[3/19/06] Tolerance (Take Two)
by Rev. Patti Pomerantz
After 9/11 I heard a presentation by an American who worked as a negotiator in the Middle East. He named tolerance as the crucial starting point for successful peace negotiation. Palestinians, he explained wanted Jews to disappear from the face of the earth; Jews, for their part wanted the same fate for Palestinians. There can be no compromise, no meeting of the mind, he said, unless each side of the conflict recognizes the other side's right to exist. Tolerance is clearly part of the road to peace. Unitarian Universalism's commitment to tolerance is a gift we can bring to the larger world. When we bring tolerance to the different sides of the political and religious struggles just in Moscow and Pullman, we're creating a stronger community. When we bring tolerance into our political disagreements--if we could bring tolerance just into our Letters to the Editor--we'd be creating a better community for our children and their children.
Tolerance has had an important role in the growth of Unitarian Universalism. When Theodore Parker criticized the organized church in 1841, it was tolerance--the deeply held belief of a minister's freedom to speak from the pulpit without retribution--that kept him from being booted out of the minister's guild. Parker became one of the most important liberal theologians of the nineteenth century and a founding father of Unitarianism. It is tolerance that is tested when we meet someone in this congregation whose political or theological beliefs seem diametrically opposed to our own. It's often hard work and if you're anything like me, it's work that I am often not very good at. Just last week I was not tolerant last week when I tried to convince Mike Browne that my view of religion was truer than his. I'm sorry, Mike. We need tolerance to respect the inherent worth and dignity of all beings--even those with whom we differ most.
Freedom, reason and tolerance have long been considered a trinity of sorts in Unitarian Universalism. They were first used this way in the middle of the twentieth century by the great Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur, in his history of our faith. As he reviewed our early Eastern European roots, through the Reformation, over the English Channel to England and then across the Atlantic Ocean to the Revolutionary United States, Wilbur found that while each historical period supported different theologies, all of them exhibited a commitment to the three principles. He distinguished these three principles from religious belief:
"Freedom, reason and tolerance. . . are not the final goals to be aimed at in religion, but only conditions under which the true ends may best be attained. The ultimate ends proper to religious movement are two, personal and social; the elevation of personal character, and the perfecting of the social organism, and the success of a religious body may best be judged by the degree to which it attains these ends." (Earl Morse Wilbur: A History of Unitarianism, vol. 2, p. 487).
Wilbur's work provided part of the framework for developing our current religious Principles. His perspective is one way to make sense of what holds our religious community together. It helps me to understand how our Principles are not a creed so much as conditions under which we choose to live our lives. Our liberal religious history, especially held up against the wrath of intolerance around the world, holds up the benefits of respecting beliefs that are not our own. Tolerance is good.
Several weeks ago Janis Eliot and Dave Huggins led a reflection on our theological diversity and how tolerance plays a role in respecting theological differences. Your discussion then led to responses about how it feels for people sitting among us, long time members or first time visitors here, to be outside the mainstream of Unitarian Universalism--for instance to be Christian in this congregation, or to be Republican, or fiscally conservative--about their need to be partially invisible here, if they choose to stay. It's not that we're being intentionally intolerant of other views, or even knowingly exclusive. This is not the intolerance of anti-Semitism or homophobia. This is not the intolerance of political groups working against marriage equality and other civil liberties.
But tolerance does have a dark side, one that I think is more active in our religious faith than we'd like to admit. It threatens our vibrancy and keeps us from achieving our potential as a community of faith. I'll use two examples of how this operates--by exploring two concepts we each either love, or love to hate--theology and spirituality. Unitarian Universalism challenges each of us to articulate personal views on each subject. I wager that if we went around the sanctuary right now there would be as many views as there are people present. And we would likely be surprised by how much we don't know about each other, in many cases people we have gathered with for many years. That exercise would have the same result in most UU gatherings, and it exemplifies one of the primary dangers of tolerance--tolerance can silence us.
