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Theology Canadian Style

Sunday Service - March 1, 10:00am
Rev. Julie Stoneberg

Music: Resonance
Our theology is really just an expression of how we look at the world, and that is deeply influenced by the context and environment in which we live.

 

OPENING WORDS

Harold Rosen
”Ours is a land of many peoples and colours. We aspire to justice for each person, participation by each person, and fulfillment within each person. And as Canadian Unitarian Universalists, we hope to become world citizens, honouring our global religious heritage.
If we fully awaken to the beauty and challenge of being in Canada; if we embrace the opportunities for intercultural and interfaith cooperation; if we embody our principles of inclusiveness and unity-in-diversity…. Then we will bestow blessings upon our Unitarian Universalist movement, our nation, and our world.
To our movement, we will offer a rainbow theology, inclusive of many peoples and  perspectives;
To Canada, we will over rainbow justice, expressive of a truly international nation;
To the world, we will offer a vision of a rainbow creation:
one earth, many living things…
one humanity, many peoples…
one light, many colours.
If not here, where? If not us, who? If not now, when?”
 

Reading

James Britton
Personal Reflection
 

Message

The daytime book club is struggling through Ken Wilbur’s book “A Brief History of Everything.” During this past Thursday’s meeting, we got to talking about the distinction between modernity and post-modernity, which might be briefly and partially described as the difference between believing there is empirical truth, and accepting that there are multiple truths, created by individual experience and perspective. 
 
I just read an interesting story that illustrates post-modernity beautifully...it comes from an article on Theological Geography written by Craig Dykstra.   He writes:
“My high school senior is taking a geography class, and my wife and I went to meet his geography teacher...this particular teacher seems to be an especially wise and good one. An assignment he gives...is for the students to draw a map of their neighborhood. He does not define "neighborhood" for them, and this creates some anxiety in the students. They sense that if they do not know what their neighborhood is, they will not be able to know if they are drawing their maps "right." But he encourages them and tells them just to go and try it.
 
When the maps are finished, they are hung on the classroom wall. Then the teacher begins to tell them what he has learned from their maps. They are fascinated, because he can tell from most of them which house the map-maker lives in, even when the house is not labelled as such. Quite frequently, the student's own home is in the center of the map. Even if it isn't, the vivid details around a particular home (shrubbery, driveways, sidewalks, the coloration) provide the clue. From some maps, the teacher can tell where special friends live or what places are most regularly visited and mostly highly valued by the map maker.
 
The teacher knows that we all make maps, in our heads if nowhere else. We operate from day to day on the basis of the mental maps of our imaginations. When we sketch them out on paper, we can see from them what we pay most attention to, what we value, what our own personal neighborhoods, our effective worlds, consist of. It is also interesting to note, when such sketches are shared, how different they are-even when they sketch the same basic environment. As one elementary geography text puts it, "Mental maps are individual views of the world and the things in it. No one has had your unique experiences, and so no one's mental map is precisely like yours."”
 
The point is, that we each draw maps, mental images, and create stories that are based in our particular experience and context.   The “neighbourhood” in which we live, the world in which we create meaning, is, at least in part, painted with the unique lens of experience. 
(As an aside, here’s a plug for the Building Your Own Theology series that Kathryn and Andrew are planning to present in April. Essentially this course is about map-making, about drawing your spiritual map, so that you might grow to better understand yourself.)
 
Exploring the effect and the relevance of our physical environment is what I had in mind for my talk today. Theology Canadian Style. How might living in Canada influence our religious and spiritual beliefs and practices? I wanted to explore how what we see and experience in the natural world affects us.   As former CUC president Kim Turner once mused, “If such things as northern-ness, coldness, and isolation matter in literature, it is quite likely that they matter in religion.” 
 
I mean, think about it. Such things, the stuff of the surrounds, do matter in literature. Characters who exist in rocky, windblown terrain are portrayed to be prone to gusts of paranoia and dread, and are emotionally isolated, without a mooring in a spiritual centre.   Stories that take place where there are interruptions in the surrounding topography...where cliffs, secret valleys, caves, and dark forests prevail...contain elements of magic and often come to miraculous endings.  
 
