Tradition is a fascinating thing to look at. It is amazing how some traditions persist and others die, how easily they are formed and seem to be carved from granite almost at once, and how easily they can be forgotten. Have you ever noticed, for example, the jokes that children tell? If you want to see the persistence of tradition, look at the ages at which certain jokes are current. There's one — I think it's in third grade — that they all bring home, and no one can tell you who told it first. They don't tell it in second grade; by fourth it's passé; but every third grader's parent is asked sooner or later, "Want to hear a dirty joke?" Wanting to learn what horrors are going on in their little minds, or more likely, remembering one's own third gradeishness, parents naturally say yes, and the child says, dissolving into helpless giggles, "The white horse fell in the mud!" Okay, but it's tradition and it has lasted for generations. In fact, bad as it is, there seems to be no way to destroy it.
There is a story in my family which I dearly love, whose truth or falsity I have no way of checking, as whose age is also lost in the shadows. My mother told me as hers told her. The event recorded is over 500 years old. Can it have been passed down through the generations for so long? And like the white horse joke, the question would be why it should last, if indeed it was not a simple invention of later years, although why such a story should be invented, I cannot imagine. It is that, back in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella ejected the Jews from Spain along with the Moors, an English ancestor of mine rescued and married one of these Jewish women. It is a lovely story, but if my sisters' and my children forget to tell it to theirs, it will be lost in one generation after having existed — how long?
There are far more important stories that one would think would have been handed down for eons that have been entirely lost. I think, for example, of the building and purpose of Stonehenge. We know less than nothing about the ancient Britons who created that fascinating megalith, but it is so important that new traditions have been invented to explain it. Every year modern self-described druids celebrate the solstice at Stonehenge. Although it has been made off-limits to observers who have been unable to contain their vandalism, those rules have been relaxed in favor of those who say that it is the ancient tradition of their religion to hold those rites at Stonehenge. Of course, it is not. Stonehenge was built long before the Druids came to England, and their rites were held in woods and forests, not on Salisbury Plain. We have written records of them — written by their enemies to be sure — but if Stonehenge and the other stone circles that exist in western Europe had been centers of their worship, it would surely have been noted. The real story is gone and only a plausible untruth remains.
There is a story which I am assured is true about a young woman who was required to read her first Shakespeare play, Macbeth, I believe, and when she was asked what she thought of it said that she couldn't understand why people thought Shakespeare was so wonderful. There wasn't, she complained, an original line in the whole play. It was just one quotation after another. The story could be true, I suppose. Shakespeare may have become a monument like Stonehenge with few people knowing more about him than that. At least she had heard the quotations. I sometimes wonder if literary allusions that were at one time common to all educated people are even recognized in our modern times. At one time it was understood that there was a kind of base of history, literature and mathematics that anyone with a pretense to culture would be familiar with and understand. The context and origin of allusions did not have to be explained because, except for those who were completely illiterate, we shared the same information and the same way of thinking about things. With the information explosion, the shrinking of the world, and the shift from education to job training in what we call our schools this can no longer be taken for granted. People no longer share the same information, and even that which is generally known is out of context and merely another little piece of data. Shakespeare is a monument to be cited rather than an author to be read.
My fear in recent years is that the religion of Unitarian Universalism, too, is becoming a monument which is used by people who know nothing about its origins or its meaning, and not only don't really understand the idea to which they have attached themselves, but have invented a new one, as the modern self-named Druids have attached themselves to a little-known and less understood story of an ancient religion and a great circle of standing stones which had nothing to do with the religion they think they are practicing. Traditional meanings are so easily lost and replaced by something different, or become a mere shibboleth to be repeated. We have a tendency to name famous Unitarians and Universalists simply because they were famous, without, it seems to me, any understanding of what it meant to our religion or about it that they were a part of it. There is a very popular t-shirt that has been made available at various conferences which says "Famous Unitarian Universalists," with a list of names ending with "and me". It feels like an effort to maintain the importance of something because we wish it to have that tradition of significance, without any real tradition of what that significance was.
That is only one symptom of what I mean. There has been a thread (for those of you who aren't on lists on the net, that means a continuing topic) on the use and misuse of the purposes and principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association on the ministers' association chat-line. You will find these principles on the flyleaf of your hymnal, and much of the organization of the hymnal is based on them. The question is whether they have begun to be used as a creed, and if so, whether that matters. That some of our ministers could say that the principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association are, for all intents and purposes, a creed imposed upon their individual churches, and that that was the way they used them, is a sign of how far we have traveled from the religion of our famous Unitarians and Universalists. They would certainly turn over in their graves if such activity were possible, and if they were alive today, they might well repudiate a religion in which even some of its clergy have forgotten why and how it was founded, and what appears to be a majority of its members haven't even been told.
