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Where Do We Come From? We’re Turning FIFTY!

Sunday Service - October 3, 10:00am
Rev. Julie Stoneberg

Music by The Occasional Singers

Continuing with our annual theme, we’ll take a close look at our history. Were we conceived in 1961, or can we trace our heritage much further? What do we take from our past that informs and creates our future?

 

Opening Words         

In The Middle        - Barbara Crooker           
Of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
Struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
Has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
To get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
The chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
Green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
And a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
Our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
Again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
And evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
Mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
Twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
His tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
Us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
Sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
Of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
In love, running out of time.
Welcome to this place, where we can take off our watches and lie in the hammock. Welcome to this place, where week after week, we learn again how to love.
 

Story For All Ages

This is the Wind    - Liz Rosenberg
This is a “House that Jack Built’ type of story that unwinds all the connections that were happening ‘on the night you were born.’ It begins: “This is the wind that blew on the farm...”
 

Reflection

Marion Habermehl

Today Julie will be talking about our Unitarian Universalist history, where we have come from, what changes our living faith has seen. The question of faith has strongly informed where I come from. I was born into a family that for generations followed a principled unwavering faith in the Dutch Calvinist tradition.  It is because of this strong faith that I was born in Canada, unlike all of my family before me, who were born in Holland. My father was asked to come to this country to minister to the many Dutch immigrants who arrived in the post-war era of the 1950’s. He read this request as a call from God, and there is only one way to answer that!

I grew up immersed in the Christian Reformed tradition. It was my home, my school, my church, my extra-curricular club, my meat-and-potatoes diet. All my friends were the children of new immigrants. Dutch was spoken all around me, the culture’s traditions closely observed. It was a sheltered, safe, fairly simple up-bringing. But everything changes. As an adolescent I witnessed my father growing more disillusioned with the inflexible nature of those beliefs, and witnessed his attempts (of varying success) to reform this Reformed church. He was brave, and bold. It was not always easy for him. Yet he remained deeply involved with, and committed to, the Christian faith.

It was when I was in university that I seriously began to question the dogma of that faith. It was a long slow process of shedding everything I knew about being in the world. Letting go of the worldview that I was born and raised in, a worldview that informed my religious, cultural, and personal practices. Fortunately I was not alone in that process. Profound change is hard to do alone. I found support in a small alternative Christian Reformed Church in Toronto. I also found Gary there! He, too, was doing a lot of processing to release the restrictions imposed by that rigid dogma. 

One thing that is hard about change for me, is that when I have moved closer to where I want to be, and I have gained a measure of wider vision, I feel the sadness of not having started out at that point already! I guess it’s regret for all the distance traveled when it seems there is still so much ahead. But of course I’d never trade it, I’d not go back to the small, protected group I was once so immersed within. There wasn’t enough breathing space for me. I have found I now have great sensitivity to dogma in any form. I am fine with that. I am fine, too, with the great loss of deep belonging that I felt in that group long ago. I think that is akin to the great loss each of us experiences when we leave our child selves behind, in our metamorphosis into adult selves. You can’t change if you won’t risk loss. And to not change is to not feel alive. None of us here, in this Unitarian Universalist fellowship of Peterborough, would give that up. I am in very good company. Thank you.

 

Message

Where Do We Come From?
When we do our “New UU” classes here, we spend a bit of time talking about our Unitarian Universalist history. I struggle with how to tell the story, because my western brain wants to find the bud of the bud, the nub of the nub, the seed of the seed...something to which I could point which says, “See, this. This is where we come from. It all started here.”   And I can’t find it. Sometimes I just throw up my hands and say ‘we’re as old as humankind’...it all began there. And then, I remember that I’m not a creationist, and that I don’t believe there is any moment that clearly defines when human life began, and then...all there is to say, as was part of our responsive reading a few weeks ago: out of the stars we have come. 
 
This congregation, the Unitarian Fellowship, does have a beginning demarcation. It began almost exactly fifty years ago when a small group of people responded to a newspaper ad and to calls from the Rev. Bill Jenkins from Toronto, and met together to discuss starting a Unitarian congregation here. Shortly thereafter, the Fellowship was granted a charter by the American Unitarian Association. We have the document. It’s signed. That’s where it began. 
But then, I could say that Rev. Jenkins’ desire to start a new congregation goes back much further, and I could say that the particular religious leanings in those who gathered for that first meeting were formed much earlier, and...
Where do we come from?
 