I imagine the following example is familiar to most of us. A group of Unitarian Universalists are gathered--perhaps it is coffee hour, or a potluck. We start conversation with someone--it doesn't matter if it is someone you don't know or someone you think you know very well. You find out--perhaps to your surprise--that their understanding of the world is much different than yours. Perhaps you are a staunch atheist and they are pagan. Perhaps they loved the earth-centered service of greening the sanctuary before winter holidays and you were just irritated at being asked to welcome the four directions. When you discover how you see the sacred in two different ways, you make an unspoken truce not to bring up the subject again. You'll serve on committees together, watch each other's children and grandchildren grow up together. You may share a book discussion group, a small group ministry group, an adult religious education class. And the silent tolerance runs through the relationship. We hide our diversity, however selectively, in a dance of the silence of unspoken compromise, the agreement we made without speaking a word at that first conversation, keeping us from creating the depth of community that we not only crave, but that the world needs us to model.
Could this be different? Is there a different framework we can use to be in diverse relationship? We don’t want a community where everyone has the same beliefs. We don't want a religion that tells us what is right belief and what is wrong. We don't want to be told we have to even have a theology. In the 2001 Commission on Appraisal report called, "belonging: the meaning of membership," a theology of relationships is presented. Using the work of Henry Nelson Wieman, a process theologian in the early 20th century, and Mary Hunt, a contemporary feminist theologian, the report convinces me that theology is more than whether or how we believe in God. The report describes both writers as humanistic theologians--not because they necessarily reject the notion of deity, but because they believe in the centrality of human experience. It doesn't matter here whether you believe in a transcendent energy or not, it matters what responsibility you assign to yourself and to humanity for the condition of the earth and our relationships with its inhabitants. Paraphrasing the report in Wieman's terms, human beings are the agents within whom the greatest value-appreciation has been released into the known universe. Relational theologies are transformative, generative, and directed toward the creation of community. This means that individuals who enter into particular relationships can expect to be changed by these relationships, to become more caring, more concerned with the well-being of people around them, and more able and willing to effect change. [p 21]
This does not say to me that by being in this relationship in community we will create uniformity of belief. What it does say is by being in conversation--including being in conversation about that which is not similar--we will deepen our relationships, we will practice finding common ground in differing beliefs. This says to me we are expected to be in deep conversation with each other; that we are urged to be present and willing to be changed every time we come together. This level of presence is not just manifest in observing rituals that we think have no meaning to us--whether it be earth ritual, humanist presentation or a reading from the Gospel--but that we open our hearts and our minds to the possibility that there may just be something connecting our disparate beliefs. Why can't we sing the old Christian hymns with the original words many of us bring into UU community with fondness? What is the benefit of constant translating into words I think you may find more palatable than my own? And why should we spend so much energy trying to not offend, which often results in use of language that does not have meaning to any of us? Why can't common ground grow out of the fact that we all have questions, and a commitment to conversations that affirm our common humanity, our common struggle for justice, our common passion for freedom of belief?
Theologian Mary Hunt, believes that friendship reveals what is of ultimate worth to us. Her model of theology portrays friendship as the basis of our relationships, voluntary associations that require intentionality. And when the elements of friendship she presents are in balance, the relationship becomes generative; not only does the process impact the individuals involved, but the larger community in which the relationship exists as well. One of the elements of her paradigm is spirituality. Here is her definition: "spirituality is defined . . . as an intentional process of making choices that affect self and community; it is attentiveness, focus, awareness of how our behavior and choices affect the people around us." [23-4] Using her definition suggests that spirituality is not something we choose to have or not depending on our beliefs, but a way of being in relationship that we all do. Spirituality is not something attached to worldview, but a way we act with each other regardless of specific worldview.
The theologies of Wieman and Hunt suggest a process of relating that goes beyond the passive, non-relational aspect of tolerance, a way of accepting that there are different points of view. This more relational definition of what we believe and how we behave can bridge different perspectives. Here we practice living as if we are all one--regardless of how we describe that oneness. Our relationships become the foundation of religious community, the quality of this community the foundation of how we live, and therefore how we act in the world. This is a definition of tolerance I can live with, a definition that is worthy of the principles and values of Unitarian Universalism.
