Unitarian Universalists sit on our national boards. Unitarian Universalists consistently step forward to strengthen the multiple program initiatives of The Interfaith Alliance. What would we do without you!
Two leaders in the Unitarian Universalist Association simply must receive special attention. Speaking for The Interfaith Alliance organizationally and for myself personally, I am profoundly grateful for Ms. Denise Davidoff and Dr. John Buehrens. Both of these splendid individuals unfailingly move far beyond the character traits of good friends to offer suggestions, forge alliances, and elicit new dimensions of support that make The Interfaith Alliance a better organization, enhance the effectiveness of its efforts, and substantively hearten its Executive Director. I am so pleased to be able to speak to all of you about my gratitude, for Denny and John and the whole Unitarian Universalist family of faith.
For a few minutes of our time together this evening, I want to fiddle and fuss with a theme that is fundamental in your founding documents as Unitarian Universalists and integral to all that you are about in the present. The theme is Walking Together.
Liberal members in early Unitarian churches incorporated the phrase "walking together" into covenants of fellowship. According to Conrad Wright, documents such as the Salem Covenant of 1629 and the Boston Covenant of a year later were composed as agreements between people committed to walking together.
Walking Together. Massage that phrase with your minds and, meander its meaning through your souls allowing its truth to linger, stick, nurture, inform, and inspire you - Walking Together. Within those two words joined together reside the substance of a vision and an agenda for action.
The Substance of a Vision: The concept of walking together informs our vision of spirituality insisting that the life of faith is a shared journey.
Everybody among the faithful is moving, reaching out, stretching, and pursuing growth, but nobody has arrived. Though the journey has a goal, to be sure, in the most basic sense, the journey is itself a goal.
Horrendous problems develop when one group of people imagines that it has arrived while all others are still on the way. When individuals start placing periods or exclamation points where commas or ellipses belong, trouble develops theologically and socially as well as grammatically.
My friend Will Campbell's novella called Cecelia's Sin highlights the danger of attempts to write the end of a story that cannot be completed. The central character in Will's work has written a history of that fiercely independent group from the radical wing of the Reformation called Anabaptists. As Cecelia reflects on her narrative, she comments that the story really has no end; that her conclusion represents not the ending but a new beginning. She recognizes that when you declare a story ended, you then have to defend it even with violence if necessary, to preserve your conclusions.
Alive and sick in contemporary American religion are people who have presumed to construct the end, to write the final conclusion, of a spirituality so dynamic in nature that it defies any form of captivity. Rather than continuing to ask questions, think new thoughts, pursue unvisited avenues of truth, and thus grow, these folks spend all their time defending their dogmatic conclusions and imposing their static beliefs on others, even attempting to use the power of government to do so when possible.
Friends, the journey is not over. In most ways, we have just begun to mine its riches. As Robert Frost said so eloquently, "We have miles to go before we sleep."
The concept of walking together also informs our vision of community reminding us that walking is a spiritually authentic mode of travel.
I love the Hebrew prophet Isaiah's images of the life of faith. Remember that wonderful text: "They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint." What encouragement! Empowered by the spirit of God, people mount up with wings like eagles and soar or run like a young sprinter who does not grow weary. Honestly, though, the last image in Isaiah's vision is the one that gives me hope empowered by the spirit of God, some people walk and don't faint.
Being a part of a community in which people walk together makes us aware that a life of faith is not synonymous with constant happiness, incessant smiling, highpitched excitement, the power of positive thinking, running like a youthful sprinter, and soaring like a mighty eagle. As we walk together, we see who others are and we know who we are.
Look at those of us gathered for this General Assembly. We attend these meetings carrying within us concerns over an elderly parent who is dying, a child who is battling major difficulties, a marriage that is unraveling, a job that is boring, a friend acting as a traitor, a dream that is fading. Heaven knows we can't soar. Some of us carry heavy burdens that caused us not even to want to get out of bed this morning. We cannot run and not be weary; we came here already too weary to run. But we can walk with the promise of not fainting. And, that's enough; more than enough actually. As we lift our feet and get one step before another, we realize that we are not alone. Walking is OK. We are walking with others; indeed, we are walking together.