As with the story today...which is, as I’m sure you recognized, a variation of “The house that Jack Built” or “There’s a Hole at the Bottom of the Sea”...I am struck with a childlike acknowledgement that there is always something behind or before the thing that’s before the thing that’s before what happened before we got to where we are now. And while we’re not looking today at ‘where we are going’, implicit in this progressive connection and string of influences is the understanding that who and what we are today lies before, and helps to create, what will be tomorrow. 
 
But what is perhaps not so simple in our Unitarian and Universalist history, is that there are many strands of influence and direction, strands that weave and wander, diverge and merge, begin and seemingly disappear. It’s like popcorn...bits of our history and ideals popping up at different times and in various places. How am I to make any sense of where we come from...at least in a way that can be covered in 15 minutes?   It’ll have to be simple and in very broad strokes, like the story. 
This is the wind that blew on the would-be Unitarians scattered around Peterborough one fall...the fall of 1960. 
 
This wind was undoubtedly stirred up out of a combination of factors...the conservative nature of “pre-university” Peterborough...the optimistic and free-thinking young engineers and their families who were settling in the city...the political and economic climate brought on by post-WWII society, which in one hand held the promise of progress, but in the other hand held the memory of the atomic bomb. This was the wind blowing in Peterborough in 1960, and it must have contained a breath of hope. 
 
And directly behind, or blowing alongside that wind, was a period of great transition for Unitarians and Universalists, as the Canadian Unitarian Council was formed, and the American Unitarian Association merged with the Universalist Church of America to create the Unitarian Universalist Association. All in the same year. Recently someone told me that what they loved about our history is that we are, in large part, a result of merger and coming together, rather than a religious movement formed by schism.   I guess that while there are many instances of heresy and secession in our history, we can also claim a commitment to working together and finding common ground. And so, just as thousands of Unitarians and Universalists were working toward a common identity across the continent, a small band of souls was trying to do the same in Peterborough. This is a wind of cooperation. 
 
Another force in our history, already mentioned, was the Rev. Bill Jenkins from Toronto First. And perhaps what lies behind his passion for helping to found this congregation was the Unitarian Fellowship Movement. In 1946, Rev. Lon Ray Call published a report calling for an extension program, based in his study of an alarming number of church closings. What ensued was the Fellowship Movement, which was a growth strategy to plant small, autonomous, lay-led congregations just about anywhere ten or more religious liberals could be brought together.[1] This effort was primarily led by Monroe Husbands, whose extensive missionary work brought him to Canada. We don’t usually think of Unitarians as having missionaries, but in the period from 1948-1967, dozens of fellowships were begun in Canada, and although many of them did not survive, as a testament to this effort, there are currently twice as many congregations in Canada than there were in 1957. This is a wind laced with determined survivalism and a belief that what we have to offer can make a difference in the world.
 
(An interesting note about the Fellowship movement; specific communities were targeted...places where there were universities and therefore academics and free thinkers, and places where there was a higher than average socio-economic class in order to make establishing the congregation more fiscally feasible. I have to wonder how that choice of communities has influenced who we are today. Over 300 existing congregations across North America were begun during this time and in this way.)
 
And, at about the same time, huge theological changes were sweeping through both Unitarian and Universalist congregations. Universalist churches, which had always been grounded in the spiritual leadership and authority of Jesus, were beginning to see beyond Christianity to a broader type of universalism. Unitarians had recently been heavily influenced by Humanism, which disavows anything supernatural, and puts its faith in human nature and ability.   And prior to that surge of Humanism, Unitarianism had been altered by Transcendentalism, which insisted that a person had the right and ability to experience the spiritual directly, without mediation.   As Transcendentalism was wending its way through Unitarianism, Unitarian congregations were beginning to form across Canada.  
 
Before the Fellowship movement, before 1900 even, many congregations already existed in Canada...some long-established and thriving...the church in Montreal, formed by New Englanders and recent immigrants from England, who called their first minister in 1843 from Ireland; First Church in Toronto, formed in 1846 with the support of two brothers from Montreal and some Irish Unitarians. Their first minister was a Scotsman. Ottawa formed a congregation and called a minister in 1877. The First Icelandic Unitarian Church of Winnipeg began meeting in 1890. And a smattering of Universalist congregations dotted the countryside beginning as early as 1828.[2] 
 
England, Ireland, Scotland, Iceland... behind these congregational starts was a wave of immigration, immigration that brought with it a commitment to freedom...political and religious. Which carries us back to England and Europe, and to the Protestant Reformation...
 
I was thrilled that Marion chose to mention her Calvinist roots...because I want to mention ours as well. It is true that it was Calvin who burned at the stake Michael Servetus, a martyr that we claim for Unitarianism. But it is also true that Calvin’s experiment with democracy in Geneva in the early 1500’s provided the model of democratic governance that our churches use today.   We come from Calvin as well as from those he and his doctrines persecuted. 
 