This tolerance is demanding and never static. It requires that we live in a way that sees the questions still unanswered, whether we believe they are ultimately answerable or not. It makes the quality of our relationships the core of how we perceive our place in community, our role in the larger world. This makes sense to me--this is a paradigm of Unitarian Universalism I can celebrate and follow. If we look at personal theology and spirituality as behaviors to help bring our lives and work into a framework of common ground, a foundation for how we listen to each other and how we make decisions, we bring our daily lives into the realm of the sacred. And they are. How we believe in our hearts is deeply personal, intimate really. Even if what I believe in my head seems to be unrelated to what I think you believe--how we each act to relate them is sacred work.
It is hard work, too. Work for which we need each other's support, both to examine perspectives and to question. This is not tolerance that comes from a mind that makes hard lines out of difference, but a call to be in relationship that challenges both head and heart. Perhaps our lives of privilege lead us to think we can choose which paradigm we live through--the active or the passive understanding of tolerance, theology, and spirituality. But I don't believe we really do have that choice. We choose the passive paradigm at great peril. Maybe not to us in our lifetimes, maybe even not in our children's lifetimes. But insistence on a paradigm of right belief and wrong belief can lead only to destruction.
It is simply no longer enough to live and let live. We must live in a way that proactively gives voice to all lives. We can no longer sit back and watch foreign policies bring more death, or domestic policy that assigns civil rights and power according to economic status. And I say we can no longer afford to live in a community that fosters divisions based on differing religious interpretations of life and the sacred. We must truly live our statement that all are welcome here--welcome into our community that seeks unity and peace above all else. Please God of many names, may it be so. In our most rational minds, may it be so. In our connection to the earth, may it be so. In our love for each other and for our humanity, may it be so.
(c) Rev. Patti Pomerantz 2006
After 9/11 I heard a presentation by an American who worked as a negotiator in the Middle East. He named tolerance as the crucial starting point for successful peace negotiation. Palestinians, he explained wanted Jews to disappear from the face of the earth; Jews, for their part wanted the same fate for Palestinians. There can be no compromise, no meeting of the mind, he said, unless each side of the conflict recognizes the other side's right to exist. Tolerance is clearly part of the road to peace. Unitarian Universalism's commitment to tolerance is a gift we can bring to the larger world. When we bring tolerance to the different sides of the political and religious struggles just in Moscow and Pullman, we're creating a stronger community. When we bring tolerance into our political disagreements--if we could bring tolerance just into our Letters to the Editor--we'd be creating a better community for our children and their children.
Tolerance has had an important role in the growth of Unitarian Universalism. When Theodore Parker criticized the organized church in 1841, it was tolerance--the deeply held belief of a minister's freedom to speak from the pulpit without retribution--that kept him from being booted out of the minister's guild. Parker became one of the most important liberal theologians of the nineteenth century and a founding father of Unitarianism. It is tolerance that is tested when we meet someone in this congregation whose political or theological beliefs seem diametrically opposed to our own. It's often hard work and if you're anything like me, it's work that I am often not very good at. Just last week I was not tolerant last week when I tried to convince Mike Browne that my view of religion was truer than his. I'm sorry, Mike. We need tolerance to respect the inherent worth and dignity of all beings--even those with whom we differ most.
Freedom, reason and tolerance have long been considered a trinity of sorts in Unitarian Universalism. They were first used this way in the middle of the twentieth century by the great Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur, in his history of our faith. As he reviewed our early Eastern European roots, through the Reformation, over the English Channel to England and then across the Atlantic Ocean to the Revolutionary United States, Wilbur found that while each historical period supported different theologies, all of them exhibited a commitment to the three principles. He distinguished these three principles from religious belief:
"Freedom, reason and tolerance. . . are not the final goals to be aimed at in religion, but only conditions under which the true ends may best be attained. The ultimate ends proper to religious movement are two, personal and social; the elevation of personal character, and the perfecting of the social organism, and the success of a religious body may best be judged by the degree to which it attains these ends." (Earl Morse Wilbur: A History of Unitarianism, vol. 2, p. 487).