Regarding this "vision thing" as George Bush called it, the concept of walking together also informs the nature of our ministry.
We offer encouragement to others simply by walking. By no means a perfect people who have arrived, we travel together as people who have doubted, hurt, and failed, yet stayed together. Henri Nouwen's portrait of the wounded healer painted with hues drawn from the Servant Songs of Isaiah and the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth is a profoundly important picture. Those of us who are walking together are the walking wounded - the wounded who are still walking, not people defeated by our wounds but people empowered by our wounds, enabled to assist others. Scars from our wounds become the source of our healing.
Walking together. That is all about walking. Now let's talk about togetherness. That, too, is part of the vision.
Togetherness is essential as a matter of necessity and as a matter of integrity. We need each other.
Several months ago the White House convened a meeting of the nation's leading scientists asking them to take a look at the possibility of life on the planet Mars. As a result of Carl Sagan's insistence that the religious community be represented in that gathering, Joan Brown Campbell and Bill Moyers attended. Later Joan shared with some of us an observation made by one of the other participants -- a scientist who said without equivocation that in the biosphere independence means death. In other words, for life to be a reality, interdependence is a necessity. As another scientist put it, "The future either will be ecumenical or there will be no future."
One of the great joys of my present work with The Interfaith Alliance is interacting with persons pursuing diverse commitments of faith and learning of the richness of faith traditions other than those associated with western Christianity. The Interfaith Alliance takes faith seriously. We work not only for interfaith dialogue but for interfaith cooperation and for the realization of a civil society in which multiple faiths enjoy a place of respect and opportunities for expression. It is not that we have to get along because of the closeness of our geographical proximity but because of the depth of our religious integrity, not because of the smallness of the global village in which we live, but because of the largeness of the faith that lives within us.
As one who grew up in the Christian tradition, I have known for a long time that Christ impacted world in which selfless love embraces a fellowship devoid of classifications that separate people according to race, sex, social or economic status, and nationality. But, there is more - much more. Muslims denounce one group of people lording itself over other people as evil and embrace the Quran's vision of one emerging community inviting to all that is good. Sikhs encourage mutual respect among all persons by affirming the dignity and worth of every individual as a repository of divine light. Buddhists understand the nature of our shared lot as humankind to be far more basic than any divisive identity defined by race. Jews know the importance of welcoming strangers and celebrate the joy of all people dwelling together in that most pleasant state of unity and peace. Hindus desire that as people from the same source we learn to meet together and to speak together that we may live well together. Confucianists realize the impossibility of social stability apart from unity, equality, and justice within a population. Native Americans sensitively recognize that within the intimacy of our common family, the downfall of one person through injustice is in fact the downfall of all persons.
Do you hear; do you see the common thread of truth interwoven throughout these diverse traditions? We can do what we should do and walk together.
Walking
together is the substance of a vision, a vision that expands our definition
of "we." Moreover, walking together is
An
Agenda for Action
Walking together involves action as well as vision. The concept is about doing as well as being. Behavioral as well as ideological elements are integral to walking together.
Walking together means moving beyond tolerance to practicing acceptance. Diana Eck, one of the board members of The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, has been of immense help in my understanding of this challenge. Toleration does not lead to real fellowship and true community. Toleration is a form of paternalism. Beneficent though it may be, beneficent paternalism is still paternalism. To tolerate certain persons is a form of audacity, giving those persons permission to be who they are-as if we could do that. Toleration makes no demand for dealing with other people, getting to know them and understand them.
Walking together involves far more than tolerating each other. Walking together requires engaging each other, risking the possibility of being influenced, even changed, by each other.