In world religions, we can see why a rain god might be important in India, and why the Nile River has been prevalent in Egyptian worship. Christianity was born in a region where sheep-herding was a major occupation, and its deity is often called the Good Shepherd. Judaism, which developed in an agrarian society, teaches that humans were created out of dirt, and that paradise is best expressed as a beautiful garden, Eden.   Or, here’s another example from Judaism...where, it is said, g-d doesn’t have a place, rather g-d is The Place.” Not a surprising bit of theology from a people who have been exiled repeatedly and who live primarily in a diaspora. Religions reflect, interpret, and incorporate their environments. We ‘make’ theology that is consistent with the world we live in.
 
But Canada is a hugely diverse country, both in its natural expression and in its social construction. So, it gets a lot more complicated, perhaps even impossible, to draw sweeping conclusions about “Theology Canadian Style.” There is no one sense of place, no one topography, no one expression of nature’s impact on Canadian thought. And layer on top of that the incredibly diffused religious presence in this country...and everything starts to feel a bit watered down and irrelevant. 
 
What do I mean by diffused religious presence? Well, other than aboriginal expressions of spirituality, every religion present in Canada has come from another place. These religions had their birth in geographies quite different than that of Canada. In coming here, in order to survive, they quite likely adapted and changed, yet it’s hard to say exactly how. The major religions present in Canada (Christianity and Islam) are ‘universal’ religions...that is, religions that have sought to convert all peoples. In that quest, they have spread rather deliberately, probably without much consideration for the physical environments into which they have moved. Unitarianism and Universalism were no different in this regard. They were carried to Canada by immigrants. And Unitarianism for a time operated an active missionary-type effort in the western provinces. Most of the religious perspectives present in Canada are not native, and at least, in their nascence, were not influenced by this particular geography. 
 
So, why even talk about it? Well, as many of you know, the Canadian Unitarian Council went independent from the Unitarian Universalist Association only about six or seven years ago, and that secession was, in large part, about the fact that Canada is a very different place than the United States, and our identity as Canadian Unitarian Universalists was being swallowed up in the sheer size of the American organization. As an association, we are still trying to capture the essence of our unique voice, a voice that I’m sure, is influenced by the Canadian landscape.
 
Just think about it for a minute. Use that incredible ‘mind’s eye’ that you possess. When you hear ‘Canadian landscape’, what picture comes to mind? Seriously, just take a moment to form an image that for you ‘says’ Canada. 
 
Got it? Anyone want to call out a description of your picture? 
 
Now just try to imagine how those ideas of place influence how we see ourselves in the world. So, does “northern-ness” affect us spiritually and religiously? You might be interested to hear that theologian Karl Barth thought so. He said,
“How can we make clear the victory of Christ?  In this way: when speaking of sin, demons, darkness, by not speaking of them in too tragic a manner—like the German theologians, all so serious! The further north you go in Germany, the more they are concerned with the realm of darkness. And if you move to the Scandinavian countries, all is darkness: God against Satan, and vice versa! ... It is not wise to be too serious.”
 
At least in Barth’s view, northern-ness produces a kind of theological darkness. I can’t say that I agree with him, and I don’t mean to imply that who we are is determined by our environment alone. Just as the same type of parent might produce children of very different temperaments, the same environment contributes to very different world views. Still, the natural world is the canvas on which we make our maps of meaning. 
 
Although she’s speaking of a house, I love how Phyllis Tickle speaks of her environment in her book The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape:
“The house in which I grew up and in which my first subjective instruction was played out was a determinate in those lessons. And, if not a determinate, at least a kind of text upon which my memory and understanding have recorded them and to which I have attached their intricacies.”  
 
She goes on, with an example of sorts:
“...the house was laid out so that no one seat, not even my favoured one on the stairs, was satisfactory as an observatory. No, ours was a house that required an inquisitive person to move about a lot.”
 
