One of the most enduring and crippling weaknesses of the Unitarian Universalist faith is its inability to explain itself, not only to outsiders but to its own membership. The danger in this in a free faith is obvious. If your own membership does not have a clear understanding of its own unique place in the dialogue of world religions, it will find it impossible to maintain it. If you, yourself, don't know who you are, you are quite likely to become something else, and there is no telling what that something else might be. Since it is not grounded in its own integrity and has lost sight of its core values it can take on any or all of the characteristics of other more solidly grounded entities. As the country song says, "You've got to stand for something, or you'll fall for anything."
One of the ways this works itself out in Unitarian Universalism is a kind of pride in uncritical eclecticism. Sometimes even those who do know our history and heritage find themselves falling into this trap. I have heard more than one person define Unitarian Universalism as a synthesis of world religions, and I have lost count of the people who call me to perform their weddings who say that they are looking for a non-denominational or interfaith church. So far, when I have explained that that is not what we are, they are perfectly satisfied, but I still find it unutterably depressing to have to tell people that our 200+ year-old faith (that is, here in North America) has its own identity and values. It shouldn't be surprising however. We have kept the secret from ourselves as well as we have kept it from others.
It is easy to see how some of us have come to the idea of a syncretistic Unitarian Universalism, and I suppose it's better than the anything-that-isn't-Christian definition that some of us have held, if not articulated. Christianity is the only religion we feel called upon to criticize, and probably rightly so. It's the only one most of us know well enough to criticize. Those people who say that we live in a Christian culture, although they usually say it to make a point with which we will strongly disagree, are quite correct. Although our country was not founded to support Christianity, there is no question that that is not only the most widely practiced religion, the one that is assumed in civil religion, but also the one that most of us grew up in. We therefore have a romantic notion that other religions are somehow better. They aren't. All religions have their strengths and weaknesses, their truths and falsities. Ours does, too, although if we maintain our traditions, it does have self-correcting possibilities.
That is part of how we have mistakenly started to think of ourselves in this syncretic way. In our search for truth we have refused to be confined to our birth religions or to the doctrines of majority religion. We have cast our nets wider and have discovered truths in the other religions of the world. That simple discovery, however, does not make our religion a synthesis, and celebrating the Hindu feast of lights does not make Hinduism a part of the religion of a particular Unitarian Universalist; nor does hanging the symbols of all the world religions on the walls of our sanctuaries make a religion for the world - or for an individual.
There has been a tendency lately for many of us to hyphenate ourselves. Rightly dissatisfied with the notion that we can be all the world's religions or all the ways of looking at the holy, we've started to identify with one or several. We call ourselves Christian UUs, Moslem UUs, Jewish UUs, theist UUs, humanist UUs, Buddhist UUs, or whatever. When the Commission on Appraisal gave its report at General Assembly a few years ago it asked for the people who identified themselves in those ways to stand, and it was amusing to watch the people jumping up and down like jack-in-the-boxes to claim various identities, or waiting for the one they liked best and complaining loudly if it wasn't mentioned. The Commission didn't even ask for anyone who just identified him or herself as Unitarian Universalist (or one of those). I would have liked to stand up for any or all of those three possibilities.
All of this foolishness happens because we forget what we are here for, or perhaps it was never really articulated for us, and although we really do know, we haven't found a way to say it that makes sense to ourselves, and so, since we know that we find religious truth in (for example) Buddhism and Judaism as well as humanist teachings, we think we need to claim those religions as our own, or define ours as a synthesis of them. We can call ourselves Buddhist-Christian-Jewish-humanist UUs. Or we can call ourselves Unitarian Universalists, because what we are about is discovering our relationship to that which gives our lives meaning and living in that relationship in a particular way. All religions do that, but it is the spiritual discipline of freedom that allows and requires us to seek for truth wherever it may be found, and test it to make sure that it be truth - test it against other ideas and against our own experience. Nevertheless, there is a wide gulf between appropriation and appreciation, a wider one between a flirtation with certain ideas and the transformation that can happen because of those ideas.
When we do certain things in our public worship such as stumbling through rituals from the religions of the Plains Indians or the Tantric Buddhists to show how inclusive we are, we come perilously close to a trivial kind of appropriation. Many of those who find this embarrassing argue correctly that you need to be wholly and seriously steeped in a religion for many years to really understand it, and that what we are doing probably neither clarifies to us the religion we are copying nor enhances our own spiritual growth. They would argue that we should either stick to what we know or become entirely a part of the new religion we admire before we can really understand it and make it a part of us. However, that ignores the truth that you do not need to understand all the context of an idea for that idea to be of great significance to you. You don't need to be a Buddhist UU to grasp the concept of mindfulness. You may not understand it in the same way as a Buddhist does. You may not have followed, or even been able to follow, the arguments of Buddhist philosophers and theologians as to its exact meaning, but within the con-text of your own life and thought it can be one of the most important understandings you can reach. I think that that is the difference between trying to become a synthesis of the world's reli-gions - an impossible as well as useless task - and seeking for truth wherever it may be found in order to live more faithfully.
