YOUTH
Making Youth Council Accountable to Its Constituents
Resoltuion: It's Time We Did Something About Racism in YRUU
Youth Council Positions

I am a "Cradle Unitarian." Before any of you get some wild visualizations of me wearing a diaper stuck in your mind’s eye, let me assure you that this means I grew up in a Unitarian church school. Beyond that, I am the son of a Unitarian Religious Educator -- my mother for many years did the week-in week-out work of teaching in the Sunday School and later served as the Director of religious education at First Unitarian in Oklahoma City. This profoundly effects my perspective on what goes on in our church school -- on what happens in our religious education -- on what we teach "over there" while the rest of us are gathered "in here."

I am a product of my background. Several years ago while compiling my list of experiences that display my ability to serve as a Unitarian Universalist minister I listed my primary qualification in the area of religious education as being a "surviving adult child of a UU Religious Educator."

I remember one of the stories that my mother tells of her experience in teaching Sunday School. She says she quit teaching anything above the third grade after a particular Sunday with a particular child (and before you ask -- it was not me). She was teaching a section to the fourth grade class that focused on the Hebrew Scriptures: they were building a clay and paste model of Egypt and this led to a discussion of the Dead Sea. Naturally, one of the kids asked, "Why do they call it the Dead Sea?" My mother carefully explained that because of the low elevation and high evaporation rate the Dead Sea was very, very salty. So much so that fish and frogs could not live there. A pretty good answer, isn’t it? It touches on the science and geography while being grounded in an example that a fourth-grader could easily understand -- everyone knows, after all, that fish and frogs live in places like lakes and oceans. As you might expect, this answer was insufficient for one of the darlings in her class. He asked, "You mean it’s really dead?" "Well, yes, I suppose so," she replied. Her answer was immediately rebutted: "Well, what about amoebas?"

Indeed, what about amoebas? The course material didn’t say anything about amoebas. While she was stammering for a response, another voice cried out, "And bacteria? What about bacteria?" Soon there was a feeding frenzy underway about what might and might not be able to live in the Dead Sea. My mother decided then and there never to teach anything above the third grade in a Unitarian church school.

This little vignette holds many of the keys to our way of being religious. This story, told slightly at my mother’s expense, unfolds many of the things that are true about our approach to religious education. This episode is insightful, not because it is out of the ordinary but because it is so typical. There are many of you sitting in this room have invested yourself in the church school. I imagine each of you has your own "Dead Sea story."

The genius, the beauty, and the frustration of our approach to religious education is that it elicits this kind of curiosity, this kind of questioning. In another congregation the teacher’s task might be much easier. The teacher could smile knowingly, pat the child on the head, and return to teaching biblical geography. We don’t do that. We can’t do that. Because ultimately it wasn’t biblical geography that was being taught. It is precisely this quest and questioning we are trying to foster in our youth. We believe that curiosity is a religious thing, it is a divine gift, it is a tool that helps us discover and live into the mystery of the world. Often it is precisely mystery and wonder that we are teaching in our church school. We are, after all, into life’s questions. That of course does not make those "Dead Sea moments" any easier to take, though.

We are into life’s questions. I’m reminded of Lenny Bruce’s quip that he was in trouble with everyone. "Even the Unitarians have come and burned a question mark in my front yard," he exclaimed. We are good at questions. But sometimes, I fear, we are good at questions to the detriment of ourselves. I know I am sometimes. I sometimes don’t take the time to recognize that questions deserve answers.

This dynamic of focusing on life’s questions can lead us into defining ourselves with a whole list of "not’s." When asked a question, it is much easier for us to list a series of the negative answers to the question instead of coming to an affirming answer or hypothesis. When asked about Unitarian Universalism by a stranger, or a friend, I have been tempted to give a list of "We’re not’s" instead of a statement of "We are’s." We aren’t this. We aren’t that. That is so much easier than answering with a statement of who we are, isn’t it?