I once listened to a pagan who came to tell a group why paganism was a natural and appropriate part of the Unitarian Universalist movement. She quoted each of the principles and interpreted them in such a way as to make it seem necessary, if we follow them, to welcome an organization which, however harmless and well-meaning, differs in several points from what we have always stood for — and indeed teaches the opposite of what we have traditionally taught: the rejection of magic and the embrace of reason. This is symptomatic of a problem which exists in our churches. Our movement as a whole has begun to be defined by paganism and its new age cousins who think that crystals have magic power and The Celestine Prophecy actually reveals new and useful insights, to people who know nothing about us. The Beaumont, Texas, UU church, for example, was the only one in town to be asked to participate in a psychic fair, and when someone who had heard only our name was cruising the net looking for links to witchcraft, he came across it six times. I wonder if he would have discovered it if he had been looking for something like religious reason.
I was trying to figure out how all this happened — how we went from a religion of reason to one of uncritical acceptance of anything that might wish to attach itself to us in one generation. I could not blame the pagans or the adherents of the more extraordinary manifestations of the New Age. Nor could I blame the non-creedalism that is a part of our very foundation, although it is that to which logic might point. The blame, if such there is, must lie in our failure to state the obvious. It seemed so clear to us that free religion carried with it the responsibility of reflection, reason, the testing of ideas against what is generally accepted by the world's tribunal of truth, and the justification of religious belief in terms of the real world, that we forgot to mention it. We said, "Unitarian Universalism is a religion that doesn't ask you to check your brain at the door," and forgot to add that on the contrary we expect people to bring their intelligence in with them. That doesn't mean that you have to have a graduate degree or even a college education, merely that you have to use the same methods to think about religious questions as about secular ones. We were so concerned about explaining that our being non-creedal meant that people could believe different things and still be a part of our communion, that we forgot to state that there was a boundary, that our members were expected not to believe things that the slightest reflection would teach them were false. There really were some things that we were not only not expected to believe but should not believe, and those were things that we could discover were not true. The use of reason was so basic to our faith from its very beginnings in the enlightenment, that we didn't bother to mention it. We forgot to tell people that that was the reason for our openness in the search for truth, for our tolerance of various beliefs, for our acceptance of people without regard to irrelevant things such as skin color or sexual orientation, for our rejection of a creed. We thought everyone understood that, so we concentrated on explaining the effects rather than the cause. We taught tolerance and freedom for a full generation without mentioning their dependence on the use of reason and the acceptance of personal responsibility for our own religion. It seemed unnecessary to mention what everyone knew. Stating the obvious is surely a waste of time.
Except it has become clear that everyone didn't know, that people thought that because we didn't tell them what to believe that they could believe anything that they wished and, more importantly, that they were required to accept other beliefs, no matter how irrational or baseless, as being equally acceptable. We taught them that the only thing that was intolerable was intolerance by failing to mention that all beliefs are not equal, that they must be justified by reason and by their correspondence to our experience in the world. When boundaries are so obvious that you do not feel that they need to be mentioned, it is a shock to notice how quickly they can disappear, and the highest value becomes the very lack of boundaries. There's a country song that says, "You've got to stand for something, or you'll fall for anything." Some of our congregations have proved the truth of that statement.
The religion of anything goes is not the one I joined thirty years ago. It is not, really, I believe, even yet, the religion that most members of our churches adhere to. Yet we often seem to describe ourselves that way, not because we really believe it, but because we have refused to state the obvious for so long that we have forgotten it. There's a little jingle that I hear again and again that I would like to see banned from our pulpits for at least another 30 years. It goes, "He drew a circle to keep me out/Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout/ But love and I had the wit to win/We drew a circle that took him in." I don't know who wrote that, but I have heard it over and over again from Unitarian Universalist pulpits. It's not that I don't agree with it in principle — I am unalterably opposed to bigotry of any kind, and I do really affirm the worth and dignity of every person — but we repeat it without mentioning its boundaries, assuming that everyone already knows what they are, and the conclusion that is drawn is that there is nothing that we stand for except acceptance of everything. There are no boundaries.
Except that there are and most of us still know that there are, and what is done in one generation can be undone in another. That people are beginning to worry about whether we have abandoned the discipline of non-creedalism for the ease of adherence to a creed is an indication that some of us realize it is past time to start stating the obvious again. It is time to say, "No, you are not allowed to believe what you know or even suspect is not true." It is time to say that reason is not only an important but a vital tool in the search for truth. It is time to say that we stand not only for tolerance, but also for integrity of the mind as well as the spirit. It is time to state the obvious truth that meaningful lives can only be based on meaningful beliefs. It is time to call ourselves back to our heritage of a free faith which demands a responsible practice, so that our religion will not be simply a monument to a noble past that we no longer understand, but a base from which we can meet the future with courage and with hope.