A tendency toward feelings of superiority is so pervasive. Almost everybody wants to be better than somebody else. An old rabbinical tale makes the point. On the Day of Atonement, a rabbi publicly lamented his sins and declared himself to be a nobody. Catching the spirit of the experience, the rabbi's associate eagerly confessed his sins and declared that he was a nobody. Not wanting to be left out, the sexton followed suit, condemning his failures and labeling himself as a nobody. Suddenly the rabbi found himself offended by the sexton's actions. Turning to his associate, the rabbi asked regarding the sexton, "Who does he think he is to be a nobody?"
I remember a friend of mine, who, when he finally realized the God-given dignity of people of all races, muttered in complete candor, "Well, if I am not better than black people, who am I better than?"
The agenda of walking together moves us beyond toleration to efforts at cooperation; attempts to know, understand, and appreciate each other.
Prominent as well in a walking together agenda is a recommitment to the priority of freedom. Surely we know by now that we cannot take freedom for granted - not even religious freedom; or, perhaps I should say, especially religious freedom. Look around at state governments mad dash toward vouchers legislation to fund education and aspirants to the White House affirming "charitable choice" arrangements that allow participation in sectarian religious activities to be made a prerequisite to persons in need receiving basic social services.
In the present political climate, defending freedom has become an enterprise filled with the risk of confusion and misunderstanding. Many of the most dangerous threats to freedom right now use the rhetoric of liberty and operate under a banner of freedom. Claiming an interest in freedom, federal legislators pressured by the religious right want to amend the United States Constitution to provide for infringements on freedom-sectarian prayers in public schools, indoctrination rather than education, and the establishment of one religion as the official religion of the nation. Just a week ago yesterday, they were at it again. The United States House of Representatives voted in favor of posting the Ten Commandments in public places and making it more difficult to challenge violations of the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. The failure of Congress to specify which Ten Commandments were the subject of the legislation revealed a dangerous assumption related to the establishment of a majority religion. If Congress feels compelled to turn a commandment into a law, let it be: "Thou shalt not politicize religion and religious writings for personal and sectarian purposes."
The message of The Interfaith Alliance is a positive one affirming the role of people of faith in our democracy and demonstrating the healing role of religion in our republic. However, commitment to this positive message does not allow us to shrink back from challenging and opposing those who would hold our nation hostage to their partisan ideology. How dare religious right leaders scold us for immorality simply because we refuse to endorse their narrow definition of morality, which is as bad for government as it is for religion. You see, some people don't want to walk together with other people unless they determine the conditions for both being together and walking. These folks have a right to hold a wrong view, but they don't have the right to propagate that view as the only viable posture for people of faith and they are wrong, politically and morally, when they demonize those who refuse to accept their limited concept of freedom as real freedom.
Can we be critical and civil? Indeed, we must. We have to stand firm in our criticism of political operatives who manipulate people of faith and the language of faith to advance their partisan causes. We have to remain relentless in our insistence that spiritual integrity cannot be measured by conformity to a specific political platform.
Thinking about walking together sensitizes us to the importance of everybody being able to walk together. Thus, our common pilgrimage necessitates paying attention to freedom-freedom from tyranny and freedom for responsibility.
With the voicing of that observation comes the realization that the agenda of walking together inevitably involves political action. The legal fate of more and more issues of conscience is being determined in political assemblies. As people of faith, we cannot be absent from those discussions. Legislators must not be left with the conclusion that a small group of people of faith represent the moral convictions, belief assertions, and political interests of all people of faith.
Claiming a comer on truth, religious right leaders attempt to discredit all who don't bow before their authority and support their political agenda-demonizing opponents and labeling counter movements as immoral and un-American. Unfortunately, we sometimes allow such tactics to intimidate us and place us on the defensive. That should not happen. We must reclaim the initiative.