No less a shining light in our movement than Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the folly of this approach which was as alive in the 1840s as it is today. Emerson criticized the Unitarianism of his day for being stagnant. He called it a "theology of pale negations." A theology of pale negations seems like a rather thin soup to feed our children.

I fear that too often we nurture a hunger for life in our youth and then try to feed them with Emerson’s "Theology of Pale Negations." We tell our kids that it is their religious duty to as questions and then we back away from trying to answer them for fear that our truth may not speak for everyone. We worry that our truth may be partial, or that our truth may one day be proven wrong, so we demur from answering questions. It’s an odd world where we encourage questions but then fear proposing answers. We fear this subjectivism, and the transience of asserting a truth that may later fade. We settle for something we can defend as more real -- the "No’s" we have discovered along the path of our questioning. We can speak with certainty of what things are not. But I fear this offers little sustenance in the long run.

It’s little wonder that the question so many of us fear most from others is, "What do you believe?" I’m afraid that, too often, we carry our fear of that question into our Sunday school classrooms with devastating results. Too often we craft a template for religion in our youth but we refuse to give voice to the subsistence that will make that template useful. We build a loom for religion but we are often wary of suggesting the warp and woof to complete the fabric. We are, perhaps, fine architects, but frightened carpenters. We are more comfortable with philosophy than ethics, for the former asks the questions, and the latter forces us to live out of the answers.

This is a dangerous trait for us. This is a disastrous route for our youth. I am not advocating adopting a doctrinaire, dogmatic approach in our religious education. I am saying that we must be clearer on what we personally believe when we venture into the role of Religious Educator. We must be clear on what we personally believe when we take on the role of mentor, the role of friend or parent. I am saying that when we sit down with our children we owe it to them to have some clear answers about what we believe and not fall back on a list of discarded answers to life’s questions as though compiling a large enough list of these would somehow create a nurturing body of belief. We simply cannot list enough discarded beliefs to illustrate a sustaining faith. Ultimately, we must claim to believe something.

I don’t advocate abandoning the agnostic approach. We must predicate our answers with an affirmation of the partiality and transience of our understanding. Our understandings are a reflection of the partiality of being human. We must be honest enough to admit that there is always more to discover about our faith. We must admit to our youth that we are still searching, still questioning, but we must be able to tell them what our exploration has led us to believe at this point.

Failure to make this kind of speculation is dangerous for us and disastrous for them. I have often described the weakness of our approach to religious education with the metaphor of a Tumbleweed. We end up, I fear, raising Tumbleweed Children. The tumbleweed is a broad and rangy plant, vigorous and fast growing. It has deep roots but a weak connection to those roots. Our children are broadly curious, vigorous in their exploration, committed to a quest and questioning. We have deep roots in this church. Our tradition is deep. Each of us gathered in this room has a wealth of experience and a depth of being that can nurture these growing souls. But we, too, are cursed with a weakness. We are often afraid to name the truth our quest and questioning points us toward We are too often willing to settle for a "theology of pale negations." This limits our ability to strengthen that all-important spot where the rapidly growing tumbleweed above the ground connects with its stabilizing and nurturing root system. When the wind blows long enough and hard enough, as it is wont to, the tumbleweed breaks free of its roots and is gone casting its seeds in the wind. When our children encounter a promise of a sustaining vision of truth, they, too, are prone to snap off at the root and roll beyond our sight.

Sometimes that promise of a sustaining vision takes the form of spouse or partner who is committed to his or her way of being religious and our youth become Catholic or Methodist Pentecostal. Our Tumbleweed Children have learned that they can quest and question from anywhere so they leave us for the faith of their spouse or partner. Sometimes these tumbleweeds grow cynical from this lack of sustaining vision and discover that they can honor the template of exploration we have given them with the Sunday paper and PBS. Sometimes our fear of naming a truth, even an admittedly partial and transient truth, sours the soul to the point of nihilism and the promised glitter and glory of consumerism are the only things that can set root in their soul.