Again, I ask, what does living in Canada require of us, of our religious imaginations? Here is where I feel a need to expand my focus on the natural world, and use a definition of geography which includes a broader sense of context. Contextual theology, the recognition that our context is a persuasive presence in our theological outlook, certainly includes more than our natural environs. For us, then, it includes, for a start...
  • a sense of vast expansiveness co-existing with feelings of isolation
  • living in areas that are bordered by a largely unsettled and potentially dangerous wilderness
  • Easy access to nature, a natural world which is punctuated by extreme elements
  • A cultural mosaic paired with a society in which almost all are immigrants, though with admittedly differing seniority
  • A country where there are two official languages, and which is sometimes said to exist in the shadow of two powerful empires...Great Britain and the United States
  • A nation founded on order, good government and peace

So, if religion can be broadly defined as our attempt to tie things together, to create cohesion and meaning in our lives, then the question must be asked, how do we make meaning from a list of environmental factors such as these?   I know, what I’ve mostly done today is to ask questions.   But maybe the only answer we can get is, ‘it depends.’ For indeed it does. It depends on our level of awareness. It depends on our ability to take what we have and to make something of it. It depends on the direction of our ambition and the depth of our commitment. It depends on what we do with where we live. 

About twenty years ago, Rev. Mark Mosher de Wolfe wrote about the Canadian Unitarian context and the potential that lies within that context. He drew attention to Margaret Atwood's thesis that "survival" vis-a-vis the harshness of nature (and perhaps also 'human nature') is the theme of Canadian literature.  He pointed out that our Unitarian Universalist "affirmations of life", despite all of life's ambiguities, qualify as Atwood’s "creative non-victim". In other words, as Canadian Unitarian Universalists, we insist on choosing life in the presence of extremes, in the harshest of elements, and amidst a cultural cacophony. We ‘get’ that where ever we go, there we are, and we are willing to celebrate that or at least deal with it, as the circumstances might require. 
 
I want to leave this for you to think about, but I will share this one personal pondering. Statistics show that while a majority of Canadians say they are religious, only about half of those participate in religious community. We have the great blessing of living so close to so much awesome nature, and it is no wonder that many say they find their spiritual sustenance alone in that nature. Yet you can’t form a community around a private experience of a tree, an eagle or a river; and some, myself included, are concerned about the lasting effects of this breakdown in community. We are enriched and supported and challenged by connecting with others, and I believe one of our great challenges is to find ways to build and sustain community in a context that increasingly puts its emphasis elsewhere. And, the Canadian context, if nothing else, demands that we ‘do’ and ‘make’ community in a way that responds to and interacts with our natural world. 
 
Rev. De Wolfe emphasized that the most important gift we Unitarians have is "the insistence that our religion be congruent with our experience".  Being aware of exactly where we are is key to both our identity and our ability, to use a Thich Nhat Hahn term, to inter-be authentically with what surrounds us. And since our Canadian experience is so completely an embrace of opposites and tension, this will include naming the dark side clearly, even as we affirm sources of hope.  This tension is beautifully summed up in de Wolfe’s conclusion...
               "Standing in [the] shadows we can see our own Northern Lights, our own winter
               stars".   
 
May we choose, as people of the great north, to be neither dark nor cold, but rather to see the incredible beauty of this world and to draw upon that beauty to build a world of love and justice. We may be winter stars, but we are, nonetheless, filled with light. 
So may it always be. 
 
 

Closing Words

Raymond Baughan  
We are all theologians. We touch the running water and the rocks. We hurt. We laugh. We grasp and are grasped. We fall and are embraced. Broken and fragmented, we are driven toward wholeness. Long before we hold any belief about it, we feel the presence of something sacred and meaningful. Unable to name it, we respond with metaphor, with vision, with decision; and we live as though that were the way the world is. Your theology is your commitment. In Unitarian Herman Melville’s words, “it is not down in any map; true places never are.”