As we work tirelessly in the political process, let there be no mistake about who we are and what we are about. We are pro-American: patriotic citizens in the truest sense of that terminology; patriots like that friend described by William Butler Yeats, "A patriotic man who gave the country not what it wanted, but what it needed -- a kind of perpetual last day, a sound of trumpets and summoning up to judgment." We are pro-family, believing that every member of every family unit, whatever its nature, should be able to exercise a freedom of conscience as well as enjoy the rights and share in the benefits of government. We are promorality, liberally calling for a conservative interpretation of the United States Constitution that works for liberty and justice apart from partisanly defined restrictions on either. We are pro-life in the old-fashioned way - supporters of a view of individual dignity that mandates the best quality of life possible for all people. We are pro-religion responding to inspiration and instruction from sacred scriptures as we work for a civil society in which an appreciation for diversity leads to the realization of community and the unspeakable joy of walking together.
Offering simplistic answers to complex questions always bothers me. I don't want to be guilty of such a ploy. However, I do want to risk venturing a simple observation regarding this whole complex matter of walking together. The possibility of cooperation, mutual understanding, and respect for dignity runs deep into the issue of spirituality and relates directly to a person's view of God, the sacred mystery. Tell me your view of God and I can tell you a lot about your view of the world, other people, and your role in society.
How do we see God?
Many of you know that during a weekend one year ago last spring a Taiwanese cult based in Texas announced that God would make a nationwide television appearance early the following Wednesday morning. According to the group's prediction God would appear on channel 18 of every television set in North America. According to the press release, a television would not even have to be turned on for the divine image to appear on the screen.
This bizarre announcement prompted a lot of questions in my mind. Why was God being partial to people in North America? More particularly, why was God showing preferential treatment to Americans who owned television sets? Why would God, desiring to reach all people, appear only on channel 18? That is not even one of the apocalyptic numbers rich in religious symbolism, I don't think.
While in Louisiana during that particular weekend, I turned on channel 18 to see what network God had chosen for this dramatically staged revelation. I must tell you that when I saw a Disney program playing, I thought how upset Southern Baptists were going to be if God did not honor their boycott of Disney.
Then came musings of anticipation. What if God really shows up on television? What will we learn about the divine identity? Will God be wearing a Gary Bauer for President lapel pin and touting the religious right as the last best hope of this nation? Will God espouse a hierarchical view of life and cite James Dobson as an authority on the submissive role of women-graciously submissive, if possible? Will God confess to targeting Orlando for tornadoes and hurricanes, as Pat Robertson warned, because of the city's unrestricted hospitality? Will God have an agent working to secure an appearance for the Divine on Jerry Falwell's "Old Time Gospel Hour?"
Seriously! Must God appear as a Republican or a Democrat? Anthropomorphicly speaking, is God nervously wringing divine fingers having determined that only certain candidates for public office can usher in the divine realm? Does God appear as a CEO preoccupied with bottom-line profits and interest-producing investments?
This God does not inspire walking together!
Personally, I see God as the Supreme Lover, as Inviting Mystery, as Sovereign Mercy. The movement of God is the wind or breath that energizes cooperation and enlivens fellowship. I envision the Divine One laughing with joy when people join hands and walk together.
Suddenly my images of God get all mixed up with other images - images of people walking together. I see a search party successful in finding a lost child because of people holding hands while walking together. I see a civil rights march in which fear from the threats of bigots are tempered by the solidarity of a mutually - strengthening fellowship. I see persons in communities all across this land marching toward light and freedom - people walking together. Oh, by the way, God never showed up on channel 18 that Wednesday morning. Obviously the divine one was not looking for a media gig that day. But God is alive and at work in this world. We can touch the mystery. Just go where justice is being done, food is being shared, wealth is being redistributed, understanding is being expanded, prisoners are being freed, and health care is being assured. We can find God. Better still, we can join God in these efforts.
Now one thing more about walking together. As we enjoy our shared journey and benefit from each other's presence and the contributions of scores of others, to our great surprise, we suddenly realize the Mystery among us, God in our midst. God shows up where people are walking together and, great goodness, the Divine Lover walks with us - walks with all of us. My God! Great Mystery! Thanks! Amen.
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