Wilbur's work provided part of the framework for developing our current religious Principles. His perspective is one way to make sense of what holds our religious community together. It helps me to understand how our Principles are not a creed so much as conditions under which we choose to live our lives. Our liberal religious history, especially held up against the wrath of intolerance around the world, holds up the benefits of respecting beliefs that are not our own. Tolerance is good.
Several weeks ago Janis Eliot and Dave Huggins led a reflection on our theological diversity and how tolerance plays a role in respecting theological differences. Your discussion then led to responses about how it feels for people sitting among us, long time members or first time visitors here, to be outside the mainstream of Unitarian Universalism--for instance to be Christian in this congregation, or to be Republican, or fiscally conservative--about their need to be partially invisible here, if they choose to stay. It's not that we're being intentionally intolerant of other views, or even knowingly exclusive. This is not the intolerance of anti-Semitism or homophobia. This is not the intolerance of political groups working against marriage equality and other civil liberties.
But tolerance does have a dark side, one that I think is more active in our religious faith than we'd like to admit. It threatens our vibrancy and keeps us from achieving our potential as a community of faith. I'll use two examples of how this operates--by exploring two concepts we each either love, or love to hate--theology and spirituality. Unitarian Universalism challenges each of us to articulate personal views on each subject. I wager that if we went around the sanctuary right now there would be as many views as there are people present. And we would likely be surprised by how much we don't know about each other, in many cases people we have gathered with for many years. That exercise would have the same result in most UU gatherings, and it exemplifies one of the primary dangers of tolerance--tolerance can silence us.
I imagine the following example is familiar to most of us. A group of Unitarian Universalists are gathered--perhaps it is coffee hour, or a potluck. We start conversation with someone--it doesn't matter if it is someone you don't know or someone you think you know very well. You find out--perhaps to your surprise--that their understanding of the world is much different than yours. Perhaps you are a staunch atheist and they are pagan. Perhaps they loved the earth-centered service of greening the sanctuary before winter holidays and you were just irritated at being asked to welcome the four directions. When you discover how you see the sacred in two different ways, you make an unspoken truce not to bring up the subject again. You'll serve on committees together, watch each other's children and grandchildren grow up together. You may share a book discussion group, a small group ministry group, an adult religious education class. And the silent tolerance runs through the relationship. We hide our diversity, however selectively, in a dance of the silence of unspoken compromise, the agreement we made without speaking a word at that first conversation, keeping us from creating the depth of community that we not only crave, but that the world needs us to model.
Could this be different? Is there a different framework we can use to be in diverse relationship? We don’t want a community where everyone has the same beliefs. We don't want a religion that tells us what is right belief and what is wrong. We don't want to be told we have to even have a theology. In the 2001 Commission on Appraisal report called, "belonging: the meaning of membership," a theology of relationships is presented. Using the work of Henry Nelson Wieman, a process theologian in the early 20th century, and Mary Hunt, a contemporary feminist theologian, the report convinces me that theology is more than whether or how we believe in God. The report describes both writers as humanistic theologians--not because they necessarily reject the notion of deity, but because they believe in the centrality of human experience. It doesn't matter here whether you believe in a transcendent energy or not, it matters what responsibility you assign to yourself and to humanity for the condition of the earth and our relationships with its inhabitants. Paraphrasing the report in Wieman's terms, human beings are the agents within whom the greatest value-appreciation has been released into the known universe. Relational theologies are transformative, generative, and directed toward the creation of community. This means that individuals who enter into particular relationships can expect to be changed by these relationships, to become more caring, more concerned with the well-being of people around them, and more able and willing to effect change. [p 21]
This does not say to me that by being in this relationship in community we will create uniformity of belief. What it does say is by being in conversation--including being in conversation about that which is not similar--we will deepen our relationships, we will practice finding common ground in differing beliefs. This says to me we are expected to be in deep conversation with each other; that we are urged to be present and willing to be changed every time we come together. This level of presence is not just manifest in observing rituals that we think have no meaning to us--whether it be earth ritual, humanist presentation or a reading from the Gospel--but that we open our hearts and our minds to the possibility that there may just be something connecting our disparate beliefs. Why can't we sing the old Christian hymns with the original words many of us bring into UU community with fondness? What is the benefit of constant translating into words I think you may find more palatable than my own? And why should we spend so much energy trying to not offend, which often results in use of language that does not have meaning to any of us? Why can't common ground grow out of the fact that we all have questions, and a commitment to conversations that affirm our common humanity, our common struggle for justice, our common passion for freedom of belief?