It is in this sense, as a Unitarian Universalist, that I annually observe what seems to me to be the greatest creation of religious genius, the Days of Awe, the ten days leading up to the Sabbath of Sabbaths, Yom Kippur. It is the time of confession, atonement, forgiveness and reconciliation. Yesterday was Yom Kippur. The New Year's day of the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashanah, was celebrated eleven days ago. Many, if not all, religions have as an integral part the reconciliation of imperfect humans to the perfect ideal. Even the secular world has a secular remission of sins at the time of the New Year, when we are adjured to put the past behind us and make new resolutions for the future. The genius of Yom Kippur is that it comes ten days after the new year, with the ten days between a time for paying debts, atoning for those evils we have done for which we can atone, begging forgiveness for those for which we cannot, forgiving those who have injured us. It reminds us that turning over the leaf of a calendar cannot wipe out the past. It also reminds us that forgiveness should not be too easy - that it can happen only after admission of guilt, and, if possible, atonement.
Many people think it strange that I should say that I find the idea of original sin comforting. There are even those who say that the main difference between Unitarians and other religions deriving from the Judeo-Christian heritage is that we don't believe in original sin. I don't think that's true. We certainly don't believe that human beings are doomed to eternal damnation without the intentional intervention of a loving god because of that sin, nor that people are necessarily irredeemably evil without that same intervention, but I don't think many of us believe that human beings were born perfect. There may be a few Rousseauean romantics who think children are born good and warped out of that goodness by civilization, but most of us realize that at the least some training is required. We do believe that it is possible for us to recognize and choose the good, as the traditional doctrine of original sin denies, but we have to admit that most of us fail regularly in doing that, simply because of the fallible nature of humankind. For me it is comforting to recognize that my failings are universally shared, that sin is more a matter of the human condition than the commission of intentional evil. Not that most of us can't do that occa-sionally, too, but it is more usual that we fail to live up to our highest ideals through indifference or selfishness or laziness or fear, rather than setting out to do real harm.
That does not make us any less responsible for our actions (or our inactions) however. Although we will fail more often through weakness than intention, our failure is no less culpable. If we cause hurt or harm to others, it is necessary to try to undo what we have done, heal the wounds we have made, or somehow make up for the pain we have caused if we can. If we can't atone, and sometimes we can't, we can only ask for forgiveness. We can also offer it, which is the other half of atonement. Alexander Pope said that "to err is human, to forgive, divine," so often quoted because so often true. It is fatally easy to err and often so difficult to forgive that forgiveness can seem an exclusively godlike quality. It seems to me that one of the most im-portant reasons for an understanding of the inevitability of our own sins is that it will help us to forgive the sins of others. I don't believe that you can forgive with a whole heart without the awareness that you also have erred and will do so again. In that forgiveness as in atonement we may partake of the divine.
There is another important aspect of this holiday, on Yom Kippur itself, that reminds us that we can sometimes do evil without even being aware of it, and so the prayer that asks forgiveness for those sins that we know we have committed and also for those we have committed unknowingly. We cannot atone for those sins of which we are not aware, and yet even for those forgiveness is necessary. For us Unitarian Universalists, at least, that forgiveness doesn't magically undo the evil we have done, heal the hurt or dry the tears we have caused. Nor can we use the scapegoat that is part of the traditional ritual, because like many Jews who no longer find the scapegoat meaningful, we know that there is no way to slough off the responsibility for our own deeds. Nevertheless, we can forgive and be forgiven. We can put the past behind us, but not easily, not by shrugging off our responsibility for what we have done, but by atoning for it when we can, asking forgiveness when we cannot, and giving the forgiveness that we owe because of our own need for it.
Throughout the Unitarian Universalist year we have many rituals. We have the ones that come from our Christian heritage, Christmas and Easter in which we celebrate the sacred as part of our mundane existence and the renewal of hope. We have some that we have created ourselves, the lighting of the chalice and the flower communion. We have none that speak to the universal human condition of brokenness. We celebrate but refuse to mourn. Yet we are often broken and sad. We often fail in our attempts to be as generous and kind and loving as we know we should be. We sometimes are unable to forgive. I think we need the Days of Awe in our faith - that our search for truth is incomplete without the acknowledgment not only of our possibilities but of our failures. Perhaps this, too, should become a yearly holy day for us, and Yom Kippur an integral part of our faith, not in order to be inclusive of our members of Jewish background, not to make us think that we can be a synthesis of world religions, but because confession, atonement and forgiveness are a part of what we need to be whole, and without them we do not speak to the completeness of our lives. We can be strong and good; we can rejoice and be glad; and we can forgive and be forgiven in our brokenness.