Here’s the word: Christians and the nameless group who appeal to accustomed polity standards (like plain congregationalism) not play-acting. We have something to say and something to offer.
I’ve been in this game for a long time now. And so it’s not hard to tell when I’m being sidelined or even gently insulted, although I didn’t understand this at first.
- Oh, you’re a nineteenth-century Universalist.
- I didn’t know there are any Christians left.
- That’s fine for traditionalists like you but what you suggest isn’t practical.
There’s the insinuation that anyone who’s a Christian is being obstinate, or that our presence is indulged as some sort of polite inheritance. The same goes for anyone who insists that the processes within our religious institution should be held to a higher standard of democratic and spiritual accountability, using historic models of how Unitarian and Universalists organize. What better way to sideline people than to tell them they don’t belong, or that they belong to another era.
There’s the cruel insinuation that our religious lives are some kind of live-action role playing (LARP) game and that the way we worship is more about re-enacting then having moments of profound spiritual joy or insight.
To me, the issues are fundamental. Does Unitarian Universalism include a assortment of customs and churchmanships (we need a new word for that) that can cooperate without trying to undo each other? Meaning that there needs to be room for each to grow. Unitarian Universalism is increasingly a brand name: a kind of politically-involved, community-focused, liberal eclecticism, within in the bounds of respectability.
Or are we just subject to the American fascination for the new? Unitarian Universalists have the uniquely unsavory prospect of outliving what they have come to know is good and true.
I bring this up now because I have been posting so much historical material lately. I don’t necessarily feel old works should be used as-is, but the tendency to write off any resource or development (except trust funds) that’s more than a few years old means that we don’t dwell with our ancestors long enough to learn from them. Would it hurt to try? We don’t get inside their heads to see what they valued and what they rejected; we don’t understad their process. And because we don’t understand well what made them tick, it’s hard to see the arc of Universalist or Unitarian culture, past individual personal preference. How we do what we do is not an accident, but in many cases an inheritance. (I’ll post a couple of examples of “living fossils” within Unitarian Universalism when I come across them again.)
And once we understand how our traditions evolved, it become easier to draw on old cultural resources, adapting them to our own time. This is a serious practical matter. We have a thinner corpus of go-to worship, education and (perhaps) administration resources than we did 25 years ago. Through the Internet, the cost of storage and “duplication” has dropped to nearly nil, so we should be awash in resources, but we aren’t. It makes sense to reuse and recycle; I suspect money’s going to get tighter in the next 25 years. Room for everyone, and resources for all.
Is the man on the left going to hurl the typewriter into the air so the man on the right can shoot at it, a la skeet? Or has the man on the right already bagged the typewriter, which his gun bearer has taken up? Anxiously awaiting illumination.
On the larger question, each five-year’s crop of new UUs seems to feel it invented UUism when it got here, so why worry about generations past?
It seems to me that many of us within UUism, no matter our position on matters of belief and polity, worry about the question, “Is there room for me at the table?”