Theologian Mary Hunt, believes that friendship reveals what is of ultimate worth to us. Her model of theology portrays friendship as the basis of our relationships, voluntary associations that require intentionality. And when the elements of friendship she presents are in balance, the relationship becomes generative; not only does the process impact the individuals involved, but the larger community in which the relationship exists as well. One of the elements of her paradigm is spirituality. Here is her definition: "spirituality is defined . . . as an intentional process of making choices that affect self and community; it is attentiveness, focus, awareness of how our behavior and choices affect the people around us." [23-4] Using her definition suggests that spirituality is not something we choose to have or not depending on our beliefs, but a way of being in relationship that we all do. Spirituality is not something attached to worldview, but a way we act with each other regardless of specific worldview.
The theologies of Wieman and Hunt suggest a process of relating that goes beyond the passive, non-relational aspect of tolerance, a way of accepting that there are different points of view. This more relational definition of what we believe and how we behave can bridge different perspectives. Here we practice living as if we are all one--regardless of how we describe that oneness. Our relationships become the foundation of religious community, the quality of this community the foundation of how we live, and therefore how we act in the world. This is a definition of tolerance I can live with, a definition that is worthy of the principles and values of Unitarian Universalism.
This tolerance is demanding and never static. It requires that we live in a way that sees the questions still unanswered, whether we believe they are ultimately answerable or not. It makes the quality of our relationships the core of how we perceive our place in community, our role in the larger world. This makes sense to me--this is a paradigm of Unitarian Universalism I can celebrate and follow. If we look at personal theology and spirituality as behaviors to help bring our lives and work into a framework of common ground, a foundation for how we listen to each other and how we make decisions, we bring our daily lives into the realm of the sacred. And they are. How we believe in our hearts is deeply personal, intimate really. Even if what I believe in my head seems to be unrelated to what I think you believe--how we each act to relate them is sacred work.
It is hard work, too. Work for which we need each other's support, both to examine perspectives and to question. This is not tolerance that comes from a mind that makes hard lines out of difference, but a call to be in relationship that challenges both head and heart. Perhaps our lives of privilege lead us to think we can choose which paradigm we live through--the active or the passive understanding of tolerance, theology, and spirituality. But I don't believe we really do have that choice. We choose the passive paradigm at great peril. Maybe not to us in our lifetimes, maybe even not in our children's lifetimes. But insistence on a paradigm of right belief and wrong belief can lead only to destruction.
It is simply no longer enough to live and let live. We must live in a way that proactively gives voice to all lives. We can no longer sit back and watch foreign policies bring more death, or domestic policy that assigns civil rights and power according to economic status. And I say we can no longer afford to live in a community that fosters divisions based on differing religious interpretations of life and the sacred. We must truly live our statement that all are welcome here--welcome into our community that seeks unity and peace above all else. Please God of many names, may it be so. In our most rational minds, may it be so. In our connection to the earth, may it be so. In our love for each other and for our humanity, may it be so.
(c) Rev. Patti Pomerantz 2006
posted by UUCP Sermons at 12:26 PM