I like to think of the Protestant Reformation as a great waking up...an awakening of minds that had been previously subdued by a lack of education and freedom. When lay people began to be able to read the Bible for themselves...when this information was spread through all classes of society...different ways of thinking exploded. 
One of these ways manifested in Transylvania, where a former Lutheran by the name of Frances David influenced King Sigismund to declare an Edict of Tolerance in 1548, the first of its kind, which allowed for people to practice religion as they chose. The edict didn’t last very long, but it happened, and that opened the door for greater and greater tolerance. 
And why Transylvania? Well, it could be because a group of people settled in the Balkans hundreds of years earlier...after their leader Arian ‘lost’ in the theological battle at the Council of Nicaea in 325. [3] You see, Arian believed that God was one, but another guy, Athanasius, won.   Athanasius put forward the belief that Jesus was God, and his view was the decision of the Council. It was from Nicaea that the idea of the Trinity was born, and unitarianism (small U) went underground until many years later.  This is a wind of courage and conviction.
 
And before that? Well we can’t leave out Origen, who lived in the early 200’s, and while a trinitarian, also believed that all souls would be restored to God.  He is one of first known universalists (small u). 
 
And before that? It’s lost in history, but Origen was not made in a vacuum, and whatever the influences that created his thought, they existed with and before him.
 
And this is the wind that blows. It weaves and bends, lies dormant and surges, leapfrogging across continents and between cities. It is a wind that is born in a spirit of religious freedom, a wind carried by a grace that allows each individual ‘to know’ for themselves, a wind fuelled by a love that accepts and embraces difference.  It seems to me that where we come from is a trust in that wind...knowing that if love, and freedom, and the human spirit are all present... it matters not where it blows. We will follow. 
 
We have let go of prescribed beliefs. And once you open the door to all that can be, then anything can be. We have accepted that change is necessary, that change is inevitable, that change is desired, and so we refuse to write things in stone....that is, except freedom, and reason, and love. 
 
Oh, and one more thing...each other. We come from a tradition of covenant, one that believes that we need not think alike to love alike, and that we continue to need one another’s presence and support.   Our commitment to covenanting with one another goes back at least as far as 1648 and the Cambridge Platform, which stated that ‘there is no greater church than a congregation’...and called on us to care for and engage fully one with another. Like the sangha in Buddhism, the congregation is the thing. 
 
Now it may surprise you that these same values....freedom, the sacredness of the individual, and the idea of covenant....are the key values that are lifted up over and over again in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament. And this is also a place from which we come. We may not now identify as Christian, at least not centrally, but it has only been in the past 70 or 80 years that we have stepped outside of the Christian stream.  
 
If I could offer a kind of time capsule to understand what was happening when this Fellowship was born, I would offer it by way of a denominational historical document.   This is the pledge that was spoken at the time of the Unitarian and Universalist merger in 1960. This is what the newly-merged UUs were saying when this Fellowship began:
We, Unitarians and Universalists, children of Judeo-Christian heritage, inheritors of the wisdom of the universal prophets, eager to experience the insights of the great faiths of the world, open to all sources of inspiration, ancient and modern, determined to explore the boundless ocean of truth which lies about on every hand ..., and welcoming into fellowship all men [sic] of whatever background of faith, here together on this night of Consolidation, conscious of the presence of the past, and of our urgent tasks, dedicate ourselves anew to the free and universal fellowship of all mankind that is the church to be.
 
We .. pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our faith to its high purpose and sure upbuilding.
 
None of these ideas and ideals began in that exact moment in time. And none of these ideas and ideals ended at that moment. Much as happened since then, including, thankfully, the use of more inclusive language.   We are born and re-born in each moment. Each moment is a beginning that we carry with us, and that we re-create for what is to come. 
Where do we come from? Out of the stars of we have come. Born on the wind of liberal religion we have come. May this powerful trust in love and freedom be the wind that blows on the Unitarians in the pews of this sanctuary on this Sunday morning in October, 2010. 
So may it be. 
 
* Closing Words     In The Middle (reprise)     - Barbara Crooker
Remember some of the words from where we began today...
            Each day we must learn again how to love...
We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
Us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
Sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
Of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
In love, running out of time.
Where do we come from? We come from a deep knowing that each day, we must learn again how to love. And for that, there is always enough time. 
So may it be. 
 

[1] http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/90617.shtml
[2] Hewett, Phillip, Unitarians in Canada
[3] Cited in “Roots and Wings: Where Do We Come From?”, a sermon by Rev. Claudia Elferdink