But this does not have to be. Charles Dickens’s ghost of Christmas future did not bring a vision that could not be changed. And on this day I do not bring you a prophesy of a future carved in stone. The children are our future. And on this day I tell you that above all else we believe in the future. The future is our sustaining vision, glowing and growing, we must ultimately hold out for each other. This is the legacy that we pass on to future generations. It is the future we give to the children and youth in our Sunday School. The gift we present to our heirs is the deeply felt belief that the future is shaped by the work of our hands. The work of our hands, we tell them, depends on the way they answer the deep question of life. "It matters what we believe," wrote Sophia Fahs. "Some beliefs are expansive and lead the way to wider and deeper sympathies; some beliefs are like the sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness; some beliefs are bonds in a universal brotherhood, where sincere differences beautify the pattern; some beliefs are gateways opening up wide vistas for exploration. Some beliefs nurture self-confidence and enrich their feeling of personal worth; some beliefs are liable like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life. It is indeed important what (Humanity) has believed. It is important what we believe. And what a child believes is also a serious matter -- not a subject for jest or sentimentality."

Fahs has summarized much of what we believe in those few sentences if we have but ears to hear and eyes to see. Fahs points us beyond Emerson’s "theology of pale negations." You see, we believe that life is wider and deeper than any of us can imagine or experience. We believe that life is a gift, a gift filled with the blessings of happiness. We believe that differences need not separate us but can bring us the richness and contrast of diversity. We believe that life is best lived with a heartfelt love for quest and questions and this promises us wider vistas of exploration -- the wider the better. We believe human life, indeed all life, is of value in its own right. And above all we believe in the upward thrust of life. For over 150 years we have had a common rallying cry -- a spirit that still unites us beyond all our differences. "The future is before us. Onward and upward forever."

Our task, our obligation, our duty, is to help our kids grow beyond questioning into a recognition that these questions demand honest answers and that pursuing the answers to the questions is our most profound religious task. How do we do that? How do we nurture these young lives we are blessed with? We do it primarily by giving them ourselves. We do it by bringing our questions, our doubts, and our beliefs into their lives. Sometimes we do that by volunteering to teach in our Sunday school. Some of my most profound memories of a Unitarian church school center on the personalities who gave of themselves to help me discover my answers. This approach is not perfect, though. So often parents end up teaching in RE and our youth therefore do not experience the full diversity of humanity that is gathered here. Children get to hear from parents every day. Sometimes I wish that none of our Sunday School teachers were parents of children in the program and that we drew completely from teachers who don’t have kids or from parents whose own kids have moved on in life.

But the task of educating our children religiously is not just about the Sunday school. It happens before church and during the coffee hour. It happens every Sunday morning when we gather for worship. That is why it is essential to have our youth with us for a time each week. When they sing with us at the start of every service we tell them they belong to something larger than themselves -- they are part of our community. When they gather for a story, "not for children only," that’s an opportunity for them to hear something we believe. When they listen to our announcements they get a glimpse of what we think is important in our coming together. When we share our joys and sorrows they come to understand what it means to be human. And, most of all, when they join with us in sharing their joys and sorrows they get the opportunity to express their humanity to us.

This is what it means to believe in the future. You see, it was not just a perplexing question about amoebas that my mother encountered in that fourth-grade classroom so many years ago. It was the religious spirit in its purest form breaking from its captivity in the human soul. That’s why, in our approach to religious education, we don’t just slough off the question and get back to the lesson plan. That’s why we stay with the question discovering what ultimate truth it may speak. That’s why our Sunday School classes are noisy and active places and not just row upon row of children receiving instruction. In our way of being religious, the children are the teachers as much as we the adults are the learners.

One of the polestars of our movement, William Ellery Channing, correctly observed that when it comes to the religious education of our children, "the great end" is not to stamp our minds upon the mind of the young, but to stir up their own -- not to impose religion upon them in the form of arbitrary rules, but to awaken the conscience, the moral discernment. In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul, to excite and cherish the spiritual life

On this day, I tell you that our souls must be awakened, excited, and spirit-filled if we are to live into the heritage that our future demands. Our future is our children. We must tell them what we believe. We must tell them we believe in them. Amen.